XPEL, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Expel Incorporated Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open to our presentation. It's now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, John Nesbitt of IMS Investor Relations. John, the floor is yours.

Good morning and welcome to our conference call to discuss Expel's second quarter 2026 financial results. On the call today, Ryan Pape, Expel's president and chief executive officer, and Barry Wood, Expel's senior vice president and chief financial officer, will provide an overview of the business operations and review the company's financial results. Immediately after the prepared comments, we'll take questions from call participants. The transcript of this call will be available on the company's website after the call. Take a moment to read the safe harbor statement. During the course of this call, we'll make certain forward-looking statements regarding Expel, Inc. and its business, which may include, but are not limited to, anticipated use of proceeds from capital transactions, expansion into new markets, and execution of the company's growth strategy. Such statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to known and unknown risk factors and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to be materially different from those expressed in these statements. Some of these factors are discussed in detail in our most recent Form 10-K, including under Item 1-A, Risk Factors, filed with the SEC. Expel undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will now turn the call over to Ryan. Please go ahead.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2026 call. Thank you for joining us. either actual or perceived coming price increases that would go into effect in Q3. So all said, I still think that's really good performance. Our US region turned in another solid quarter with revenue growing 11.7% to 78.6 million, which was a record high for the region. Our independent channel had another strong quarter. In contrast to the broader trend we've seen over previous quarters, we actually saw better performance Thank you for joining us. With these challenges, though, there is opportunity as a flight to quality helps us in many of these scenarios. Our Canada region grew 10.8% in the quarter. If you recall from last quarter's call, we have a large distributor in Canada, and there's always some timing impact in terms of their ordering cadence. So last quarter, that was a bit of a drag. Obviously, it helped us this quarter. To exclude that timing, revenue grew around 4%. certainly a good for Canada, which has really sort of struggled in the past year. Our China region had a good corner revenue coming in at $15.9 million. In September, we'll cross the one-year anniversary of our acquisition of the distributor there. The team's doing a really great job. I'm very happy in our progress in integrating the acquisition. And these are good results despite a very challenging Q2 for domestic car sales in China. Many focus on the headline sales, which includes exports. But if you subtract those out, which is really what we're focused on in the China market, the domestic sales, they're down something on the order of 20% year over year. So it's a super challenging quarter in China for domestic sales.

The rest of the APEC region also saw solid growth in the quarter.

Our investments in the various countries are paying off. We would not be seeing the growth and development opportunities we have in Japan today and elsewhere if we didn't have the presence that we've built over the past few years. So absolutely convicted in that strategy and how that's going to pay off for us. We did begin to see some impacts from the Iran conflict in our Indian Middle East region where revenue declined 5% in the quarter. Overall, this impact was not as great as we feared. and in large part seems to be driven due to a shortage of vehicle availability in the region rather than a broader sort of collapse in consumer demand and confidence. I think when we looked at the quarter going in, we would have expected a larger impact, so we're pleased with that. And I also think given the vehicle availability issue, we'll see whether that means we can actually recapture some of that business in the second half of and many more. in India. That's the third largest market for car sales in the world. Many don't realize that and obviously still developing. So we're well positioned to continue to grow significantly in India and in the Middle East. Very excited about it. We have great leadership driving our direction there. Our Europe region saw revenue decline 2.3% in the quarter. This was driven by multiple factors including timing of Distribution Orders, and lower year-over-year volumes in some of our OEM operations, which is really just driven from vehicle production cadence more than anything that we control. As compared to the prior year, we saw exceptional strength in vehicle volumes. And also, although we report our revenue by destination shipping address, there's products sold in Europe ultimately destined for the Middle East, so we likely saw impact from that as well. Thank you very much. When you put it together, we're expecting Q3 revenue to be in the $137 to $139 million range, assumes consistent U.S. and Asia-Pacific trending. Obviously, there's always a little bit of seasonality to Europe business as you hit holidays in August, so we expect to see that. And then also modest improvement in the Middle East, but we're not expecting really any of that recapture I mentioned. If that were to occur, that's certainly upside for us. And then we probably – pulled $1 million or $2 million forward out of this number into the current quarter. So, all in all, I think pretty good. Moving on, in May, we announced two key investments that will chart the course to accomplish our manufacturing strategy. First, we purchased a four-building site that included our existing San Antonio facility. This site will serve as a centerpiece of our North American manufacturing and supply chain footprint. We will initially occupy a little over Half the footprint of the building for our operations, while the remainder is leased to third parties. I believe this approach creates maximum optionalities who scale up these manufacturing operations. And then secondly, as we mentioned, we acquired a 75 interest in an existing manufacturing facility in China, which will round out our footprint there. And this facility will serve customers in China and some export markets. We don't expect much if any of that product end up in the North American market. Although it certainly will be capable of doing so should we need it. Overall, these investments will total approximately $110 million. That includes what we've acquired and then further build out and equipment in San Antonio and beyond. So we expect to begin seeing incremental margin benefits starting in mid-2027. And with operating margin goal of ours reaching mid-20 range on a run rate basis as we exit 2028, of course assumes the fundamentals of the rest of the business stays they are and assumes these projects remain on schedule, which as of today they are. So really excited about that. It's taken a long time to get to this point, and our team's doing a really great job. Our gross margin in the quarter finished at 44.1%. This is up from 43.7% in Q1. As I said before, we'll be implementing some relatively modest price increases in some regions during Q3 to help offset some of the price cost pressure we've been seeing, as I mentioned on the previous call. And our expectation remains that gross margin will continue to modestly increase through the rest of the year in spite of that. We'll talk more about that as it happens over the next few quarters. And overall, I think, you know, the cadence we're seeing in gross margin is what we expected as we sell through some higher priced inventory acquired in the and the China distributor acquisition. If we hadn't seen some of the cost pressure come in, we'd probably see even a little bit incrementally higher gross margin for Q2. But I think really good progress anyway. And as I mentioned, even with that noise, we see a path to drive that higher even as we work towards bringing some of the manufacturing investments online. We did have costs related to the startup and ramp-up of our manufacturing investments in San Antonio and China. These are approximately $0.03 per share in Q2. We see that growing to $0.03 to $0.04 per share in Q3 based on our current estimates. So some of that is more full run rate in Q3 of those costs, whereas the Q2 costs had more upfront transaction costs and things of that nature. These are really transformational moves for the company. I know many of our investors are very interested in the future financial benefits, but really ads are more importantly, this is going to do amazing things for the business to increase our rate of innovation and improve our agility and product quality. So it's an exciting time. Our team is really bought in, ready to go, and working very hard. Overall, a good quarter in a challenging environment. as we see stability in the dealerships, understanding the rules of the road in which they need to operate, and increasing car inventory in the Middle East. We're really optimistic about the rest of the year. We have a great pipeline of new customers in multiple geographies with car manufacturers around the world. Our personalization platform, referral platform is putting up record numbers and providing great volume to our aftermarket installers. We see opportunity to expand on this and are looking to launch additional programs this year. And finally, record cash flow from the quarter from operations, as Barry will mention. We're very focused on the nuts and bolts of the business, especially as we integrate China where we acquired inventory from our distributor. We're aggressively looking to reduce SKUs and consolidate what we're offering. alongside our manufacturing expansion to drive more efficiency and working capital and to always make sure we're giving our customers better products and not just more products. This laser focus continues into other parts of the balance sheet, accounts receivable, data sales outstanding, and changes that result from being direct in China and other places versus operating through distribution. All these are These details matter a lot. Overall, I think we're doing a good job, but we can turn the screws tighter to improve our functioning here and get through the integration pieces even faster. Outside of incremental CapEx that's required for the manufacturing initiative and ensuring that's well-funded, we'll be looking at a few small tuck-in acquisitions and then keep our focus on share repurchases with the rest of our cash flow. And we expect that approach to continue well into next year. So a very good quarter for the company, and congratulations to the team. I'll be remiss if I didn't mention the work we're doing to integrate these acquisitions and organize the back office in preparation of the manufacturing expansion. A lot of unsung heroes here doing really important work. We continue to add substantial complexity to the business. Our team does a great job of sort of digesting that and integrating that But we need to give them credit, and we also need to give them time to complete that. So really good job. And with that, I'll turn it over to Barry. Barry, go ahead.

Thanks, Ryan, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with a few more comments on the product lines. Our window film product line grew 16.1% to a record $32.5 million in the quarter, which represented approximately 22.7% of total revenue. This growth was solid in all the regions led by the U.S. and China. Our total installation revenue increased just under 11% in the quarter and represented a little over 21% of total revenue led by strong performance in our corporate-owned stores. Just to call out a note on the overall revenue picture for the first half of the year, our revenue for the first half of the year grew 14% versus the first half of last year. So really good performance in the first half. Our total SG&A expenses grew 16.7% in the quarter to $39.9 million, representing 27.9% of total revenue. And this did include approximately $1.5 million of new SG&As resulting from our China distributor acquisition in September of last year. EBITDA grew 17.6% in the quarter, and our EBITDA margin was 19.3%. Our adjusted EBITDA, which factors out costs related to a ramp-up of the manufacturing initiatives that Ryan was referring to in San Antonio and China, that adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter grew 20.7%. Our year-to-date EBITDA margin grew 17.7%, and our year-to-date EBITDA margin was 17.1%. Operating income increased 20.3%, and our operating income margin was 16.2% in the quarter. Our year-to-date operating income increased 19.1%, and our year-to-date operating income margin was 13.9%. Our net income attributable to stockholders for the quarter grew 10.7%, and our net income attributable to stockholders' margin was 12.6%. Our adjusted net income attributable to stockholders, which again factors out those items I mentioned before, for the quarter grew 15.6%, and our adjusted net income attributable to stockholder margin was 13.2%. Our EPS was $0.65 per share and our adjusted EPS was $0.68 per share. And on a year-to-date basis, our net income attributable to stockholders grew 14.1%. As Ryan alluded to, our cash flow from operations was $30.8 million in the quarter, which was a new record for us. We saw some nice improvement in our cash conversion cycle, including approved DSO in the quarter. So that certainly was nice to see. CapEx in the quarter was $65.1 million, which includes the real estate purchase. And as Ryan alluded to, we expect to incur more CapEx in the back half of the year and into Q1 and really weighted more towards the equipment that we still need to get into our San Antonio facility. As you likely saw in our May announcement, we did finance a portion of the real estate purchase with a $44.8 million 10-year term loan. So you'll see some new debt on our balance sheet in Q2 here. And while it was critical, you know, in our view to control our site and own it to expand our manufacturing operations, we'll continue to evaluate that as we move forward Whether to own real estate in the long term or maybe we have other options, but we certainly have optionality in deciding what we do there. So solid quarter for the company, and we look forward to continuing that momentum in the second half of the year. And with that, operator, we'll now open the call up for questions.

Thank you very much. We are now opening the floor for questions. If you have any questions, you can join the queue by pressing star 1 on your phone keypad. We ask that while you're posing your question, please pick up your handset if you're listening on a speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. So star 1 if you would like to ask a question. Please wait a moment whilst we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is coming from Steve Dyer of Craig Hallam. Steve, your line is live.

Hey, thanks. This is Matthew Robb on for Steve. I just want to start on the manufacturing plans. You know, we've talked in the past about the cadence of that margin expansion. I believe you mentioned there's incremental benefit coming in mid-27. Can you just talk about the shape of that? You know, is that a step function change in mid-27? Or are there several quarters of maybe a more modest change? And then with that, you bought the facility in China. And I would have assumed that there's a quicker benefit there given it's an existing facility. So can you just walk through that gross margin expansion in the context of both the U.S. and China?

Yeah, I think you're thinking about it correct in that we'll see some points in time with step-up. So it's not a huge jump up to the terminal run rate. and so on. That's definitely part of what we'll see by mid-2027. Obviously, if we can speed that timeline up, we're going to do that too, but that's what it looks like right now.

Understood. And then maybe, Ryan, maybe if I put on my devil's advocate hat on, how should investors think about the risks associated with this manufacturing build-out? This is the largest project that the company has ever undertaken. How are you managing quality control and the leadership of this build-out? Just walk through that for us.

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, certainly for dollars invested, it's the largest project that we've done. I think that what I would stress is that for the majority of what we sell, we're responsible for the quality Supply Chain Sourcing, and overseeing the production of what we're doing already. We just simply don't own the assets that are used to make most of these products that we sell. And so in many respects, when you're thinking about quality, managing quality, total cost of quality, yields, and efficiency, these are things that we're already responsible for, yet We may not be able to control directly, and we may not be able to drive investment in contracted facilities where small amounts of money can make a big impact on the finished product. So I think if you think about it that way as opposed to thinking that we're buying some sort of product turnkey from a vendor and we're replacing it with our own facilities, that's absolutely not what we're doing. We're involved in every part of these products, the development, sourcing, quality, R&D already. It's really just a change of using more of our own assets versus other people's assets to actually laminate and code and make the finished products. So I think that if you think about it like that, I would have a lot more confidence probably on the outside looking in than some do. Our technical team, which is QA, and R&D, our labs, manufacturing, process engineers. This is some 40-something people. So it's a very extensive and experienced team that's already responsible for most of these things. So I have a high degree of confidence in the plan that we have.

That's great. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Just a reminder there, if you have any questions, you can still join the queue by pressing star 1 on your phone keypad now. Our next question is coming from Dylan Hines of B. Reilly Securities. Dylan, your line is live.

Hey, how's it going? Thanks for taking the question. This is Dylan. I'm from Jeff. I was wondering, you mentioned aggressively looking to reduce the SKUs. I know that can be a You know, rather long-term project. I was just wondering where you are along that and what do you expect to see from that and when?

Yeah, great question. I think that, you know, the first, we probably talked about it maybe as long ago as a year ago where The first objective there was really to reduce the rate of SKUs in which we, or reduce the rate of additions to the SKU base. So I think we really arrested that, you know, several months ago or longer to just say that, you know, it's not necessary that we supply everything one of our customers needs and every basically, you know, consumable or commodity product, you know, that The joke we would use is our customers don't need to buy toilet paper for their business from us. But I think when you want to serve your customers well, sometimes you can be dragged into that line of thinking. So we really succeeded in that to create sort of laser focus on that. And then now it's really looking at the portfolio of products we have with the film products, be them paint protection film or window film. You can end up with with a lot of different SKUs. You've got different widths, different lengths, different thicknesses, maybe different colors or different VLTs or different constructions. And when you look at how these are sold and why they're sold and why they're used, yeah, someone will buy them, but that doesn't necessarily make them a viable product. So really now we're at a point of saying, look, can we reduce that? Maybe it's a total SKU count or something like 10%, but you get in there increased efficiency in terms of inventory turns. Inventory has been something that we've talked about for a long time as there was a period of time where it was really growing excessively and it bounces around seasonally, but it's much more stable now. But we're looking to see how do we improve that efficiency, improve the turns as we go. And then as we make everything about our supply chain more efficient over the next few years, which includes a lot less WIP and a lot less product sitting on trucks between facilities and different things. Do we have the possibility to actually have lower aggregate inventory dollars at work for the company even on compounded revenue multiple years out? I'm not here to say that's going to happen, but I think it's possible that happens and it's certainly a goal of ours. But I will caveat everything I said with those that understand our customer profile know that and many more.

Thank you. And then just one additional follow-up. You mentioned some tuck-on acquisitions. Is that still regarding the manufacturing? Or I guess, what does that relate to?

No, great. Yeah, appreciate the question to clarify that. No, it would not be related to that. We're very solid in this plan relative to the own manufacturing footprint that we'd like to have. You know, where we're looking at tuck-in acquisitions, it's really sort of in the service and OEM adjacent areas where are there things we can do to help bring more net new customers in the fold, be they in the dealership channel or in the OEM channel. And I think there are, and those are things we would pursue. I think we would describe them as tuck-in really just to reinforce our orientation that large acquisitions – don't really seem to be readily apparent that we're interested in, and transformative acquisitions, quote-unquote, are things that we have an outright aversion to. So that's probably where that language comes from.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Well, there appear to be no further questions in the queue, so I will now turn the call back over to the management for any closing comments.

I want to thank our team for doing an amazing job in absorbing all of our added complexity and projects and know that it's very much appreciated from our leadership team. I want to thank everyone for joining us today and for getting up early to do so. Have a great day.

Thank you very much. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time.