Gary Niederpruem
Analyst · Bank of America
Thank you, Kate, and good morning, everyone. As is our practice, I'll begin with our fourth quarter financial highlights and a business update. Then since this is our year-end call, I'll spend a few minutes reviewing our full year results against the commitments and priorities we outlined during our IPO process earlier this year. After that, I'll turn it over to Ryan to walk through our fourth quarter and full year financial results in more detail. Then I'll conclude with a discussion of our strategic priorities for the coming year and provide our fiscal '27 guidance. Turning to Slide 5. We closed fiscal 2026 with the strongest quarter in Forgent's history, delivering record quarterly revenues, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. Fourth quarter revenues increased 94% to a record $462 million. Adjusted EBITDA increased 163% to a record $113 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 200 basis points sequentially to 24.4%. Importantly, Q4 represented the second consecutive quarter of significant margin expansion which aligns with the expectations we set throughout the year. Adjusted net income increased 275% to $77 million. For the full year, revenues increased 89% to $1.42 billion. Adjusted EBITDA increased 91% to $323 million, and adjusted net income increased 136% to $208 million. These results reflect the strength of our value proposition and our team's unwavering commitment to delivering for our customers and our shareholders. Taking a company public, expanding manufacturing capacity fivefold and doubling revenue all in the same year, while continuing to meet our customer commitments is an extraordinary achievement. I'm incredibly proud of and grateful to our employees for their exceptional skill and dedication. Thank you, Forgent family. Turning to Slide 6. I'll frame our business update for the quarter around 7 takeaways. First, we continue to see strong demand for our products and solutions, and we are managing that demand effectively, that is reflected in our performance relative to guidance with each of our KPIs, all exceeding the high end of our guidance. Guidance that, as a reminder, we raised in just May. Second, our commercial strategy continues to drive growth well above the market, a clear indication that we are gaining share, and our rate of growth is still increasing despite our significantly larger scale. To put that in perspective, fourth quarter revenue growth exceeded our full year growth rate by approximately 500 basis points. We also booked more than $1.5 billion of orders in the quarter alone, that's more than our total revenue for all of fiscal '26. Third, we are delivering on the margin expansion we committed to. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased 200 basis points sequentially for the second consecutive quarter, primarily due to operating leverage as volumes grew. Fourth, our scale is beginning to drive significant cash generation, resulting in our operating cash flow increasingly approximately 2.5x in fiscal '26 versus fiscal '25. Fifth, demand for modular solutions is growing rapidly. Customers increasingly want to shift work from the field to the factory in order to reduce reliance on field labor and accelerate speed to power. This trend benefits Forgent in 2 important ways: it expands our addressable wallet by allowing us to capture value that historically would have been performed by contractors on site; and it plays directly to our strength as one of the few companies with the capability to deliver these types of integrated solutions at scale. Our momentum in this area is evident in our fourth quarter Powertrain Solutions booking and in our backlog, which is now approximately 40% Powertrain Solutions. Sixth, we already have sufficient demand visibility to justify adding manufacturing capacity beyond the expansion we recently completed. We plan to make an incremental investment at our Tijuana campus to increase Powertrain Solutions capacity, and we are again accelerating hiring in the first quarter to prepare for a significant production ramp in the quarters ahead. Finally, the quality and depth of our demand visibility are the strongest in our company's history. At this point last year, we entered fiscal 2026 with $850 million of backlog. Today, our backlog stands at $3 billion, more than 3.5x higher, placing us in a fundamentally stronger position as we enter fiscal '27 and providing substantially greater confidence in our outlook for the year ahead. Moving to Slide 7. Let me put some numbers around the demand environment. Fourth quarter bookings reached $1.5 billion, a new company record, increasing 375% year-over-year and 73% sequentially. Order strength was broad-based across all 3 of our end markets, led by data centers and extended across both custom products and Powertrain Solutions. Year-over-year bookings growth was higher in the fourth quarter than the third quarter despite comping to a much higher prior year result. Our book-to-bill ratio reached a new record of 3.3x also on a much larger revenue base. Backlog increased to $3 billion at year-end, an all-time high, up 256% year-over-year and 53% sequentially. The fact that Forgent set new records for bookings and backlog for 7 consecutive quarters underscores the durability of the demand we are seeing, our continued share gains and the strength of our visibility on future revenue growth. Turning to Slide 8. When I joined Forgent in 2025, our data center business was largely focused on selling point products, individual pieces of equipment and we primarily reach the market through EPCs, engineering firms and OEMs that acted as intermediaries. Since then, we have made deliberate investments in our sales and engineering capabilities to engage end customers directly and support a broader, more integrated set of solutions across the Powertrain. You can see that progression on the slide. We started with EPCs, engineering firms and OEMs, then expanded into regional co-location providers, national and international colos and Neocloud customers. Each step moved us closer to the end user and increased the portion of customer spend available to us. Our next major step is to enter the Frontier AI labs and hyperscalers shown on the right side of this slide. We received our first direct order from a Frontier AI lab in the fourth quarter, and we have also signed an MSA with the hyperscaler. We view these milestones as proof points and more than that as the foundation for meaningful direct orders from both of these customer types as fiscal '27 progresses. The key takeaway is that we are still in the early innings of expanding our direct customer base in the data center market. We have already demonstrated the ability to move upmarket from intermediated point product sales to direct engagement with some of the most technically demanding data center customer types in the world. But we believe the hyperscaler and Frontier AI lab opportunity remains largely untapped for Forgent and represents a significant organic growth opportunity for us over the next 24 months. Building on that progression, Slide 9 gives you a concrete example of what this move up market looks like in practice. This recent win with the Frontier AI lab demonstrates that Forgent now has a seat at the table with the largest electrical equipment providers in the industry. This customer is pursuing one of the largest AI infrastructure build-outs in the U.S. These programs are highly technical, qualification standards are rigorous and proper engagement is paramount. Securing this award reflects the strength of our engineering capabilities, the quality of our solutions and our growing credibility with the most demanding data center customers. Importantly, this is only the initial award. The customer's first campus alone is expected to exceed 1 gigawatt and the broader opportunity for additional orders is measured in multiple gigawatts. So while this win is meaningful on its own, we viewed it as even more important proof point of our ability to penetrate Frontier AI customers directly and build a foundation for significantly larger opportunities ahead. Turning to Slide 10. Let me zoom out to a shift that is reshaping how our customers build, the move towards more modular solutions. As a reminder, a modular solution is a prefabricated factory-built system such as power, cooling or compute modules that can be deployed on site much faster than traditional field built infrastructure. It shifts working from the construction site to a controlled manufacturing environment, reducing reliance on field labor, improving quality and scalability and accelerating speed to power. Our data center customers tell us that the modular construction can compress portions of the builds scheduled by roughly 30% to 50% versus traditional field built construction. The chart on the left highlights the shift that has already occurred and what is expected through 2030. In the cloud era, modular and prefabricated construction accounted for only 10% to 20% of data center construction. Today, it is approximately 40% and third-party research expected to grow to 60% by the end of the decade. That continued shift is a significant positive for Forgent. It expands our addressable wallet by allowing us to capture value that historically would have been performed by contractors on site, and it plays directly to our strengths as one of the few companies capable of delivering these types of integrated solutions at scale. We are winning in modular solutions for 3 reasons that are difficult for competitors to replicate. First, we are vertically integrated all the way back to sheet metal fabrication. That gives us a meaningful advantage on cost, lead times and customization compared with competitors to rely more heavily on third-party suppliers. Second, we have deep in-house engineering capabilities, which allow us to deliver highly customized solutions tailored to each customer-specific requirements. In other words, we can offer the speed and efficiency of a modular factory build solution without compromising the level of customization our customers need. And third, proximity matters. These are large complex systems and e-House can be approximately 60 feet long and weight as much as 50 tonnes. So having manufacturing capacity close to key customers can make a significant difference in delivering time, logistics complexity and shipping costs. With facilities located near every major data center hub in the country, we believe we are uniquely positioned to serve customers quickly, efficiently and at scale. The strength of those capabilities aligned with clear market demand is reflected in the Powertrain Solutions results shown in the middle of this page. Powertrain Solutions revenue grew 187% year-over-year and 48% sequentially to $147 million in the fourth quarter. Put simply, we nearly tripled the size of that business in just 6 months. That growth is well ahead of the demand assumptions that supported our original capacity expansion plans. In response to that momentum, today, we announced an incremental investment to build a dedicated 385,000 square foot Powertrain Solutions facility in our Tijuana, Mexico campus. To put that size in perspective, it will be roughly 80% the size of our largest plant today. So it's a very meaningful expansion. Once complete, the new facility will increase our Powertrain Solutions manufacturing capacity by more than 50% and bringing it to over 1 million square feet. It will also increase our total revenue capacity to approximately $5.8 billion, an increase of about $800 million. We expect the new facility to come online in the fourth quarter of fiscal '27. Moving to Slide 12. As I mentioned at the outset of the call, I want to spend a few minutes reflecting on where we were when we began our journey as a public company, where we stand today a little over 7 months later and what that progress means for our shareholders going forward. This page really highlights how far the company has come in just 1 year. Forgent is a bigger, broader and better positioned company today across nearly every dimension than it was in fiscal '25. We ended fiscal '26 with approximately $3 billion of backlog, more than 3.5x the $850 million we had at the end of fiscal '25. Just as importantly, our backlog now represents more than 2x our fiscal '26 revenue compared with roughly 1x revenue at the end of fiscal '25. That gives us a fundamentally stronger starting point and significantly greater visibility as we enter the new fiscal year. We also nearly doubled the size of the company in 12 months, with revenue increasing 89% to $1.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA increasing 91% to $323 million. Importantly, we delivered that growth while also expanding margins demonstrating the operating leverage in our model as we scale, even while absorbing the additional costs that naturally come with rapid growth. Our fastest growth came in data centers where demand remains exceptionally strong but we also continued to deliver growth across each of our end markets, data center, grid and industrial. This is an important point because it reinforces one of the key messages from our IPO. Forgent has multiple ways to win. We are not dependent on a single end market customer or growth factor. Finally, we meaningfully expanded the breadth of our offering, Powertrain Solutions increased from 13% of revenue in fiscal '25 to 25% in fiscal '26, reflecting strong customer demand for more integrated modular solutions. We also continue to expand our service businesses by attaching start-up and commissioning work to a meaningful portion of the equipment orders in our backlog. At year-end, our service backlog was approximately 3x our FY '26 service revenue, underscoring the significant growth opportunity ahead for this business. Together, these shifts expand our addressable market, deepen our customer relationship and position Forgent to capture more value across the life cycle of the infrastructure we provide. So the takeaway from this side is pretty slight forward, compared with where we stood a year ago, Forgent is bigger, more profitable, more visible and better positioned for sustained growth. Turning to Slide 13. Internally, we place a lot of emphasis on doing what we say we're going to do. We hold ourselves accountable to the commitments we make to one another, and we believe shareholders should hold us to the same standards on the commitments we make externally. Over the next 4 slides, we will walk through the commitments we made during the IPO process and what we have delivered since then, financially, commercially, operationally and with our people. Starting with financial performance. As is customary, we shared a fiscal '26 forecast with research analysts in conjunction with our IPO process in December '25. Those forecast figures are shown in the gray area on this slide and our actual results are shown in blue. We meaningfully exceeded that forecast on both revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and we did so while scaling the business at an unprecedented pace, expanding our manufacturing footprint, adding head count and building the SG&A infrastructure required to operate as a public company. For fiscal '26, revenue was $150 million or 12% above that forecast. Adjusted EBITDA was $18 million or 6% above that forecast. And excluding start-up costs and the under-absorbed labor and overhead associated with bringing new capacity online, adjusted EBITDA was $34 million or 11% above that forecast. These results also exceeded the high end of the guidance we initiated in March and raised in May. So from a financial standpoint, the scorecard is clear. We exceeded our commitments. Turning to Slide 14. During the IPO process, we outlined a very deliberate commercial strategy designed to deliver growth in excess of our underlying markets. The strategy was straightforward: focus on attractive end markets supported by long-term mega trends; expand the customer wallet available to us; win a larger share of that wallet; and take share from competitors by delivering shorter lead times and greater engineering value. In fiscal '26, we executed that strategy exceptionally well. The chart on the right breaks down our growth by end market, showing the contribution from both customer count and average revenue per customer and then compares our revenue growth to the estimated growth rate of the underlying market. Starting with data centers. Revenue grew 161% year-over-year. That growth was driven by an increase of 18% in customer count and 121% increase in average revenue per customer. Said differently, we added customers, but more importantly, we significantly expanded the scope of what we are delivering to those customers. That resulted in growth that was roughly 4x the market, which we estimate grew approximately 37%. In grid, revenue grew 69%, driven by a 7% increase in the customer count and a 58% increase in average revenue per customer. That represents approximately 7x the market growth rate based on our estimate that the grid market grew about 10%. And in industrial and other revenue grew 11%, approximately 300 basis points faster than the market growth rate. Our customer count declined as we high graded our mix of customers but average revenue per customer increased 28%, demonstrating our ability to deepen relationships with our largest industrial customers. The pattern across all 3 end markets is consistent, we are not simply benefiting from market growth. We are adding customers, expanding our share of wallet with existing customers and increasingly selling more complex, higher-value solutions. That includes more prefabricated and integrated offerings and engineering offerings across the full Powertrain rather than delivering individual point products. This is exactly what we said we would do. We positioned Forgent end markets with powerful secular tailwinds and then we executed commercially to grow well in Texas of those markets. So from a commercial standpoint, the scorecard is very clear. We delivered on the strategy we laid out to investors and we are meaningfully outperforming the market. Next on to Slide 15. Let's turn to operations and assess what we delivered against the commitments we made during the IPO process. We said we would invest in capacity to capture demand, offer some of the shortest lead times in the industry and deliver customization at scale through vertically integrated flexible manufacturing, and that is exactly what we did. Across fiscal '25 and '26, we invested approximately $190 million to bring more than 1.8 million square feet of new manufacturing capacity online across multiple campuses. In total, we expanded our footprint from roughly 480,000 square feet to 2.3 million square feet, roughly equating to a fivefold increase in manufacturing capacity. Just as importantly, this was not capacity added in just 1 location or for just 1 product line. We expanded in each of our 5 campuses, giving us a broader, more flexible and more geographically advantaged manufacturing network. That matters because proximity to customers, particularly in large-scale modular solutions can have a meaningful impact on lead times, logistics costs and execution certainty. The execution required to do this was significant. We were building facilities, hiring and training employees, ramping production and adding new operational infrastructure, all while delivering for our customers in a period of exceptional demand growth, and we did all that while limiting the impact on margins as we scale. Today, construction is complete or nearing completion across the major expansion of the projects, and we are progressing toward our target production rates at each campus. As those facilities continue to ramp, they provide the capacity, flexibility and speed we need to support the demand we are seeing as well as give us opportunities to increase our margins through economies of scale. So from an operational standpoint, the scorecard is also clear. We delivered on what we said we would do. We added the capacity, we scaled the organization. We protected customers' executions and materially strengthened the manufacturing platform that will support Forgent's next phase of growth. Slide 16 covers our people. And in many ways, this may be the most important page in the deck. Scaling the business at this pace requires more than physical manufacturing capacity. It requires the ability to recruit, train, develop and retain the talent needed to execute. During the IPO process, we committed to recruiting and retaining the direct labor required to match our expanded manufacturing capacity. Growing the engineering resources needed to deliver customization at scale, maintaining a flat accountable organization built for speed and operating leverage and attracting A+ leadership talent to help take Forgent through its next phase of growth. In fiscal '26, we delivered against each one of those commitments. We nearly doubled our manufacturing headcount. We made significant investments in engineering talent, application engineering headcount grew 54% and process field and design engineering head count increased 78%. Those hires really matter because our ability to deliver custom engineered, integrated solutions at scale is one of the core differentiators of our business. We also strengthened our leadership team with exceptional industry talent. We recently welcomed Juan Macias as President of Solutions & Services; Dan Eslinger, as Executive Vice President of Engineering; and Joe Reele as Senior Vice President of Technical Business Development. Each brings decades of relevant experience and a strong track record from leading companies in our industry. Their expertise will help us continue executing at a high level for customers as we look to double our business again. Talent is a known constraint across our industry, particularly in manufacturing and engineering. Our focus on making Forgent an employer of choice has allowed us to scale rapidly without workforce constraints limiting our growth. That is a real competitive advantage, and it reflects the strength of our culture, the opportunity we offer people and the commitment of our teams across the company. So from a people perspective, the scorecard is clear. We invested ahead of the opportunity, expanded the talent base required to support our growth, added critical leadership capabilities and strengthened the organization for the next stage of Forgent's evolution. This is our scorecard for fiscal '26, commitments made and commitments met or exceeded, that matters to us, and we know it matters to our shareholders. It also raises the bar. The year ahead is more ambitious than the one we just completed, and we are starting from a base that is nearly twice as large. But we enter fiscal '27 better positioned, better resourced and more confident in our ability to execute than at any point in our history. With that, I'll turn it over to Ryan to walk through our fourth quarter and full year financials in more detail. Then I'll come back and cover our priorities and outlook for fiscal '27.