All right, good afternoon. Our next presenting company is Smith-Midland, trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker SMID. Third-generation run family business that is involved in the precast concrete sector. It has some very other very interesting things going on. They are a Three Part Advisors client, so if any of you'd like to speak to them afterwards or set up a call next week after Thanksgiving, happy to take care of that for you. Here today to start the presentation is the CEO, Ashley Smith, and with him is Dominic Hunter, the company's CFO who came aboard this past spring. Ashley?
If you only remember one thing today from the presentation, that is every piece of concrete barrier, safety barrier that you see along the highway is in the process of being replaced in the United States. I will repeat it again, that is the only thing I want you to remember. Every piece of concrete barrier across the United States is in process of being replaced. That is a factor in our three main divisions, and I will talk about the effect of that replacement as we go through the different divisions. I would like to start by saying thanks for being here today. I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to be here with us. Please read the Safe Harbor statement. As John said, I am third-generation family member to run the company. We started in 1960. My grandfather started.
He dropped out of school after the eighth grade. He was then an inventor, and he developed a concrete cattle guard, which is how we started up on the family farm in 1960. My father came on shortly thereafter. Our DNA has been developing and also licensing proprietary concrete products. This started way back in the 1960s because we were shipping our products up and down the East Coast from our headQuarters in Virginia. A guy in Georgia approached my dad and said, "Why don't you let me make your products in Georgia instead of shipping them?" That is how we got into the licensing business. We have been licensing our products since the 1960s. Our licensing really has taken off in the past five years, ten years because of this demand and mainly the switch of the concrete barriers.
The four products you see, excuse me, on the screen are proprietary products that we've developed, marketed, and licensed. In the precast manufacturing industry, these four products are the number one branded product in each of those markets. J-J Hook barrier, we're the only company, private company or any company going across the country and marketing and getting our J-J. Hook produced across the country and also overseas. Our SlenderWall panel is a Class A high-end permanent architectural precast concrete panel. It's lightweight, so we can ship it further than a typical heavy precast panel system. Our Easi-Set concrete buildings are used by many different industries, and they're the number one branded product in a small transportable concrete equipment building. Then our soft sound absorptive on the face of a concrete panel so the SoundWall absorbs 80% of that sound.
Again, these proprietary products are the number one branded products in each of those different end markets. I was reading Larry Fink's letter to shareholders on a Saturday morning. I do not have anything better to do, but this kind of struck me. If you indulge me, I would like to read it. By 2040, the global demand for new infrastructure investment is $68 trillion. To put that price tag in perspective, it is roughly the equivalent of building the entire interstate highway system and a transcontinental railroad start to finish every six weeks, every six weeks for the next 15 years. When you talk about a tailwind, I do not know of many tailwinds out there that match the infrastructure. This is a worldwide demand, but obviously the U.S., the markets that we are in, is one of the largest infrastructure markets in the world.
In addition to our proprietary products, we also manufacture custom products. Precast concrete is very flowable, so whatever form that we make, the concrete, when it's wet, flows into that. These are some examples of high-end architectural decorative products we make, security products in front of the White House, military. The end markets are varied. We have in our production, our production side, manufacturing side, we have a very diverse customer base. We also have diversity in our product. We have manufacturing. We have rental, which we'll talk about in a minute, and we also license our technology. We have three manufacturing plants. Our headQuarters is in Virginia. We have a plant in North Carolina. We just doubled the size of the plant last summer. We have a plant in South Carolina.
Our market for our manufactured products is basically from New Jersey, New York, all the way down to Georgia. Our SlenderWall panel is lightweight, so we actually can ship that further. Most precast production is shipped within a couple hundred miles of the location of the plant because it's heavy and it's expensive to ship. We have some diversity because we are up and down that market. Some people say that the Mid-Atlantic market is one of the best construction markets in the United States. A lot of people are moving to the south, moving to the coast. North Carolina and South Carolina, those two states are in the top 10 fastest growing states population-wise in the country. We have a lot of demand for infrastructure and a lot of growth in the markets in which we serve.
I'll switch from manufactured products over to concrete safety systems. This is a division that rents the highway safety barriers. We've been renting highway safety barriers for construction projects since the late 1970s. My first job when I was in high school was patching the barrier. After it goes to the job site, it gets chipped up, it comes back. Actually, I might have been in junior high, but my job was to patch the barrier, make it look good before it went back out. For years, we only had 40,000, maybe 50,000 feet of barrier in our rental inventory. The reason was we didn't have a lot of money to invest in that product anymore or that barrier for rental. Also, maybe we were a little too conservative. Starting about 10-12 years ago, we went to 50 mi of rental inventory.
Three years ago, we doubled the size of our rental fleet from 50 mi of rental barrier inventory to 100 mi. We did that by buying back 50 mi of barrier that we made for a customer on a large project in Northern Virginia. It was a public-private partnership, which meant at the end of the project, all the assets were going to be sold. When we sold the barrier upfront in our contract, we told the contractor we would buy all the barrier back at the end of the job for a fixed amount, which was a lot less than what it took us to make it. At the end of the job three years ago, we got that 50 mi of barrier back. We put that into our rental fleet. Our rental fleet today, we're at over 90% utilization on our rental fleet.
We're making—the demand we see right now is so much that we're making 60 pieces a day, day in and day out. We started last summer. I don't know when we're going to stop making barrier for our rental division. Right now, we're barely keeping up with the demand for rental barrier. It's a good problem to have. If our market, and where we rent the barrier, is from Delaware to Virginia throughout that market, if that market needs a million feet of barrier, we're going to continue making barrier to fill that rental need. In Virginia, when a highway project comes out for bid, we don't even quote purchase. We only quote rental. Now, some of our customers, some highway contractors say, "I want to own barrier." And Smith-Midland, if you're not going to, "I don't want to rent it.
I want to own it. If you're not going to sell it to me, I'll buy it from somebody else." In that case, we will go ahead and sell it. First and foremost, we're moving them from a purchase to rental. I'll talk about the replacement again and what's happening right now, the barriers being replaced. All the barrier that the contractors own in that market where we rent barrier from Delaware to Virginia, in Virginia, by 2030, they can't use the old-style barrier. Let me take one step back. The reason that the barrier is being replaced is about every 15 years, Federal Highway Administration develops new standards for roadside safety features. Steel guardrail, signs, signpost, light post, because the kind of cars on the highways change. In the 1970s, you had small cars. Now we have SUVs and large cars.
After the Federal Highway Administration had the higher crash test level, after 2020, any new product on the roadside had to be a new style. What's happening, all the existing barriers are being phased out. It's a state-by-state decision. The state of Virginia said, "You can use the old style until 2030." The state of California recently sent their standards out. They said, "At the end of 2027, you cannot use any old style." In California, there's probably new style versus old style is probably less than 5% of the barrier is the new style. 95% of the barrier in California is the old style. After 2027, you cannot have any of the old style on the road. We expect the licensing revenue, royalty revenue from California to skyrocket in the next few years.
In our rental division, this replacement is driving the growth because contractors are having to decide right now in our market, "Are we going to buy a new-style barrier?" We own $10 million of old barrier. We now can give them, if they need 100,000 feet of rental barrier on a project, we can do that. In the past, we did not have enough barrier to rent. Now we do. We also see the market going towards rental as opposed to owning construction equipment. A lot of contractors rent it now instead of owning it. The market is going more towards a rental, and we are pushing all of our customers in Virginia to Delaware towards rental. There is a rental company north of us in Pennsylvania. There is a rental company south of us in North Carolina, South Carolina.
At our two plants down south, North Carolina and South Carolina, we do sell it. We do not rent because of that competitor down there. There are contractors in that market that want to buy. They do not want to rent from that company. We have been selling quite a bit of barrier down in South Carolina and North Carolina. The rental division in Virginia is growing. It is recurring revenue, which we like. Another thing that we really like is all of the money for the whole value, the whole time of the contract gets paid upfront. As soon as the barrier goes out on the highway, we get 100% of the rental revenue. If it is a four-year rental, we get all that money upfront. We get all of the money to ship it to the job to bring it back.
We get all that money upfront. It's just the way that the highway contracts are written. When you do that piece of work on a highway contract, that's when you get paid 100%. We have a deferred income on our balance sheet of about $10 million. What that represents is future income from rental of barriers. We have to take it month by month over the term of the lease. It could be a six-month lease, could be a 12-month or a 48-month lease. We like getting the cash upfront. We kind of joke. We say we're the Warren Buffett of the precast concrete business. We get all the money upfront, then we get to invest it. We also are using it right now to help us build our rental fleet of new barrier to put into the rental division.
We also like it's higher revenue, higher margins. We also like the fact that it is more stable as far as earnings and income because we do show that over the life of the project. One other piece of this is we do have a special division, and we rent the safety barrier for high-security projects. We are close to Washington, D.C. You can imagine this past week when the Saudi Arabian prince was in town, we were downtown putting barrier around his hotel. Every four years, when there is a special event and everybody knows what that is, we do all the barrier for that. We have done all the barrier for those projects since the late 1970s as well. Those special projects, they are very high-risk, high-reward, very compressed time frame to get the product out on the streets, get it pulled back up.
High risk because if we don't do our job right, somebody could die. We don't want that. That's the nice thing about barrier in general. We save people's lives every day. You get out on the road and you see where somebody's hit barrier. If that barrier wasn't there, they would have gone off the side of the road. They would have gone into a construction site. The third part, we have the manufacturing part of the business, which is the tailwind there is infrastructure spend. We have rental, and the tailwind there is infrastructure spend as well as the replacement cycle. We also license. Our products are good enough where precast producers across the country are willing to pay us a royalty to make our products. The four proprietary products that you saw earlier, we license all those.
The biggest market is for J-J Hooks barrier. As you can imagine, that revenue is, even though it's a small part of our overall revenue, it's 100% gross margin, and it's growing 10% a year, year over year. The closer we get to 2030, where all this barrier across the country is going to be replaced, the busier our licensees are going to get making the replacement barrier. We expect over the next five years, 10 years, for that royalty revenue to increase substantially. Here are just a few of the tailwinds. We talked about the new MASH TL3 requirement for barrier. Also, California, in 2027, after 2027, it has to be the new style. For the past 30 years, we've tried to get our J-J Hooks barrier approved in California, and we couldn't. They had their own system.
They said, "We don't want to change." What happened when the new mandate came out for MASH TL3, state of California did not have a MASH barrier. We came to them again for the tenth time. We said, "Here's a package, all the testing, the Federal Highway approval, everything you need to get a MASH barrier approved for use in California." That happened three years ago. We got approved. At the same time, the state was developing their own MASH barrier that anybody could make. We knew they were working on this. Our licensee was actually the company that was making the barrier, the other style for California. We saw all the drawings. When we saw what they had developed, we cheered because J-J Hooks is by far much more efficient, cost-effective to make, and also a lot more cost-effective to put out on the highway.
It's probably about 20% less expensive to sell cost-wise to the contractor, and then probably 400% or 500% less expensive to set. The state designed for California, the barriers hooked together with pins, and then they have bolts that go through. They have to get lined up. I would estimate and predict we're going to have over the next 10 years, J-J Hooks will probably have somewhere between 60-80% of market share for all the new barrier in the state of California going forward because the Easi-Set J-J Hooks design is so much better than the alternative. In Texas, we developed a low-profile barrier, and that had been on our list to make as a low profile. It just means it's shorter.
It's used on secondary roads where the speeds aren't as fast. One of our licensees in Texas who makes J-J Hooks for the tall barrier also made the low profile. He was sending that out to a construction site, and it was the standard for the state of Texas. We flew down, went out to the job site, watched them have to line up two pieces of barrier, lift it up, put it down, and then try to put two bolts through from one piece of barrier to the other. The construction workers were standing up on top of the barrier with a sledgehammer, driving bolts from one barrier to the next. As soon as we saw that, we cheered again. We got J-J Hooks crash test. We designed it, got a crash test approved by Texas.
I predict we're going to have 80%-90%, maybe 100% of the market for low-profile barrier in Texas because the J-J Hook connection is so much better than the state design. Just a lot of little pieces that come together that helps our system. Also, just on the panels, the SlenderWall and then architectural panels, off-site modular construction is very important. The average age of a construction worker is getting older. It's probably mid-40s right now. There's not a lot of people that tell their kid, "Hey, I want you to go into construction." It's a big problem for developers, architects, contractors. They're looking at off-site modular construction to be able to have all that work done off-site and then ship to the job. That's what we do. We make the panels, store them on our yard, tell the building, the structure's ready, then we ship them and install them up on the building. At this point, I'm going to get Dominic to talk about some of the numbers for you all.
Thank you, Ashley. I was sitting there enjoying the presentation. I forgot I was in it. First thing, let's talk a little bit very briefly about Q3 2025. We filed our 10Q on time. We do have some just quick notes because we consider the Quarter to be very successful as a Quarter before we talk about these slides that are trailing 12 months. If you really look at our Quarter for Q3 2025, you'll see that our revenue was $11.9 million, which is 11% higher than the prior Quarter, same period in 2024. We call that a win.
It's a success and exhibits the things we've been talking about as far as the buildup of our backlog, burning some of that down. As far as service revenue, you really have to look at Q4, I'm sorry, 2023 and 2024 and 2025. If you look at our service revenue growth, you'll see that we've almost doubled the size of our service revenue from 2023. In 2024, for the Third Quarter, we had a special barrier project. It is just very lumpy, but we consider definitely for Q3 of 2025 that all the elements as far as our production and across all of our products and services, that it was a very successful Quarter for us. Some of the differences are just really attributed to things that happened in 2024 that were non-recurring.
We had a very strong Quarter, and we're looking forward to more success for the remainder of this year. We will talk about that in the rest of these slides. Revenue, and this is the slide that really is a trailing 12 months. Looking at $88.9 million for the 12 months into September in revenue, it's about a 33% increase over the prior year, 2024. All of the factors that Ashley has already talked about as far as infrastructure spending, the tailwinds that we're seeing in our industry, even the barrier replacement, we're seeing in our numbers, and we will continue to see as we drive into 2026, some of the elements of our products continue to grow. We had increases in the Easi-Set Buildings sales, increases in definitely our SoundWall sales. You will see that in our queue, and even our miscellaneous wall sales.
All of those products are higher in the nine months compared to the prior nine months. We definitely see some positive tailwinds in all of those areas. For backlog, which is still strong, $54.8 million. Comparatively, if you go back years, I mean, this backlog would have been unheard of. You can see some of our contracts being burned down. It is really a timing thing when we look at our backlog of when some of these bids get awarded, which we have no control over. One thing we are doing regarding the backlog is increasing our sales team. We've had phenomenal salespeople in the South Carolina and North Carolina market, and we want to continue doubling down on that to push some of that. We can look at right now our pipeline. It is very positive, and we're very bullish on the future of our backlog.
I think it's still strong, and it's going to get stronger. Earnings per share, this is, again, a trailing 12-month view of earnings per share at $2.23 compared to 2024 of $1.45. All the elements we've spoken about before are driving that growth and that improvement in our earnings per share, as well as EBITDA. We've already talked about the elements. We've talked about us managing our costs, us investing in areas that are going to be positioning us for future success. I think the strong earnings per share and EBITDA kind of speak to that. We do have some areas that we can provide some outlook on, even though we don't do kind of full guidance.
For 2025, our year-to-date monthly service revenue, obviously, we've spoken about it in prior presentations, but for Q1 and Q2, and even somewhere in Q3 of 2025, we've had significant special barrier projects that have elevated our revenues. They are by nature. We can't predict them. We can't quantify them. We can say that Smith-Midland is uniquely positioned and qualified to get any of those types of projects in the future. Aside from those projects, all the elements of our projects and products and services are increasing and improving over time. The rental income, again, trending higher, even if you exclude special barrier projects. Utility sales and architectural panel sales are expected to trend higher. Utility sales have been a bit lower. These are the volts that we do for data centers and very competitive as more data centers are coming on board.
We are very positive that we will have a good lion's share of that work as it is put out to bid in 2026. Full year, we had a slide about our royalty revenue. It was $2.4 million in the nine months into 2024. It is $3.2 million in the nine months into 2025, about a 33% increase in royalties. We expected that it would probably be a little shy of $5 million for 2025. For all the elements that we have spoken about for the future, that is something to watch. It goes straight to the bottom line. It is good revenue to have. It differentiates Smith-Midland from other precasters having intellectual property. We are really excited about the future for our licensees. The next slide is investment highlights. I will kick it back over to Ashley. The one thing I am contractually bound to ask, though, is does everyone know? You remember the one thing that Ashley said to remember, that all barrier you see today will need to be replaced by 2030. Thank you very much.
Dominic asked the question I was going to ask. He talked about intellectual property. We have patents, trademarks, trade dress. We have approvals from State Highway. We have approval from Federal Highway Administration. We have crash tests. No single precast company is going to go out and do that. We make that investment because we have over 40 precasters making our barriers. As soon as we get those test state approvals, then we can start getting royalties back. No individual precaster is going to make that a number one. Most of them do not know. I would say none of them know how to do it. We have done it three times. This is the third time we are going through the replacement cycle. Intellectual property, recurring revenue. We have $5 million worth of royalty income that does not even show up on the backlog.
You can add to our backlog. You can just add this year, we're going to do about $5 million of royalty income. I've been in the business over 40 years. We've been putting all these pieces in place over the years. I've never seen the tailwinds. I've never seen our company position better than it is today. I said it a year ago, and it was true a year ago. It's true today even more so than it was a year ago. Thanks for being here today. I appreciate your interest and attention. Are there any questions?
Would your data center projects be described? Who the customers are? What kind of companies are they? Are they large scalers, small regional ones? What approach do you take to look at those bids?
Sure. The question is, you're talking about who our customer is on the data center side. For the data centers, we make concrete boxes that go under the ground, and they get installed typically before the building is built as the site is getting developed. They pull telephone communication and electric cables, power from the street into the building. Those are mostly smaller subcontractors to a site contractor that specialize in putting in the electrical and communication underground infrastructure. We do concrete boxes all over a data center site. It's exploding. We're busier than we've ever been. There's so much Dominic talked about, some competition there is, but there's so much work out there that we can't do it all by ourselves. Even with competition, we still have the most work in that market we've ever had for our utilities. Any other questions?
Could you please help me with some math? I think you said in your presentation that there's a million feet that need to be replaced of barriers. You're producing about 60 barriers per day. Would it be correct that the barriers are about 10 feet long, estimated to be four and a half years at this production rate to create that million feet that needs to be replaced?
Right now, we already own about, in our rental fleet, about 700,000 feet we already have. In our market, we're expecting that we're going to need a million feet in the Washinton D.C. to Virginia market. If it turns out that that market needs one and a half, a million and a half feet, we're going to continue to make barrier to put into our rental fleet to get up to a million and a half feet that the market needs. Okay. Thank you very much. We'll be outside after this if anybody has a question. Thank you.