Okay. Morning, everybody, and thank you for joining the Sidoti & Company Year-In 2025 Virtual Conference. My name is Julio Romero, and I cover building products, industrials, and engineering and construction here at Sidoti & Company. We're really pleased to be able to host L.B. Foster. Their ticker is FSTR. With us today is John Kasel, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bill Thalman, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Lisa Durante, Director of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations, and Sean Riley, Corporate Controller. The format of this is going to be a traditional presentation followed by some Q&A towards the very end. If you do have any questions for L.B. Foster, feel free to type them into the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Happy to ask on your behalf. With that, John, Bill, Lisa, Sean, thanks so much for being here, and the floor is yours.
Thanks, Julio. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for joining us in December at the end of the year, and we're excited to share with you our story as we navigate our way through exciting times with a lot of opportunities. We want to share that with you today. So I'm John Kasel, President CEO of the company. I'm in my 24th year with the company. And as Julio mentioned, Sean Riley, our Controller, Lisa Durante, who's over our IR group, and then Bill Thalman, our CFO, is with us today. The company was founded in 1902, so we've been around for 123 years. We make products, and we do technology innovation primarily in two markets. We're going to talk about that in detail today: the transportation market and the civil construction markets here in North America.
In fact, about 90% of what we do is here in North America as it relates to sales. The company, as you can see up on top here, the guidance we share, somewhere in just over $500 million in sales, with $40-42 million EBITDA. We're a capital-light company. We'll share more of that today. We've had a nice run as of late with our stock price. I think our stock price is up about 40% since the spring of the year. So there's been a lot of attention related to what we do because we make things, and we're about the infrastructure play moving people around in North America as well as providing them opportunities for shelter and other things that make America and North America what it is today. Next.
So our journey is going to go back 123 years, but the real pivot happened in 2021 when we really got laser focus on what it is L.B. Foster has done well, and more importantly, where our opportunities for growth are and really simplifying what we do and how we get excited, you guys, the investment community, excited about what we do, so we're going to unpack a little bit of this, share with you what we aspired to be back in 2021 and where we're landing the plane from a guidance point in 2025. Next, so as I mentioned, the history of the company has been around for a long time.
It was started by a family, the Foster family, four brothers here on the left, a number of milestones of significant importance, specific as it relates to acquisitions and growing the company, and then entering the NASDAQ, as Julio mentioned, FSTR back in 1981. On the right-hand side is where Bill and I and Sean and Lisa really want to talk about is where we're changing the company and why you should be excited about our trajectory, what we're doing, more importantly, where we're heading. So next slide, please, Lisa. So let's talk about the big business segments. So as I mentioned, we report out in two areas: rail and infrastructure. So primarily, the company has been a rail company as far as size, but that's changing. In fact, rail is only around 55%, just over 50% of the company as it relates to sales today.
We've really been focusing on infrastructure and growing that. We're excited about the opportunities here in North America. We love the rail business, but for us to grow, we know that infrastructure is a big place to play in that. The margins is something that Bill, I, Sean, and Lisa, and our leadership team have really been focusing on: getting consistent margin and predictability in our business, and you can see that here on the bottom left-hand side with margins being equal and north of 20% across the businesses. So let's talk a little bit more of what these segments are, Lisa, so on the rail side, this goes back, again, 123 years. The rail product side is what we started with the company with on distribution, taking rail and then reusing that rail and then selling it to other people that had interest in used rail.
And from there, we built on and we started doing many more things as far as building track and infrastructure. That's the rail product side of the business. It's a very good piece of the business, but in itself, it really wasn't enough because we would like to continue to grow off the commodity cycle of making track components. And that's why on the right-hand side and the bottom, you can see the growth that we've done in very specific M&A activities, specifically bringing technology innovation to our company. So rail is only so good related to what you can do with it, but the real advantage is how you make it more efficient for our operators. This is reducing noise, improving friction, improving fuel efficiency. And that's why we bought Portec Rail Products back in 2010, which brought this Global Friction Management business to us.
It's no longer just about selling the components. It's about providing a component that has a better use case to our customer. And that's something that's been really, really exciting, not just to us, but to our investors because it's an area of significant growth that takes us outside of North America throughout the world. The third piece of it is we wanted to make sure that we continue innovation, but do it a little bit off track, provide our customers with analytics, with information, with data to show that the other two things that we're providing on the rail side are giving them information to be more efficient, more effective, and safer, not just from a customer point of view related to our OEM or operator, but also in the U.K. specifically as it relates to passengers. We're really hitting all three pieces now.
The other two that I mentioned, Global Friction Management and TSNS, are smaller businesses, but it's an area of growth. And you can see on the right-hand side here, it's also the opportunity where we have a larger profit margin. Next. So I mentioned earlier about infrastructure. That traditionally has been a much smaller segment for us, and that's really growing nicely, specifically on both areas, quite honestly. On precast side, we have a significant part of it, 70% of it, actually, of the sales is in precast today. And we did a nice acquisition. You see down here the VanHooseCo acquisition back in 2022. So it really brought us into product expansion as well as specific products as well as geographic expansion in the east. And then we opened up our operations in Florida last year.
So we have an opportunity to continue to grow in the east markets with additional products. Also exciting to us is something we've had for a very long time is our energy business, our coating business. We're an inline coater for ACIPCO. We've had this operation now for about 35 years, and we're really seeing an uptick in what's going on in the energy space, and we're looking for a very strong 2026 beyond. So we'll talk more about that as we continue this presentation. Nope. I mean, Lisa, sorry. So I mentioned how we actually report out the business, but actually how we run the business is this way. So we have return side and platforms, which is on the right-hand side. This is how we kind of bring all the businesses together, if you will.
So a lot of people maybe look at it as confusing two different segments, but the reality is we keep it very simple how we run it. On the right-hand side is our returns business. These traditionally are the commodities component type businesses that we have that are very stable, very predictable, and also generate cash. We like that. So we really focus on those. We invest where we need to on that. A lot of that is maintenance play related to capital. But then we take that cash, and we'll talk more about the cash generation with our company, which is exciting in itself. And we plow it in the left-hand side here, which is our growth side. This is where we have Global Friction Management on the rail side, our Total Track Monitoring side, which is rail again, and then precast products.
This is where the top line growth will continue. And more importantly, this is where the profit margins will continue to get investors excited about us continuing to grow our company from a bottom line point of view. Next. So here's really the story. This is one of our favorite charts. We really had to make the company smaller to make the company attractive and make the company profitable. So on the right-hand side here is with 123 years, we had a lot of legacy-type products, a lot of legacy-type businesses that we had to shrink or to shut down or honestly had to sell.
So on the Rail Products and these other things you see here on the right side, we had to take some actions to simplify the business or sell some of those types of businesses and then really make sure that what we have here is something that we can contribute cash to the company. And then on the left-hand side is where we've taken that capital allocation, if you will, as well as financial and human, and be able to plow that into Global Friction Management, TTM, Precast, and really driving the growth platform of our company, which is something that we do each and every day. And this is where I think we're just going to continue to differentiate ourselves in years to come. We're able to really leverage this left-hand side of the platform. Next.
I'll turn it over to Bill now and the financial review, and I'll come back with some comments. Bill.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everybody. As John mentioned, I've been with the company since 2021. It'll be five years here coming up in March, and I joined the company at a very exciting time where we were undertaking this strategic review and transformation action, and very proud of a lot of the progress that we've made thus far with more to come in the coming years. I thought I'd start with just a recap of our most recent quarter that we completed. You can see on the slide here that we did report modest organic growth. It's the third straight quarter in which we had organic growth in the business.
And that is important from the perspective of we're growing certain more profitable components of the business, but we are still addressing certain elements of the business that, as John indicated, we're looking to downsize or make a smaller component overall. Most of the growth that we've seen thus far this year has been within infrastructure. The rail portion is down in the second quarter, our third quarter, but we are also expecting a very strong fourth quarter for both infrastructure and rail. And we'll talk a bit more about that when we talk about the backlog. Profitability on a year-over-year basis in the quarter was down due to a margin headwind. We really had a strong Q3 last year, and just the softer volumes in rail resulted in lower margins. But we also had lower SG&A.
So overall, EBITDA was down in the quarter, but we expected to be stronger again in the fourth quarter. Cash was really the positive story for the quarter in Q3, along with backlog build. Our cash flow was $29.2 million, up $4.4 million over last year. We deployed that cash to lower our debt levels. We are typically very heavy cash generators in the back half of the year. So that is trending this year as well. And we see significant improvements in our leverage in addition to continuing our stock buyback program, which you can see we made progress there as well. And then the order rates and backlog, we feel really good about the progress in Q3. Our order rates were up almost 20%. The TTM book-to-bill ratio was 1.08- 1, so expanding, and our backlog was up over 18%.
And I guess the key message, and John will cover this a bit more later on, our backlog is $38 million. At the beginning of Q4, it was $38 million higher than what it was last year, which supports the $32 million sales increase that we expect year- over- year in the fourth quarter at the midpoint of our guidance. So we wanted to just emphasize that we made some good progress in Q3, but we're really expecting a strong finish in Q4. Next slide, Lisa. This is something that we like to cover. This chart provides a profile of the movements in sales and the margin progression that we've made over the last five years or so, four-to-five years or so, with the different portfolio moves, both acquisitions and divestitures and product line exits.
And you can see that we've made through 2024 very good progress in terms of growth and improved profitability. The trailing 12 months in Q3 is a bit soft. You can see sales are down to $508 on a trailing 12-month basis and just shy of 22%. However, the outlook for 2024, sorry, 2025 Q4 will push both of those numbers up, and that chart will look different at the end of the quarter. Next slide, please. And that translates to a similar story on this slide where you can see the trailing 12-month figures are showing a negative trend thus far. But again, with a large portion of our business pushed to the fourth quarter, we're expecting those charts to look very different at the end of the quarter. Next chart, please. So we like to spend a little bit of time on discussing the seasonality of our business.
And we look at it from two perspectives: sales and EBITDA as it relates to how they split within the quarters, and then cash flow. So sales and EBITDA were a construction-related business. So typically, we would have our strongest quarters from a sales and EBITDA point of view in our second and third quarter, with Q1 and Q4 typically being a bit softer. Now, Q1 in 2025 was extremely soft. And that was largely related to our rail distribution business. If everybody remembers some of the DOGE impacts that occurred early in the year, constrained spending from some of our customers because of government funding being on hold. That basically got released in Q2. We started to see improvements in Q3, and we're actually expecting a much stronger Q4 than what we would typically see.
So that's impacting the sales and EBITDA phasing versus the history or what we would normally expect in 2025. From a cash flow point of view, we really aren't seeing that much of a difference, although some of the cash flow needs were pushed to the back half of the year. We're still seeing positive cash generation in the back half of the year. It was really strong in Q3, and we expect it to continue to be strong here in Q4. So important to understand in terms of the phasing of our financials based on how we typically operate. Next slide. Turning to leverage and net debt, I feel like we do a really good job overall of managing the peaks and valleys and some of the choppiness related to our cash flow and the debt levels that we carry relative to our leverage and our EBITDA generation.
You can see we spike up in the kind of above two in the heavier working capital need periods of the company. And then towards the back half of the year, we typically get back down to our longer-term targets of one to one and a half. You can see the progress that we made year- over- year. We were down three-tenths of a turn on leverage at the end of Q3. We'll expect to make more progress again in Q4, generating cash and paying down debt. We do have an NOL in place that will help us with keeping cash taxes in check for the foreseeable future. And we also have our share buyback program, which we have made progress on in Q4 as well. Next slide. Next couple of slides. I'm just wrapping up the narrative around our orders and backlog.
So again, the book-to-bill ratio for the business overall remains favorable. The last three quarters has been north of one. So expanding the book-to-bill, the order book over that time frame. You can see a lot of it is driven by the rail business, which bodes well for the growth that we're expecting to see for the rail business in the fourth quarter. And infrastructure had a large order that was canceled in the third quarter, which really didn't impact current demand activities. It was a longer-term order that our customer ultimately took out of their backlog. So we took it out of ours as well. But it didn't have an impact and does not have an impact on current demand within infrastructure. And we feel good about the growth prospects for infrastructure in Q4. Next slide.
That same message is basically translated here to the backlog that you can see, which is up 18.4% over last year, driven largely by our rail business, which should have a strong growth profile here in Q4, and we expect, even though the backlog for infrastructure is down year- over- year, current demand levels remain strong, and we expect growth there as well. Next slide, so the last slide is just some metrics around our overall valuation. You can see the free cash flow yield is around 6% at the current stock price, and that's at a midpoint of just over $17 million for 2025. I will say our volume was down a tick. Average volume is down a tick from trailing 12 months last year.
That's largely because of the Russell 2000 inclusion last year that occurred in June of 2024, which spiked our volume at that point in time. And then on the valuation on the right-hand side, you can see we're a pretty attractive value based on the range of outlooks that we have for the balance of the year and where we're currently trading, especially compared to the valuation that was out there for 2024. So we think we're a very compelling story and worth taking a look at. So I'll end it there and turn it back over to John for his closing remarks. Thanks.
Thanks, Bill. I'll try to wrap this up in a few minutes. We have a few minutes for a Q and A session as well. So our capital allocation priorities, debt reduction, we try to land in that 1-1.5 times.
We've been significantly working towards that. We typically end the year in that range. We have a share purchase program going on right now. In fact, you can see here we purchased 1.7% of shares outstanding in the quarter. We have a large authorization from our board of $32 million, which we got the ability to execute through 2025 and 2028. We talk about being a capital-light business. We are. A lot of that is related to organic programs. We're running around 2% of sales. And then where it makes sense, our growth, again, is really heavily focused on our innovation technology. But where it makes sense, we do look at tuck-in acquisitions to help us move us down the path of our strategic plan. Next. So we talked about DOGE at the beginning of the year.
That was an impact to our business as it was to most businesses. We're seeing recovery of that in H2 of this year, specifically Q4. It's very strong. I have a chart that we had in the presentation showing that. But the demand is there, and the models are there. So the nice thing about our business is that you can defer spending for a while, but we're in the maintenance business. So they need the products to build their track infrastructure, to use the precast products. And they definitely want our products to help them run their railroads more efficiently, effectively. And then our TTM business gives them the ability to manage and remotely monitor, make sure what's happening in safe conditions. So our customers need those products.
So you defer so long, but the reality is the need is there, and we're definitely seeing that in the second half of the year. Next. So why the company? Why this company? 123 years old. When I joined the company, stock price was at $3, right? Today, we're around $25, $26. The reality is we've really been focusing on doing things structurally in the company with a real focus leading in on what we do well and changing the narrative for growth, which will come in the top line, driving bottom line return. Much of that is done through organic focus that we have today. So we're really, really focused on what we can manage and what we can control versus doing a lot of risky M&A work. Companies generated cash for years. We'll talk about that at the end. We'll hit that as well.
We're very disciplined where we spend our money and related to capital. Next. So here's this third, fourth quarter. Look at what's going on in the business. Typically, our fourth quarter is a little bit of a wind down as construction, as Bill talked about, but the reality is this was the pent-up demand from the first part of the year with the impacts that we saw coming out of Washington, D.C., and our customers need the products, so we're working hard, as Bill would say, land the plane here in the fourth quarter. We're excited about the opportunities we have and the need for our products here and specifically in North America. Next, so key takeaways from today is organic growth is something that we really, really focus on. We got a lot of that happening here again in Q4. The organic growth is 25%.
It's significant in Q4, but we've strung together a couple of quarters now. Q4 will be a third or fourth quarter of consecutive organic growth. Really focus on free cash flow. Cash generation is very important to us. And we're projecting around $18 million of free cash flow with our guidance money here. And the bill hit on the attractive valuation for the company. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. I think where we're at right now is a good buy. But the leadership team is really focused on continuing to grow the profitability of this company, not just today, but in the future. Next. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today and turn it back to Julio. I think it leaves us a few minutes if there's any of your questions. Julio.
Thanks, John, Bill, Lisa, Sean. Thank you all for the rundown. Again, if you have any questions for L.B. Foster, feel free to type them into the Q&A section bottom of your screen. I'll kick it off here by honing in on the growth portions of your businesses. You have Global Friction Management, Total Track Monitoring, and Precast Concrete. Can we just high-level dive into those businesses and identify what's the key above-market growth driver in each of the three?
Well, Global Friction Management is about the operator really wanting to be more efficient, right, and have their assets live longer and provide a better ride when it's a passenger transit authority. So in the past, it was something that we were trying to bring to the market for adoption or acceptance. And today, we don't have to do that. They need the product. They want the product. It's very, very important. Now, TTM is all about really safety and being able to provide them the equipment, the analysis to be able to see how trains are running over their track and the opportunity to see if their track has fallen, meaning if there's an obstacle or some other issue.
This is where we completely changed and pivoted our company into providing the insight foresight to our customer to be able to see how they can run their equipment and their assets more efficiently and effectively. Our precast is really about infrastructure. Concrete is really one of these things that people need. The growth, specifically where we sit in the east, southeast parts of America where the demographics are moving and the new product introductions that we're doing, has really poised the company well for success for the future. As we grow as an economy, as a market, L.B. Foster is there putting the things in the ground that make that happen.
Really helpful, so just following up on that, in your view with regards to the friction management piece, you're saying the customers, maybe relative to prior periods, are now, they've accepted, "Okay, this is something we need. This isn't like a nice-to-have. It's a need-to-have," and now it's kind of just about wallet share gains with the customers.
Yeah. In the beginning, they called it black magic because a lot of the product is dark, right? It goes on the rail, squeeze whatever else. In the beginning, people really didn't understand the value of it, and now it's part of how they run the railroad, so it's completely different because they've seen the benefit, and the benefit's really easy. In some areas, if you're not treating the without product, you're changing rail out every year. Put our product and use our solution. The product that track or that curve may go 10 years, so it becomes a very compelling case, excellent ROIs, and then on the transit side, it's about. We've all been on trains. It's loud, and we know it's loud. So when it's treated, it's a much better passenger ride. Of course, when there's noise, there's friction. When there's friction, there's wear and tear.
So it's really one of these things that it's just common sense. But that common sense is now becoming part of how our customers operate, both the freight and transit rails.
Got it. And can you give a State of the Union on the steel products business unit? I know that's typically more of the returns business, but specifically related to the positive trends you're seeing on the pipeline coatings business.
Yeah. We're seeing the midstream business. I mentioned that earlier. We're going to be in 35 years doing that business as inline coater. We do ID/OD coating from 12- to 24-inch. And there's really been a focus on continuing growth of our pipelines and connecting, I guess, state-to-state here in the U.S. So we're looking for a strong fourth quarter and a very strong 2026 and probably beyond of getting back to some of the things we were doing in the past, specifically with our inline partner, ACIPCO. And so that's something that's been kind of off the radar because the last four years, well, specifically during the last administration, there has been a lot of work in the energy space. And that is absolutely changing overnight.
Last question from our end is, as investors are looking for fresh ideas heading into 2026, can you give us a quick 15 seconds on what aspects of the L.B. Foster story should investors hone in on?
Yeah. Real simple. We know what we're doing. It's an exciting place to be, and put your money into infrastructure, right, is something that we need, specifically here in North America. We got a lot of wear and tear. If you look at the overall grading and infrastructure, it's not good, so the demand for our type of products is going to be here for many years to come, so it's a safe bet, and we know where to spend our money, and we're in the right places, and we believe it at the right time.
Excellent. Well, John, Bill, Lisa, Sean, thank you all for taking the time this morning.
Take care.
Thank you.
Thanks for.
Thank you.