L.B. Foster Company

Good day, and welcome to L.B. Foster's third quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Ms. Lisa Durante, Director of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to L.B. Foster's third quarter of 2025 earnings call. My name is Lisa Durante, the Company's Director of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. Our President and CEO, John Cassel, And our Chief Financial Officer, Bill Tommen, will be presenting our third quarter operating results, market outlook, and business development this morning. We'll start the call with John providing his perspective on the company's third quarter performance. Bill will then review the company's third quarter financial results. John will provide perspective on market developments and company outlook in his closing comments. We will 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. 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 will 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. Thanks for joining us today for our third quarter earnings call. I'll begin with slide five, covering key drivers of our results for the quarter. We continued a favorable trend in the third quarter, posting modest sales growth. For the second consecutive quarter, with sales up 0.6% to 1% over last year. Like the second quarter, the growth was achieved in the infrastructure segment, with sales up 4.4%. led by a 12.7% increase in stale products. Rail revenues, on the other hand, remained soft, declining 2.2% from last year due to continued planned downsizing of our UK business and timing of rail distribution sales. But it's important to note that these results included positive revenue gain in our rail growth area, starting with a 9% increase in friction management and approximately 135% increase in total track monitoring. Turning to profitability for the quarter, Jesse Vidal was down $1 million with lower margins in both rail and infrastructure, partially offset by lower SG&A expenses. Speaking of SG&A, we remain focused on our strategic execution to leverage our cost base with containment measures reducing the SG&A percentage of sales to 16% for the quarter. That income also declined year-over-year to $4.4 million compared to $35.9 million last year. As a reminder, improving profitability allows to release a $30 million tax valuation allowance in last year's third quarter. The major highlight of the quarter was our exceptionally strong cash generation, with cash provided by operations totaling $29.2 million. These funds were used primarily to lower our net debt to $55.3 million at quarter end, with gross leverage improving 1.6 times compared to 1.9 times. In line with our capital allocation priorities, we also repurchased approximately 184,000 shares of our stock, representing about 1.7% of outstanding shares. Finally, the increased level of orders and backlog in the quarter sets us up for a strong finish to the year in Q4. The trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio remained positive at 1.08 to 1, and the backlog at quarter end stood at $247.4 million, up $38.4 million, or 18.4% over last year. The elevated backlog is expected to translate into Q4 sales growth of approximately 25%, with both segments expected to make gains. I'll revisit our financial guidance to cover the market outlook after Bill runs through the financial details for the quarter. Over to you, Bill.