Products, industrials, and engineering 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, William Thalman, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, and Lisa Durante, Director of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. The format of this is gonna be a presentation followed by Q&A towards the very end. If you have any questions for L.B. Foster, feel free to type them into the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. I'm happy to ask on your behalf. With that, John, Bill, Lisa, thanks so much for being here.
Thanks, Julio, and thanks for joining everybody today. As Bill mentioned, or Julio mentioned that, Bill and Lisa are joining me today, and we look forward to sharing with you our story, starting with the company. Back in 1902, so we're in our 124th year. The company was started and headquartered out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Much of what we do is here, sales related is in North America. Almost about 92% of what we do is focused here, and that's a big part of who we are and more importantly, where we are going. The segments we'll talk about in detail today, we break it up into two reporting segments between Rail, Technologies, and Services and Infrastructure Solutions.
We'll break down for you the size of these segments, and then we'll get into respectively, what we're doing in these segments and more importantly, how we're gonna grow, shareholder returns in the future. That's up in the top right-hand corner, you see our guidance for this year of $540 million-$580 million. That's coming off a nice ending of 2025. We'll get in a little more details on that as well. Next chart. As I mentioned, we've been around for 124 years. It was started by four brothers, the Foster family, back in 1902 in Pennsylvania. We've had a really nice run of doing things related to just growing the company. In 1981, the company became public.
As Julio mentioned, it's traded on Nasdaq FSTR. We've had three significant acquisitions during the last 30-40 years that really set ourselves apart and give us the opportunity for real growth. One was CXT, which is a precast business, and at that time, a prestressed business as well. In 2010, we acquired Portec Rail, and it gave us a larger beachhead, not just in North America, but across Western Europe. Then we did another acquisition, bringing technology innovation in 2015 with the acquisition of TEW Plus.
Over the last five years on the right-hand side is about really streamlining the company, understanding what we do well, and make sure that we repeat that each and every day to give ourselves confidence in, you know, economic environments like today that companies like ourselves or small micro-cap companies can deliver returns for the shareholders, for the investors, and do it in an environment that, you know, is challenging at times outside of the company, but inside we many times flourish. We would like to share that with you today. Next. All right, the segments themselves, $540 million is what we did in 2025, which is the low end of the guidance, as I mentioned at the beginning of the page for 2026. You see the margin profiles that we have respectively in rail and infrastructure.
We've been working at that very hard and related to cost management, as well as taking price to the marketplace and make sure that we get paid for the value we're bringing to our customers. Next. When you get into Rail, Technologies Services, again, this is one of the segments that we report out. It's a segment that goes back to the beginning of the company, and it starts with Rail Products. Rail Products is building track. You see pieces of steel here, and that's rail. That's running rail. We sell both to the freight side and the transit side and regionals, and commuter rails. You know, we have a significant part of that business. I'll share that with you in a few minutes.
That's the history of the company, but the future of the company are the next two pieces here. We knew that, you know, building track or providing materials for track wasn't enough. We needed to get to help our customers be more efficient with that track, and that's where we're bringing Global Friction Management. That's what the Portec acquisition brought to us.
You see this little glob on top of the rail here, that's with a product that we make, we engineer, we patent, and it gives our operators, our customers, who are the freight customers as well as transit companies, the ability to manage their systems more effectively, provide better safety conditions, and to more importantly, save fuel, which is a big thing going on today, and have the longest asset life that they can get without treatment. In some cases, these assets can only last a year or so, but with our products, it can go up to 10 years in the most difficult conditions.
We've also been pivoting company off track to provide information technology to our customers to know how the track is performing, what's in front of them or that they can't see, and be able to manage those systems, and understand how to keep the trains moving, or if they need to slow down, to slow down, but not to do it unless it's absolutely required. That's what we have, our Technology Services and Solutions business. If on the right-hand side, you can see the growth that we have on the margins as you move in the technology innovation side continue to grow. Then as we take these businesses, our rail businesses is over $300 million now. Next.
Addressable market, as we like to call it, the TAM, in Rail, the Rail Products side, again, this is the base component of the business. It's a $450 million market, so not a huge market by any stretch of the imagination. We represent a significant part of it, 42%. We are the largest player, if you will, in this market. The rest are made up of smaller players, and it's an area that we are seeing growth in, but more importantly with this is the opportunity for us to deliver each and every year and bring cash back into the company to invest in other areas, namely the area below, Rail, Technologies. This is a larger market of $570 million.
It's global, so it gets us outside of North America, specifically into Western Europe as well as Asia. You can see where we're growing here. This is our technology and innovation at play here. The market's growing almost 5%, and we're growing close to 15%. This is where the customer is accepting our product, where the market's growing, but more importantly, we're picking up share. It's something we're very excited about and performing very well. Next. You move over to the other segment we report out on, and there's two components here. One is concrete and one is steel. The largest of the group is Precast Concrete. I'll give you some more details on that and steel products. Starting with steel is primarily what we do here is midstream, you know, energy.
It's coating for in-line coaters as well as one offline. We have an offline coater as well. We're seeing a real jump up in demand for energy here in North America. We coat pipe between 12- and 24-inch, which is used in the distribution networks primarily on the outside of the pipe for corrosion protection. The larger piece of this business is Precast Concrete. We'll break down the pieces of that, but this is an area that we're seeing quite a bit of opportunities for growth and expansion, and it's where we're doing our acquisitions of late. Next. Why we're excited about this? Well, first of all, you know, if you look at the TAM here, CXT Buildings is where we started back in 1999. If you saw that earlier chart, this is where we bought CXT, the business CXT.
What came with that was a small buildings business, which at the time was only $5 million of sales. You can see the addressable market is $200 million sales. Today, we, you know, last year we did $86 million, 44% of the market. It's not a large market, but it's an area that we again have a number one position in it, and we feel very good about our opportunities to continue to grow. As you see, this market is growing, and we're still growing at a very reasonable rate, over 10%. Where we're taking this though, we have these facilities that make this product across North America, and it was clear to us that strategically we need to do more, and we needed to penetrate other markets.
Along with making buildings, we got into other precast products, specifically as it relates to managing water. This can come in many ways, potable water or water as it relates to septic or other things that's required in building civil works, that's required in either new or existing construction. What we're excited about is this market size is $14 billion, so it's by far the largest market that we serve as a company. It's a fragmented market, so you can get into it, and you can really take advantage of the situation related to taking products and being able to manage that market.
You can see the growth rate is over 5%, and our growth, although small today, you know, at 1% of the market, this is an area that we're really focusing on growing the company. This is where that top line of the growth is gonna be coming for years to come. Next. How we run the company is on the right-hand side, we have a returns business. These are the ones that are stable. In our minds, they produce cash. This is a really, really good thing for the company. We don't plow a lot of extra money in this related to SG&A. There's not a lot of extra technology innovation. It's just about delivering each and every day. It's good quality, good delivery, and great customer service.
With that comes the ability to take those monies and profits and put them on the left-hand side, which is where our technology innovation is, which is Global Friction Management, which I shared with you before. Part of the TSS business, which is Total Track Monitoring, which is our wheel impact load detectors, which give the railroads the ability to see what's going on in their track as it relates to cars or traffic that's out of balance or out of condition. As I just mentioned, the Precast Concrete products that we're very excited about with that addressable market being at $14 billion. Next. I'm gonna turn it over to Bill Thalman, but beforehand, I'm gonna leave you with this. This is what, you know, I think why you could be excited with the L.B. Foster Company.
At the right-hand side, we've been managing the return side. In fact, the sales, the top line of the sales is we've been trimming these businesses and really focusing on where we can produce product that's not a widget or commodity, but something that we can generate cash and make sure we take that cash to the left-hand side, which is our growth side. This is Global Friction Management, Total Track Monitoring, and the precast side with 106% growth, top line growth since 2021, and gross margins are really moving up nicely, really driving bottom line return for the company. Something that customers are really looking for, and we're really investing money in. We're becoming more than the steel company that we started back in 1902.
Now we're becoming a technology innovation company that happens to sell steel and concrete. Bill, I'll turn it over to you, and I'll come back with some closing remarks.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. As John just indicated, the refresh strategy we launched in 2021 has really delivered some solid results. We've repositioned our portfolio, and you can see the profitability gains that we've achieved over that time period on relatively modest sales growth. You know, we've doubled our EBITDA on 5% sales growth. The margins have expanded 430 basis points, and the free cash generation of the business has improved substantially. As John mentioned earlier, our guidance for 2026 is showing more of the same, where we're expecting relatively modest sales growth at about 3.7% for 2026 at the midpoint, but with EBITDA growing just over 11%.
The free cash flow at the midpoint's about $20 million. That's a little bit less than 2025, but our CapEx spending rate's a little heavier in 2026 because we have some very strong growth opportunities that we're investing in our precast business. We're really excited about 2026 and the progress that we've made thus far. Next slide, please. John mentioned that we've done quite a bit of portfolio work over the years. You can see the activity in the top of the chart here, where we've done six acquisitions, divestitures or product line exits over the last four years. Then complementing that, we did some very specific investments, acquisitions, product line extensions in our growth platforms, primarily in Precast Concrete.
You can see on the bottom of the chart how that has over time resulted in a combination of organic growth, but, you know, offset to a certain degree by some portfolio trimming. A nice improvement in our overall margins growing about 430 basis points. On the next slide, Lisa will show us here that, you know, you can see the improvement in the margins and the modest sales growth, but you really see it in terms of the EBITDA performance over that timeframe, where we've gone from $19 million in 2021 up to $39 million last year. We're really pleased with that progress. We're gonna continue to execute that strategy. The large heavy lifting portfolio work is behind us.
We'll always have some trimming that we'll be looking to do, but the heavy lifting's behind us, and we're really focusing on organic growth in our growth platforms. Next slide. We like to spend some time covering the phasing or the seasonality of our business. It tends to be a little bit lumpy and concentrated because of the construction season that we have with our customers. The second and the third quarters are typically when we would see our stronger periods of sales and profitability just from a pure volume point of view, with the first and fourth quarter being a bit lighter. Last year, that was a little bit skewed with some of the spending delays in the railroad industry that kicked in more towards the back half of the year last year.
We expect this year to be a bit more like what we would typically see with the second and third quarter being stronger and our first quarter this year being better than what we saw last year because of the government spending impacts that impacted the demand levels early in the rail business last year. The cash generation, because of the construction season, generally is pushed to the back half of the year. You can see that in the upper right-hand side, and we would expect that to be consistent here in 2026 as well. Next slide. I feel like we've done a really good job of managing the overall cash and balance sheet position of the company. Our leverage is just under 1x at the end of 2025.
We would expect us to be just above 1x, just shy maybe of 1.5x, here in the early part of 2026 as the working capital cycle ramps up to support the construction season. You know, it'll trend back down in the back half of the year as cash is generated, profitability is improving, and, you know, we are very comfortable operating in that typical cycle. We do generate a lot of cash, $28 million on average, free cash flow over the last three years. We expect that similar in 2026, save for the additional CapEx spending I mentioned earlier.
We do have an NOL that provides a very nice tax shield for the organization for the foreseeable future. We have a very active stock buyback program where we've repurchased just over 9% of the shares outstanding through the end of last year. We've got just shy of $29 million of authorization left at this point. Next slide. Orders and revenues. Again, the book-to-bill ratios can move around a little bit just because our orders tend to be lumpy. Our revenue tends to be a little bit lumpy at times just based on the project work.
You can see over the last 12 months, the rail business has been expanding in terms of the order book, strong revenue growth or sorry, strong order growth relative to the revenue. You'll see that in our backlog on the next slide. Infrastructure was under 1. We had an order cancellation last year, that drove that decline, but the order rates have been picking up in both segments, which I guess I'll cover here on the next slide. Lisa, yeah, we've got an overall backlog that's just up over $3 million over last year. Pretty significant shift in that backlog from rail being up about $35 million. And then the infrastructure side is down about $31 million. But again, the infrastructure side's down about $20 million related to that order cancellation.
Both businesses have seen nice increases since the end of the fiscal year with about 15% growth in backlog for both of them as of the end of February. We feel good about the start of 2026. Next slide. I'll wrap up with this slide. You know, we were added to the Russell 2000 back in 2024 as a cash flow yield. From that perspective, we're just about 7% at today's stock price. When you look at the valuation on the right-hand side, considering the midpoint of our guidance for 2026, we're relatively inexpensive at just over 7x EBITDA from an enterprise value point of view.
You know, we feel good about the strategy, continuing to execute on the investments in our growth platforms to drive economic profit generation. We expect more of that to occur in 2026. With that, I'll turn it back over to John for his closing remarks. John?
Thank you. I'd just like to share with you our priorities as it relates to capital. You know, Bill hit on a number of these things, but that obviously, you know, being a small micro cap, we really focus on our balance sheet at the end of the year, just shy of 1x leverage. And we, you know, we're gonna keep in that range, being mindful of also using cash where we need to use cash to make sure that we're growing the company as well, which really drives to the next part is our capital expenditures. You know, 2.7% of sales is about, if you look at the midpoint, is about $15 million of capital.
In the past, that number would be significantly lower than, and it would be more on the maintenance efficiency side, which is always important with the safety and health productivity of our employees. Also this year, we're really plowing in money back into organic growth initiatives. We feel very good about what we have in front of us, and our ability to continue to grow in those, you know, the addressable markets I shared with you earlier, not just to maintain, but grow in those respective markets. We've been active in the share repurchases with 121,000 during Q4 last year. As Bill mentioned, we still have $28.7 million authorization out there. We're a believer in the company, and we're a believer in the value. Right now is a great value.
We will continue to buy shares. We haven't done a large acquisition since 2023 because honestly, we haven't needed to. We've been really focused on bringing up our portfolio, as well as these organic opportunities that I've talked about. Having said that, where it makes sense, we will continue to look at opportunities to grow a little more meaningful, but these will be looked at as tuck-in acquisitions, specifically in the infrastructure segment in the precast business that we have today. Next. Last year was, you know, it's really the tale of two years. Last year at this time, we were in the middle of DOGE, which is a big part of, you know, the business we have, the demand. Ultimately, a lot of this comes from federal spending. We had some headwinds last year.
We're not seeing them this year. There's plenty of money out there today. There's plenty of need out there, and demand in the marketplace today, both on a rail technology side as well as on the precast side. Of course, we're seeing a renewed interest in energy today, specifically in our midstream business. We're well-positioned, not just for a strong year this year, but we do see a super cycle for years to come as it relates to our demand. Next. I guess if you wanna think about how you should look at our company, what our investment thesis is, how we run the company, we really start with strong cash flow. And then we have a disciplined approach with what we do with that cash.
We're plowing the money wherever we can into organic initiatives across the company, specifically here in U.S., North America. Much of what we've done is behind us now as far as the portfolio that we have had. We feel good about where we're at, we feel good about the markets we're serving, and we feel good about the geographic locations that we have today. We always will continue to look at trimming those and making you know, make sense where they make sense, but much of our heavy lifting is done. It's about growing the top line and driving shareholder returns for, you know, the investor. With that, thank you for your time today. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Lisa. And Julio, I'll turn it back to you.
Excellent. Thanks so much for the rundown on the company. I have some questions here in the Q&A, but I'll start off with some questions of my own. Maybe just start off on the 2026 expected revenue cadence. You know, last call you talked about your expectations for a better start to 2026 relative to 2025, particularly on the rail side, where you enter 2026 with backlog up 55% year-over-year. I know you talked about it a little bit on the presentation, but just how would you have us think about the re-cadence of revenue and profit progression in 2026?
Yeah
versus 2025?
Yeah. Thanks for that question. I mean, seasonality, Bill hit on that too. It's important, right? Q2 and Q3, it's like a bell curve for us being a construction company. We got hit pretty hard last year because of just the pullback in funding and the need with DOGE, specifically North America. It's not. That's not the case this year. We're back to what we would call normal. We picked up, as Bill mentioned, 15% in our backlog just since the end of the year. We're off to a good start.
Absolutely. On the precast business, you know, you had the slide in there, I think slide 11, you outlined a $14 billion total addressable market for precast products. Currently at $77 million of sales now, you know, less than 1% share. You talked about on that slide the substantial runway for additional share gains. Can you maybe unpack that a little bit? You know, dive into where you see the biggest opportunities to gain share, whether it's by product line, geography or by channel.
It's both. We start with geography. We really like Southern U.S. part, right? Southern eastern coastal areas. We're there today. What we're looking at then is product line expansion coming out of those facilities that we have. We don't have to add a lot of brick and mortar. It's about taking products and taking the marketplaces that we're serving today. Water transmission is a big piece of what we're focusing on today. Concrete is something that has a lot of excitement in the marketplace today using concrete. We're a good part of that 2.7% of sales. We're plowing it back into our existing businesses today and expanding our capacities and our reach within the respective markets in the concrete business.
Got it. That would be the product lines you talked about would be in line with Envirocast or incremental to that, or?
In line. They all support each other. You got Envirocast, you got Envirokeeper, and then you got all the other water civil engineering products that we make. Expansion will be in Florida, it will be in Tennessee, some Carolinas, some Georgias, some Texas.
Okay. That's really exciting. I think that's also the first time you guys have, you know, broken out that TAM.
Yeah
It's really eye-opening when you see that $14 billion number there. Definitely exciting.
We're taking it one day at a time, but we're, you know, it's a big elephant, but it's something that we can really grow into, right? Manage the risk as we do it.
For sure. Maybe if we could talk about some of the rail growth platforms for a bit, maybe talk about the positive momentum you've seen in Friction Management and what's driving the growth there today. Would it be increased market adoption, increased wallet share gains? Again, all the above, however you want to
Well, it's all the above and the reality is that this Friction Management thing, we bought the company back in 2010 with Portec. It was something that wasn't really understood by our customers. Today, it's more than understood, it's required. They're seeing fuel savings up to 3.7%. If you look at the respective customer, you know, labor and fuel, diesel fuel are their number one and two expenses. It's a big deal. We also brought a service arm into this, so not only are we helping our customers be more efficient and get a longer life out of their assets, our service side is taking the requirement for them to be able to do this work. We're doing it for them. We're hitting both sides, fuel as well as labor.
This business is really doing very well. The market, we're gonna see continue to grow because the adoption rate's gonna pick up and we're gonna continue to pick up share.
Same question, but for Total Track Monitoring, which I think on slide 13 shows that total sales growth since 2021 has been 324%.
Yeah.
I know it's a smaller part of the portfolio and the growth moderated somewhat in 2025. Can you maybe just dive into that a little bit? Because I think that's always-
Yeah.
That's all one part to me at least.
Yeah. That's what we're very excited about, and this is where we're throwing our extra SG&A money and bringing in some of the best in the country understanding what it is that we can take with this really good base technology that we have today and providing the information to our customers to manage, to understand if their track is fouled with our Rocla installation or if they got trains or traffic going over their track that is or not under specification, being weight or, you know, they're skewing or back and forth.
You know, this is stuff that really gets our customers excited about our changing the way they operate because at the end of the day, they're looking at reducing their dwell time in their respective yards, and they want to get more trains on the track and reduce the distance between those trains, be it transit or freight. Our technology gives them an opportunity to show that they can do that, do it safely. It's a small piece of the business today. It's something that we're very excited about because it really differentiates us, not just from our history, but from our competitors.
You've really grown the profit profile growth since 2021 meaningfully. Revenue, not as much, but clearly you're implying growth based on the 2026 guidance, even on the low end is, you know, flat, but on the high end, it's about 7% growth.
Right
You know, just talk to us about, you know, maybe beyond 26, what we can expect from, like, a growth perspective.
Well, we wanted to get smaller before we got large. We wanted to get really solid on what we do well, understand our core competence, understand what the customer would pay for. The last 5 years, you're right, our top line's been flat as a pancake. This is the year that we're changing things and coming out, as you said, up to 7% if you look at the top end of our guidance, 3.5, 3.7% on the midpoint. Always focus on profitability, though. That's a big part of it. I think, maybe sometime later this year, we're gonna come out and give another three-five-year projection so people can see what we're looking at, where we're going.
We'd like to get a couple good quarters behind us before we do that. More to come on that.
Absolutely. Well, we look forward to it. John, Bill, Lisa, thank you guys so much for taking the time.
Thank you, Julio.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us, everybody.