Okay, our next presenting company today is Smith-Midland , trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker SMID. The company is among the leaders in the precast concrete space. It has a very good barrier, barrier rental company. Here today to speak on behalf of the company is Ashley Smith, and with him is the relatively new CFO of the company, Dominic Hunter. Ashley?
All right. Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. Or actually, yeah, it's still morning. Good to see everybody. Thanks for taking time to be here with us this morning. The Safe Harbor statement, please take a minute to read that. I want to start this morning by saying that every piece of concrete barrier that you see across the country is in the process of being replaced. If there's only one thing that you take away today from this, that's, I'm going to check when you leave. I'll say, what's the one thing that you're supposed to take away from that? Every piece, and here's a little model of a concrete barricade. You see them on the side of the highway. Who has not seen a barrier beside where they live or close by? No hands. Everybody has seen the concrete barriers.
Every piece of barrier is in the process of being replaced between now and the year 2030. I'll talk throughout the presentation about how that affects and how that's a tailwind to our company. We have a couple of different divisions, and that barrier replacement cycle is a tailwind to a couple of our different divisions. I'm the third generation CEO of the company. My grandfather started the company in 1960. My father was a CEO. I've been CEO now for about six years. We went public in 1995. I would say for the first 20 years, it really was not a big part of what we are, what we were, what we did. Today we're a lot more attuned to our investors, and that's why we're here today, just to share the story with everybody here.
The share price is around $40, $42 a share, market cap over $200 million. Our business is basically three different parts. Number one is we manufacture precast concrete products. Precast concrete products are made in a factory. They're stored at the factory until they're needed on the job site. For example, the concrete barrier, we make those, we store them in stacks on a yard until we need to take them out to the job site. Some of our other products are proprietary. We're one of the few, if not only, precast concrete producers in the country who actually have a research and development committee, and we patent our products. We also have intellectual property, which on the barrier side consists of crash tests. We have trademarks, trade dress. We have patents now, design patents we're currently trying to obtain right now.
The products on the slide are proprietary to us, and they're the number one branded products in each one of those parts of the market. The JJ Hooks highway barrier is the number one barrier across the United States. The SlenderWall cladding system, that's a Class A, beautiful precast concrete, lightweight panel system that's used for multi-story buildings. It's a wide variety of buildings from multifamily, hospitality, healthcare, so a wide variety of buildings. Our Easi-Set Buildings, that's the number one brand of small transportable precast concrete building. These are used for hundreds of different reasons. They're used at parks for restrooms. They're used at schools to store equipment, used at wastewater treatment plants. The other day, just for fun, I, on ChatGPT, I put in a query. I said, what's the number one transportable precast concrete building in the United States?
It came up, Easi-Set Buildings, and it had a really nice description of the building. Dominic was kidding me. He said, ChatGPT probably knew it was you that was asking the question. That's why you got that answer. I think we would get that regardless. Our SoftSound absorptive noise wall is the number one brand of absorptive sound wall. That's the manufacturing. We have three plants in the U.S., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. Our market basically is from New York down to Georgia into Florida. These plants have been growing. The North Carolina plant, we just doubled the size of that. That's a fairly new plant. We've been in North Carolina since the 1970s. We moved about six years ago to a 40-acre site, built a plant, and we doubled it two years ago.
The South Carolina plant, we just increased capacity by 35% this past year with some new forming systems. We've been investing heavily in our precast manufacturing. With some of the highlights, we have the patented products, intellectual property we were talking about with the precast products. The products are so well known, and they're so in demand by the marketplace. Another segment of our business is licensing. The precast concrete products are heavy, so it's hard for me from the East Coast to ship them to the West Coast. We've been licensing our technology to other precast producers across North America, also overseas for quite a while, but we have some tailwinds that we'll talk about that have been increasing our licensing business quite a bit recently. Also, in our Virginia plant, we rent the barrier. We've been renting barriers since the 1970s.
We always had a small fleet, and we're really transforming and moving our customers away from buying barrier to renting barrier. Also, a macro tailwind is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was passed by Congress a few years ago. Right now, only about 35%- 36% of that money has been invested in infrastructure. There's still 60% of that money. That was the single largest investment from Congress in infrastructure in the history of the United States. We still have 60% of that money left to be spent. We talked JJ Hooks and then the growing licensees and also a strong backlog. Besides our proprietary products, we can also make custom precast products. We make, recently, we made all the panels for the exterior of BMW's plant expansion in Greenville, South Carolina. We make panels for wastewater treatment plants.
There's a lot of custom products that we can make. These are a couple of examples of some of the products that we can make in our manufacturing facilities. About four years ago, we bought an additional 30 acres in Virginia, and we've been expanding our storage capacity to give us more production capacity. We were constrained by how much storage space. Now we can fully utilize the production capacity at that plant. Our other two plants have rooms. South Carolina, we do have to do some storage expansion at that plant. To talk a little bit about the barrier rental business, we've been renting concrete barriers since the late 1970s. Up until maybe eight, ten years ago, we only had about ten miles of barrier in our rental fleet. Call us conservative. Maybe we didn't have all of the cash to increase that.
Between, say, ten years ago and five years ago, we went from ten miles of barrier to 50 miles of barrier in our rental fleet. Starting about two and a half, three years ago, we increased the rental fleet from 50 miles of rental barrier to 100 miles of rental barrier. The way that we did that was in 2018, we sold 50 miles of barrier to a client who had a project in Northern Virginia. When we signed that contract, at the bottom of the contract, we said, "We will buy all that barrier back at the end of the job and for this amount of money." The client knew that they had the barrier sold at the end of the job. That happened to be a public-private partnership.
At the end of those contracts, all of the assets are sold, and the partnership is dissolved once that project is finished. Three years ago, we bought all of that back at that predetermined price we'd given them back in 2018. We went from 50 miles of barrier to 100, and we paid $0.01 on the dollar for all that barrier. Our rental fleet went from 50 miles to 100 miles. As soon as we doubled the rental fleet, our utilization went to about 50%. We've been increasing that each year. Right now, we're at 90% of that 100 miles is rented. That means it's out on the road being rented.
This morning, somebody asked, "Where do you put it all?" We said, "We hope it's out on the road making money for us." A couple of things that are tailwinds that are—oh, before I get to that, one thing we really like about the rental business is we get 100% of the income. Say it's a three-year job. We get all of the income upfront when we install the barrier on the road. We get paid for shipping the barrier, setting it. If it's a three-year period, we get all of that rental income for three years when we first put it down, and then the money to pay freight to bring it back, and the labor to put it back on the trucks to bring it home. We get to use that. I call ourselves a Warren Buffett of precast concrete barriers.
He takes money from, you know, his insurance money and reinvests it in the business. Basically, today we're using money from the rental companies to help build more rental barrier. Starting first part of 2025 and into 2026, we're going to add about 30%, another 30 miles of barrier to our rental program. We're doing that for two reasons. One is some of the barrier is what we call the old style barrier. That's another driver that's helping to drive this rental division. We're replacing the old style barrier, and then we're adding to our fleet. In our local market, we rent barrier basically from Delaware down to Virginia, and all the barrier is going to be replaced. I'll talk a little bit about that.
If we're going to go from 50 miles to 100 miles to 130 miles or 140 miles or 150 miles, if our market needs 200 miles of barrier, we're going to make that ourselves. Right now, we have the largest investment, making the largest investment in the company's history in new rental barrier in 2025 and 2026. Let me talk just quickly about what's really driving the replacement of every piece of concrete barrier that's out there. About every 10 or 15 years, the Federal Highway Administration develops new higher crash test levels for vehicles on the road and for any safety features. That means concrete barriers, metal guardrail, sign posts that hold signs up, and then light posts that hold lights up. The reason they do this is because the type of vehicle on the road changes.
This is the fourth time we've been through this, starting way back in the late 1970s. The cars went from little compact cars to bigger cars. The next change was from cars to trucks. Now everybody's driving an SUV. Starting in 2020, any new roadside safety feature, including any new barrier, had to be the new style. Since 2020, our licensees and our factories have been making the new style. There's a lot of old barrier out there that contractors still own and they still use. The first point was 2020, everything, any new barrier. The next date is around 2030. It's state by state. For example, the state of Virginia, by 2030, you cannot use any of the old style at all. Between now and 2030, all of that barrier is going to be replaced.
Contractors in our market, since for years we only had 10 miles of barrier, if they needed 50,000 feet of barrier on their project, we didn't have it. We would make them buy barrier. We would make it, and then they would buy it. Starting 10 years ago, we went to 50 miles of barrier. We started bidding on larger projects. Today, with 100 miles of barrier in our rental fleet, if a contractor calls today, and we actually had a contractor that called, we negotiated, we got a contract for a 90,000 linear foot project of rental barrier, and it's about a three and a half year project. Before, we couldn't have done that. We would have made the contractor buy it. Today, two things, switching all of our contractors from buying barrier to rental. One is all the barrier has to be replaced.
They have to decide if they want to invest $5 million in new barrier or concrete safety systems. Smith-Midland will rent me everything that I need. Also, the mindset is different today. I would say 20 years ago, 30 years ago, a lot of contractors wanted to own everything, but there's been a switch. There's a lot more rental companies running, you know, earth moving equipment, trucks. This just fits into that same pattern. That's why we expect in our local area our barrier rental program to keep growing. We like the barrier rental. It's recurring revenue. In the long term, after it's been paid off, everything goes to the bottom line. Of course, we like the cash flow that we talked about earlier. This is one of our local projects. This is JJ Hooks barrier. You'll notice, really just two folks on the ground.
One's got a white hat. He's a supervisor. You only need the one operator on the ground and the one construction operator. No, we don't really do it that fast in real life. This was, but the one thing about JJ Hooks barrier, it is the number one barrier across North America for a reason. JJ Hooks, you saw the barrier comes off the truck, and it just slides together with the other piece. All of the other barrier that's out there has to be hooked together with a mechanical connection. Typically, they have to line up the ends of the barrier. There are loops, metal loops that stick out of the end of the barrier, and then they have to slide a steel pin down to hook them together.
JJ Hooks is much less expensive to make compared to the others, also a lot less expensive to handle and to use. That's why it's nationwide the number one barrier connection out there. One other thing to talk about here as far as our licensees, as far as the competition. There are other, there's nobody doing what we're doing as far as a private company going out and getting their barrier approved across the country. The competition is the state standard design, and there are still companies that make, precast companies that make that design, but it is very costly compared JJ Hooks. The way we've grown the business, we've been licensing our technology since the late 1960s. In the beginning, we had a franchise model where my dad would go out and actually start another company just like ours.
In the mid-70s, we switched to a licensing model, and that's what we've followed since then. This change, we licensed JJ Hooks highway barriers, Easi-Set Buildings, the SlenderWall cladding systems, and then the SoftSound absorptive noise walls. Each one of those is the number one branded product in the market. A big driver for our licensees is the switch to the new barrier style. Between now and 2030, we've already seen the beginning of this transition in the barrier, and we've already seen it in our royalty income that was increased. The last three years, it's grown. This year, the first half of the year's, I don't know, 15% higher, 20% higher than the year before. Dominic is our CFO. He'll give you the details. Just a couple of data points. The state of California didn't have the new style barrier.
It's called MASH TL3, and they didn't have their own system. We came in. We've been trying to get our other older designs approved by California for the past 30 years, and they said, "No, we like our own designs." It was just an opportunity. We had all the testing. We had the Federal Highway Administration approval. We brought them a package. Everything was ready to go. It still took us a year to get approval by California. We had to tweak our drawings like 15 times. We finally got it approved. For the first year and a half, we were the only design that was approved. At the same time, California was developing their own design, and we got an early drawing of it because the company that made that design to take to the test lab was one of our licensees, and they sent us the drawing.
As soon as we saw it, we said, "We're going to get 80%- 90% of the barrier market in California," because that design that the state came up with was so expensive. It has extra bolts, where we can set a barrier in about one minute. It's probably going to take them five, six, seven minutes per barrier. It's more expensive, more loose hardware. We're working in California with the largest independent precast concrete producer in the West. They have four plants in California, and they're already buying new forms because they know this is coming. The other thing California did was starting January 1st, 2026, they're not allowing any of the old style barrier. All of the barrier that the contractors own is obsolete starting this coming January 1st. We expect California to be a gold mine, so to speak.
Through our licensing, we get a 6% royalty on the products that our licensees manufacture. Again, we have 75 producers across the country. Forty of those producers are making JJ Hooks barrier. What we're finding is the two drivers there are going to be, we're filling in states. For example, Alabama. We've wanted to have a licensee in Alabama for years, and a producer down in Alabama called us and said, "Alabama's switching. You can't use the old barrier. We want to JJ Hooks." We're already starting to get tens of thousands of dollars royalty. We're going to start, there's areas across the country that we're going to start to fill in. Also, the existing licensees are going to start having an increase in their production because of this change to the new style of barrier. Again, the tailwinds, infrastructure spending.
Just another data point, we talked about barrier, the new crash tests that are developed every few years because things change on the highway. What's the change that's been happening to vehicles on the highway the last couple of years? EVs. EVs are heavy, low center of gravity. We sit on all the committees, and they're already starting to plan for the next crash test. Probably in the next three to five years, we'll be crash testing EVs, and we'll have to design the next barrier that's going to replace all the barrier that we're making right now. The folks on these committees that do this, a lot of them work at the crash test facility. Their motivation is to come up with a new design.
We've seen crash tests with an EV going through a concrete barrier, and it just blew right through it because of how fast they can go and the inertia with all the weight. We recently developed a low profile barrier, which we introduced in Texas. Again, JJ Hooks compared to a bolted connection. We went down while we were developing ours, and we watched a crew of nine people putting the Texas style barrier together. Once it's together, it's a very good connection. They had to have nine people, and they had to have a truck following along that had all these big bolts. The contractor in Texas had used JJ Hooks on taller barrier.
He told us, "As soon as you JJ Hooks approved, we're never going to buy the, you know, what we were looking at." We expect to have 90% of the low profile barrier market in Texas. Texas and Florida are the two biggest states for low profile. Texas uses it on secondary roads where they don't want a real tall barrier. When you come up to an intersection, they want cars and trucks to be able to kind of look over the barrier. In Texas, there's almost as much low profile barrier as there is the taller barrier. That's just another data point. We expect to have 90% of the market share of low profile in Texas. We're trying to get approved in Florida. We're in the process now of developing our next barrier. It's a limited deflection barrier. We do in-house static crash tests ourselves.
Next time I'll show a video, it's kind of fun. It's what we do for fun on the weekends. What we're doing this time, the first time ever, typically we would do our own in-house testing, go out and do the $150,000 crash test. We're spending $20,000 to have a computer model and simulate the crash test. We've already done that once. We tweaked our design because the computer model showed more deflection than we wanted. We wanted between 24 and 30 inches. Our first design had a 40-inch deflection. That design now, we have a patent and utility patent and a design patent. In addition to making product, we're also designing for ourselves and also for our licensed producer. Offsite, precast modular construction is driving our business. That's a tailwind. There's not enough construction workers out there to get everything made.
We make the panels, store them offsite, and then we bring them onto the job. At this point, I'm going to let Dominic take over and run you through the numbers.
All right. Thank you, Ashley. Good morning, everyone. I think it's still morning. As Ashley started, he was talking about ChatGPT, and I think you can do a little bit of leading the jury in your prompts and how you ask questions for ChatGPT, even though Easi-Set is truly the number one brand in this industry. If you were to go and tell it, well, who's the number one concrete manufacturer in the Midland area that's publicly traded under SMID and has been in business since 1960 and Smith in its title, it'll come back with Smith-Midland. I mean, you know, there is some, definitely you got to watch your prompts. We can do a quick run-through here of the numbers. Everyone has probably seen our Form 10-K and Form 10-Qs for the last two quarters.
Because of all of the tailwinds that Ashley has previously discussed, you can see the company's had some success as far as revenue, backlog, EBITDA, and the EPS. You can see it here in the numbers as we move from $59.6 million in 2023 to $78.5 million in 2024. It's about a 31.7% increase. We've added kind of a trailing twelve months here, which is a little different than what you'll see on a Form 10-K or Form 10-Q of $91 million for the last four quarters, if you include Q1 and Q2 of 2025 and Q3 and Q4 of 2024. This is really a factor of a lot of things, growth in all of the investments we've had in products, as well as this strategic shift of the business from barrier sales to barrier rentals and the special barrier projects that come along that have a high profit margin.
From a quarter-on-quarter basis, they add a lot of revenue in any given quarter. You'll see this great growth in the trailing twelve months for where we are right now in June 2025. On the backlog side, we have a very strong backlog. It remains strong, even though you can see some slight reductions, from $59 million- $54 million. We still consider it a very strong backlog, historically for the business. In improving that backlog, we've made some increases in our sales team, and we'll continue to increase our overall sales efforts to push the backlog forward. Still a very strong backlog in respect to the company's history. Next, again, tied to all the tailwinds that we've discussed, you'll see this growth in our EBITDA and earnings per share. At the end of the year, we're at $1.45 EPS. If you look, trailing twelve months is $2.27.
Again, tied to our revenue, our cost containment, and the success we've had in our sales and growing our backlog and the overall expansion of the business. EPS is tied, obviously, to EBITDA. $12.7 million of EBITDA for 2024, trailing twelve months, it's about $18.4 million. Again, tied to some of the growth we've seen in Q1 and Q2, barrier projects, higher sales in our product line, higher royalties. We see several factors that are driving that up. We continue to improve through the rest of the year. We have a couple of slides that talk about that. This is just a summary for the quarter itself, for Q2. It was a 33% increase in revenue, $26.2 million just for the quarter. It's the highest quarterly revenue the company's ever had in its history. The service revenue nearly doubled, $12.8 million.
Sorry, an operating income of $5.5 million, which was, you know, compared to $2.7 million in the prior quarter, prior year. Big takeaway here, very successful second quarter of 2025. Last thing, the net income of $4.2 million, which is $0.79 per diluted share versus $0.37 in Q2 2024. The last slide here is really kind of the second half of 2025. Obviously, we don't give guidance, so we don't really talk in terms of total revenue and total EPS, but we do have some confidence in certain aspects of the business and wanted to relay that here. The first half of the year, we had, you know, service revenue benefited from these, we call them special barrier projects. In a sense, we are in the DC area. We are a barrier rental company. We are the preeminent barrier rental company, at least that's what ChatGPT says, in our sector.
When you see things going on in DC, whether it's an inauguration or a parade, we benefit from those things because we are the go-to source for barrier. If you ever want to pull over on a Saturday road and look at bar and JJ Hooks, that's Smith-Midland. Definitely benefited from that in the first half of the year. We make no guarantees on the second half of the year, but we have had many barrier product projects historically in the second half of the year. It's on the table. Just from a point of recognition, we've definitely benefited both in Q1 and in Q2 from these projects. Utility sales and architectural panel sales are expected to trend higher in the second half. This is kind of a conversation about competition.
The company had, you know, when we talk data centers, if you know anything about Northern Virginia, that area, they are the national hub of data centers. You can't throw, you can't throw anything out of your car without hitting a data center in Northern Virginia. The company has benefited significantly from data center sales, utility sales. We had a lag in the first half of the year. We expect that to increase. We've already locked in some utility sales, but competition has reared its ugly head. We have a lot more competition because it's a known target. We're pricing appropriately to meet that challenge. Royalty revenue, we expect that we're probably shy of $5 million for the year, as a start. We're definitely looking at probably in this next five years to have, as Ashley's already detailed, significant impact on royalties because the company has intellectual property.
We leverage that for royalties, and it's a big benefit for us. One of the last things I wanted to say, because I'm contractually obligated, when Ashley started this, he wanted everyone to remember something. Does anyone remember what Ashley wanted us to remember? That every barrier you see will be replaced. That is a big driver for our business. I think we're at the last slide. I can open it up for questions, please.