All right. Thank you all for joining us here in person today. We really appreciate it. Those of you on the webcast, we do as well. First off, my name is Joe Noyons with Three Part Advisors. Up next, we have one of our investor relations clients, L.B. Foster. L.B. Foster is traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol FSTR. It is a leading technology-based solutions provider for the rail and infrastructure markets. Today, giving the presentation will be the company's Chief Financial Officer, Bill Thalman. Thank you.
Thanks, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone. As Joe indicated, my name is Bill Thalman. I'm the CFO of L.B. Foster. I've been with the company for a little over four years, joined in 2021. Typically, John Kasel, our CEO, would be with us today. Unfortunately, he had a family emergency and was not able to attend. I'm going to be covering the presentation today. We'll jump right into it. L.B. Foster is a company headquartered out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We've been in business for a little over 120 years. The company got its start as a recycled rail business in western Pennsylvania and has grown to what it is today. It's largely North America-focused. We do have a presence overseas, primarily in the U.K. region, but it is primarily North American business.
I would describe us as an infrastructure solutions provider that is focused specifically on rail and civil construction. When you get into the business units, we go through that in some detail later on. You'll understand why. We do have two segments: rail and infrastructure. You can see the regional breakdowns there on the screen. We'll cover those in a little more detail here in a minute. I guess maybe rewind a few years. Back in 2021, the company had initiated a strategic reassessment of the business. That's when I joined the company in February, March of 2021. John Kasel became CEO in June of 2021. Basically, the company had lost its way for a period of time. The board took a very proactive step to say, "We're going to define what we're going to be going forward.
We're going to reestablish our strategy and figure out a way how to grow this business and return the business to its former performance and hopefully then some. We established goals back in 2021. You can see the goals in the middle of the page there. In 2024, we've made great progress in terms of sales growth and, more importantly, margin expansion and profitability expansion. Cash generation has improved dramatically as well. We expect more to come in 2025. I'll spend a little bit of time on how we got to the results that you're seeing here in a few slides. As I mentioned earlier, we have two segments: rail technologies and services, as well as infrastructure solutions.
The rail technologies business is just under $300 million on a trailing 12-month basis and just a little over $206 million for our infrastructure division, again, on a trailing 12-month basis. So just over $500 million in revenue. Margin profiles of the business are very similar, right around 22%. You can see on the previous slide that our goals were to be around 22%-23% in 2025. So we're in that range at the moment. We expect improvements to continue throughout the year. And yeah, the segments you'll see here on the next couple of slides are very much focused on infrastructure-related support for both rail as well as civil construction. The first slide is the rail technologies and services overview. You can see three business units within the segment. I always start off with our largest component, which is rail products.
When you think about rail products, the largest component of that business is selling track to Class 2, so the regional railroads, as well as the transit authorities in the U.S. That is a pretty steady piece of our business. It is about $150 million in revenue. We have some other value-added product lines as well within rail products: insulated rail joints, direct fixation fasteners for the transit applications. That is all within rail products. Next, we have friction management, global friction management. That is exactly as it says. Our friction management business line provides support to the rail industry in terms of improving wear and tear, as well as improving fuel efficiency for the railroads as they apply that friction management application across their networks. I say across their networks pretty liberally. Only 5% of the North American rail network is treated with friction management today.
There is an opportunity for that to be a much greater component of the business going forward. Lastly, technology services and solutions. That is where some of our more interesting product lines are in terms of the network monitoring applications that we have. That is a growing piece of the business. I will speak about that here in a few minutes. Margin profiles are on the right. As you can see, the technology services and solutions, as well as friction management, are areas of focus for growth given the margin profiles. Turning to infrastructure solutions, two primary business units: precast concrete products, which is about $130 million in revenue, $140 million on a trailing 12-month basis. Then we have $63 million for steel products. When you think about the growth platforms that we have as a company, precast concrete is one where we see significant opportunity for growth.
Attractive margin profiles. It is a somewhat fragmented market. We feel like there is an opportunity for us to grow both organically and inorganically in precast concrete. We have been making investments in that space along the way. For steel products, that is a variety of different applications that support civil construction: bridge forms that are used for bridge repair, pipeline coating that is used for oil and gas pipeline transmission. We have a threaded pipe product line that is used for water well drilling. Yeah, so the steel products portion of the business, the one thing I would emphasize there is within steel products, the coatings business has been a component. The pipeline coating business has been softer over the last several years, largely due to a lack of investment in pipelines here in the U.S. That is something that had been a pretty strong business for us in the not-too-distant past.
We are actually expecting that to improve here given some of the current macro trends with energy investment here in the U.S. Opportunities for growth there. The primary area of growth within infrastructure is going to be within precast. This is just a different slice of the business. It is important to understand how we are viewing the elements of the portfolio from a strategic point of view. Back in 2021, we made very purposeful choices to establish growth platforms and returns platforms. We actually went through a series of divestitures and acquisitions that were aligned with this strategy. We are taking cash that is being generated from those return platform businesses, which is relatively steady and pretty consistent, and we are applying that money into investments in our growth platforms.
Global friction management, track monitoring, and precast concrete, those are the product lines that we expect to see above-average growth along with our strategy. The reason that's the case is the margin profiles of those businesses are much better. It's a value-added element of the offering that we feel like there is headroom for growth. You can see on the slide on the left-hand side of the slide, those growth platform businesses over the last three-plus years have grown 79%. The margin profiles on that growth are much higher than what you see on the right-hand side, where we've divested certain elements of the business, and the growth rates are negative in some cases and much lower in other cases. Again, the margin profiles are lower on the return side.
That mix of growth aligned with our strategy is what's translated to a significantly improved profitability profile for the business, which I'll cover here on the next slide. Over that time period, as I mentioned, we did nine transactions since 2021. The sales back in 2021 were $514 million, and our margin profile was 16.8% at that time. As a result of the work that we did with the portfolio, as well as other profitability initiatives, our sales have grown in 2024. I'll focus on that data point to $531 million in sales, but 22% gross margin. A significant improvement in the gross margin profile. We were a bit weaker in the first quarter, largely related to our distribution business. I will highlight the fact that the margin percent did stay the same despite the fact that the sales were softer.
We believe that that will come back as the balance of the year progresses here with some of the trends going on in Washington around government funding and that starting to improve the outlook for the year. This is just another view of those same metrics, but obviously driven all the way through to EBITDA. You can see where we stand in terms of the EBITDA performance. We grew EBITDA up to 6.3% of sales. Very capital-light business model. That EBITDA performance is relatively attractive when you evaluate that against free cash flow, which I'll cover here in a minute. A lot of work to change the profitability profile of the company. Despite the soft quarter, first quarter, we feel like we're on a good track to improve on that in 2025.
You've probably seen this slide already if you follow the company at all. This is a slide that came out of our first quarter investor deck, earnings call deck. I think the key message here is that we tried to tease out the fact that our distribution business for rail had a very soft quarter, relatively speaking, in the first quarter against a very strong first quarter in 2024. We tried to highlight the fact that the order book was up, the order rates were up, the book-to-bill ratios were improved in both portions of the business. We reaffirmed our guidance for 2025 despite the soft start to the year. The strong order book should translate to sales growth and profitability expansion as early as the second quarter, which ends at the end of June.
We certainly will provide an update in early August once we have those results in hand. One of the other things to consider about our business is it's somewhat cyclical from a seasonality point of view. We are a construction-related business, so we provide a lot of work support to businesses that are doing construction work outside, whether it's repair, maintenance, installation of precast buildings, or installation of precast forms in a civil construction site. We tend to be a little working capital heavy in the early part of the fiscal year. That working capital tends to unwind over the balance of the year. Things are a little bit choppy in that regard. Generally speaking, our revenues and profitability will be strongest in the second and third quarter compared to the first and fourth quarter.
We want to highlight that for people that are new to the story just because of the potential choppiness that you would see with our financial performance. Over time, I guess the key message is that we do a very good job of managing our leverage over time. You can see we're generating really nice cash and generating strong EBITDA relative to our debt and are able to get to the point where we are consistently running between 1 times and 2 times on EBITDA as a percentage or as an index against our debt. The 2.5 that we typically are sitting at at the end of the second quarter is first quarter, second quarter is generally working capital related. That will unwind through the balance of the year.
We feel good about where we expect to be by the end of the year given the normal seasonality of the business. I will highlight that we generated $31 million worth of free cash flow in 2023 and 2024. That is excluding an $8 million per year payment that we had been making to Union Pacific that is now behind us. That is a baseline that is in place right now. We hope to be able to improve on that as the year progresses. I will also mention that we had $93 million worth of federal NOLs that are available to mitigate federal income taxes. The working capital or the capital needs for the business in terms of CapEx and interest are really the only significant deductions against EBITDA to get to free cash flow. We are very active with our stock buyback program.
As you can see, we've repurchased 5.5% of the shares outstanding since the program was initiated in 2023. We just re-upped a new program that expires in February of 2028. I won't cover this in too much detail, but this is just suffice to say that we saw a nice improvement in our book-to-bill ratios across all elements of the business. When you flip that over to the backlog, the backlog improved significantly on a sequential basis and is up year over year, about 6-7%. The thing that's important to glean from that is that the backlog has improved in terms of the profitability profile of what we have in our backlog compared to last year. That should translate to a nice improvement in margin expansion on a year-over-year basis as early as the second quarter.
That is very much in line with our strategy that we are trying to accomplish. A couple of valuation-type comments around where the stock price is today relative to cash flow and EBITDA multiples. Our cash guidance, free cash flow guidance for the year is $20 million-$30 million. At today's stock price, that is a 10%-15% yield, which we think is pretty attractive. As I mentioned earlier, the average free cash flow for the last two years was $31 million. We feel like those are numbers that are in the cards in terms of our outlook. Looking at valuations at where we are at the moment, we took the excess cash, paid down some debt in our projections, and came up with what we felt was a fair way to evaluate the enterprise value against the EBITDAs that are out there.
You can see the range of 5.3-6 times based on where we're trading at the moment. Attractive, inexpensive valuation at the moment. We feel good about that opportunity that we have to buy stock in this timeframe given where we are with those valuations. In terms of closing remarks, just a couple of comments with the capital allocation that we focus on. I mentioned earlier that the company had gone through a significant challenge 2015 through 2020. With the revised strategy that we've put in place, we're very much focused on being disciplined with our approach to capital allocation. We are going to manage our debt leverage levels. We'll be closer to one.
We will range between one and two, but we will make sure that whenever we're up against a time period where needs might be a little heavier than others, we're going to be cautious with what we can control to make sure we maintain that leverage level. CapEx is a relatively light capital need for the business. It's about 2% of sales, so running about $10 million-$12 million worth of CapEx. We are investing in organic growth platforms that will allow us to grow, should allow us to grow. Our guidance certainly suggests that we will be growing here in 2025. The share repurchase program I already mentioned, that was re-upped for another $40 million program that started in February and runs through 2028. We continue to be active there. Tuck-in acquisitions, I would say that's primarily focused in the space of precast concrete.
We think there's an opportunity there with a pretty much fragmented market and an opportunity to pick up businesses at reasonable valuations in that space. Just a couple of items I want to highlight here. On the left-hand side, we talked about the government funding programs that are supporting business investment for our customers, projects to harden up their rail networks and the infrastructure that they operate in. We expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. On the right-hand side, there are two pieces of our infrastructure business. We just commissioned a new facility in Florida that is producing concrete wall systems for residential housing in that market. That's just starting now. We believe that that is an opportunity for growth moving in here starting this quarter and then moving forward. Lastly, I mentioned earlier the pipeline business.
That's an element that we feel like has an opportunity to get back on track similar to what it was in the past. The backlog for that portion of the business is up nearly 52% versus last year at the end of the first quarter. That's a strong indication of where that business is headed. This is always an important slide for investors to take a look at as a leading indicator of volume improvements for the rail industry. Congress has a program. It's called a CRISI grant. That stands for Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement. Those grants are annual. They're administered by the FRA, the Federal Railroad Administration. It's funding that supports the rail and transit network in the United States in terms of repairs and maintenance and upgrades to their networks.
You can see the level of funding that has been approved over the last three years that compared to the previous five years, it is a 5x increase. Suffice to say that some of the activities in Washington have slowed down the funding flows of those particular programs. A large portion of that funding has yet to come. We do not think it is being eliminated. It has just been slowed down. We think that is an area for improvement, improving demand for the rail business here into the future. Lastly, in terms of growth drivers, we have construction starts that are all on a positive trend. There has been a large number of infrastructure-related programs, whether it is the IIJA or the Great American Outdoors Act, as I mentioned earlier. There have been a lot of government programs in place to support infrastructure spending.
We expect that is going to be a long-term tailwind for the business going into the future. I guess to wrap up on some of the key things to think about when you're considering L.B. Foster as a potential investment. We've done a lot of heavy lifting over the last four years to position the business to benefit from a very focused level of growth potential that's driven by not only government funding, but also demand from our customers for what we would call a more technology-oriented offering. We've taken steps to dramatically change the profitability profile of the business. You can see that it's coming through in the results that we've demonstrated thus far. We feel like there's more to come.
The places that we're investing are areas where we believe organic growth can be robust between 5%-10% for an industrial company, which is very good. Importantly, the growth rates of the more profitable elements of our portfolio, we expect will be at a higher rate than that average, which will lift the margin profiles and overall profitability and cash generation generating elements of the portfolio. I mentioned earlier that we have a very capital-light business model. We're only spending $10 million-12 million per year for CapEx. Some of that is for maintenance, but also a portion of that is for growth CapEx as well. We have our stock buyback program, which we think is an appropriate use of our cash, especially where we are with terms of evaluation today.
We also will be very prudent with deploying that cash to potential acquisitions that are out there. From an overall capital allocation point of view, we feel like that disciplined approach will serve us well. We feel confident that there is shareholder value to be gained by that disciplined approach. I am not going to read the key takeaways. We have, I think, eight minutes or so for a Q&A session. Suffice to say that we have done a lot of heavy lifting. We feel good about the work we have completed thus far. We feel like there is more runway ahead of us. We also feel as though, given the first quarter challenge with the year-over-year comparables being a bit softer and the stock price reaction to that, we feel like it is an opportunity to take a close look at L.B. Foster.
If you're a long-term believer in infrastructure spending here in the U.S., we're an attractive option to consider. With that, I will open it up to any questions. Yeah. Can you give us some more color on precast? Yeah. Yeah. The question was some more color on precast. It's about a $130 million business for us. The lion's share of that business for us is precast buildings that we build in our factories and ship to sites already built, prebuilt. They go in ready to be utilized right away with the utility hookups that are necessary. It's a nice alternative to a facility or some other property that would be built using concrete block as an example. You don't need the same labor cost to have that done. It's done much quicker. Now, on the other hand, it's a little more expensive.
It is also much more sturdy. It can hold up to some significant weather conditions and is much more likely to be a robust solution than some of the other solutions that would be out there. If you go to a national park and there is a restroom, a restroom facility, I am trying to think if there is a picture here. Yeah, I have seen places. Say again? I have seen places. Yeah, we do not have a picture in this deck of that. That is bottom left. You can barely see it. It is really small. It is a precast building that is made out of concrete that does not look like it is made out of concrete. It can have stone structure. It can have wood-looking structure. It has got ready-to-use restrooms, water fountains, showers in some cases. It is a turnkey solution for a need that would be out there for a national park or residential. Yeah.
That's actually one you can see pretty clearly here. On the left-hand side, you see those wall systems that are used right there. Is this a pointer? That's not. On the left-hand side, you can see those concrete walls. Those are insulated walls that are built in our factory and shipped straight to the job site ready to be erected. You're not building a cinder block home. You're building a concrete wall home. A lot of the applications in the Florida market are looking at solutions like this. We just opened up our facility in Central Florida, just north of Orlando. Right now, it's just started up. We think the turnover can be $25 million eventually. Literally, we're taking orders now and just starting up production.
If you're here to present your story and to get new interest, just a thought. I mean, I understand your buyback of stock, but there are any number of institutions and probably public investors too who won't buy a stock without a cash dividend. Why don't you really consider instituting a modest cash dividend to attract these? You want to present your possibility to the widest possible universe out here. Just consider it. I understand the competing thing about buying your stock.
Sure. Sure. Of course. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
What is your biggest challenge with precast for residential? Is it getting the large home builders to buy into the concept? Is it ?
Yeah.
The question is, what's the largest hurdle that we have, our most significant challenge that we have getting the residential market to buy into a precast wall system solution? I would say that it starts with the home builder. The home builders, they have certain options similar to this that they're already using. To me, this is them getting comfortable with our solution, which is slightly different. It's an insulated unit already, insulated wall. We're new to the local market. They want to see what a new home with our system looks like, see it in their market. As they get comfortable that we're able to deliver and perform, we feel like over time, the uptake of demand will occur. It's a strong market. Just in terms of construction that's already there, they're looking for solutions.
We just have to show that we can perform with a quality product and be on time. I mean, yeah.
In that market, Bill, are there termite-resistant options, or are they primarily the wood, the wood-premade walls?
In that market, I would say today, anything that's new is not wood. It is concrete block. Yeah. Produced in a different way. In a different, yeah. Yeah. It is a concrete wall produced in a different way. We have a license for the technology that we are using to produce this wall, so it is slightly different than what is already out there. Yeah. We have about a minute, minute and a half left. Yeah, in some ways.
There are some projects that have been done here in the U.S. Brightline East is one that's from Southern Florida up to Orlando and a little bit further east. That's been in place for a while. Say again? That I don't know. I don't know that off the top of my head. We do do some work related to some of the high-speed projects that are currently being discussed, like Brightline West, which is a line that would go from Southern California to Las Vegas. That's one that we're actively looking at. Do I? Yeah. I don't know.
SpaceX, I know we do some work for SpaceX in Houston related to some of the pipeline coating work that we do out of our facility in Willis, Texas. But nothing related to rail with Elon that I'm aware of anyway. Anything else? Great. Thanks for your time today.