Holdings Inc trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol NCSM. Happy to welcome back CEO and Director Ryan Hummer. Ryan, thank you for joining us. We won't see you, but we can hear you. The floor is yours.
All right. Thank you, Anna. And, you know, hope everyone's having a great day. I want to thank Emerging Growth Conference for inviting us and want to thank everyone that's taking the time to watch. If we move on to slide three, we gave a full presentation at an earlier Emerging Growth Conference in March. We plan to use the time today primarily as an update. I'll take a moment to cover who we are and where we're focused as a company. We're a technology-focused oilfield services and equipment company. We tend to sell directly to the E&P companies, so oil and natural gas producers like Chevron, Conoco, Oxy, BP, Equinor, CNRL , Tourmaline , Whitecap , and similar customers. We compete with Schlumberger or SLB, Halliburton, NOV, Innovex, Core Lab, and others. We typically take on larger, more established competitors in what we do.
Within that market, we focus on certain areas where we can obtain a leadership position and earn attractive margins. Over time, this has led us to four product lines that have a common theme. We provide products and services that enable capital-efficient, unconventional resource development. Historically, this has primarily taken place in North America, and increasingly, we're doing this in other global regions. We focus on innovation and partnering with our customers to bring new solutions to market, solutions that will typically save our customers time, save them money or both, and help them make better and more productive wells. We pair this focus on R&D and innovation with a capital-light business model, which includes outsourced manufacturing. This enables us to minimize our capital investment requirements and to convert EBITDA to free cash flow through the business cycles.
The charts at the bottom of the slide provide our revenue by geography, our product and service mix, and our revenue by product line. I'll highlight that we worked for over 200 customers in 2004 with limited concentration in our customer base. Before I leave this page, I'll note that we're traded on NASDAQ with the ticker NCSM. Our recent market capitalization and enterprise value are both currently just below $90 million, with a trailing 12-month EBITDA and free cash flow of $24 million and $12 million, respectively, implying a relatively low trading multiple and a robust free cash flow yield. If we can move on to the next slide. We operate through four product lines. This slide provides really just a few highlights about our technology and the value that we bring to our customers.
As I referenced in the introduction, the key connection across our product and service portfolio is that we help our customers maximize their return on investment from unconventional resource development. In North America, this is typically focused on enabling operational efficiencies, although in some cases, we do enable better production results as compared to competing technologies. In international markets, we're helping to accelerate our customers' learning curve in unconventional development and to maximize the value of their more mature assets. I'd encourage anyone that's learning about NCS for the first time today to review our Emerging Growth presentation from March, where I review our products and the value proposition that we bring to our customers in more detail. Turning to the next slide, we'll highlight briefly the three core business strategies that we have as a company.
This was introduced in late 2022, and we are benefiting from the results. The first strategy is to build on our leading market positions. For us, our leading market positions include our fracturing systems product line on a global basis, our presence in Canadian completions, the strong resulting customer relationships we have in that market, and also our global capabilities and presence in tracer diagnostics. The second component of the strategy is to capitalize on offshore and international opportunities, which we have been pursuing. We do this because international markets are growing faster than North America. The international and offshore customers tend to buy based on technical characteristics rather than just on price. Therefore, there is an ability to build stickier customer relationships and for us to be compensated for the value that we provide to our customers.
The third strategic component is to commercialize innovative solutions to complex customer challenges. We obtain and understand the voice of the customer and emerging market needs and deliver a solution that brings tangible value to our customers. We believe that this strategy will allow us to continue to create value for our stakeholders over time. Turning to the next slide, delivering on that business strategy that we've been pursuing has produced favorable financial results. We grew revenue by about 14% or $20 million in 2024 and expect that we'll grow revenue again in 2025, despite what I generally characterize as a challenging market environment for the oil and gas industry. Our gross margin of approximately 40% reflects the value of the products and services that we provide to our customers. With our outsourced manufacturing model, our cost of sales is highly variable in nature.
We were able to improve our gross margins by approximately 250 basis points in 2024 compared to the prior year, and we're continuing that momentum through the first quarter in 2025. In addition, our capital-light model positions us to generate free cash flow through industry cycles. Over time, we expect that we can convert approximately 50% or 60% of our Adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. Going on to the next slide before we open the floor to questions. In short, what I'd say is, you know, I certainly believe, and our board and company believes that NCS is a compelling investment opportunity. We have an attractive organic growth track record, and we're focused on increasing our presence in growth markets for unconventional resource development. We're delivering gross profit and EBITDA growth with strong incremental margins.
We continue to bring innovative technology to our customers, especially for technically demanding applications, which leverage our engineering capabilities and provide an opportunity for higher margins. Our capital-light business model minimizes capital investment and allows us to generate free cash flow through the cycles. We have a strong balance sheet and expect to further strengthen it this year with additional free cash flow. At March 31st, we had approximately $23 million in cash and approximately $27 million available through our revolving credit facility. This positions us well to opportunistically participate in industry consolidation or to evaluate a framework to return capital to shareholders in the future. Anna, that concludes the presentation, and I'd be happy to take any questions from you or the audience.
Perfect. Thank you. Yes. You held your full-year guidance relatively flat after a strong first quarter. Can you discuss how you're thinking about the market right now? Talk a little bit more about that.
Sure, sure. Great question, Anna. Coming into 2025, we'd expected that market activity for us would generally be flat, maybe a slightly declining market in the U.S., some slight growth in Canada, and good opportunities in our focus markets outside of North America. Since that time, we did have a strong first quarter, as you mentioned, exceeding our guidance across the board. However, there are a few items that we expect to serve as headwinds as we move through the remainder of the year. First, spot oil prices are about $10 per barrel lower, which has already led to some customers reducing their planned drilling and completion spending. We now believe the market environment is a little bit less favorable than before. In addition, we saw a combination of two of our good customers in Canada.
We're excited to work for that now larger organization and the opportunities that they're pursuing. What often happens in our industry is that the combined entity, when our customers consolidate, will drill and complete fewer wells than those two companies would independently. It reduces the market opportunity for us a bit as we navigate that pro forma organization. Finally, while we're encouraged by some of the recent frameworks and trade agreements, as well as the pause on the very high tariff rates on China, which could limit the negative impact of some of the trade actions that are taking place and their impact on global economic growth, we do continue to operate in what I'd call an uncertain market and believe our customers will continue to be cautious.
You know, offsetting those headwinds are some attractive company-specific commercial opportunities that we've been pursuing across our geographies and across the various product lines. We did discuss several of those on our recent earnings call. You know, we'd certainly recommend going back. If you're interested in some of the detail around that, you know, listen to the earnings call to understand a little bit better what we are pursuing. We also have actions that we're taking to improve product and service margins and some new products that are reaching the field trial stage, which could serve to continue to expand our addressable market. You know, taking all that in balance, we've largely held our annual guidance flat, but with a little bit wider range than we typically would have at this point in the year, given some of the uncertainty.
We will continue to adjust that as we move through the year.
Perfect. Thank you, Ryan. One more question due to time. At the end of your presentation, you mentioned a cash balance of $23 million with significant revolving credit capacity. How do you prioritize potential uses for that cash?
Yeah, another really good question, Anna. First and foremost, we want to invest in our internal research and development projects that will contribute to sustained organic revenue growth. With our business model, we're fortunate to be able to do that and not to be capital constrained. The first priority for us is really optimizing the organic growth path and the market development opportunities that we have in front of us. As we grow organically through these high-return projects, we can generate attractive incremental EBITDA margins and improve our return on invested capital. As we touched on briefly in our discussion in March, we do believe that we can leverage our operational capabilities, our global footprint, and our public company infrastructure to create additional value through strategic acquisitions, especially for businesses that are in or close to our current product lines.
However, if we do not find that right M&A opportunity and cash continues to build up on our balance sheet, we could then explore options to prudently return capital to shareholders while retaining the ability to use our balance sheet strategically going forward. I know we got a little bit of a late start and we are short on time. I think you mentioned that is the last question. Just want to thank you again and thank Emerging Growth again. We appreciate the discussion and look forward to sharing some future updates later this year and as we move forward.
Perfect. Thank you. We will send you these questions. You can answer on your own, and we'll give you a little bit more time on the next conference you join us at. We appreciate your time today. Thank you.
All right. Thanks.