First off, my name is Joe Noyens. I'm with 3Part Advisors. Our next presenter is also an investor relations client of ours. It's L.B. Foster Company, traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol FSTR. Presenting on behalf of the company today is going to be the Chief Executive Officer, John Kasel, and the Chief Financial Officer, Bill Thalman. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Joe.
Thank you. As Joe mentioned, Bill and I are here together to present to you, and thanks for joining us this morning. We're looking forward to sharing with you the L.B. Foster story. A little bit about me. I'm in the 23rd year with the company. This is my fifth year as President and CEO of the company. Foster's been around quite a while. We'll get into a little bit of the history, but more importantly, we'll get into the recent trend in how we're turning the company around and really driving shareholder returns of value. It's set up as two segments. We report out two segments. We'll get into the details of that. One's on the rail side, rail technology services, and the other's on infrastructure solutions. About 90% of everything we sell, manufacture, engineer, and sell is here in North America.
That's really our focus, is continuing to work in North America. You see the size of the business is trailing 12 months. It's over $500 million, and our guidance is between $535 million and $555 million for the year. Stock price is $22.40 at the end of June. If you look as of close yesterday, it's north of that by a few dollars. We had a very strong quarter. We built up quite a bit of backlog at the end of the quarter, and we got a heck of a lot of momentum going into the second half of the year. We'll share that with you today.
One of the things that Bill and I did is we started with the company as far as the new roles and responsibilities was to put our foot kind of on the ground, a stake in the ground, and say, we need to be better. We need to start driving shareholder return values. Back in 2021, we put our goals in place that we wanted to achieve for 2025, which you'll see in the middle of the page here, between $580 million- $620 million of sales. We're falling short of that this year, but what we're really focusing on is our profit margin. If you see on this page here, we got a 540 basis point improvement in our margin between 2021 and 2024, and then that's flowing through to EBITDA, and we're starting to really generate cash. We do provide guidance.
You see on the right side of the page here where we're looking at landing this year. It's a big step function for where we've been the last three or four years, and we're looking to continue that in 2026 and beyond. Take it back to the company because I think it's important to talk a little bit about the heritage. We've been around for almost 125 years. For the first 80 years or so, the company was privately held. Back in 1981, it became public and trading today on Nasdaq as FSTR. A lot of things happened in that first 100 years, if you will, and really gave a good foundation to the company that in the last couple of years, we're really getting focused on what it is, how we add value, and how we drive shareholder return.
That is the strategic execution that I have here on the right side of the page, and we'll get into a little bit more details of what we're doing and, more importantly, the results we're achieving. Here's a closer look at our segments. Of the $500 million, you see $289 million, largest segment is rail. That's something the company started with back in 1902, a big piece of it. Infrastructure is a growing piece for us. We're going to get into details of that. You see the margins here, respectively 21.9% and 22.6% . This is where we're doing the heavy lifting of getting the margin profiles in these businesses steady and improving. We're doing that through technology innovation, and we're going to share with you today what that looks like.
If you take a step back and you look at the rail business, going back 100+ years, basically, if you just look at Chicago and you look at the Transit Authority, CTA, right, a couple of miles from here, they're a large customer of L.B. Foster, as all the 72 transit authorities are and the Class Is and shoreline railroads. That rail has that line as rail. A lot of that rail comes through L.B. Foster. That also has a power rail that energizes the train, it's called, and that's a product that L.B. Foster makes. Then it's got fasteners and stuff to protect people to make sure that they're not energized with how the trains are being energized. That's a product made by L.B. Foster. That's all under the rail.
When you fall under Global Friction Management, when you look at the CTA again, you come into a terminal or you're coming to a crossing and you hear a lot of noise, or you're coming to a curve, you hear a lot of noise. That's this product that alleviates that noise and provides friction when the train needs to stop coming into a terminal. These are products that we sell to help the operator be more efficient, either with safety or with fuel or both. That's a big piece of this business. The third piece is off the rail. Now that we've got the components, we got the modifications related to Global Friction Management technology, we want to give them the ability to assess what's going on at or near the track to make sure the track's not fault, to make sure that clear operating systems are running.
This is a big part of our business today. It's a piece that came out of the U.K. and we're bringing it to North America here. The exciting thing about this isn't necessarily what you see on the sales here. The sales are growing. It's the profit margins. This is the technology innovation and how we're pivoting the company. It's bringing this technology into North America and expanding it through the Class Is, the shortline railroads, and transit authorities like CTA. On the Precast, excuse me, infrastructure side, steel products has been a long-stay product of L.B. Foster Company. We really kind of tapped that down to what's important. Today, it's primarily tubular. We do some oil and gas coating, inline coater. We're an inline coater for SIPCO, and then we do a specialty coating for other types of work, all for oil and gas.
We also do a little bit of threading work related to water well and transmissions. We've been doing that for about 40 years. That's a small piece of the business, but something we're just counting on each and every day as part of the infrastructure of America. We're really excited about the Precast side. We started really getting focused on how do we grow and expand. We've done that through M&A work, as you see in the bottom of the page here. It's an area that we are definitely really focusing on when we talk about tuck-in acquisitions and opportunities for expansion. These are the things we're talking about here with Precast. We'll get into a little bit more on that in this presentation.
When you take a step back and you look at the company, when Bill and I kind of think about how we run it, we look at it in two different ways. The segments are the segments and how we report it. How we run the company is focusing on we have very specific businesses that we expect returns out of. This is generated in cash. You see these on the right-hand side of the business here or the page. That cash then generates, provides us the ability to go fund the growth platforms. This is growth from a top line and bottom line return. This is where we plow in the exterior SG&A, and this is where we're bringing products not just here in the U.S., but also through North America and some other targeted regions.
If you look at the growth platforms, this is what we're seeing in the last couple of years since 2021. The growth in Global Friction Management, 42%. Total Track Monitoring, we've been talking a little bit about that today, is 273% growth. Now, it's a small loose segment, but it's something the customers really want, and they're making sure that it's part of how they run their railroads. Precast, 119%. Significant growth in what we're focused on. Our growth platforms are working because the strategies behind them are making it such. The margins you see below are also something that we're very happy with, and we're focusing on to make sure we protect those margins. On the right-hand side is actually a different story. This is another reason our margins got better because we've been cleaning up our businesses. We divested a number of businesses over the last four years.
That heavy lift of divesting is gone. It's behind us. We've also been cleaning up product lines to make sure we're focusing on what we do well, what our core companies are, and more importantly, where we can make money. On the right-hand side, these are the businesses that have shrunken or have been removed since 2021. I'll turn it over to Bill now, and I'll come back with some closing remarks. Bill?
Morning, everyone. Thanks, John. Just a little bit of background for me. I joined L.B. Foster back in March of 2021, so a little over four years at this point. I joined the company right at the time when this transformation work and strategic reset was kicking off. It's been a very exciting time, very fulfilling time. A lot of great work accomplished thus far and certainly more to do. Our most recent quarter, John mentioned this, we did report a pretty strong quarter. We were up organically 2% on top line. That kind of is a little bit misleading because what's within there is some movements in the portfolio in terms of descaling or scaling back our U.K. business.
There was also a bit of a delay in the order book development for our rail segment here in North America, which again did occur by the end of the quarter and is setting us up for a strong second half. Within the infrastructure business, you can see we grew 22.4%. That was led by Precast , which was up 36% year-over-year. Really strong growth. Order books really good there. Good margins within that business portfolio, and we expect that to continue. The other element of the quarter that was really strong was the SG&A leverage, which we were down 200 basis points over last year, improvement over last year with the increasing top line and the SG&A controls that we've got in place. That translated into a 51.4% increase in EBITDA in Q2 year-over-year.
We're basically saying that in the back half of 2025, we will see strong profitability expansion and greater SG&A or top- line sales growth with the improved backlog and the improved mix that we have in our backlog. It was a great quarter. We were pretty pleased with the results, and we think there's more to come here through the balance of the year. John mentioned a lot of the portfolio work that we've been doing over the last four years. You can see there's on the left-hand side six product line divestitures and business divestitures, product line exits, and we also had a handful of acquisitions focused in Precast Concrete as well as rail technologies. If you can look at the overall sales picture of the charts across the bottom, we were $514 million in sales back in 2021, but the margin profile was 16.8%.
Now we're just slightly under that at $507 million in terms of revenue on a trailing 12-month basis, but the margins were up to 22.2%. As I just mentioned, our guidance for the year midpoint is $545 million. We expect to be growing in the back half of the year. We expect growth for the full year and a much higher margin profile. This is the strategy, and it's been working, and we feel good about the progress that we've made. This translates that into a visual that takes you all the way down through EBITDA. We had a flattening out of EBITDA on a trailing 12-month basis, again because of the delay in the order book, primarily within the rail distribution portion of our business. Our guidance midpoint for 2025 is $42 million.
You can see that would be a step change improvement from where we are on a trailing 12-month basis, and you can see the progress that we've made over that four-plus year period of time. One of the things about our business that's important to understand is the working capital needs and the seasonality of our business. As you can imagine, being highly focused on infrastructure and markets, there's a lot of outdoor work that is done with our product lines and serving our customers. A lot of the business is executed in the middle quarters of the year. Second and third quarter are typically our two strongest quarters. Generally, what that means is that we're consuming working capital in the first half of the year, unwinding working capital in the second half of the year.
This year is a little unique in that the working capital needs were not as significant in the first half of the year because of the delay in the order book development in rail distribution. We expect that to be deferred to the back half of the year, but it's also expected to contribute to strong year-over-year growth in the back half of the year. We have about a $41 million free cash flow expectation for the back half of 2025. That just gives you an indication of what the cash-generating power of the business is. Looking at leverage and cash flow over a longer period of time, you can see that profile over several quarters here. Working capital needs are going to elevate our leverage in certain quarterly periods, but we consistently bring those leverage levels back down.
We target to end the year between 1x and 1.5x . I currently think that's where we'll be this year as well. We just ended up renegotiating a new credit facility back in June, which increased the flexibility of the facility as well as the overall capacity, which allows us to execute our strategic plans with adequate capital to be able to do that. We do have a pretty significant NOL position, which is mitigating federal taxes here in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. We are very active with our share buyback program. We have an authorization that was $40 million earlier this year. We've started to utilize that, of course, and we think our stock price is at an attractive value today, so we continue to be active with that program.
A couple of closing slides on our revenue and our book-to-bill ratios and the order intake levels. We were under one on a consolidated basis for several quarters with this concept of us having deferred growth within our core businesses, but also scaling back revenue in other parts of the business that we're looking to have be a smaller component of the overall order book. You can see in the last two quarters, we were north of one on a consolidated basis, and that was really led by the growth that we saw on the rail technology side of the business. Infrastructure continues to be steady. Order book and backlog is healthy. I guess you can see that more clearly here on the next chart.
You can see the red chart, the red bars show you the growth that we've been able to drive into the rail business in terms of backlog. That's what gives us confidence about the second half of the year. Importantly, across the entire portfolio, the profitability profile of what is in our backlog is much better than what it was last year. While we're going to have top- line growth, and we expect that in the back half of the year, as well as for all of 2025, the profitability profile of what we're selling today is much better. That'll drive operating results, cash flow, and of course, financial returns. Two last comments from me, just talking a bit about the valuation. We're consistently a strong cash generator. The last two calendar years, we averaged $31 million worth of free cash flow.
That's adjusted for a Union Pacific warranty settlement that was completed at the end of 2024. We're targeting right now about $20 million at a midpoint. That $20 million obviously contemplates some deferral and working capital collections in the back half of the year just because of the timing of when our rail business will execute within the back half of the year. That is still translating into a yield of between 6% and 11% at today's stock price. We feel like that's pretty attractive. If you look at the valuation of where we're trading today compared to the midpoint of our guidance, we're trading at a range of 7.4% down to 6.7% at a 7x multiple at the midpoint.
We feel like we're at a pretty attractive valuation, and that's one of the reasons why our share buyback program continues to be a major target for allocation of capital. With that, I'll turn it back over to John for his closing remarks. John?
Thanks, Bill. All right. You are going to have a lot of questions on capital allocation. Here, we'll share with you what our focus is. Debt, Bill just mentioned 1x, 1.5x . That's something we strive for. Some of the people we talked to today think we should be around zero. We think 1x-1.5x makes a lot of sense for our business because we're also taking that capital right now and we're buying shares. We have an active 10B5-1. The board authorized a $40 million three-year stock buyback program, and we're being very aggressive in the market, buying as many shares as we can last quarter as well as in this quarter and probably for the indefinite future because we believe in our story and we believe it's a good use of our capital.
The other piece is the actual, which is not a lot of money, but our growth capital runs around 2% of sales. We make sure these areas that we're funding to make sure that we have this growth that continues in 2026 and beyond, and we're plowing the capital in to make those things happen. Where it makes sense, you know, we're not always aggressively looking at the marketplace for acquisitions. We're looking at the ones that are meaningful, that are bolt-on tuck-ins, and also really can help us to enable that strategy that we have today and accelerate it, as well as keep the gains that we're getting in the geographic reach and our product line expansion that we're doing. That's where it makes most sense to us. Right now, we believe it's been a tough first half of the year.
As I mentioned, our rail business and infrastructure, a lot of that flows through the government with the programs and the cutbacks and the scrutiny by the administration. We had a lot of just concern in the first half of the year. The good news is a lot of that is now freed up, and it's translating to us in backlog. A lot of quoting activities and things are starting to really pick up and move. We feel very good about where we're at. The second half of the year, when we share these numbers with you, is really about execution. We don't need the big orders to come in to happen. We just need to execute on what we have and then start building backlog for 2026 and beyond. Another thing that's going on here, of course, the renewed energy is good too.
This business that I talked about, inline coating, we are a partner with SIPCO, and they've been very busy, and everything that they produce related to that oil and gas, we coat. That's good for our business and our shareholders as well. You see that backlog is up 36.8%. Then Precast Concrete, this is an area that we didn't acquire. We went out and worked with a brownfield facility. We partnered with somebody in Florida, and we're starting to deliver residential and light industrial wall panels. It's really becoming pretty exciting for us because the need today, you know, these things are being built by labor and by block, block by block. That labor is in tight demand now. It's shrinking. As interest rates and the housing continues to come back, they're looking for people like L.B. Foster to help build a product that's in a factory.
The amount of time that actually takes to bring a house or a light industrial building to fruition is a fraction of the amount of time than hiring a bunch of labor and doing it piece by piece or block by block. If you look at our investment thesis, and this is what we just keep coming, you know, honing back on, you know, make sure that we, him and I, and Bill and I stay very focused. One or two of these charts talk about transformation. Most of the transformation work has happened in the last couple of years. We feel that we have a structural improvement that is already in place, and the profitability is here today and is going to continue in the future. We feel very excited about our growth organically. As Bill mentioned, we've seen the first growth last quarter.
It was the first growth we've seen in five quarters. We expect that to continue through the second half of the year, as well as well into next year. Cash has always been something the company has generated quite a bit of in the past. This is something I know shareholders are excited about too, and Bill shared with you what the cash generation looks like for the year, as well as a big cash generation for the second half of the year. When we spend money, we're very disciplined about it. We make sure we think through things first. We look for good processes, and where it makes sense, we'll bring in automation and other things like that, where we'll spend the capital to help our employees make sure that they're first and foremost being safe, and then to improve the productivity and reliability.
Bill hit on many of these things, but we'll just make sure we come back to them in the last chart here or two. The second half of the year is a big year. It's going to be a big year for us. 43% H2 related to our adjusted EBITDA growth. It's a big deal. 14% organic sales. This is where our strategy is really bearing fruit. I feel very excited about that. Free cash flow generation, $41 million in the second half of the year. That's a significant amount of cash the company's generating. If you look at the attractive valuation, Bill just mentioned that, you know, anywhere you want to look in that range that you see on this page and what he just referred to, we feel the company is a very attractive buy at this time. I guess we got a few minutes here.
We can open up to questions if you have any for either Bill or myself.
Yes.
Yeah. The question is, what is the common thread between us? It's an infrastructure materials company. The materials we use are steel and concrete. That's the common thread. Many of the customers, contractors between rail and the infrastructure side are the same to us. We run them in two different segments, but there's a lot of overlap on the admin side of how we take the business. That's that SG&A we're talking about. We took out, and the company used to in the past have vertical silos, if you will. We're kind of bringing that together into how we run the company into one company, one business. On the rail side, for sure we do because there are large projects that are out there, especially on transit authorities. We're bidding work that goes out for three years on the rail side specifically.
Class Is, you know, the heavy freights, the six Class Is that run across North America. A little less visibility there, except for they tell us how much money they plan to spend, what their capital programs are, and what they're looking for as far as geographic improvements they're trying to make. We got good visibility into that for at least a year into what's going on there. Infrastructure is a little bit regional. We got pretty good visibility of what's going on in the east and southeast. Then you get back in the Midwest, that's kind of job by job right now. The business has been still very good.
I might add just real quickly. One of the other areas that we look at is there's a federal program called CRISI Grants. Those CRISI Grants are part of the elements of it that are part of the IIJA Act that was put out. They give spending allocations by year for the CRISI Grant programs that ultimately make their way to our customers. It's for largely infrastructure build. Also, the level of allocation of money for those CRISI Grants has been increasing significantly. It's about 4.5 x what it's been over the last five years compared to the previous five years. There's typically a two-year delay between when the money is appropriated and when it actually makes it into the projects. There is some momentum behind that in terms of visibility towards demand for our product lines.
Yeah. How is tariffs impacting us? I'm sure we have competitors, but first of all, a good part of what we procure is here in America, is in the U.S. The steel, the concrete, is all U.S. We've actually seen very little impact to us on tariffs from a negative point of view. In fact, some may say they've been beneficial to us because it has the opportunity with those supply chains that we have to take prices at a market rate and improve our margins. Yeah, that's right. We're able to stay in front of that on the cost side very well. We've got very good partnerships here. COVID was a tough time for the company, but it was a great time to come out of it because we domesticated a lot of the stuff that we did through COVID.
When the tariffs hit, we're in much better shape today than we were back in 2019, back six years, seven years ago. We have 18 facilities across the company, and manufacturing is here all in North America from Vancouver to Boise to Pueblo, Colorado. We got a couple of facilities in Texas. We got two facilities in Tennessee. We got a new facility in Florida and one in West Virginia and two in Ohio. We have some light manufacturing in the U.K. This is that technology that I was referring to in the rail side. They do some assembly type work or type of stuff, and a lot of that product is shipped over to the States for us to then do the final assembly installation. Any other questions? Yes.
We have some knowledge that you're getting a real section and some new research today. I think new clients are graduating and so.
Yeah, good. Thank you. Very good question. This is where we're spending a lot of our time and energy. The question was, you know, what's going on in rail and technology innovation because it's new to our company. Our company was a steel provider and track component provider. I called it a widget company for the first hundred years. We knew that wasn't sustainable, and we definitely knew that was an area that we could continue to grow the company from a margin profile. This is where we did acquisition of Portec back in 2010, and we brought in Friction Management. This is an area that we have a significant market share. We are the brand leader. We've been working on this product for a number of years. We own the chemistry. We have the people that do the formulation.
We do much of the work ourselves, both on the equipment side as well as on the consumable side. Each and every day, we're working with our customers to figure out what it is, what's their pain points. How do we help them provide a better ride for our transit authority? How do we provide a better ride or a better wheel and life for the wheels and a freight installation? How do we provide something that makes sure the trains, as they go through a track or around a curve, stay actually on the track? This is something that we're just becoming really an extension of how they do business today. In the past, many of the transit authorities and freight operators kind of looked at this as a little bit as a black magic.
Today they're like, we need this because they're demonstrating this product demonstrates a significant fuel savings, for example, 3%- 5% fuel savings is what this product can provide. You go through a curve without a product like this, you hear the squeal and the noise. That squeal and noise is deteriorating the wheel and the rail. Without proper treatment, that curve may only last one year. With treatment, this could go 10 years now. There's a real understanding now and a real excitement by our customers of how do we take this and expand it across their networks. We're really kind of defining the market as you go and the opportunities with this business. The last piece here, the TSS, was the technology service solutions. This is where we've taken over quite a bit of technology, LiDAR technology from the U.K.
What a railroad struggles with is really understanding what's in front of them. If there's a rock or there's an animal, there's some debris on a track, they don't have visibility to that until they come upon it. What our technology does is it gives them advanced warning and visibility. They call that if the track is fault. The customers are really excited about that because today, when they have that kind of stuff, they have to slow the trains down, stop the trains, do a slow order, and it really impacts their ability to perform. Of course, there's the possibility of derailment. This is where the company has really been pivoting ourselves, taking something that we know and do very, very well, but giving it to our customers in the form of early diagnostics, early warning, and the ability for them to operate their lines more effectively and efficiently.
This is where we're looking to do this wholesale installation and service across here in North America. This is the real exciting thing about the company, really pivoting off a steel distribution company to a technology innovation company. Any other questions? Thank you. Really appreciate your time. Have a great day.