Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started with the next presentation. First off, my name is Joe Noyens with Three Part Advisors. Thank you all for joining us today. Up next, we have L.B. Foster. It's traded under the symbol FSTR on the Nasdaq, a global technology solutions provider, particularly for the rail and infrastructure markets. Today you have the CEO, John Kasel, and the CFO, Bill Thalman. All right, thanks, guys.
Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everybody. I'm John Kasel, and it's great to be with you today. We've joined these conferences. Our first one, I guess, the first one has been in New York. Prior to that, we've been in Chicago, and we find these very, very helpful and very useful. More importantly, in the last couple of years, we've been talking about transformation of the company. Everybody stands up here, talks about transformation and strategy and why you should be interested in the company. We've done a lot of heavy lifting in the last couple of years. Bill and I are going to share with you where we're at today, more importantly, what our vision is, and where we're going to take this company into the future. A little bit about L.B. Foster. We've been around for a while, actually quite a while.
Started back in 1902. We're headquartered in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to be exact. We do business across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. But as you can see on this chart, most of what we do is here in the United States. About 85% of our sales activity is in the U.S. And that's something that we're going to continue to really be focused on and supporting what needs to happen here in North America, specifically in the U.S. We have two business segments. We cleaned up things over the last couple of years and really streamlined our message, as well as who we are and our core competence. We're going to talk about those segments today, one serving the rail market and the other serving infrastructure here in North America. Our revenue, as you see here, you guys see our 2024 guidance.
So we came up with 2023 guidance, which we hit. We have 2024 guidance, and we'll talk about 2025 aspirational goals and guidance that we have. We got a range between $525 and $560, Adjusted EBITDA between $34 and $39. And free cash flow is something that's very, very important to us, and we'll continue to grow over the years. And we'll talk about the importance of CapEx in our business model and our thesis coming up right now. One of the things that Bill and I have really been focused on is cleaning up the portfolio. So the last couple of years, we've done a number of deals. We'll share kind of the highlights of that. But we've done nine transactions cleaning up our portfolio.
This really gives us the ability to look at the company, I think, in the light of something that you really get your head wrapped around for a small microcap. What is the value of this company? And more importantly, how do they add value in the future? Much of what we're doing this year is, well, going into next year, our organic programs. We're very excited about things that we have in front of us, the available cash that we have, and we're going to be generating and going after some significant organic growth, specifically in the United States here. So we'll talk a little bit about that. We talk about free cash flow and the favorability of that. We're in an inflection point. Bill will talk about that in his financial review.
We're going to continue to drive more free cash flow, not just this year, but in the years to come. And then our disciplined capital allocation. We'll touch on that as well. Again, I think our history is very, very important. Goes back to four brothers that started the business in 1902. They were a pretty neat way of going about things. They figured out how to take rail and reuse the rail. So they took rail that was coming off of freight lines and transit lines and were able to reuse it for coal mines. And that happened way back in 1902. In 1981, the company was listed on Nasdaq, and we've been on the market ever since. And we've done a number of transactions. And we'll talk a few of those today, the real how we really shaped this company.
But more importantly, what we've done from 2021- 2024 is really, really the transformation difference. We'll get into that as we speak now. I mentioned we did a number of divestitures and acquisitions. In fact, we did 9 back since 2021. Much of what we were looking at prior to this 2021 was a company that was really heavy into track products, into commodity type, into steel components, into stuff that really didn't have the ability to grow and really be able to drive scale as well as continue to grow margins. So we divested, and we, through a very in-depth strategic focus of who we are, more importantly, where we want to be. We divested piling products or track components. One of our, actually two of our energy businesses got divested, as well as some of the other ancillary type products, including concrete ties.
More importantly, what we did was we went out and acquired technology type companies that supported our business, two in the U.K., one in Tennessee, which actually turned out to be two companies with VanHooseCo, and our most recent acquisition of Cougar Mountain, which gives us another nice little market segment in the precast business. But as you see on this bottom chart, we got 300 basis point improvement in gross margin over that period of time. That was by cleaning up our portfolio and really figuring out what we do and then how to go to the market and get paid for it. So coming out of COVID, like many companies, we struggled.
Contracts were not favorable to market conditions, but we figured out a way to turn that around and get price and, more importantly, build a business that now has scale and the ability to really, really grow and continue to prove upon these margins. So a little bit more about our business and our segments. So I mentioned to you we have 2 segments today. We started that reporting here in 2024. The core of the business, rail technologies, is about 60%; actually is 60% of the business. The other 50% is infrastructure solutions. If you look at the margins, respectively, they're about the same across the 2 segments. We like that. Rail does have the ability to be a little more of a global company. That's where our global reach is, and infrastructure is right here in the U.S., primarily the markets that we serve. More on rail.
So our foundation at the beginning of the business was Rail Products. We simplified that business model over the years. These are some of the divestitures. We kept what we think is important, the things that we can bundle, the things that we can bring to the market to continue to build track infrastructure. Back in 2010, we bought a company called Portec, which brought us global Friction Management. This is now we're bringing a technology innovation and service to the market to be able to utilize those rail for our customer, both transit and freight, to utilize those rail assets even more effectively and efficiently. And the third leg of it, we went into businesses on technology service solutions. So now we're off the track.
Now we're providing information and data to help our operators, both the freight and transit again, to be able to operate their equipment more effectively, to ensure their trains stay on the track, to help them with their fuel efficiency, and to be able to provide a better ride for the passengers on the transit side. This is an area we're very excited about. If you see these respective margins on the right-hand side here, this is where we continue to build the margins, as well as continue to build our technology offerings that differentiate ourselves, not just from our past, but more importantly, really provide the value of the company moving forward. Why today? Rail has been ups and downs. You read it today. The Class Is are shrinking. They went from 7 to 6 to 5. But rail is always there.
They're always out there doing maintenance and type of work. They're spending billions of dollars each and every year. And so what we do, we feel very confident that we'll be able to go through the cycles, as well as we really see an investment supercycle here in the future. Many of these rail things are continuing to go or close to pre-pandemic levels on transit here in North America. The rest of the world has already recovered. So we're seeing the rail as a really good place. And you can see that respectively in our organic sales, the growth year-over-year, both on revenue as well as our margin. Our second segment, as I mentioned earlier, which is 40% of our business today, but growing, is the precast. So there's concrete business and there's steel business here.
Some of the steel businesses, this is where we've been kind of cleaning things up year over year, specifically in the energy space. We had some upstream work that we divested in the energy space. But concrete is really where we're placing our bets. We're very excited about this business. This is where we did the acquisition of VanHooseCo, the most recent acquisition of Cougar Mountain. This is where we're building scale. This is where we're going to market. And this is where we're starting to penetrate in the east and southeast markets. And you can see respectively what's going on in our business here, including with the margins. Why today again? Concrete is really in favor. Maybe a couple of years ago, nobody wanted to touch concrete. Today it's in favor.
With the environmental issues that's going on, the emissions, things that are going on, houses that were made out of timber that are in hurricane areas, all those type of things are really leading to concrete. And concrete gives you the ability to do a lot of fab work off job site, do the work in a factory, and bring it to the marketplace. And that's what we as a company are doing. And we're very excited about those opportunities. So now I'll turn it over to Bill on the financial review. And now I'll come back with some closing remarks. Bill.
Thanks, John. Morning, everyone. I'm Bill Thalman, the CFO with the company. I've been with L.B. Foster for just over three years. And as John indicated, we've been pretty busy over that three-year period of time. And over the last 12 months, it's really started to show in our results. In our first quarter, we just completed at the end of March, we reported about 17% organic growth and 32% increase in our profitability reported on an EBITDA basis. Really strong performance there. We saw a lot of that come through our technology orientation within the business, particularly in the rail side of the business, which is getting increased attention with a lot of the different initiatives around rail safety here in the U.S. And as a result of that, we continue to generate really strong cash flow.
We were able to pay down our debt on a year-over-year basis, managing our debt at around 2 times leverage. It was elevated a little bit at the end of Q1. That's a typical working capital cycle that we see, as you can imagine, with a lot of the work that's done outside. Working capital needs in the business and moving into the second and the third quarter are higher, and then they start to decline through the balance of the year. So that's a normal cycle. We expect to see improvements on a year-over-year basis on leverage, and we're very comfortable managing it around 2 times. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. And then the last thing I would say is we reaffirmed our guidance that we had established with the close of 2023 and the outlook for 2024.
We'll look forward to providing an update to that as the year progresses. John mentioned the heavy lifting that's been done and looking at the profitability of the business over a 3-year period of time. The sales growth has been very, very strong. There's a lot of puts and takes in those numbers, of course, but the puts and takes really manifest themselves in the profitability elements. So the margins being up from 16.8%-21.4% on the trailing 12-month basis compared to 2021. And then the EBITDA margins, we were going from 3.6%-6%. Capital-light business model. So the EBITDA multiple on the business, we don't have to generate a significant EBITDA margin to be able to attract a nice valuation because the capital needs of the business are relatively light. And we'll go into that a little bit more as well.
So we were at $19 million in 2021, and we're up to $33 in the most recent quarter. And as I mentioned, the midpoint of our guidance is right around $37 million for 2020-2024. So structural improvements have really transformed the profitability. Sustainability of our cash flow has been one of the hallmarks of the company over the years. And we see some positive inflection points in that regard that I'll talk about here in a minute. This is a little more granular looking at the quarters because we wanted to highlight and emphasize the fact that the most recent trailing 12 months is continuing to show strong organic growth in the business, which you can see on the left-hand side there, left-hand chart. And then the overall margins on a year-over-year basis are up year-over-year and over 21% each quarter in the last four quarters.
So when you look at, sometimes it can be a little bit choppy just because of the mix of business and how it transacts within each of the individual businesses. But we're very happy to see margins above 21% on a consistent basis. And you'll see in our goals that our longer-term goal is to get that number within the next 18 months up to 23%. And we'll talk a little bit about that with respect to our aspirational goals. Leverage has been a positive story for us. You can see over the cycle that we've been able to work our leverage down consistently. We completed some acquisitions in 2022 that got us to the point where leverage was about a little over 3x. We're more comfortable around 2x, but we also understood that 3x leverage was appropriate given the acquisition that had just been completed.
We've been systematically working that number down. We were just basically cut in half at the end of the fiscal year that was just completed. Again, it cycled back up because of working capital in Q1, but we're very comfortable that that number will work down through the balance of the year. Capital-light business model with significant free cash drivers, which we'll talk about here in a second. One thing I'll highlight is we had a lawsuit settlement with one of our larger customers, Union Pacific. I think the settlement was back in 2019-2020 timeframe, $50 million. There's $8 million that has been paid each year since that settlement. This is the last year of that payment. That payment is in our free cash flow number that we've been reporting.
So that's a very natural inflection, favorable inflection that will occur after 2024 that will even improve our cash-generating capability going forward. We also have about $100 million worth of NOLs that came from some transactions in the past. So we do not believe we'll be paying federal taxes for the foreseeable future, both of which should help us in terms of cash generation, which we're using for the capital allocation needs in the business, which also include a stock buyback program, which has been in place since February 2022. No, sorry, 2023. And we're very active with that program. We like to highlight this for potential investors because we think this is a strong indication of why you should be thinking about the valuation of the company at this point in time. John will cover here our goals that we put out.
In 2021, December 2021, we had an investor day where we said we were going to be $600 million in revenue and $50 million of EBITDA by 2025. So we still have those goals in place. We have a roadmap where we believe we can get there. And what we'd like to try to do is translate what that means to free cash flow generation in 2025. Now, as a data point, last year, we did $33 million of free cash flow, including the $8 million payment to Union Pacific. So that would be $41 million worth of free cash flow generated last year. Now, that number's, I'd say, not sustainable, a little higher than what I would expect because we had some elevated working capital that got collected in 2023. We also had a $3 million federal tax refund that got collected last year as well.
But we believe with the capital-light business model that we have in place, as well as the other free cash flow favorable drivers that are already going to enhance and come to fruition in 2025, we think a yield of about 10% is very reasonable in terms of free cash flow generation with a midpoint of about $30 million on a consistent basis. And against a $25-$26 stock price, that's an 8%-12% yield. We think that's pretty attractive, and we like to have people focus on that. Mentioned the capital allocation priorities. Pretty straightforward, frankly. Debt reduction is always going to be on our radar as a top priority. We do not want to get over-levered. The company had been over-levered in the past, and we don't think that would be prudent at all. And so we're targeting to be right around 2x.
John mentioned the capital expenditures that we have in place to fund organic growth programs, which are very meaningful, particularly in rail technology, rail technologies, and precast concrete. The tuck-in acquisitions, we just completed a small tuck-in acquisition that extended a product portfolio out in Boise, Idaho. We have the share buyback program in place, which we're active with today. I guess I'll just close by saying the dividends that we don't currently have a dividend policy in place, something we'll consider in the future, but it's not a priority today. We have more than enough levers to pull to create value for sure. So with that, I'll turn it back over to John for his closing remarks. John.
Thanks, Bill. So, as we were talking about for the last 15, 20 minutes, is momentum. Years ago, we stood in front of the crowd and we talked about what we're going to do. Well, the good news is we've done a lot of the heavy lifting with the things that we shared with you today. And our investment thesis, we believe, is strong and will continue to grow. As far as activity, it's some of the best activity we've seen as far as bidding activity, our increased backlog, and the momentum that we built here in the U.S. And you're starting to see that uplift in our stock price.
We feel that we also have the opportunity now to really lever some of the things that we've done and then take that back to the back office and really start leveraging our SG&A, which is really the next goal and objective of ours as well. As far as IIJA, and I'm sure many of you have other questions, where is that? I think we're still in the early innings. Much of this money and things are still sitting out there. We're seeing a lot of bidding activity, a lot of engineering work, a lot of things that we see coming in the future, but they're not necessarily here today. So I'd call it the second or third inning. Great American Outdoors Act has been fantastic for our business. That's different. That is really humming and doing very, very good things for us in our company today.
The rail, we're part of a rail industry that is focused on safety, both on the freight side and the transit side. We have been bringing solutions to the marketplace that really help our operators assure that trains stay on the track. And if there is an issue, how do you do early diagnostics? So we're seeing a big uptick in our ability for us to bring our products and services and technology to the marketplace today. The last piece that I think is exciting about the company is our ability for our customers to save their number one cost, their number two cost, and that's fuel. Most of our customers use diesel fuel, or they use energy that was created by fuel.
So much of what we do is helping them, not just with the global footprint, which is very, very important, but also the ability to get their cost and their cost drivers down related to fuel. So that's a good thing that's happening for us. And why our customers are coming to us and we're being not just, I think, getting our fair share, but we're picking up market share here in North America and abroad. So Bill mentioned, and you see our stock price uplift that we've had. We were referencing 106% here. At any given time, you can see the uplift. I think last, if you look at different data points, 132%. But we're not done. We talked about 2024, and we reiterated our guidance for 2024.
But the guidance that we put out back in 2021 with our aspirational goals that you see here is about continuing to transform this company and really starting to grow and build off this portfolio that we have streamlined over the years, a couple of years in the past. So this is the aspirational goals that we put out there in 2025. We haven't wavered from those. As you can see, we're approaching the gross profit. We need a little more revenue to come. And as we continue to focus on our SG&A and really leveraging that, it'll start flowing down to EBITDA. So with that, it was the close of our presentation, and we got a few minutes here, which we wanted to save for any questions you may have for either Bill or myself. Any questions? This is our second largest shareholder.
Good presentation. Just to get a little bit of clarity on a couple of things. The 2025 goals, you mentioned that.
Right.
Help us understand what that means and.
Right.
Those goals out.
So first of all, this is Justin with GAMCO. So thank you for attending today. And so the question is, the M&A work. Well, M&A was a big piece of it. But the first thing was to clean up our portfolio, just to get some of the items that we just didn't see growth coming, and then supplement that with more of the acquisition type stuff. But I'll tell you, and Justin, we've talked about this. We have many things in our wheelhouse today that we feel very, very good about with the organic opportunities in front of us. So we're going to continue to look at small type tuck-in type acquisitions.
But for most, I would say between 2024 and 2025, it's going to be continued to expand our growth, both top and bottom line, to work on these, hit these aspirational goals here based upon activities that we have in front of us, specifically in the infrastructure business and continuing on the condition monitoring side on the rail space, I just mentioned.
I can add to that.
Sure.
Yeah. So the original playbook that we had laid out contemplated more portfolio churn, greater divestitures, more acquisitions. What we found was we were able to get the pressing divestitures out of the way, and we would say today that our current portfolio is not one that we feel there's anything we have to take action on immediately. In the meantime, what we've identified since we've kept those in place and not had to be able to, not had to divest those, we've also been able to, with some of the acquisitions we've done, identify those organic growth opportunities. So I would say that the playbook transformed to be heavy M&A portfolio churn to light M&A portfolio churn, organic growth.
And that's what helps us to be confident that we've gotten to where we are for 2024 in terms of our outlook and then what it's going to take to get to.
Gotcha. So it seems like maybe the.
Farther away because of.
Yeah. I would say the goal post has always been those numbers in 2025.
How we're getting there.
How we get there changed a little bit.
Yeah. We didn't want to go out and bet the farm with a bunch of big deals, right? Acquisitions. And what we found by doing some of these smaller deals is there's a tremendous opportunity to get scale and to go into either sub-markets or adjacent spaces. And that's what we're focusing on today.
Yep. Questions about real estate and continuing to.
Right.
There be no.
Right.
Following some of the.
More so federal encouragement.
Yeah.
Yeah. So what's sort of driving the activity?
Because I think at the end of the day, Justin, people, they believe do the right thing. And I think that's what we're seeing today, more than the government coming in and mandating something. And so I think there's just awareness of what this technology can be and using it and adopting it. And I think we're seeing more and more of that than ever. That's a great thing. Another thing to note on this chart is the Russell 2000. We were in the Russell. We were moved out of the Russell in 2021. So we're looking to be back in that. And the official word will be, what, two weeks?
Yeah.
The math suggests we will be back in the Russell, which was a very good thing for our company back in 2021 and before.