The webcast. Sorry.
All right. This is going to be a challenge, but okay, we'll try to do it. First of all, thanks for coming. Again, Stuart Bodden, CEO; Melissa Cougle, CFO. We're excited to be here. We announced a transaction last Monday. We're very excited about it. Melissa will go kind of walk through some more details about that. Let me just kind of give you a little bit of a history of Ranger. Ranger was founded by a former Army Ranger, hence the name. We are the largest well service provider in the United States. What that means is we're not drilling new wells, but when you go drill a new well, if you put it on artificial lift or you need to do any kind of maintenance, you need a Well Service Rig to do that. That's really our core service line.
In last year, our revenue was a little over or not quite $550 million. We had about $75 million of EBITDA. We tend to convert, plus or minus in a year, about 60% of our EBITDA to Free Cash Flow. The acquisition that we just did is called American Well Services. That's a Permian-based player. It allowed about $180 million of revenue and between $35-$40 million of EBITDA at very similar Cash Flow conversions. I kind of caught the back end of diversified. You're going to hear us also talk a lot about Cash Flows. You're going to hear us talk a lot about Balance Sheet strength. We're going to talk a lot as well about Capital Returns Program. We do pay a dividend. We have grown that dividend, and we have also been very active repurchasing our own shares.
At this point, we've actually bought back over the last couple of years a little over 15% of the company. You'll hear us talk about all of these things. Why should you think about Ranger? The first thing we would tell you is we are the market leader. We're the market leader in size. We think we're the market leader in our focus on Safety and Executional Excellence. We also have capacity that we think we can grow as the market gets better. We don't feel like we are at Peak Earning Capacity right now. We have the opportunity to grow as the market gets better. The 2nd thing is on Cash Flow generation. We're very focused as a management team on generating free cash, right? We've been very open.
We have a commitment to returning at least 25% of that to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. We have averaged historically since we began that program in 2023 about a 40% return to our shareholders. Very shareholder-friendly, very Cash Flow focused. Financial Flexibility. On the deal that we just did, about a $90 million transaction, that was $60 million of cash. The bulk of that cash was actually off of the Balance Sheet. We did have cash on the Balance Sheet. I am going to let Melissa talk in more details, but you'll find that we still have a lot of Financial Flexibility even in the back end of that deal. One of the things that we would tell you is different. If you follow the space, if you think about the drillers, you think about the frackers.
We're different than all of them, right? We're not drilling new wells and we're not completing new wells. If you kind of go across the top here, you see drilling. We don't have any exposure to that part of the life cycle. We do have some exposure on the completion side, and that's after you drill a well and getting it ready for production. The bulk of what we do across our service lines is really focused on production and a little bit on decommissioning as well. That tends to be OpEx versus CapEx for our customers, and we tend to be a lot more consistent through the cycle. Just to go kind of prove that to you on how to think about it. This is all indexed back to 2010, but the yellow line on top is production spending indexed.
You'll actually see that it has increased 80% as you kind of go through the estimate through 2025. Completion spending has only gone up 30%, and exploration spending has actually gone down. Not a surprise. A lot of the shale basins were much more in a Development Mode at this point than we are in kind of true exploration. As you can see, we're not going to sit here and tell you that we don't have any volatility. We do have some exposure, but we do think that we're really kind of more muted to it through the cycle. If you think about our service lines, and I'm going pretty fast just so we can hopefully have some time for Q&A at the end. Our core service line, we call it High-spec Rigs. That's Well Servicing Rigs. These are our reporting segments.
We report in three segments. The second one is processing and ancillary services. A lot of these are services that support the Well Service Rig. That's a P&A business, Plugging and Abandonment business. We also have inside of that a Rental and Fishing business. We also have a Coil Tubing business. That is really completion focused. That's in the Rockies. We just happened to pick that up. We got a great deal on that when we bought assets out of bankruptcy in 2021. We have an Infield Gas Processing that really supports through cleaning up gas streams in basin gas for a lot of that uses for in basin power, which you probably heard a lot about as well. We have a Wireline Group. Wireline Group can do completion exposure called Plug and Perf. That's basically right after the well has been drilled.
You would go blow a hole in the side of the casing. The frackers come in, they frack, then you set a plug and you work your way up. You work your way up the well bore. Just to highlight, again, our High-spec Rigs business, our Well Servicing business. This is really the flagship service line of the business. If you go kind of look across on the middle chart here. You see this line. This is the Land Drilling Count going across. If you actually see what you'll notice is that Land Drilling has actually been declining, right? Again, we're getting really, really efficient at drilling wells. On the Well Servicing side, you still have to maintain a well. After a well has been drilled, you're usually going back into it in the 1st six to nine months.
Every year or two, you have to go back in. I think some people think that it's like, "Oh, I've got a balloon. I stick a straw in it. I leave it." It's not really what happens. It's more like a car. You have to maintain your car. Sometimes it's pretty simple. You change the oil, maybe you change the tires. Sometimes you have to do a lot more work. A well is the exact same way. You can see here, even though Land Drilling Count has been declining, our revenue has actually been quite consistent. We think that that's really important, an important part of the story, and part of the reason that we're very confident in having a dividend and actually committing to our shareholder return program as well.
Again, on the right-hand side, you can just see the EBITDA and the margins. Again, we're really just trying to highlight the consistency of this business. I'll turn it over to Melissa right after this. We get a lot of questions about, I mean, we talked about the consistency, the resiliency. The other thing that we do is we're very focused on the majors. The majority of our work is with the majors, the likes of we're the largest Well Service provider for ExxonMobil, for Chevron, for ConocoPhillips. Depending on the day, we're one or two with Oxy. Really our Bread and Butter is working with the majors. That's for a couple of reasons. One is their work programs are a lot more consistent. The hardest thing for us to manage is White Space.
When we say that, if someone says, "I want to work for six weeks and take two weeks off and come back for six weeks," very, very hard logistically for us to manage our crews and manage the equipment. The bigger players tend to say, "I need X number of rigs, and I'm going to keep them busy, and I'm going to make sure that we just have work programs that are always ahead." That is one of the reasons that we do it. They have also been wanting more and more packages on location. Consolidation, we get the question a lot. Has consolidation helped you or hurt you? I'll tell you overwhelmingly it has helped Ranger.
The reason is, as the largest player, focused on safety, focused on training our crews, and focused on maintaining our equipment, they're saying, "We're tired of managing 10 vendors or 15 vendors. We want a handful that can operate in multi-basin, and we know that they're going to be consistent, and we know they're going to be safe." That has helped us. Over time, they've started to say, "It's a rig, but I also want a pipe handler," which the form guys are always happy when we buy pipe handlers, "a pipe handler. We want a blowout preventer. We want an accumulator. We want a reverse unit." We are seeing more and more complete packages go out into location, particularly with the majors. That has helped us. You will see this chart here shows our kind of blended hourly rig rate, if you will.
It's really Revenue Per Hour. You'll see that it's actually been increasing, and it's been pretty steady. We saw a little bit of a pullback in Q3, and part of that has just been by mixing up some of the packages. In general, we had a lot of questions about, "Well, how is pricing power? How's it going?" Again, it's been really consistent. The majors tend to understand they're kind of understanding now that if they go in every time, it's three bids and a buy, and they're just going to beat us up, eventually you're not going to have the quality of service provider that you want. It's a little bit about Ranger. I'm going to come back at the end, but again, very excited about the acquisition, and Melissa's going to give you details on that.
Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you guys. I will talk a little bit about we had a big announcement last week. We acquired a company. After I talk about that a little bit, you'll hear me actually mention Echo, and Stuart will actually take us home with some exciting new technology we've been bringing to bear in the market as well. Last week, for anyone who may have not seen our Press Release, we announced earnings, and alongside that, we actually announced a transaction. Ranger redefined itself in 2021 when we acquired three companies and more than doubled the size of the organization back in 2021. We have worked really hard and talked to our Investment Community at multiple intervals since then about our desire to continue to be acquisitive.
Some of the challenges leveled at us were, "We can't get anything done because your multiple's too low." We were really excited to bring to market another transaction last week that we feel like represented an incredible value on behalf of our shareholders in that on a combined basis, the pro forma company really has something special to bring to the market better than Ranger could do alone. When we look at AWS, it's a company called, not Amazon Web Services. We are a small cap company, and we still remain, so even though we're very excited about it. It's a company called American Well Services. They're a company that was built on the back of combining three companies, PE owned. We've actually been talking to them for a few years.
They finally had reached a point where they were really ready and felt like that they had reached a point where they needed to monetize. Ranger is one of the only publicly traded well services company, actually was the one that could put the most compelling offer in front of them. That said, we feel like that was still in the range of an incredible valuation on behalf of our investors. We kind of look and married up here on this slide those strategic priorities that Stuart talked about earlier, how that they are benefited by this AWS transaction. When we talk about grow market leading position, you can look over at the chart on the right. When you look at that chart, we were arguably before this transaction. Who was number one? Who was number two? It kind of depends on how you counted it.
Do you look at all of Ranger as compared to Axis? Only rigs. They were a little bit bigger. We were both kind of competitive on the back of an acquisition they had done last year. This firmly and squarely put Ranger back at the top of the Totem Pole, so to speak, in terms of a market position. We are and will remain the largest well service provider in the Lower 48. Across domestic U.S., we are the only publicly traded one. We have a fleet at this point of 219 active and working workover rigs. We have another 200 rigs sort of sitting on the fence. That is important when we start thinking about the Echo program that Stuart will tell you about in a little bit. It also dovetails into driving technology advancement.
Although AWS does not have technology on its own, they have a very strong business model that we are acquiring at a very compelling valuation. They Cash Flow like Ranger, right? You heard Stuart say that we convert at 60%. They are another Well Services business. In fact, they have a few other ancillary lines that are slightly more profitable, but we Cash Flow very comparatively. What this does is it gives us new scale. It provides for some synergies that create more Cash Flows to allow us to continue to push on the technology side to really bring to bear some new and interesting things that we feel like further differentiate Ranger. On the maximized Free Cash Flow, we just talked about that, but it is important to reinforce the accretion of this deal is not only that we bought it at a much lower multiple.
Ranger's multiple, if you look at it over the past year, kind of depends on how you want to measure it. Let's say we trade somewhere between three and 3.5 turns. We would argue that we should be trading far higher than that, but the reality means that's what the market's decided our multiple is, right? This deal was actually priced at 2.1 turn of trailing 12 months. It was negotiated at 2.5 times, but they have had some really great tailwinds during the time we were even negotiating.
We were able to get that deal done with a combination of $60 million of cash, and that was constituted mostly with cash we had on the Balance Sheet that we were convinced investors were not giving us credit for because they probably thought in Standard Oil Field history terms we were going to waste that money. Instead, we went and bought something really interesting that is going to Cash Flow really well. We did borrow a small amount of our ABL that we perceive we can pay back in less than a year. We are left in a really strong financial position to actually be able to do this again, to actually be able to continue to repurchase our own shares and do other interesting things towards driving technology. We also will continue to prioritize shareholder returns. You heard Stuart say we have already bought back 15% of the company.
In the same quarter where we actually bought back 667,000 shares at, I think it was an average price of $12.50, we issued half of those shares back again at a 2.1x multiple. With the Financial Flexibility we have, because we had so much cash we were able to put behind the transaction, we borrowed so little behind it, we can continue to repurchase, and we will have strong Cash Flows from the pro forma company to continue to do that in the future. Maybe just diving a little bit in and touching on a couple of things that we maybe have not touched on before. AWS is a very highly regarded company. I mentioned that was brought up by three different companies over the past seven years, Stuart?
The first one was 2018.
Yes, 2018. The company itself has a fleet of 40 rigs. They have about 550 employees. Their margins are actually slightly better than ours. This is at 23%. When we're looking at their margin rate, what I would encourage you to do is look at this margin rate as compared to our High-spec Rigs margin rate. When you look at that 23%, it still looks a little bit relatively high. One of the questions we got last week from our investor base was, how are they having, how do they have better margins than you? How did you get a deal done if they have better margins than you at 2.1 turns? I think it actually has to do with the Middle Box here around high margin complementary service lines.
One of the things that you saw Stuart show was this increasing rate that was not on the back of just charging customers 5% more in a down market. We have not been able to pull off that, maybe next time around, but not so far. What we have been able to do is continue to bundle things alongside our rigs where we are getting better fall through. That is resulting in incremental pricing for that fall through that we are getting on these incrementally bundling equipment lines. They have even more of that than Ranger has today. They have not only a fleet of High-spec Rigs, they also have a few additional service lines that offer strong pull-through where their rigs are already taking advantage of these service lines. You can bring those same service lines through to Ranger, and we can grow that much more.
The gross margin was about 29%. Stuart mentioned they had about $185 million of trailing revenue, and they had about $43 million of EBITDA to match that. When we look pro forma, we're frankly a very conservative team. You heard Stuart mention earnings capacity of 35-40. The reality is they've achieved 43. Their earnings capacity is beyond that $40 million. What we also know is the 1st year post-acquisition in a company, sometimes you can kind of have a customer leave here, you're acquiring there, you've got integration costs. We've bought ourselves a little bit of latitude in saying, "We're going to get there," but I think it does speak to the earnings potential. That doesn't include synergies and potentially additional Cross-selling or Cross-service lines.
I talked about it a little bit more, but a little bit earlier on the service line, but I wanted to reinforce when you look at this lower chart here, this actually represents the yellow bar actually represents what looks a lot like our High-spec Rig segment today. The black piece of the donut actually represents these new service lines. This is stuff like Mixing Plants and the chemicals that go along with that. That's something Ranger doesn't have one of today. That's something that they've been able to monetize well as a piece of equipment that's bundled along a High-spec Rig that we're really excited about acquiring. We've got a really nice mix of we do the majority of that company is stuff that we do well every day.
It has some other things that it's bringing to the table that we can really look to Cross-sell across both of our business lines. The earnings potential of the company is demonstrated on the left where you can see they've had very steady—we talk about the consistency of work. They've had very consistent and growing revenue profile as well as EBITDA over the past few years. I've talked about most of these, but I want to point out a couple of things on this slide. One thing I haven't said yet that we are really excited about and announced last week is at this point, we've reached a huge milestone at Ranger. We believe we will generate more than $100 million of EBITDA in 2026. That's a pivotal inflection point for us. There's a huge opportunity set because our multiple does not yet reflect that.
When you look at just the graph on the left, it is our year-to-date adjusted EBITDA for both companies. On the Ranger side, we have $53 million of adjusted EBITDA through September. On the AWS side, there was $35 million. Just through September, three quarters is at $88 million. We have every confidence we are going to get up over $100 million next year. That is something to really be proud of as an organization and very different than our historical track record. That will be very, very exciting for us. On the right side, we have Debt and Leverage demonstrated. This really includes our vehicle leases and financing leases.
When you look at our leverage ratio and you see the $51 million pro forma, recognize our borrowings and our ABL, our true debt is actually a number much smaller than that and what we had guided out to be about $25 million post-combination, leaving us with a leverage level of less than a half a turn. When we look at Free Cash Flow conversion, we can see that we've maintained 60%. You heard Stuart talk about that earlier today. What I also want to talk about, as mentioned also by Diversified, is the pro forma Cash Flows on the right. You can see Ranger, again, last 12 months, $53 million of Cash Flows.
The Modeled Cash Flows from AWS, again, converting at the same rate as Ranger, which we believe we can do, is $27 million to put us at a pro forma Free Cash Flow conversion rate. Again, retrospectively, last 12 months of $80 million. That is a lot of powder to buy back shares with, to actually buy another company with, to do some really interesting things and build new Electric Rigs with. We will be able to take advantage of that much more in the space in the coming periods by benefiting through this transaction. Finally, we talked about returning capital to shareholders multiple times. It would not be a good investor deck if we did not spend two seconds on it. We just wanted to say that we have actually returned 48% of our Free Cash Flow to shareholders since we instituted our capital.
We instituted a Capital Returns Framework as soon as we paid down our debt in 2023. We prioritized getting a super healthy Balance Sheet to give us maximum flexibility. We paid down on our debt and immediately started buying our shares because we thought we represented a compelling value on behalf of our shareholders. We have bought back. You can see we had peak shares outstanding of almost 25 million shares, and we're now down to 21.8. We have actually, and those share repurchases over that time, it is worth mentioning all of those shares that we've repurchased, 4.3 million of them were repurchased at an average price of, I think we're at $10.38 now. We just issued 2 million shares at $12.51. There is a tremendous value capture right there that's worth pointing out to you.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Stuart and let him talk about Echo a little bit.
Thank you, Melissa. Just to echo, Echo is our Electric Hybrid Rig. We're very excited about that. That is a refurb of an existing rig. I mentioned earlier about us working with the majors. I think you'll find that we're a conservative team. Instead of just going to build it and hope somebody buys it, we've been working with our major customers to have them help us fund this to lock them in and actually ease the capital requirements. Echo is a Hybrid Electric Rig. We're very excited about it. It has Electric Drawworks. That means we're moving the blocks up and down with an Electric Motor. We can plug into Pole Power. If there is electricity on location, Pole Power or pump check, we can plug into that.
If there is not one on location, we're okay with that because we do have a generator on location that can top off the battery even though everything is operated electrically. It has regenerative braking on it. If you think about every time the blocks come down, you're partially recharging the batteries, particularly when you're installing pipe. Whenever you're installing pipe, every time you're lowering, you're going down heavy. When you kind of pull back up, you're going up light. Obviously, if you're pulling tubing, it's the opposite way around. I made the comment we actually just got we've got our first one is over a well right now. They were installing tubing. After they were done, the battery had actually charged itself up 5%.
We were actually pretty excited because it was going down heavy and coming up light. Very excited about that. These are under contract. They're under contract with two different major providers. One of these rigs is in the Bakken. One is in the Permian Basin. We are having very active conversations about getting more of these out there.
How we've kind of really thought about it, and I think just to kind of give you a sense of how we think about just our capital, because we're working with the major providers, we said, "Look, if we have to do our own refurb, it's called on a rig, let's call it $400,000± ." We said, "We're willing to eat that, but everything beyond that, every incremental dollar on a conversion, you need to either help us pay that in cash or you need to give us an uplifted rate that returns our capital." The first one we put out, the customer actually put down a $500,000 deposit and then also agreed to the Uplifted Rate. The other company, it's only an Uplifted Rate, but we feel like the incremental capital was getting returned to us.
I think hopefully I bring that up just to give you a sense of how we just think about partnering with our customers and having them invest alongside with us. If you've been in this space for a long time, it's a little bit different, right? Because it used to be people would just sit back and go, "Why don't you build it?" If I'll try it and if I like it, maybe I'll pay for you. At that point, it's a pretty tough negotiation because they know that it's a sunk cost for you. We've basically said, "We're not going to build it unless you help us out." The second thing I would highlight here, Tango. Tango is our E-ticketing platform. We are now connecting this ticketing platform into data systems on the rigs.
We can actually, on a ticket, you can see how long we were tripping, if there was NPT, all those kinds of things. The other thing I would tell you is, and again, this is just sort of how we think about the world, our HR system ties into our E-ticketing system. The reason is that's a big deal. People don't get paid until the tickets get signed. If you've been in this space, the hardest thing was you had a ticket and you had to send a guy out there to go beg for the ticket. When the crew isn't getting paid until the ticket is signed, guess what happens? The ticket gets signed every day. Guess what that means? That the clock stops on our AR that much sooner. Again, these are some investments that we're making.
Melissa talked about the size and the earnings potential of Ranger with AWS going forward. It just lets us do these kinds of things. We have another program called Overwatch that we've been investing in. That is actually an AI camera on location. What that is doing is we can set up an Exclusion Zone. If somebody walks into that zone without the Proper Protection Equipment, they don't have their Safety Glasses, an alarm goes off. Needless to say, our customers are really excited about that. Here's another opportunity for us to, A, be safer, but also get additional kind of wallet share from our customers. We're opening up for questions after this. Hopefully, you kind of got a sense of what we're about. We really think that the investment fundamentals are attractive. We've talked a lot about Cash Flow.
We think the services are very consistent. We're very resilient through the cycle. The combination, the type of work we do and who our customers are. We do feel like that if the macro improves, we have additional earning capacity beyond the 100 that Melissa mentioned. We are very focused on shareholder and shareholder returns.
With that, we'll open it up for questions.
You said the AWS acquisition, they had some services that they offered in their package that you didn't. Is that something that you can then add to your existing Pre-merger Fleet that then could bolster your?
That's exactly what I'm thinking. The most kind of prominent additional service lines, they do have Mixing Plants. Particularly if you're doing drill-out work and completion chemicals, they have a tubing, rental, and inspection business. If you looked at our customers and their customers, they're selling these to the same customers that we work with, right? I think to your point, we feel like those are two of the biggest ones. They also have a water hauling business, but the trucks are on a schedule. They go to specific fields every day. I think in particular, we would point to the Mixing Plants and the tubing, rental, and inspection business that we think there's opportunity to expand.
In a prior slide, you listed the hourly revenue that you're achieving. That's fallen off towards how low as it was since Q1 of 2024. You are talking about the additional services. That seems a bit incongruent. Would you tie that in again?
Yeah, sure. Let me go back because I think the timing, I think you're speaking, this would hit right.
It is.
So.
There you go.
All right. If you kind of look through here, this is for the 2023 timeframe. If you went back to 2022, what you would saw is that this had continued to increase. A lot of that was quarterly.