All righty. We're going to get started with the next company. First off, thank you everyone. My name is Joe Noyons. I'm with Three Part Advisors. Up next, we have L.B. Foster Company, which is traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol FSTR. Critical infrastructure manufacturer and provider. Presenting on behalf of the company today we have John Kasel, the CEO, and the CFO, Sean Reilly. Thanks, guys.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate that. As you mentioned, with me is Sean Reilly. Sean's been with the company now four and a half years. He started as the controller of the company, and he was just recently promoted to CFO. Many of you that follow the company know Bill Thalman, who is the CFO now, was CFO. I promoted him to Chief Operating Officer. The reason we did that is because we got a lot of really exciting things going on now, and Bill has the opportunity, with his background and experience, to make our growth come to life. We're going to share with you that story today. All right, a little bit about me. I've been with the company now for, this is my 24th year. I've been the President/CEO for the last five years, so I'm in my sixth year now.
Company's been around for 124 years, so next year we'll celebrate our 125th year. We're headquartered out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1,200 employees. Joe talked about we're critical infrastructure. We work with simple commodities of steel and concrete, but we bring them to life. We add innovation technology solutions to steel and concrete, and we bring those products into the infrastructure here in North America and abroad. I'm going to break these pieces down for you so you can see them. We report out in two different segments. One is the rail side, rail technologies and services. When I mean rail, I mean specifically freight rails as well as transit rails. Here in Chicago, you got Chicago Transit Authority, which is a major customer of ours. And then infrastructure.
We play in a small niche in the infrastructure here only in the U.S., in the concrete side, and we'll talk about what that niche is, on the steel side. We like what we do. It's not sophisticated, but in many ways it gives us a lot of complexity for nice organic growth and we'll be looking for some incremental type acquisitive growth, organic growth, outside of organic growth in the future. We'll kind of tease out some of that in a few minutes. Going back to the company itself, rail technologies on the rail side, it started as Rail Products 120 years ago. This was a large proliferation of products that we had, and the company really wanted to be this rail track infrastructure company. Over the last few years, we really simplified what it is that we do in the rail space.
This is where we have shut down locations and we simplified our SKUs and our product lines to really lean into what we want to do related to our Rail Products. The reason being is because the transit authorities, as well as the freight authorities, were starting to commoditize the components that we were selling. We needed to differentiate ourselves. In doing that, we said, "Let's move on. Let's move on to technology innovation," which was what you see here on this chart, which is Global Friction Management, as well as TS&S, which is our Technology Services & Solutions side. Global Friction Management was an acquisition that we did back in 2010 with Portec Rail Products, Inc., and TS&S was an acquisition we did in 2015 in the U.K. with a company called TEW Engineering.
I'll unpack these for you, but the exciting thing about the company is we're starting to move off track now, and we're providing engineering solutions to our customer for them to be more efficient in what they do. Meaning how do you get better fuel efficiency, how do you get safety performance, how do you get better usage or life out of the assets that you have, the wheels that you have on your rolling stock, the actual rail itself that you have you're running your trains on. And how do you get a better ride and comfort on the passenger, so less noise, less vibration. The third piece of it that we're really leaning into, we're seeing growth as well as sales and incremental margins, is our off-track solutions. Railroads struggle today, we really understand what's in front of them.
Many cases, they're going into dark areas and they don't really understand if a track is fouled. Is there something on the track? A simple thing as an animal or a boulder. And we've taken our technology from our U.K. businesses with simple LIDAR technology, with our own technology innovation of giving early warnings and detections for our rail customers to understand what's out there for them to either slow down the trains, stop the trains, or get a service crew out there without just today just go out and find that they have an issue and they manage it. This is an exciting part of our business that we're continuing to grow. When you look at our TAM, assessable market that we have today, it was just over a billion dollars in the rail space.
Now granted, rail's a lot bigger, but we don't play in a market like that. We want our niche opportunities. On the rail side, Rail Product side, it's an area that we have about 42% of the growth today. I'm sorry, 42% of the market share today. And we're comfortable in that area. This is an area that we get a lot of cash, and we're able to take products. Most of this work that we're doing is on the repairs and maintenance side. On the technology side, some of the areas I just mentioned, $570 million. We have the largest share at 18% today. But it's an area that we're seeing growth. This is where our top line and incremental margin growth is coming from, not just here in North America, but also including Western Europe. The other segment that we have is the infrastructure side.
This is the concrete, the other commodity I was mentioning before, and this is why we like this, because it's also on the steel side, it has its attractions, but on the concrete side, it has other attractions. We're a concrete player up here in North America, specifically in the U.S. We like what we do because we have special niches in it. We like to build turnkey Precast Concrete products. We like to engineer and design it in a factory, and we like to put those on the job site or put them in locations up and running in a very short period of time. I'll talk more about that. On the steel side, we've been in the midstream energy space for many, many years. We have two coating facilities, one inline coater and one is an offline coater.
A third piece of our steel business is a threaded water pump column business that is just a steady little business and generates nice cash for us today. If you look at our TAM related to Precast Concrete, you got a $600 million market here as it relates to these buildings, these turnkey buildings I'm referring to today. At 14%, we are the largest market share in the business today, and this is an area that we're really seeing nice growth in. If you look at this chart, we're growing at significantly more than the market is today. The reason being is labor. It's difficult to get labor to build product on job sites today.
Many of our customers and many of our new customers are coming to us with the need to build something and have it delivered so they don't have to bring labor in to build it block by block. We're seeing a really nice uplift in our business today. Our operations all have these Precast Concrete type buildings, if you will. It's our core business. What we do then is we supplement what you see here below, which is Precast Concrete products. This is a huge marketplace today that a lot of people play in. We just do it to help the leverage of the facility.
We'll do some very niche type products, septic tanks, risers, manhole covers, stuff like that, support what we do, and that's on the first part of this chart, which is the buildings in the modular side and the erections of walls and barriers that we do, both residential and industrial markets. How we actually run the company, and we've done this for the last five years, we get good at this, is we look at it as a returns and growth platforms. On the right-hand side here is our real product side and what we have over in the U.K. in our steel products. These are very stable businesses growing at basically GNP and something we can count on type work.
The monies we get out of there, we plow on the left-hand side, which I mentioned earlier, which is our Global Friction Management business, our Total Track Monitoring business, and what I just mentioned on the concrete side. This is where organic growth is coming. We take 2.7% of our sales, and we plow that into our capital programs to keep these organic programs alive and moving at a nice pace. That is what you see on this chart. On the right-hand side, you can actually see where we contracted on the right-hand side. We simplified the business. We got out of making all these SKUs and components on the return size. So we have shut down our facilities in some cases, we reduced product lines, and we figured out where we can make money and where we can be extension of our customer.
On the left-hand side then, we take that and we plow it in with engineering, with SG&A, with our scientists we do, and continue to plow the resources, innovation, and technology. This is where we are seeing the growth, on the TTM side as well as on the Precast Concrete side. Nice double-digit growth, and then you see the margins that are flowing with it as well. This is where the profitability of the company has been coming over the last couple of years. This is why we feel very bullish about the future of the business as well. With that, I will turn it over to Sean, and I will come back with some closing remarks. Sean?
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. As John indicated, I am newly promoted to the CFO role, and I have been with L.B. Foster Company for a little over four years. If we take a look at Q2 highlights, I will start with our Q2 highlights. What I want to do prior to jumping in here is just make sure that we have an understanding of L.B. Foster Company. L.B. Foster Company can experience variability in our quarterly results, primarily related to our customers and our customers' business and how they ebb and flow. So much of that project-based business can impact our quarterly results.
As we go through our Q2 results, I will point out some year-to-date just to keep it a good perspective on things. For the second quarter, our sales were down 3.5%, and that was primarily driven by timing of product sales in our Rail Products division.
However, on a year-to-date basis, as you can see, our sales were up 7.6% year-over-year for the first half, or $18.3 million. Gross margins in the second quarter expanded 80 basis points, and that includes a million dollar headwind associated with exit costs in one of our U.K. product lines. SG&A expense in the quarter was higher, primarily driven by employment costs and variable compensation due to our strong year-to-date performance. Our adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was down $575,000. But once again, when we take a look at our year-to-date performance, our adjusted EBITDA increased $3.8 million or 19.6%. When we take a look at operating cash flow, operating cash flow was the best quarter since 2017 at $17.9 million. Historically, Q1 and Q2 are uses of cash.
Q3 and Q4 is where we generate our cash, and a lot of that seasonality of the business, but Q2 really outperformed. I will talk about our debt and leverage in a future slide. Backlog, down 8.8%, $24 million. However, 19 of that is related to an order cancellation in Q3 of the prior year. Moving on to our strategic transformation. John Kasel had touched upon much of this, but if you take a look at the divestitures and product line exits, from 2021, we have done over seven divestitures. This is really targeting low-margin products or commodity-based businesses. If you look at the bottom chart, this is really the story. Our gross margin was 16.8% in 2021. We closed our trailing 12 months in Q2 at 21.4%, a significant improvement, and that is driven by this cultivation of changing the portfolio of the business that we are serving.
This is another example of how that strategic transformation has supported the business and the improved profitability of the business. Once again, even over that period as we were divesting quite a bit of businesses and product lines, we were able to grow sales. More importantly, take a look at the adjusted EBITDA. In 2021, our EBITDA dollars effectively doubled. From a percentage of sales, our EBITDA went from 3.6% to 7.5%. Significant improvement in the profitability of the business as a result of all the portfolio actions that we have taken. When we take a look at net debt leverage and cash flow, we ended the quarter at $42 million worth of debt, down significantly from the $77 million that we had last year in Q2. Our gross leverage ratio was one times.
Our target is to be at one to 1.5 times, so we are well within that range. Our balance sheet is solid. We have $107.5 million of funding available, and we will talk about capital allocation on an additional side, but we are well-positioned. When we take a look at our capital-light business model, one of the things that is very powerful about the L.B. Foster business is over the last three years, we have generated free cash flow of approximately $28 million per year.
This year, we are targeting the midpoint of our range is $20 million of additional cash flow, but we are putting in approximately $5 million worth of capital spend above and beyond what we have done in the past to support our organic growth initiatives. So we are investing back in the business to help support additional growth in the future. Another very important aspect of L.B. Foster
is we have $71 million of federal NOLs. This will minimize our cash taxes paid for many years to come. We would target about $2 million of cash taxes being paid on an annualized basis. Then finally, our share repurchase program. Since February of 2023, we have bought 9.3% of the outstanding shares back of L.B. Foster stock. Capital allocation. We have talked about that. We have a very good balance sheet, and we are well-positioned. Share repurchases, we still have $28.7 million remaining available. Growth capital, we talked about 2.7% of sales this year.
That is above what we normally do, 2% to 2.5%, but it is driven by organic growth initiatives that we have. Then acquisitions. We are positioned to evaluate acquisitions that would be accretive to the business and help support our growth initiatives. So in summary, the last couple of years, it has been to restructure the portfolio. All the strategic transformation allowed us to be in a position where we're ready to grow. With that, I'll turn it back to John.
Thanks, Sean. Well, you can't grow unless you have the conditions to grow. We now have a portfolio to grow, and we also believe, or we know we have the market to grow. On the rail side, the CRISI, the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety Improvement. If you look at Chicago Transit Authority, that runs very close to here. Monies have been appropriated to that line, as well as the other transit authorities across North America. L.B. Foster, we reap the benefit of that. We received a nice award, and we expect to receive more awards before the year is out, just for that one particular rail line. We've seen more in the last five years is five times the amount of monies appropriate than the prior five years. There's a bunch of work that's happening here in North America, specifically in the rail space.
On the infrastructure side, what we haven't shared with you is where we're located. We set up our factories around where the demographics of the people are. We're in the South and the Southeast primarily. Places like Dallas, places like Florida, places like Tennessee, reaching into Carolinas. As you got this big AI boom and the data center booms, we're in the middle of that. Our factories that are nearer are at capacity today. We're spending this money to get ourselves shored up for the continued future. There's a lot of work that's in front of us. The Great American Outdoors Act, which was really a big stimulus for us on our concrete buildings, is really winding down, but we have seen no pullback at all in the order book.
Our modular turnkey buildings has been just something that the government as well as local state authorities continue wanting our products. Now we're shipping to other markets and other segments. It's something that we're really starting to get some traction, some base into the future. On the concrete side, looks very, very strong. The energy, definitely renewed energy here. Being a midstream pipeline, oil, gas coater is a good place to be today. We're an in-line coater, I mentioned earlier, with ACIPCO, and we have our own business in Texas, which is now in line with a actual steel producer. Both of them are at or near capacity. We see this activity going for years to come, so that business looks very, very strong. Just as a reminder about the company and why should you invest in L.B. Foster?
It is about really we keep things simple. In the last couple of years, we have been about simplifying the message, and getting our portfolio into something that you can get your arms wrapped around, and something that makes money. We love organic growth. The first thing we do is look at how do we expand our operations and grow organically. We like that idea much better than going out and doing risky M&A work. In our type of work, we have the opportunity to grow organically in many areas, and that is our first play that we always make. Generating cash.
You just heard from Sean, we had the best quarter that we have seen in many, many years generating cash. When this company is operating well, and we are today, we generate a lot of cash. Then discipline in what we do and how we do it on the capital allocation.
We are smart about how we spend our money. We got significant expectations what we do with the money. Then, we also buy a lot of shares, our own shares, because we believe not just in what we are today, but we believe in the future story of the company. If you look back just in the last five years, and this is where we did this transformation, the heavy lift is behind us. I just want you to look at a couple of numbers here. In 2021, you will get our sales of $514 million. We ended up last year at $540 million. That is not a lot of growth in top line. In fact, we got smaller in many areas. That was the simplification of the business.
If we let the business continue to ride out the way it was from 2021, it would be much higher in sales. But we were not happy with where that business was going and the profitability of that. If you look at our guidance we see this year, between $540 million and $580 million. We are going to double our growth in one year than we did on the top line we did in the last five years. This is all organic. This is with the strong backlog we have and the opportunities we have, not just this year, but heading into next year. Look at the profitability that is followed with it. So our adjusted EBITDA, $19 million back in 2021, and our guidance between $41 million and $46 million this year. So things are happening, and we are generating cash. Our debt is down at one times.
We have the ability to continue to reinvest in ourselves for capital programs as well as do small tuck-in type acquisitions. So we feel very good about our position today. We aspire to do more, and we believe that we have the platform for sustained growth, not just for this year, but for years to come. With that, I thank you on behalf of Sean and myself, and I think we have a minute or two maybe. Joe, do we have a minute for maybe a question or two?
We do.
Okay. Anybody have a question? Okay, John and Tom. John, Tom. Go ahead, Tom.
[inaudible]What is happening there? Are those orders actually coming down yet, and it is just being replaced by other stuff? Or what is sort of-
Well, there is other acts in Senate right now for continuation of that bill itself, but we have seen no pullback in orders at all. What we are seeing is, unrelated to Great American Outdoors Act, people want turnkey modular concrete buildings. We are now shipping into doing other projects that we have not ever seen before. We have expanded our reach and expanded our market.
It is non-government.
Which is, in this case, non-government. Government is still very strong. Do not get me wrong.
U.K.'s been kind of a thorn in the side for a couple of years here.
Yeah.
just had to do a write-off or-
Yeah
[inaudible]
Right.
What do you see going on there going forward? Are there other aspects to that you're going to have to back off on that could be a negative impact there? Or do you think that's kind of stabilized out?
Yeah. John's referring to is we have operations over there in U.K., TEW Engineering. We bought it back in 2015, and then we bought a company called TEW Plus in the latter half of 2015. I'm glad we bought them, because we would be a different company today if we didn't buy them. That's where our technology innovation came from. The market over there is very difficult. I don't know why we're up seven prime ministers now in 10 years. We've been taking actions to simplify the business over there, just like we did in North America. The heavy work is behind us now. We took two product lines. We took the charge in the second quarter. We feel very good about where we're at today, what's left over there.
We got some nice projects going on over there that we feel good about, and we also feel good about its future based on what we have today. We need to do as much as we can to keep that group together, because a lot of our Total Track Monitoring work that we have in the rail space, that's the engineering center for it. That's where we have 20 years of history with level grade crossings, the LIDAR technology we're doing. It's a big part of our future growth. We feel that we now commercially are where we need to be. We have taken the SG&A cost to support that.
You'd mentioned in your comments earlier that there were more activity in shorter cycles.
Right
Whatever, is that something that you see as being sustainable going forward?
Yeah.
I mean, there's still a lot of activity that
There's still work over there. What was happening is they were just running amok in the U.K. when they built Crossrail. Crossrail went on for many more years than it was supposed to be. This was connecting Heathrow with downtown London. They spent twice the money that needed to be spent. When it came time to paying the suppliers, the suppliers, in many cases, took the shortfall, and we were one of them. We do not do work like that anymore. We do project work specific, a very short period of time. We do the work, we get paid. We have totally changed our position, what we do and how we do it over there. We learned. Any other questions? Well, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it, and have a great balance of your day. Thank you.