Haitham Khouri
Analyst · UBS. Please go ahead
Thank you, Seth. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As always, I'll start on Slide 3 with a summary of our strategy. Our goal is to fulfill our critical mission by providing our customers with quality products and exceptional service, while delivering private equity like returns with the liquidity of a public market. We plan to attain this goal by owning extremely high quality businesses and maximizing their long term strength and value through consistent improvement in our three operational value drivers, which are: number one, profitable new business; number two, continual productivity improvements and number three, pricing our products and services to the value they provide. In addition to our three operational value drivers, we seek to maximize equity value creation through a clear focus on the allocation of our capital as well as the management of our capital structure. Slide 4 provides a snapshot of our three main product lines, retardants, suppressants, and specialty products, all of which share the following attractive structural traits. Each provides a mission critical function where failure is not an option. Each is a clear leader in its market. Each serves an extremely challenging and complex end market through a tightly integrated solution offering that spans product, equipment, and service. And finally, each has an attractive organic or inorganic long term growth profile. Turning to Slide 5. Perimeter reported a solid fourth quarter to close out a solid 2024. In my public remarks over the last two years, I have repeatedly asserted my confidence in the consistent and significant progress we've made to increase the normalized earnings power of our business via the consistent and rigorous application of our value driver operating strategy. Specifically, we've increased our organic growth rate via significant and successful investments in profitable new business initiatives. We've increased the value our products, services, and solutions provide our customers and have shared in this value creation through value based pricing, and we've driven significant operating efficiencies via our productivity initiatives, which have allowed us to maintain strong overall cost discipline while reinvesting record sums into activities that enhance customer value, including research and development, sales and marketing, and capital expenditures. Virtually every time I've asserted my confidence in our operational improvements, I have also asserted confidence that this progress should be evident to investors when we experience normalized end markets which allow for more apples to apples comparisons versus our historical financial results. While no comparison is perfect, we believe that 2021 and 2024 are comparable years, with roughly normalized demand environments in both our fire safety and specialty products businesses in both years. I'm proud to report that our consolidated adjusted EBITDA approximately doubled over this period from $141 million in 2021 to $280 million in 2024. This represents a three year adjusted EBITDA CAGR of 26% and extends our adjusted EBITDA CAGR since 2010 to 19%. Our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin expanded approximately 1,100 basis points over the three year period or approximately 360 basis points per year. Given our belief that both 2021 and 2024 represent normalized and comparable years, we are confident that the improvement in our adjusted EBITDA over the three year period is the direct and sustainable result of our value driver focused operating strategy. Moving to Slide 6. I'd like to acknowledge our team members who sprang into action to help combat the devastating January fires in Southern California. January is traditionally a quieter month for our North American retardant business, where we primarily focus on base builds and upgrades, equipment maintenance, operational training and safety programs, and other preparedness activities. However, there is no off season in wildfire firefighting. As I've often stated, our job is to support our customers by loading 100% of air tankers with 100% reliability 100% of the time, irrespective of season, location, or any other variable. Our team sprang into immediate action when called upon in LA. We quickly had six air tanker bases open and loading air tankers, Santa Maria, San Bernardino, Lancaster, McClellan, Ramona, and Channel Islands. We also deployed three fully crewed mobile retardant bases to support close range helicopter operations, two at the Palisades Fire, and one at the Eaton Fire, as well as several ground applied retardant units. All six of our tanker bases, all three of our deployed MRVs, and all of our deployed ground applied units remain fully inventoried and active during the wildfires. This was made possible by the virtually irreplaceable breadth and depth of Perimeter's operational preparedness. We have the product, infrastructure, equipment, and personnel to respond and react with virtually perfect reliability in virtually any scenario. This incident also illustrates why a highly distributed and localized manufacturing footprint is essentially a requirement for any competitive retirement program. We continually supplied our air bases, our MRVs, and our ground applied units from our manufacturing facility in Rancho Cucamonga, just East of Los Angeles. We have five retardant manufacturing facilities located throughout the Western United States with a six under construction with expected completion in spring of 2025. We also have a retardant manufacturing facility in each of British Columbia and Alberta for a total of seven and soon to be eight retardant plants in North America. This distributed and localized manufacturing footprint is essential as we support our customers' wildfire response irrespective of location. Thank you to our team members who so valiantly responded to these wildfires, to the firefighters and first responders who stepped into harm's way to keep others safe, and to everyone still dealing with the challenging aftermath of these devastating fires. Moving to capital allocation on Slide 7. As I've repeatedly stated, we expect to deploy all of our free cash flow as well as the incremental leverage capacity we generate through organic EBITDA growth towards the highest expected IRR combination of internal reinvestment into our business, M&A, share repurchases, and special dividends. I'll recap our capital allocation results from 2024, starting with internal reinvestment into our business. We reinvested a record amount of capital back into perimeter in 2024. This is most evident in our capital expenditures, which grew substantially versus our historical levels with the growth focused on investments that we expect to drive attractive returns via profitable new business, value based pricing, and productivity. Our higher OpEx reinvestment is less evidence since this spend hits the income statement. However, we've significantly increased our sustainable OpEx spend levels on R&D, sales and marketing, field service, customer relations, and several other customer facing and value generating OpEx categories. Moving to M&A. We closed our first acquisition since going public on December 24, 2024, when we acquired Intelligent Manufacturing Solutions or IMS for approximately $33 million. This purchase price represents an approximately 10 times multiple on IMS's 2024 adjusted EBITDA pro form a for specific recurring expenses we're adding to the business to execute on our long term strategy for IMS. Based in Manchester, New Hampshire, IMS is a manufacturer of highly specialized printed circuit boards or PCBs. PCBs are electronic components which are critical to the functioning of much larger assemblies, including large medical devices, communications infrastructure, energy infrastructure, defense systems, and industrial systems. Our market research led us to PCBs as an excellent fit for our value driver based operating strategy and highly consistent with our often stated target economic criteria. Specifically, many of the largest PCB end markets would experience solid long term organic growth. A very significant portion of PCB sales are what we describe as spares and repairs, which constitute a predictable and recurring aftermarket demand stream. PCBs are relatively inexpensive components, which are critical to the functioning of much larger and more expensive instruments and machines. A well run PCB business should enjoy strong free cash flow margins and high returns on tangible capital. And finally, we believe that there's a long runway to acquire and license in production PCB product lines in attractive multiples, bring these product lines into IMS for manufacturing, drive profitability improvements into these products via the implementation of our value driver operating strategy, and sell these products into established, recurring and predictable aftermarkets. Note that we will report IMS in our Specialty Products segment going forward. I'll conclude the 2024 capital allocation discussion with share repurchases. We repurchased approximately 3 million shares in 2024 at an average price of $4.81 representing an approximately 160% return on our investment. Since going public in late 2021, we've repurchased approximately 21.6 million shares at an average price of $5.90 representing an approximately 100% return. Looking ahead, we believe that we're very well positioned to drive shareholder value via active capital allocation as well as capital structure management. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kyle.