Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2024 L.B. Foster Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s session is being recorded. I would now like to turn it over to Lisa Durante. Go ahead, Lisa.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to L.B. Foster’s third quarter of 2024 earnings call. My name is Lisa Durante, the company’s Investor Relations Manager. Our President and CEO, John Kasel; and our Chief Financial Officer, Bill Thalman, will be presenting our third quarter operating results, market outlook and business developments this morning. We will start the call with John providing his commentary on the company’s third quarter performance. Bill will then review the company’s third quarter financial results. John will provide his perspective on market developments and company outlook in his closing comments. We’ll then open up the session for questions. Today’s slide presentation along with our earnings release and financial disclosures were posted on our website this morning and can be accessed on our Investor Relations’ page at lbfoster.com. Our comments this morning will follow the slides in the earnings presentation. Today’s discussion includes corrections made to the company’s previously reported financial statements as disclosed in the Form 10-K/A for 2023 and Forms 10-Q/A for the first and second quarters of 2024 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some statements we are making are forward-looking and represent our current view of our markets and business today. These forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these statements in light of new information, except as required by securities laws. For more detailed risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements, please see the disclosures in our earnings release and presentation. We’ll also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to carefully read our disclosures and reconciliation tables provided within today’s earnings release and presentation as you consider these metrics. So with that, let me turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Lisa, and hello everyone. Thank you for joining today for our third quarter earnings call. I’ll start today’s call by recognized and welcome Lisa Durante. Lisa was recently promoted to Manager of financial reporting Investor Relations. I’m also pleased to announce that Stephanie Schmidt has been promoted to an expanded role in our financial reporting team. We’re fortunate to have both Stephanie and Lisa leading our Investor Relations and financial reporting efforts and look forward to their continuing contributions. Congratulations Lisa and Stephanie. Turning into the quarter, we’re very pleased with the progress achieved during the third quarter as reflect in our exceptional profitability and cash generation results. These results clearly indicate our strategy to transform the profitability profile of our business is on track. The 23.8% gross margin report. It represents the highest level we’ve seen in over a decade. It was up 490 basis points over last year. The margin achieved we’re on $137.5 million in sales, which were down 5.4%, highlighting the improved portfolio profitability and efficiency. Net income in the quarter was $35.9 million, included a $30 million favorable tax valuation reserve adjustment, noting that our improving profitability trends allow us to release this provision. And adjusted EBITDA was $12.3 million, up 16.4% over the last year, despite the lower sales with the improved gross margins and lower SG&A expenses. As expected and in line with our normal seasonal working capital cycle, we also delivered a very strong quarter of cash generation with cash from operations totaling $24.7 million. Cash was deployed primarily to reduce our net debt by $17.7 million to $65.4 million at the quarter end. As a result of our lower debt levels and improving profitability, our gross leverage ratio improved by 0.8 times ending the quarter in an impressive 1.9 times. We also continued funding CapEx initiatives within the Rail Technology and Precast Concrete growth platforms. At the same time, we expanded our stock purchase program buying approximately 127,000 shares for $2.6 million during the quarter. With the third quarter results largely in line with our expectations, we made modest updates to our 2024 financial guidance. We lowered the sales expectations slightly, but maintain the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA outlook in line with the improved earnings efficiency of the portfolio. And with the strong results achieved in the third quarter, we slightly increased our outlook with the second half free cash flow now expected to range between $30 million and $35 million. In summary, we’re very pleased with our third quarter results and look forward to writing our continuing momentum to a strong finish to 2024. And I’ll turn it over to Bill to cover the financial details for the quarter, and I’ll come back at the end with some closing remarks on our markets and outlook. Over to you, Bill.

Thanks John, and good morning, everyone. I’ll begin my comments covering the third quarter highlights on Slide 7. As always, the schedules in the appendix provide more information on our results including non-GAAP measures discussed on today’s call. Also, we’ll call out the impact of significant portfolio actions where meaningful. For the third quarter, the only inorganic impact is the bridge grid deck product line exit that was announced last year. Net sales for the quarter were down 5.4%, driven primarily by domestic rail commercial weakness with organic sales down 8.5%. Infrastructure organic sales were down approximately 2%. Despite the lower sales, gross profit grew to $32.8 million, up $5.3 million versus the prior year. Last year’s gross profit included $3.9 million in adverse impacts from the bridge grid deck exit contributing to the year-over-year improvement. The benefits of our strategic execution delivered a gross margin of 23.8% in Q3, the highest level achieved in over 10 years. Gross profit and margin improvement was realized in both Rail and Infrastructure, despite lower sales in both segments. I’ll impact sales and margin drivers by segment further on the slides ahead. Selling, general, and administrative costs in Q3 were $24.3 million, down $0.1 million from the prior year. The current quarter included $0.4 million in costs associated with a resolved legal matter and $0.8 million in costs associated with the previously announced enterprise restructuring program. These increases were offset by $0.8 million in lower employment costs and $0.7 million in lower bad debt expense. As a reminder, last year’s bad debt expense included a $0.9 million charge related to the bankruptcy of a UK customer. Net income for the quarter totaled $35.9 million, including $30 million due to a favorable tax valuation allowance adjustment. In 2022, we established a valuation allowance on…

Thanks, Bill. Please refer to Slide 18 for an overview of our key business market drivers underpinning our outlook. Bill mentioned that our trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio improved slightly in the third quarter. The improvement was realized in the Rail segment with improving demand in both Rail Products and Global Friction Management. The recovery of market conditions for our UK business remains on track. Here in North America, we started to see some increased quoting and project activity in the rail market, which would translate to solid growth for our Rail Products revenue in future quarters. Quoting activity for Total Track Monitoring solutions also continues on the positive trend. And I’m pleased to say that we’re beginning to be awarded business with new product technologies in this space. With the increased focus on rail safety, operating efficiency and reliability, we expect this trend to continue to 2025 and beyond. While demand levels in the Rail segment are improving, infrastructure markets are somewhat choppy. The infrastructure book-to-bill ratio declined in recent quarter due to continuing weakness in Steel Products. But let me start by highlighting the positive developments of Precast Concrete. Business in this product remains robust with demand in our CXT buildings bolstered by the funding from the Great American Outdoors Act is continuing on record levels. In addition, we are in the process of commissioning a facility in Central Florida to produce Envirocast wall system. This organic strategic action is to service the booming regional residential and light industrial commercial real estate markets in that area. Our licensed technology offers an attractive solution for builders who are faced with rising costs and construction delays due to lack of labor and materials for traditional construction methods. We believe this factory built modular concrete wall system positioned in the weather challenged…

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Chris Sakai with Singular Research. Go ahead, Chris.

Hi, John and Bill, good morning.

Hi, Chris.

So, just I’m looking at the 2025 revenue goal targets. Can you help kind of shed some color on, I guess, what we’re expected to see, I guess next year that’ll really help boost that revenue number to get to the target?

Yeah, good question. Thanks, Chris. We’re getting kind of line of sight what’s going on with the balance of the quarter and, right now, activity is strong. If you see what our guidance shows us landing between $530 million and $540 million for the balance of the year on sales, and then uplifting with revenue targets for $$580 million to $620 million next year. So I’m sure that’s where your question’s going and that’s where it’s happening. It is coming in our growth platforms and it’s coming through sales. We feel very good about our margins. I think we’re about 22.2% year-to-date with a strong quarter at 23.8%. So we feel very, very good what’s going on in our margins and our portfolio. So it’s all about the organics, yeah, I mentioned what we’re happening right now in Florida, which is an extension of our recent acquisition that we made in Tennessee. So we feel very good what’s going on and continue to grow our concrete business. We – Bill talked in great depth of what’s happening with Total Track Monitoring and the Friction Management business. Both those two are doing extremely, extremely well and we have great opportunities, all organic line of sight that we’re going to continue to build off these growth platforms through the balance of this year and, more importantly, into next year.

Okay. Thanks. And then gross margins of 23.8% this quarter. That was good. Was this quarter more of an anomaly quarter or how should we be looking at gross margins next quarter and into 2025?

Well, you can see the number if you look at 2025 is between 22% and what 23%. So, obviously, this is a higher run rate. But, Chris, this is our strategy. Our strategy is continuing to transform the company to technology innovation company and we’re doing it. So, yeah, there was a very good quarter, and as Bill and I both mentioned, we haven’t seen numbers like this since it’s been 10 years, but that’s what we expect in this business. So we are going to continue to push the top-line, but it’s really about bottom-line return by managing our SG&A and continuing to get these margins as it relates to bringing innovation to the marketplace specifically on the rail and the precast markets.

Okay. Great. Thanks for the answer.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you, Chris, for your question. Our next question comes from John Bair with Ascend Wealth Advisors. Go ahead, John.

Thank you. It’s Bair. There’s no L in there. No L’s in a couple of months, anyways. Good morning, John and Bill.

Good morning, John.

Yeah, a couple of questions here for you. On your Slide 18, you are showing commissioning a facility in Central Florida, and I apologize if I missed a comment on this, but how long do you believe it’ll take to get that up and running and what kind of CapEx is required to build that facility?

We’ve been working on this for a while. It’s a brownfield installation, so that means we’re partnering with a very large precaster, one of the largest precasters in Central Florida. We felt that was the best way to come to the market, enter the market with the infrastructure already there is related to making the product. And then, of course, we bring in the commercial side and the technical side, the engineering side. So it’s a wonderful partnership that we forged. It’s been now 3 years. We started a relationship with that company. So we feel very, very good about it. Ground has been broken. We are expecting to be making our first product by the end of this year. So capital based upon the way we set it up, we were targeting between $3.5 million to $4 million in capital. So, again, if you go back to investment thesis, we talk about being capital white. This is another great example where we really go in and we do it the right way. We spend enough money, but it’s not a heavy capital call. It’s about taking our products to the market, but doing it with channel partners. They really know what they’re doing and, more importantly, we’re very excited about these opportunities in the Central Florida market.

Okay. And then are your projections for 2025 on as far as revenue build in a run rate kind of for this particular facility in that market?

That’s right. Yeah, so if you go back to what Chris Sakai’s question was, because we got to increase the sales that’s going year-over-year. So, keep in mind our strategy’s been about managing our portfolio, so we’ve been really taking that top-line down over the last couple of years, right, in 2021. That’s behind us now. So our portfolio’s in place and now we’re going to continue to grow and much of that revenue is coming through all, in fact all of us coming through organics, and this is a great example of it.

And so that $3 million to $4 million at CapEx towards this project is basically behind you as well, right?

Yeah, of course, we’re spending a little bit, yeah. The major tranche of it is behind us. Yes.

Yeah. So adding the last $4 million of the Union Pacific deal, get that behind you, that’s a pretty nice swing.

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, that’s for…

Putting both of those together. That’s pretty significant. So, yeah, my other question for you, you mentioned about bolt-ons, would targeted bolt-ons be focused on U.S. operations as opposed to Europe or elsewhere?

Yes. Today about 95% of our sales is North America. We not going to stray away from that. We feel very bullish of what’s going on. We do believe there’s investment super-cycle. We do believe there’s a lot of pent-up demand right now, and I think we’re in a good place here in the U.S. specifically to take advantage of that for years to come.

Right. Very good. Thanks very much for taking the questions and hope to see you soon. Take care.

Yeah. Take care, John.

Yeah.

[Operator Instructions] This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back over to John Kasel for closing remarks. Go ahead, John.

I really appreciate it, Mark. And more importantly, I want to appreciate the team that’s sitting in the room with me today. We got a group that has done just a tremendous amount of heavy lifting here and the work that we put out to the market, I think second section to none as far as the information, the transparency, the level of detail, and this group here has worked night and day getting ourselves ready for today’s call, as well as other things that we need to get done and doing board meetings as well. So I’d like to start with Bill Thalman, who heads up the group. I look at Bill as a partner that – we run the business with, and his guidance and leadership has been up in short, tremendous and his input that he brings to the party is second to none. Recent coming in was [Sean Riley] [ph], who brought – Bill brought Sean over and has done just a tremendous job of bringing a team together that’s nothing short of world class team. So, which starts with Joe Kisucky. Joe’s done a tremendous job. Again, these are the people behind the scenes really making things happen. I mentioned two of them right off the start, Lisa Durante just moved up from his nice role with a promotion. And then, Stephanie Schmidt who’s been really carrying up the load and now again recently promoted to a larger role within the company. So I really like to thank this team for what they’ve done and more importantly really putting us in a favorable position of how we go up to market. To me, it’s all about restoring credibility. And that’s first and foremost within the company and the second is with the shareholders. And I think the package information and our transparency and information of how we do it, more importantly, how we present ourselves is second to none. So I’d like to, again, thank this team and all that they’ve done and will continue to do so. So with that, thank you for joining us for the third quarter. And Bill and I and this team look very, very much forward to finishing up a very strong and strong fourth quarter as we talked about and, more importantly, really getting into 2025 and continuing to put this company on the map. Thanks for your interest in L.B. Foster and have a great holiday season. We look forward to talking to you in March of next year. Take care.

Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.