Perimeter Solutions, Inc. (PRM)
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UBS Global Materials Conference

Sep 4, 2024

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

All right, thanks for everyone joining again. Back again, Josh Spector, UBS North America, Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, and here, happy to be joined by Perimeter Solutions. On stage with me to start, I have Haitham Khouri, Perimeter's CEO, and then we'll have Kyle Sable, Perimeter's CFO, and Jeff Emery, President of Fire Safety, join us in a minute. Before we get started, as a research analyst, I need to disclose a relationship with myself at UBS of any company I express a view on the call today. Those are available at www.ubs.com/disclosures, or reach out to me. This segment's gonna be slightly different, where Haitham's gonna give an overview of Perimeter Solutions, kind of set the stage for the company, and then we'll have a Q&A at the end.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Haitham to give an overview.

Haitham Khouri
CEO, Perimeter Solutions

Yeah. First off, thank you, Josh and team, and thank you to UBS for the really good work covering us since we've been public for the past three years, and thank you for including us in your conference today. All right. This is our disclaimer slide, which I'm sure folks are quite familiar with. So if I accomplish one goal today in this presentation, it's to really emphasize three key points to our shareholders. Number one, we have three uniquely high quality, very attractive businesses: a Fire Retardants business, a Fire Suppressants business, and a Specialty Products businesses. While these are distinct product lines, these three businesses share several key characteristics in common, and I'll reel off three key ones. First, all three of our businesses are clear and unambiguous leaders in their markets.

Number two, each of our businesses serves a very challenging market to serve well. These are critical products, these are complex chemistries, and these, in all three cases, are tightly integrated product, equipment, and service offerings, which must be bundled, sold, and consumed together. And finally, all three of our businesses have attractive long-term growth profiles. Second key point I'd like to emphasize today is that we manage the company according to a very specific value creation strategy. On the operational side, we are laser-focused on the rigorous application of our three value driver strategy, encompassing profitable new business, continual productivity improvements, and pricing to the value our products and services provide, and I'll spend a lot more time value drivers later in the presentation.

We are also extremely focused on driving shareholder value through the thoughtful allocation of our capital and the careful management of our capital structure. Third and final point I hope to emphasize today is that the combination of the first two points, so the consistent, rigorous, successful application of our value creation strategy to our three businesses, should enable us to make good on our goal of delivering private equity-like returns with the liquidity of a public market. We define private equity-like returns as 15% or higher long-term share price compounding. I'll provide a brief overview of each of our three product lines. About half of our revenue last year came from fire retardants. In its simplest form, this is the red stuff that comes out of airplanes to combat wildfires around the world.

What's important to emphasize here is we are an end-to-end solution provider, so we will do everything from build factories and airbases as a country or customer starts a retardant program from the ground up, everything through to maintaining, staffing the airbases, loading the air tankers, with lots of interim steps in between around product approvals, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, et cetera. About 20% of our revenue last year came from our Fire Suppressants business. So think about the sprinkler systems in this office building. In an industrial facility, I beg your pardon, with flammable liquids, a similar sprinkler system must dispense foam rather than water, and therefore must have considerably more attached infrastructure. That is what we do.

We provide the equipment, we provide the foam that is dispensed through the sprinkler equipment, and we provide emergency response aftermarket service, which means when there is an incident, we will deliver foam 24/7, 365 days a week, to actually fight the flammable liquid fire at any given facility that is our customer. And then our third business is Specialty Products. This business makes a very specialized specialty chem called phosphorus pentasulfide, P2S5, a number of niche and market uses for P2S5. But again, this is a product we very much sell as a solution. The phosphorus pentasulfide must come in very specific delivery equipment, and it's a highly regulated supply chain to bring raw materials into our plant and then to move P2S5 from our plants into our customers' plants, and we handle the whole nine yards there.

All three of our businesses, as I mentioned earlier, are clear and unambiguous leaders in their fields. We are by far the leading supplier of Fire Retardants globally. We are the clear leader in fluorine-free foams in our Fire Suppressant business, and our Specialty Product business is larger than our two direct competitors' businesses combined. All three of our businesses serve very, very challenging markets. These are critical products, these are very complex chemistries, and these are products delivered as and consumed as a highly integrated service with a chemicals element, an equipment element, and a service element that are inexorably linked. Overall, we think Perimeter has a very nice long-term organic growth profile, and our LTM margin is 39%, which on the one hand, is a testament to the quality of our businesses.

On the other hand, is a number we're very focused on consistently grinding higher over time via our operating value driver strategy. Fire Retardants. Our mission, simply put, is to save lives, protect property, and protect the environment. The picture on the left, the air tanker drop, that is the mission in progress. This air tanker is in the process of dropping a line of retardant. As a fire moves downhill, the retardant will stop or slow that fire spread. It'll allow wildland firefighters to come in and be sure they're safe as they fully extinguish the fire, and most importantly, it'll protect the life and property you see just in front of the fire by creating that retardant barrier line. The picture in the middle is what happens when we successfully apply our retardant to a forest.

As you can see, the left-hand side of the photo, the forest is completely burnt through, and then there's a retardant line that has been successfully applied at the top of the mountain ridge, and all the vegetation to the right is completely preserved because, again, our product successfully stopped the spread of the fire. And then finally, another example of successful application of our product. In this case, it was ground applied in a neighborhood ahead of an oncoming wildfire. Everything up to our retardant line was burned. Everything after our retardant line was preserved, clearly saved property, and likely saved lives in this case. There are very few businesses in the world that truly require 100% reliability 100% of the time. We are one of those few businesses. The reason we are, is success is measured very calculably in lives and property.

When a customer partners with Perimeter Solutions to build and deploy a retardant program, they are partnering with a company with a 100% historical track record of meeting the mission and serving the customer, and we do this everywhere we operate. There's a sampling of countries where we're active on the bottom of the slide. These are but a handful of the many countries and geographies around the world where we run active retardant programs. We fulfill our critical life-saving mission in an environment of extreme complexity. The performance requirements our customer place on us and rightfully place on us are extremely stringent. We need to have a base up and running within 24 hours. By the way, we almost always greatly exceed that and have a base up and running to respond to an emergency in a matter of single-digit hours.

If a base is open, we need to be pumping retardant within three minutes of getting the go signal from our customer, something we consistently do. We must meet these exacting performance requirements across vast and diverse geographies. The map on the bottom left depicts an actual few-day period from July of this year, so this was about 45 days ago, where we actively fought wildfires in Alaska, in the Northwest Territories, in the Yukon, in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and in virtually every corner of the United States, west of the Mississippi, from Southern California up to Washington State, all the way to South Dakota and Nebraska. We must perform amidst highly unpredictable environments at the base level. Very common for a base to be dormant for one or more fire seasons, and then find itself pumping over a million gallons.

Within a single base, within a single year, quite common for a base to be dormant for 20, 30, 40 days, have a massive burst of activity over a multi-day period, go dormant again, go active again. This is the business and the decision from the customer's perspective. Your mission couldn't be more critical. You are tasked with protecting communities. You are tasked with protecting your own wildland firefighters as they go out there to combat the fire. You must be successful. The complexity required to accomplish the mission on the retardant side is extremely, extremely high. The only solution out there that has been deemed acceptable by our customers all over the world, with no exceptions over the past decades, is Perimeter Solutions.

Only our comprehensive, fully integrated offering, built at tremendous expense and with tremendous ingrained knowledge over 60 years, has been deemed acceptable and reliable enough to fulfill our customers' mission. To put a little more color around what a full-fledged retardant program involves or what we offer our customers, we have the pie chart to the right, and we've broken it out into six distinct steps, and I'll spend a minute walking through each of them. The key point to emphasize here is nothing short of mastery of each of these six steps is required for a retardant program. While each is necessary, no combination of even five is sufficient. First step, R&D. It typically takes us multiple years of rigorous internal testing until we're ready to provide a product for qualification with our customers.

It typically takes our customers multiple years of extensive lab and field testing before the product is qualified. We are the only company in the world with a broad set of international or domestic and international approvals. These approvals take years to obtain, are extremely technically difficult to obtain from a chemistry and performance perspective, and are very expensive to obtain with the size and investment we have in R&D. While it's a wonderful accomplishment to have these qualifications, it's absolute table stakes. You get to stand at the starting line of the Retardant business with these qualifications. They are necessary to begin building a retardant program. They are woefully insufficient to claim to have a retardant program.

This is the exact same map I showed three or four slides ago, depicting a few days of actual activity from July of 2024, from earlier this summer, where we fought fire virtually everywhere in the Western North American continent. How did we do it? How did we meet every one of these challenges with 100% reliability, as we always do? We have a continent-wide hub-and-spoke logistics system with eight manufacturing plants. You have to have localized manufacturing in this business. The resupply urgency when you're actively fighting a fire means you simply have to compress that distance. We have eight of these plants, and when we show up at future conferences, hopefully here with UBS, you'll see this map expanded. Around each of these manufacturing plants, we have extremely broad and extremely deep manufacturing and logistics footprints.

There literally wasn't enough room on the map to depict the logistics footprint we have around each of these. This highly distributed manufacturing footprint, with a very deep and broad logistics footprint around each, again, is an absolute requirement to fulfill the mission with the required reliability. I'll also add for this couple of day period in July, we had 25 mobile bases deployed. These are bases we build in remote areas where there is no existing airbase infrastructure. These are bases we need to service through our logistics network. We'll talk more about them later in the presentation, but again, table stakes to satisfy the customer requirements, save lives, protect property. Inventory.

We enter each fire season with no clarity on how mild or severe the season is going to be in each of our geographies, but with unambiguous clarity that we need to be staffed for a record fire season in each of our geographies. You simply cannot run out of product in this business. We will never run out of product in this business, because we enter each fire season maximally inventoried and ready for a peak fire season. Our average inventory at the end of Q2 to early fire season of each of the past three years exceeded $140 million. Again, this is an absolute requirement to have the preparedness necessary to fulfill the mission. Comprehensive base footprint. Virtually all aerial firefighting missions are launched from air tanker bases. We support 200 air tanker bases all over the world.

It is our people at many of these bases. Much of the equipment at these bases we own and maintain. We open these bases pre-season. We run them during the season. We close them when the season's over. We maintain them in the off-season. This is a snapshot of our base footprint in the U.S., Canada, France, and Australia. There are many more countries we can show in this presentation with similarly highly distributed and robust airbase footprints, where much of the staff is ours, much of the operations are run by us, and much of the equipment is owned by us. Airbase equipment. If you want to build a global retardant program, you make one phone call. It's to us. We will design airbases for you from scratch. We will distribute them appropriately throughout the country or the state or the province, depending on the customer.

We will build them for you. We will own the equipment at the bases. We will staff them, employ the personnel, and we will run the bases for you. This is actually a photo of the most recent air base we've completed in Redding, California. The picture on the left is a CAD design of the air base. The picture on the right was taken literally a few days ago. That is the air base up and running with some close-ups below. A single air base can cost up to $3 million to fully develop. Mobile infrastructure. Our commitment to our customer is to fight 100% of the fires they want us to fight, with 100% reliability. It is not relevant if there's no air tanker base infrastructure near the fire. This is very common.

Fires break out in remote locations that put life and property at risk routinely. We can, in 24 hours, deploy a set of highly specialized equipment, build a base almost literally anywhere in the world, and again, in less than a day, be pumping retardant, loading helicopters, loading air tankers, supporting our customer's mission. There's about $2 million worth of equipment in an MRB deployment, and we can deploy 35 MRBs or mobile retardant bases simultaneously around the world. Putting it all together, nothing short of Perimeter's comprehensive service offering has been deemed good enough to fulfill the customer's mission anywhere in the world. If you want to protect property, if you want to save lives, if you want 100% reliability, the only answer is Perimeter Solutions.

This is an end-to-end solution we have built over many decades with a tremendous amount of ingrained knowledge at a tremendous, tremendous financial expense, and nothing short of fully replicating this will enable anybody to compete with us. The cost of our product, Retardant, is the active ingredient and an absolutely critical component in wildland firefighting, yet it constitutes about 3% of our customers' fire suppression spend. When I say 3%, it's the entire integrated offering we deliver. It's our product, it's our manufacturing, it's our airbase infrastructure, it's our staffing, it's our service, it's our MRBs. The entire retardant program, up into the air, up to the airplane, which we don't do, by the way, we don't do the aircraft, but all the way up to that, the active ingredient, a critical component, 3% of the cost. Growth.

We talk about mid- to high-single-digit long-term volume growth in our Retardant business, which we feel quite good about. We break that into two distinct drivers. Number one, acres burned. As you can see on the chart, consistent, low- to mid-single-digit growth in acres burned. This happens to be U.S. acres, ex- Alaska, yet this chart looks similar almost anywhere in the world you look. And then in addition to growth in acres burned, is increasing retardant usage per acre. Five key drivers of increasing retardant usage per acre. Number one, growth in the wildland urban interface. This means building is occurring in areas, in forested areas, where there was no life and property in the past, which means fires that our customers could let burn 10, 20 years ago, they have to fight today because of the values at risk.

Number two, growth in the air tanker fleet. We're constantly seeing more air tankers, bigger air tankers, better air tankers, faster air tankers, which simply means our customers can deploy more retardant. Number three, we are doing our part by beefing up our air tanker base infrastructure, which again, enables more, faster, better loading of more air tankers, which ultimately means more deployed fire retardant. There's a very interesting ground applied opportunity, which we're quite active in all over the world. And last, but certainly not least, we are consistently and successfully growing our Retardant business internationally. More and more countries are making the decision to step up from simply using water to using retardant. There's one and only one phone call these countries make when they make that decision, is to Perimeter Solutions. We partner with them, we build the infrastructure, we run their program.

We literally never lose a customer once we obtain one and our international market expansion has been and will continue to be a very nice growth driver for us. Switching gears. Our second business, Suppressants. We are the clear market leader in fluorine-free foam. Like our two other businesses, we sell a fully integrated solution. We sell the foam, we sell the infrastructure into which our foam is spec'd in, and we sell the aftermarket service, which means foam delivery in the event of a fire, an emergency response network. As you can see on the revenue chart, we are growing this business very rapidly, or have been growing this business very rapidly over the past few years.

As the market transitions from fluorinated foams to fluorine- free foams, we are a clear leader or the clear leader in fluorine- free foams, and therefore we are winning a much higher percent of new installs than our percent is of existing installs, growing our base rapidly. What's most exciting about this is this year's financial performance, despite the fact that we feel very good about that, but is the fact that we're building a large installed base of equipment where our foam is spec'd in, and we should serve on an aftermarket basis through foam sales, and servicing for a very long period to come, i.e., we're installing many of the razors in the field today and expect to sell razor blades into that base for a very long time to come. Our third and final business, Specialty Products.

Again, we make a very unique specialty chemical called phosphorus pentasulfide, P2S5. This business operates primarily in two geographies, North America and Western Europe. We have one main competitor in each of these two geographies, in both cases, private equity-backed companies, and we are larger than both our two primary competitors combined. Much like our Fire Retardant and Fire Suppressant businesses, our Specialty Products business sells a highly integrated solution. We actually sell the highly complex chemical P2S5. We sell highly specialized equipment in which it must be delivered, and we manage a highly regulated and highly specialized logistics network to get our product safely into our customers' facilities. Much like Fire Retardant, P2S5 is a critical component into the product it's spec'd into, yet accounts for 1%-2% of end product cost.

This makes the business a very good candidate for our value creation strategy, and you can see the results here. After many years of very roughly 20%-25% EBITDA, we doubled EBITDA in 2022 with the application of value driver strategy. We went through a significant destock period in 2023, while EBITDA reverted to the historical, roughly $20 million number. It was on much lower volumes than historical years. In other words, our unit economics remained intact at much higher profitability levels. And in 2024, as the destock abates, we're jumping back up to about $40 million of adjusted EBITDA per 2024 analyst consensus. Our value drivers. Three value drivers. We organize our business according to these, we examine our business according to these, we apply these extremely rigorously. One, profitable new business.

That means we seek to grow each of our businesses at organic rates in excess of the underlying growth rate of the markets they serve. The way we do that is we try to invest as heavily as we can in R&D, in sales, in product development, in order to develop new products to drive our growth rate, and we're eager to continue investing in our businesses to drive profitable new growth, as long as that new growth is profitable. As long as we can find projects with return thresholds that exceed our mid-teens overall threshold, we are extremely eager to continue to invest in our businesses and see a very long runway to continue doing so. Two, productivity. Again, we are extremely eager to invest as much capital as we can in our businesses today to drive future productivity and efficiencies.

We will continue to do so as long as we can find projects with returns exceeding our mid-teens threshold, and again, we feel very good about having a long runway of these projects. Finally, value-based pricing. We are constantly and obsessively looking to understand our customer needs better, understand our customers' pain points better, and invest in R&D, in service, in equipment, in sales, in whatever's necessary to provide more and better value to our customers. And as long as we can keep doing that, we believe we can share in that value creation and continue to drive our business forward. In addition to the three value drivers, we seek to generate long-term shareholder returns through the very thoughtful allocation of our capital, as well as the management of our capital structure.

As I said earlier, rigorously applying these five drivers to our three excellent businesses gives us confidence that we will deliver 15% or plus annual returns to our shareholders, excuse me. This is our EBITDA over the past 14 years. Two things I'd like to point out. Number one, our 14-year CAGR, the vast majority of which is organic, is 17% when it comes to adjusted EBITDA. Second thing I'd like to point out are the two boxed years. 2021 is the first year prior to the application of our value driver strategy. 2024 shows $222 million, which is analyst consensus, 2024 EBITDA. These are remarkably similar, similar years from an underlying market demand perspective.

It appears that U.S. acres burn ex-Alaska should be roughly similar, and market demand in our Specialty Products business should be roughly similar, and end market demand in our Suppressants business should be roughly similar. Yet, adjusted for incremental public company costs, analyst consensus is predicting about a 70% improvement in our adjusted EBITDA, the vast majority of which is attributable, excuse me, to the successful application of our value driver strategy. Capital allocation. We would like to spend as much on CapEx as we possibly can. Number one, to support our customer's mission. Number two, to drive profitable growth and productivity as long as we can find projects to do those things that exceed our 15% IRR threshold.

We are very confident that on a highly consistent basis, year in, year out, going forward, we will generate significantly more free cash flow than we can reinvest in our business via CapEx. We will deploy that cash flow to the highest IRR use of M&A and share buybacks. We intend to run the business prudently levered over time, and to the extent there's excess cash flow to deploy, either free cash flow we generate, and additionally, excess leverage capacity we generate by organic EBITDA growth. To the extent we cannot find good uses for it via CapEx, M&A, and share buybacks, we will gladly return that capital to our shareholders via special dividends. This is a snapshot of our extremely attractive debt profile.

One series of senior notes, not due until the end of October 2029, 5% fixed rate, no financial maintenance covenants, and an associated $100 million revolver that has never been drawn and remains undrawn. I'll conclude the way I started. Hopefully, I did a reasonable job today conveying three key messages. To reiterate, one, we have three highly unique, highly attractive product lines. Each is a clear market leader, each very successfully serves a very challenging market to serve, and each carries an attractive growth profile. Two, we adhere to a very specific value creation strategy, three value drivers, two value drivers. So far, on a like-for-like basis, our value drivers have delivered about a 70% adjusted EBITDA uplift, and we have repurchased 14% of our shares outstanding at about half the current share price over the past two years.

As long as we continue to rigorously apply our value creation strategy to our attractive businesses, we should make good on our goal of delivering private equity-like returns to our shareholders with the liquidity of a public market. With that, Josh, Q&A?

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Yeah. So appreciate that overview, Haitham. Certainly a lot of detail-

Haitham Khouri
CEO, Perimeter Solutions

Real quick.

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

The most we've gotten.

Haitham Khouri
CEO, Perimeter Solutions

Can we invite-

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Yeah.

Haitham Khouri
CEO, Perimeter Solutions

Kyle and Jeff to the stage?

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Yes, Kyle and Jeff to come up. We don't have much time left, so I'm just gonna jump right into a few things.

Haitham Khouri
CEO, Perimeter Solutions

Let's hear it .

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

I think maybe to start just with capital allocation, I mean, certainly how this year has shaped up, your EBITDA and your leverage profile has changed. So maybe it's a decent time to talk about how you think about M&A and what makes sense when you think about bolting onto the portfolio. Does it look like some of the things that you just went through? Is it something totally different? What's the thought process?

Kyle Sable
CFO, Perimeter Solutions

Hey, Josh. Great. I appreciate it. Two pieces to this on our M&A strategy, and it's an important part of our driver of equity value over time. First, is that within the add-on businesses, and we're gonna look for technology, you know, opportunity to integrate small businesses into our existing platforms over time. Those, of course, look very much like these businesses. The second piece to it is when we're looking to add to our overall portfolio of businesses, adding on a whole new chunky business that is unrelated necessarily by industry or function. But to take your term and turn it a little bit, it is looking like this business from our perspective. It may have...

It could be within the chemical space, it could be within the industrial space, but the thing that it will have is the same ability to do what we've shown with the results on these businesses, which is that 70% EBITDA uplift from 2021 to 2024. To do that, we need businesses that look like our businesses in the same sense that we want things that are market leadership positions. We want markets that are complex to serve the needs of the customers. That allows us to create value and earn the right to earn that business, and then we can price that value. It allows us to take all of our value drivers, such as productivity and profitable new business, and push those through the business.

So we're gonna look outside of something we don't. It wouldn't have to be within fire protection or adjacent to Specialty Products, but it does need to have the same attributes or characteristics that our existing businesses have.

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Okay, thanks. That's helpful. And I do want to talk about the Fire Retardants business in a little bit more detail here. So, I mean, maybe first on some of the near-term dynamics. I think 2 Q was exceptionally strong compared to the fire season, so what went right there? And then thinking about 3 Q, the fire season is quite strong. Are there limitations to what Perimeter can do to kind of capture as much growth as just acres burned would appear? So two different pieces on the two different quarters, please.

Jeff Emery
President of Fire Safety, Perimeter Solutions

Yeah, just first of all, looking at the business, acres burned are a general indicator. It's a loose correlation to the volume that we can deliver, but not a perfect one by any means. Acres burned east of the Mississippi don't matter a whole lot in the general scheme of things. They're kind of noise. Acres burned west of the Mississippi are better. Acres burned in California are even better than that, and it has to do with all of the factors that Haitham talked about earlier. But let me get to the question around: Is the capacity there to fully deliver on the demand that the wildfire season might present? And I think there's two things that really help to dictate that right now. Number one is just aircraft capacity.

If there's not an aircraft available when the fire is called in by an individual base, obviously, we can't serve that customer. There's been tremendous investment, not only in the U.S., but internationally. In Canada this year, across many countries around the world, there's been much more investment in capacity and new aircraft coming on board, and coming on board with exclusive contracts, not call when needed. That provides a lot more capacity in the system that we can support through our existing infrastructure. The second piece is, in an individual fire being supported out of a base, we don't want a line of aircraft waiting to be loaded. We wanna have the efficiency at that base to be able to immediately load them and increase the turnaround time. It helps us attack the fire quicker.

It helps our customer be able to more effectively suppress that fire, and in the process, in a peak day of activity, ultimately get more gallons out the door. And the investments we've been making in new airbases, you saw the Redding base up there. Historically, the most gallons we put out in a single day was around a hundred and seventy thousand prior to that rebuild. Three days after opening that, we delivered two hundred and forty thousand gallons in a single day, and that is profitable new growth for us. And that is a way that we can continue to invest and increase the capacity in individual bases that have that demand to create more, more opportunity to serve our customer better.

Kyle Sable
CFO, Perimeter Solutions

Josh, we'd also be remiss not to say that the strength is not just in the Retardants business. Our Q2 business is strong across the board, especially products business. We think we've seen the end of the destock period, and Steve Cornwell and Grant Bowman, who lead that business for us, have been implementing our drivers very well. And then we have the suppressants business, which we've talked about. So we're seeing strength across the businesses, and we're seeing that build through each quarter as well.

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Thanks. That's helpful. I think, let me ask on some of the competitive dynamics within there. I think we'll have to wait there, but just thinking about how that's changed over the last year, so you had a competitor ramping up, that's now backed off. What's the environment look like in terms of competition for you guys in that business?

Jeff Emery
President of Fire Safety, Perimeter Solutions

Yeah, you know, people may not recognize on the outside, but every couple of years, we're used to competition. We've seen competitors work to try to enter that Qualified Products List for year after year after year, and it's a challenging process, as Haitham laid out, that takes multiple years. This competitor went a certain length in there, but was unable to make it to the fully qualified list for a variety of reasons. At some point, someone may do this, and we're gonna salute them, right? Because we know what it takes to get there. We're also gonna welcome that competition because we know what it takes once you reach that starting line that Haitham mentioned. At that point, you know, we have manufacturing facilities across eight locations. They're gonna have to be building from scratch.

We're entering every year with over $140 million of inventory. They're gonna have to build that capability up from scratch. We have an installed base of transportation network and logistics networks established with long-term relationships to deliver anywhere on a moment's notice. That takes a long time to establish. Finally, we're supporting 200 airbases out there, majority of which we own the equipment and are completely embedded. After the four to five years that it might take, after you reach that starting line to try to build up a capability, I figure we're going to have continued to build, continue to invest, and raise the bar even higher. I can't wait to see that comparison of our value proposition to theirs at that point.

And I think it's gonna really demonstrate to everybody, ourselves, you, and most importantly, to the customer, the value that we already bring each and every day, and that value will become abundantly clear, which fits perfectly into our long-term growth and into our three P model.

Josh Spector
Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS

Thanks for that. I think unfortunately, we'll probably have to wrap this session just due to time, but Perimeter Solutions is still here to answer any of the questions in a lot of other meetings. So I wanna thank Haitham for the overview, and Kyle and Jeff for joining us today. Certainly, a really interesting story with a lot of things going on there. So appreciate the update, appreciate the time. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day.

Jeff Emery
President of Fire Safety, Perimeter Solutions

Thanks, Josh.

Kyle Sable
CFO, Perimeter Solutions

Thanks, Josh.

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