BDGIFBDGIFOTC
Loading
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Badger Infrastructure Solutions Limited Third Quarter 2025 Results Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this event is being recorded today, November 6, 2025, and will be made available in the Investors section of Badger's website. I would now like to turn the call over to Anne Plaster, Director of Investor Relations.
Anne Plaster: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me on the call this morning are Badger's President and CEO, Rob Blackadar; and our CFO, Rob Dawson. Badger's 2025 third quarter earnings release, MD&A and financial statements were released after market close, Wednesday, and are available on the Investors section of Badger's website and on SEDAR+. We are required to note that some of the statements made today may contain forward-looking information. In fact, all statements made today, which are not statements of historical facts are considered to be forward-looking statements. We make these forward-looking statements based on certain assumptions that we consider to be reasonable. However, forward-looking statements are always subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. For more information about material, assumptions, risks and uncertainties that may be relevant to such forward-looking statements, please refer to Badger's 2024 MD&A along with the 2024 AIF. I will now turn the call over to Rob Blackadar.
Robert Blackadar: Thank you, Anne. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Badger's 2025 Third Quarter Earnings Call. Before we get into the results, I'd like to take a moment to talk about safety, which is how we start all of our meetings here at Badger. As we move into the colder weather months, it is essential that our teams remain prepared for unexpected situations, including severe winter weather, equipment issues and any emergencies. We encourage all of our team members to review emergency response plans and ensure vehicles are equipped with winter safety kits. Staying informed about local conditions and having accessible, well-maintained safety gear can make a critical difference. We appreciate everyone's continued commitment to safety and the teamwork -- and teamwork as we prepare to enter into the winter season. Now on to the quarter's results. Building on the positive momentum from Q2, the team delivered another strong quarter of double-digit growth in revenue, gross profit and adjusted EBITDA. Our record Q3 top line revenue of $237.3 million grew by 13% company-wide over the prior year. We continue to see solid demand in our end markets in both local customer and project-based work. I will provide more detail and context on our broad and diverse end markets later in the call. Our positive results reflect the team's work to increase utilization while continuing to grow the fleet. Ongoing investments in sales and marketing initiatives, including consistent performance to capture pricing opportunities are also reflected in the results. Adjusted EBITDA grew at a faster pace than revenue, up 15% year-over-year. These results highlight Badger's continued strong operational efficiencies and the optimization of our overhead support functions. Accordingly, adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 40 basis points, to 28.2%. We achieved RPT or revenue per truck per month of $47,921 in Q3, up 8% compared to last year. This improvement reflects our fleet utilization and pricing efforts. Our Red Deer manufacturing plant delivered 57 hydrovacs this quarter versus 48 units in Q3 of last year. We are updating guidance for our full year fleet plan, mainly due to increased demand from our end markets. As Badger's growth in revenue and business volumes have risen, we have increased our rate of manufacturing to ensure we have the right capacity to meet our customers' needs. Accordingly, we expect 2025 hydrovac production at the upper end of our original 180 to 210 unit range. We also successfully consolidated a Badger franchise in Denver, one of our core markets and have accelerated the planned refresh of its fleet. As a result, we expect our 2025 retirements to be at the upper end of our original 90 to 130 unit range. We are excited to gain full control of the Denver market and bring Badger's size and scale advantage to accelerate market share. We retired 36 units in the quarter, bringing us to 98 hydrovac units retired year-to-date. We refurbished 5 units in the third quarter and have completed 23 so far in 2025. The refurbished program has lagged our expectations this year, mainly due to third-party facility capacity. We are reducing the 2025 refurbishment range from the original 50 to 60 units down now to 30 to 40 units for the full year. We plan to develop our own refurbishment facility in the Central U.S. to better control the pace and the cost of this program. This new facility is anticipated to be online and operational in 2026. The company ended the quarter with 1,703 hydrovacs in our fleet, growing the fleet by 5% since Q3 of last year. Revenue and profitability grew at more than double the rate of fleet growth, exemplifying Badger's operating leverage and capital efficiencies. With the increase in hydrovac production, the consolidation of the Denver franchise as well as targeted growth in strategic market branches, we expect our range of 2025 capital spend to increase from the original $95 million to $115 million range to now between $115 million to $130 million. I'll now turn the call over to Rob Dawson to discuss our Q3 financial results in more detail.
Robert Dawson: Thanks, Rob. Our solid financial results this quarter reflect the strength of our business model and the continued disciplined focus of our team. As Rob noted, we have continued to grow our bottom line at a higher rate than revenue, reflecting the ongoing execution of our road map to build scalability. In addition to the continued advancement of our commercial and pricing strategies, steady improvements in the utilization of our fleet have contributed to our performance this year. The trend in our adjusted EBITDA margins continued to rise in the third quarter, up 40 basis points to 28.2%. In particular, the addition of our fleet module and our universal data platform are showing value in the management of both our fleet and labor force. We have also continued to scale our support functions and G&A spending. This margin expansion remains on track with Badger's long-term objectives. G&A expenses were $10.6 million or 4% of revenue compared to the $9.8 million or 5% of revenue last year. Finally, adjusted earnings per share was $0.91 per share, up 25% compared to last year. As Rob has already noted, revenues and adjusted EBITDA are growing at a faster rate than our fleet, adding to the bottom line profitability and longer term, continuing to drive higher returns on capital. With year-to-date revenue up 11%, adjusted EBITDA up 16% and adjusted EPS up 29%, we are encouraged by the continued scalability and growth in margins here at Badger. Turning to the balance sheet. Our compliance leverage ended the quarter at 1.3x debt to EBITDA, down from 1.5x in the same quarter last year. It is notable that we have the financial capacity to continue advancing our organic growth strategy and maintain a stable, strong balance sheet. We renewed our NCIB program in the third quarter, maintaining our ability to make opportunistic share purchases in addition to returning capital to our shareholders through dividends. During the third quarter, we did not purchase any shares under our NCIB. I will now turn things back over to Rob Blackadar for some final comments. Rob?
Robert Blackadar: Thanks, Rob. So before we open up for questions, I'd like to share a few last comments regarding our market outlook. Badger's end markets have largely recovered following the slower activity we experienced in the back half of 2024 and early '25. As we move through the remainder of 2025 and into '26, we're seeing positive indicators of sustained growth, particularly in key U.S. regions and large metropolitan areas where demand remains robust. Our strategic focus remains unchanged. We continue to leverage our deep customer relationships, both locally and through our national accounts teams to drive market density and capture operational efficiency in our core geographies. The execution of our commercial strategy continues to help Badger capitalize on large infrastructure projects such as airports, light rail transportation, expansion of petrochemical and LNG facilities as well as data centers. Supporting all of these trends is the increased demand for power generation and transmission, particularly nuclear, natural gas and solar. These projects are in addition to the continued maintenance and renewal of existing aged infrastructure in many of our more mature markets. Overall, we expect to continue to benefit from these favorable tailwinds driven by significant and sustained growth in infrastructure and construction spending in our major markets. With one of the most capable fleets in the industry and a broad operational footprint spanning 44 U.S. states, 6 Canadian provinces, we were best positioned to capture long-term growth opportunities. As end market demand continues to strengthen, we remain committed to the disciplined execution of our strategy and to delivering sustainable value for our shareholders. So with those comments, let's turn it back to the operator for questions. Operator?
Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our first caller is Krista Friesen from CIBC.
Krista Friesen: I was just wondering if you could give us a little bit more color on the amount of work that you're doing around data centers and if you're willing to share kind of what percentage that makes up of your work right now?
Robert Blackadar: Krista, so we -- and we've shared this at some recent investor conferences because we get asked this. Obviously, data centers are kind of the big buzz right now. It's been trending in that 5% to 8% range, direct work on the data centers themselves and then some of the support functions around the data centers, I think in terms of the subcontractors, et cetera, is probably another 3% to 4%. So I would say all in, including the ancillary support around the data centers, I'd say, in that 10% to 11% range, something like that. But directly on the data centers themselves, I'd say 6% to 8% right there.
Krista Friesen: Okay. And then maybe just on a different topic. Do you have any update on how tariffs are impacting your business? And just given the announcement a little while ago on heavy trucks, if that's impacting your business?
Robert Blackadar: Do you want to cover that, Rob?
Robert Dawson: Yes, sure thing, Rob. Thanks for the question, Krista. We continue to monitor, obviously, the tariff situation very closely. I think a couple of things just overall with regards to tariffs. 100% of our business results are entirely unaffected by the tariffs, and that's mainly to deliver excavation services to our customers. And so it really only affects the supply of trucks to our business from our manufacturing facility in Red Deer and specifically to our businesses in the United States. We continue to monitor it very carefully. There has been no real clarity on the situation with heavy trucks right now. And so we don't really have a lot to say specifically about what the impact may or may not be. We continue to be fully CUSMA compliant, and we have not paid any tariffs to date on our truck builds. And I should also point out, I think we talked about this at Q1 that when we think about a worst possible case scenario where we would have, say, a 25% tariff on our entire manufacturing production for the year, it still would increase our CapEx for 200 trucks in the neighborhood of $10 million to $20 million. We'd still continue to be showing the same kind of balance sheet flexibility we have today, and the net impact on our earnings per share would be in that 1% to 3% range. So while we are closely monitoring the situation, we continue to believe that it's an issue that doesn't impact us to the degree of [indiscernible] third-party manufacturers and sellers of equipment across the borders.
Operator: And our next caller is [ Joshua Bains ] from TD Cowen.
Tim James: Yes. Actually, it's Tim James here from TD Cowen. Congratulations on the good results. My first question, I'm just wondering if you could comment on any findings that you've got or that you're seeing in terms of the longevity of the refurbished units that you're doing and putting back out in the field. I believe you expect an additional 5 years typically from those. Anything you're observing that would give you a reason to believe that, that could be actually extended or shortened?
Robert Blackadar: Yes. Great question, Tim. We -- we're very pleased. Obviously, we're pleased enough that we're going to build our own facility to help even fast track even more units. Very pleased with the first 18 months of the program. And the thing that we're displeased with is the ability to get more through our current third-party facilities. But to frame it up, Tim, and some people on the call may not be aware of the context, we take a thoroughly inspected 9-, 10-, 11-year-old hydrovac that we've owned its entire life. We make sure that it has really strong frame rails, and the underbody components are very, very strong on it. And we replace four large components of the unit, which is the engine; the transmission; the transfer case, which is how you transfer the power from the engine to the hydrovac on the back; and then the blower, which provides the suction on that. To do that whole exercise, then we do repaint or touch up, put on new tires, new seats and cabs for our operators, so they have a good experience in a truck. We put it back on the road, and that's anywhere from 175,000 roughly to around 185,000. It gives us an additional, we believe, 5 years. So far, Tim, in our first 18 months of doing this, we've had wonderful success. And in fact, a few of our employees have said that the truck is running better than it did when it was new. And again, these are mostly our Gen 4 trucks, the previous generation of trucks. We are very pleased with their performance so far, very little maintenance or breakdowns on them other than just routine preventative maintenance, PMs. And then the last thing I'll share is, each one of those trucks on those new components -- and those are the most expensive components on the chassis. Those components come with a 3-year warranty unlimited miles. So there really is no downside to the investment we're making. As far as do we think it can go beyond 5 years and maybe it's 6 or many, many of our chassis are run on the same model chassis we use for dump trucks and flatbeds and various other over-the-road type environments, and trucks have around a 20-year life. We do believe, though, in certain applications, our trucks are run in a little bit higher duty. So we're not sure if it's going to be 5, 6, 7 because it's still early on, and we're through our first batch right now, but we're very encouraged right now. But we're going to stick with the 5-year life at this point. I don't know if you want to add anything on that.
Robert Dawson: No, I've got nothing else to add.
Robert Blackadar: So hopefully, that answers your question, Tim.
Tim James: That's very helpful. I'll just have one more quick one, if I could. And I realize Canada is a relatively small portion of your business in North America. But I'm curious if Canada's budget released this week, if there's anything in there that caught your attention as surprisingly positive or negative in terms of opportunities for Badger in Canada over the coming years.
Robert Dawson: Tim, it's Rob Dawson here. Thanks for the question. I don't think we would point out any one thing from that Canadian budget, but I would say that we are very encouraged by this government's support for the return of large project, an infrastructure project renewal in Canada that has slowed down so much over the past, say, 5 or 6 years. And we are already starting to see the benefit of some of those, just a change in tone. In particular, our Western Canadian business is back to growing. Our Central Canadian as in Ontario is also starting to show some signs of really solid performance. So overall, quite encouraged by the change in tone and the return to large project resource spending that has made Canada what it is.
Robert Blackadar: And I'm going to add one thing, Tim. We have several of our larger construction customers there in Canada that, in a weird way, they're also kind of our peers, but they're our customers. I don't want to name them because the moment I start naming some customers, you always leave one or two out and make some crabby, so I don't want to do that. But we're very encouraged that several of our publicly traded customers are press releasing these large project wins, and we love supporting those customers and partnering with them. So just as Rob suggested, it seems like Canada is really making an effort to reinvest in some of the infrastructure and a lot of projects that we were seeing regarding -- around power as well as hospitals and some airports and stuff. So very encouraged what we're seeing coming out of Canada.
Operator: Thank you. And that seems to be all of our callers. So I will turn it back over to you, Rob.
Robert Blackadar: Thank you, operator. So on behalf of all of us at Badger, we want to say thank you to our customers, our employees, our suppliers and shareholders for your ongoing support that drives Badger's success. Operator, you may now end the call.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today's event. Thank you for participating.