8/6/2025

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Welcome to the cadre holdings second quarter 2025 conference call. Today's call is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute. If you would like to ask a question at the end of the prepared remarks, please press the star key and then the number one on your touchtone phone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Matt Berkowitz of the IGB group for instructions and the reading of the safe harbor statement. Please go ahead, sir.

speaker
Matt Berkowitz
IGB Group - Safe Harbor Statement & Instructions

Thank you and welcome to today's conference call to discuss cadre second quarter results. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during today's call, we will be making several forward looking statements and we make these statements under the safe harbor provisions of the private securities litigation reform act of 1995. These forward looking statements reflect our best estimates and assumptions based on our understanding of information known to us today. These forward looking statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties that face cadre and the industries and markets in which we operate. More information on potential factors that could affect cadre's financial results is included from time to time in cadre's public reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please also note that we have posted presentation materials on our website at -holdings.com which supplement our comments this morning and include a reconciliation of certain non-GAAP financial measures. I'd like to remind everyone that this call will be available for replay through August 20, 2025. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in yesterday's press release as well as on cadre's website. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to cadre's chairman and CEO, Warren Kanders.

speaker
Warren Kanders
Chairman and CEO

Good morning and thank you for joining cadre's second quarter earnings call. I am joined today by our President Brad Williams and Chief Financial Officer Blaine Browers. We are pleased to record another quarter of strong financial and strategic progress, underscoring the resilience of our businesses, the market leadership of our brands, and consistent execution across our organization driven by the cadre operating model. Revenue and gross profit increase year over year by 9% and 10% respectively as we continue to see strong and recurring demand for our suite of protection products in the second quarter despite a fluid macro environment. With a diversified platform of industry leading high margin safety businesses, we continue to build momentum across our law enforcement, first responder, military, and nuclear categories. The latest step in cadre's evolution was the acquisition of Carr's engineering division completed in April, which added scale and a broader international footprint for our nuclear vertical. As we have discussed previously, these are best in class brands, complementary to cadre's current nuclear safety focus that manufacture highly engineered products supporting mission critical initiatives with entrenched customers and long-term demand drivers and visibility. Brad will discuss the integration process in greater detail, but a key point to highlight is that we see opportunities for core cadre operating model tools to help unlock further efficiency and profitability. We continue to view additional M&A as a possibility this year and maintain a robust pipeline of actionable opportunities focusing on leading businesses with strong margins, defensible market positions, and recurring revenue. With cash on the balance sheet of $137 million and undrawn revolver capacity of $175 million, we can combine with the full support of our banking group, we have the financial strength to be opportunistic while also being patient and disciplined. From a macro perspective, the secular trends driving demand for our mission critical, lifesaving products around the world are only growing stronger. Unresting conflict are on the rise, highlighting the critical need for those who protect and serve us to be equipped with the safest and most reliable products. Regarding nuclear, we see accelerating global demand driven by strong energy, defense, and nuclear waste tailwinds. Most importantly, cadre's consistent and stable growth through cycles remains a defining characteristic of our company, and we anticipate that resilience will continue to serve us well. Moving forward, we believe cadre is well positioned to grow our platform and further enhance our market leadership over the long term, supported by a strong balance sheet, robust acquisition pipeline, and operating model. With that, thank you for being with us today, and I will turn the call over to Brad. Brad, over to you.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Thank you, Warren. On today's call, Blaine and I will provide a Q2 update and business overview, including recent trends, financial performance, and full year outlook, followed by a Q&A session. We'll begin on slide five. During the second quarter, we continued to deliver on our strategic objectives, capitalizing on resilient demand trends for our mission critical safety equipment. The company's solid execution in Q2 included further implementation of our pricing strategy driven by strong customer relationships and products that deliver best in class performance. As you can see from the slide, second quarter mix was neutral, consistent with expectations, and orders backlog was stable, excluding new acquisitions. Turning to capital allocation in M&A, we continued to successfully generate significant precast flow, which enables us to both pursue acquisitions and make strategic investments in core organic growth while also returning capital to shareholders. Our August dividend will be in the company's 15th consecutive sensor IPO. At the same time, we continue to advance our targeted M&A program and maintain a growing backlog of actionable opportunities. As Warren mentioned, we completed the acquisition of the engineering division, further strengthening CADRE's nuclear safety vertical, and expanding our international footprint with a group of complementary high margin nuclear businesses. We're in the early stages of functional integration, prioritizing finance, accounting, IT, legal, and compliance, and in parallel, have gathered all our nuclear leaders together to establish action plans to leverage our broadened customer relationships and expanded portfolio products globally and start the implementation of the CADRE operating model. As part of this process, I'm pleased to share that we have promoted and relocated Eric Gazzvota, a seasoned leader from within the CADRE organization to oversee our group of nuclear safety businesses. Eric began this role on August 1st with responsibilities that include integration, implementation of the CADRE operating model, and managing the nuclear teams to identify and execute engineering, business development, and manufacturing opportunities. We're excited about the appointment, in line with our commitment to leveraging internal CADRE expertise to drive continuity, accountability, and performance. We look forward to implementing fundamental core operating tools in the coming months. On slide six, we illustrate long-term tailwinds supporting CADRE's growth opportunity across both public safety and nuclear safety sectors. Our largest market segment remains law enforcement, and police protection expenditures have historically trended upward through cycles. This has led to CADRE's consistent and stable growth regardless of economic, political, or geopolitical conditions. On the nuclear side of the business, there is continued momentum, driven by both near-term demand and long-term structural tailwinds. As you have heard from us before, we are excited about nuclear safety not just because of the increased interest in commercial nuclear energy today, but primarily because of the long-term growth opportunities related to environmental safety and national security. This is based on U.S. nuclear material processing, handling, and remediation needs, as well as national defense initiatives that we believe will underpin consistent and growing demand over multiple decades. In terms of our core current market trends, we continue to see multi-directional support for nuclear coming in many forms, particularly with the increasing number of commercial nuclear energy projects and a push by the administration in the U.S. to prioritize the nuclear industry. Recent executive orders have been aimed at speeding up nuclear reactor licensing, deploying U.S. reactors for A.I. and military bases, expanding domestic nuclear fuel production, and growing the American nuclear workforce. With the collective scale and capabilities of our nuclear businesses, we are strategically positioned at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry and excited about the future opportunities we are seeing across the nuclear landscape. Turning to slide seven, I'll briefly touch on a couple of other non-nuclear developments in our business environment. Trends in North American law enforcement are positive, highlighted by significant federal investment in government agencies. From a geopolitical perspective, there is continued instability around the world, underscoring the importance of the work that we do. In the immediate term, however, the situation in conflict zones that we have mentioned previously, including Ukraine and the Middle East, has not yet improved such that unexploded ordinance disposal can begin. We remain confident as these conflicts eventually reach the cleanup stage, the cadre would play a larger role, likely through our various EOD offerings. Turning to our consumer channel, our brands have remained resilient despite broader market challenges and weak gun sales. Our consumer holster demand has held up thanks to the strong followership we've established in a stream of product innovation. Lastly, on the new product front, innovation remains at the heart of everything we do and our teams work every day to both protect our market share and continue to grow it. We've been pleased with the success of a number of new products launched over the past 24 months that continue to garner enthusiastic feedback. Before I turn it over to Blaine, I would like to address the macro environment. Consistent with commentary on the last two calls, our operating environment continues to show a greater degree of uncertainty than in previous years. Recent tariff announcements are one good example of this. In addition to tariffs, we have a higher proportion of large ops in our sales funnel across all business units with time in of these large opportunities shifting more than in previous years. In most cases, the funding has been allocated but due to a variety of factors, we are seeing more of these large opportunities move to the right. In almost all cases, we are still confident in our ability to win these orders but there is increasing uncertainty related to timing. We've seen this dynamic in both law enforcement and the nuclear markets and Blaine will discuss the implication these movements have on our guidance. On tariffs, we continue to monitor the situation. Keep in mind the majority of our suppliers are regional in nature and many cases covered by USMCA which helps to mitigate tariff pressure. Our global footprint with manufacturing and redundancies gives us additional options to mitigate the tariff impact. Up to this point, inflationary pressures from tariffs have been in line with our expectations. We remain confident that the strong macro tailwinds in the law enforcement, military, and nuclear markets will continue to be a catalyst for Cadre's growth over the long term. Our business makeup and operating model allows to weather uncertain times and emerge in an even stronger competitive position. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Blaine Browers.

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Brad. I'll kick off my comments with a review of the M&A strategy. As you've heard already, in April we completed the acquisition of the engineering division from CARS group and the initial phase of integration is underway. I'd like to again highlight the acquired brands including Vailish Miller, Bendel's Engineering, NW Total, and NuVision, bring world class capabilities in remote handling, automation, and radiation protection. Together with Alpha Safety, these businesses significantly expand our reach in nuclear subverticals, including nuclear medicine and robotics, while providing new opportunities with leading global customers around the world. Acquiring these complementary high margin businesses supports our broader objective of establishing a diversified platform with durable safety businesses. We continue to evaluate additional opportunities across each of our focus areas with the same disciplined M&A approach we've always taken. Our pipeline of targets is extensive and we remain committed to deals with the potential to expand our customer base, increase wallet share, and offer value added protective products. Overall, the M&A markets remain strong and we are excited about the prospect of add-on opportunities in our current markets. Turning now to a summary of Cadre's financial performance, slides 11 and 12 detail our second quarter results. Q2 sales of 157 million were above our expectations and grew 9% year over year. Of note, second quarter gross margin improved 30 basis points year over year driven by favorable pricing, the absence of inventory step-up amortization, and exchange rate favorability. Illustrate on slide 12 is net sales and adjusted EBITDA growth year over year including our new 2025 guidance. I'll discuss more in a moment. Our full year outlook implies year over year revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth of 10.5 and .7% respectively at the midpoints. On slide 13, we present our capital structure as of June 30th, 2025, reflecting the completed acquisition. We maintain significant financial flexibility to pursue inorganic opportunities with what we believe to be a responsible net leverage ratio of 1.8 times. We provide revised 2025 guidance on slide 14. Net sales are expected to be between 624 and 630 million and our adjusted EBITDA guidance is between 112 million and 116 million, implying adjusted EBITDA margins of 18.2%. Please note that our guidance range only reflects the tariffs in effect as of today and importantly assumes that USMCA remains in place. As a reminder, the majority of our product movements in North America currently fall under USMCA. We will continue to monitor the tariff situation closely and will deploy countermeasures as needed to protect margins. Additionally, as Brad outlined earlier on the call, guidance reflects our updated expectations around the timing of orders. As we think about the remainder of the year, we expect Q3 revenue and adjusted EBITDA to be flat sequentially to Q2. This combined with the full year guidance implies that the second half of the year, we will see about 6% organic growth with adjusted EBITDA up almost 19%. The new nuclear businesses are in line with the previous guidance and we've been pleased with their performance thus far. We continue to expect the second half to be stronger than the first half, driven by armor and EOD project timing. I'll now turn it back to Brad for concluding comments.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Thank you, Blaine. In closing, we're pleased with our second quarter results and remain focused on consistent strategic execution amid what continues to be a dynamic operating environment. Complimenting our core organic growth initiatives, we're actively evaluating a robust pipeline of potential M&A transactions to further enhance our market leadership moving forward. The company has established a track record of steady growth through cycles and we anticipate similar performance as we move ahead. Driven by strong demand for Cadre's best in class safety products across our law enforcement, first responder, military and nuclear categories. Despite the timing shift of some large public safety and nuclear opportunities, we're extremely pleased with the quality of this portion of our sales funnel. We have an outstanding team that has demonstrated an ability to navigate challenges and leverage the Cadre operating model to drive constant improvements. We continue to see attractive growth opportunities throughout the business and are in confident in our long-term output. With that, operator, please open up the lines for Q&A.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you would like to ask a question today, remember it is star followed by the number one on your touchtone phone. Our first question for today comes from the line of Larry Solow with CJS Securities. Your line is live.

speaker
Larry Solow
Analyst, CJS Securities

Great, thank you. I'm just curious, good morning guys. Curious just on the contracts or the push out on some of these orders. It sounds like it's kind of across the board. Is there any commonality, anything related to just reduce government spending on the federal level or any more color there? And then the follow-up would be in terms of timing, does it just kind of shift out into 2026 or any, you know, your confidence level on that?

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Hey Larry, it's Brad. Great question. Here's kind of the way to think about it. You know, across the board, we haven't seen this up in here nine years and we haven't seen it in that nine years. We have a larger proportion of the opportunities in the sales funnel that we've seen this year are what we consider large ops. And those large ops actually fall across the bigger business units, body armor. We've got duty gear, nuclear and EOD. So across all four of those, which we in the past have not seen a mix that high across each of those. In terms of any trends that we've seen, you know, due to some of the shifts, the good news is we're not seeing any budgets that are being reduced. We're not seeing any allocation issues with the dollars. So all that's very positive. So, you know, our outlook is we love seeing the funnel with these kinds of opportunities in there, but the reality is sometimes they shift around in terms of timing. Some of those orders we've taken out of this year in terms of our guidance, because we feel like there's a stronger opportunity for those to come in next year. And then some we've also left in this year in terms of our guidance overall. So it's kind of a mix of both that we see happening this year and next year.

speaker
Larry Solow
Analyst, CJS Securities

Great, okay. And then if I just wanna follow up, you know, if you can, just on margins, marginality. Look, I know this quarter, you know, year over year, I think last year you had a time-related benefit on expenses, so I think the margin is down a lot more. But just on the quarter, year over year, I think we're looking for a slight margin contraction, very modest, albeit, you know, but just curious on your thoughts going forward. Obviously it seems like there's still a lot of opportunities for you and the cadre operating model. So thoughts on, you know, mid to long-term on the margin hopeful expansion,

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

thanks. Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. Yeah, I think, you know, longer term, as we've talked about it before, you know, there's ample opportunities to move that this, all the businesses upwards in gross margin. You know, I think in the longer term, getting into the mid to upper 40s is very reasonable. I think kind of going back historically, you know, there's a track record of those margins improving. Obviously, as we, you know, buy businesses, sometimes those businesses will have an impact, you know, either accretive or dilutive to the gross margin, but we look to expand those. So, you know, I think the cars engineering, Zircaloy businesses are an example where, you know, their margin profile, the Gates is, you know, is a little bit lower than our average, but, you know, again, we're confident with leveraging those tools, and frankly, the outstanding teams that came with them that will be able to continue to drive those margins upwards, you know, along with the synergenistic opportunities we have in that nuclear platform, and, you know, the core military and LA businesses have a very good track record of continuing to push those upwards. So we're, you know, we're very bullish on the long term for those margin profiles. Gotcha,

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

great, thank you. Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Jeff Van Cindren with the Riley Securities. Your line is live.

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

Good morning, everyone. Just to circle back for a moment, if we could, and clarify, regarding the guidance change, it sounds like it was strictly a matter of timing, not of any potential business exiting the funnel. Is that correct?

speaker
Brad Williams
President

That is correct, Jeff. It's the majority of the funnel on these large ops that we've had, we expected and we had in the original forecast for this year, and they're not losses, they're essentially just shifting around.

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

OK, fair enough. And then any other color you can share on sales mix, maybe margin expectations for the second half quarterly progression? I know you gave some guidance, but just anything else, any other color that we should keep in mind?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, for the remainder of the year, for Q3, we'd expect gross margins or EBITDA margins, sorry.

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

Yes, gross margin or EBITDA.

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I mean, looking at gross, we'd expect Q3 to be similar to Q2. It'll have a little bit of pressure as we get a full quarter in with Zircaloy for gap gross margins for the inventory step-up, as well as incremental DNA. And then Q4 with that incremental volume, we'd expect it to be slightly higher than Q2 and Q3. Mix-wise, I mentioned on the call, on the prepared remarks, EOD will be stronger in the back half, a little more Q4 weighted. That is one of the higher margin businesses, so that will certainly just naturally lift those margins up in that quarter. OK, that's

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

helpful. And then just anything else to add on what you're seeing in the nuclear business, maybe touch on cars. I know you're still in the integration process there. Just curious on more color on opportunities you're seeing in nuclear, given what seems to be a really favorable backdrop for that business.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Yeah, I mean, like you said, it's early days, early time. Most of the focus at this point has been on all of our functional integration and onboarding type work we do, because that's all the, I would call them kind of risk-related things, IT, finance, accounting, compliance, all the functional integration type activities. So that's where the majority of the focus has been. That's our typical onboarding and the integration process is those areas first. We have taken an opportunity to bring together all the managing directors and leaders of all the nuclear businesses, both alpha safety and then also the engineering division that we acquired from cars. And we've started some initial work with those folks around, you know, what are the potential opportunities? That's everything from business development, you know, manufacturing, operating model, things like that with those groups. So in the early steps there, but they came out of the meeting with, I think, a really good starting point list so that we can begin to dig deeper in those items and have those teams execute the ones that we feel like are the biggest opportunities.

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

OK, great. Thanks for taking my questions.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thanks for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Sheila Cuyoglu with Jeffries. Your line is live.

speaker
Sheila Cuyoglu
Analyst, Jefferies

Good morning, guys. Thanks so much. Maybe my first question on pricing, you know, it's exceeded expectations over the past few quarters. Can you just level set us on what you're seeing in terms of pricing across the portfolio and how it helps in the second half?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, thanks, Sheila, for the question. You know, Q2, we did see pricing hitting that target, net 1% net of material inflation. So we're happy to see that. We expect that to continue in the back half. We did have a price increase that went out in early Q2. We expect to see that start to trickle in, you know, really in Q3. And in some parts of the business, it'll be late Q4. And that's not driven by really customer acceptance or any pushback in the market. That's really just a function of working through backlog. And in addition to backlog, you have to work through your quoted quoted orders in the system. So that continues to be an area where the teams execute really well. And it really shows, I think, represents the strength of the products, the brands and the value delivered by them.

speaker
Sheila Cuyoglu
Analyst, Jefferies

OK, and then maybe another one changing topics a little bit more. You called out defense in Europe. And obviously, we've seen this nice tailwind in US defense budgets, too. So how are you thinking about maybe the biggest opportunities and conversion timing there?

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Specifically, you're speaking of the EOD business, Sheila? Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, from an EOD perspective, you know, with conflicts continuing to be going on, you know, until they wind down, we really don't see that cleanup phase being entered for EOD to begin happening. And keep in mind the potential customers there, whether it's Ukraine or Israel, you know, we have existing relationships and existing supply in terms of bombsuits. So, you know, we'll see as that winds down, but who would ever thought that they'd been in the conflict for as many years that they're into it at this point? So, you know, we've worked in some areas behind the scenes to, you know, with some demining products and working on various locations to manufacture those in and some design changes there to try to be ready for anything that comes our way.

speaker
Sheila Cuyoglu
Analyst, Jefferies

Awesome. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you, Sheila. Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Mark Smith with Lake Street. Your line is live.

speaker
Mark Smith
Analyst, Lake Street

Hi, guys. In the presentation, you guys called out kind of ICE and border patrol. I'm curious if you guys can talk about kind of how much exposure you have there and any potential bumps from that business.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

So, I would just say in general, across the board, when you look at, you know, some of the focuses that are out there from a government agency perspective, you know, as we all see in the news, there's continued focus from a border patrol perspective and also from ICE. So, those organizations are, you know, looking to continue to expand is what we've seen as we've worked with those with our existing relationships. And so, you know, when you expand, you know, I'll call it feet on the street or personnel numbers or headcount numbers within agencies like that, no different than state and local agencies, the opportunity is there to outfit with our various products that they need. So, you know, we're continuing to stay close to those opportunities that come up. And, you know, we'll be ready to expand as they expand as we go forward.

speaker
Mark Smith
Analyst, Lake Street

OK. And then shifting over to tariffs, can you just walk through what is kind of built into the guidance today and maybe, you know, the unknowns that are still out there that maybe we get some resolution here in the coming days?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so what's built in is, you know, tariffs in place, you know, today. I think the biggest unknown is where they end up, right? And, you know, we feel like we've been through this,

speaker
Jeff Van Cindren
Analyst, Riley Securities

you

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

know, kind of unknowing part, both quarters, right, started the beginning of the year with the US and with Mexico and Canada, and then Q2, Q1 earnings and Q2 was in China. You know, so we've taken the approach of we're baking what's known and in place today. You know, what comes, you know, what we'll have to, we obviously have a number of mitigation plans and countermeasures we're working through internally, but, you know, externally we won't really talk about it until it's in place. Yeah, you know, the good news is, you know, we've talked about this before, you know, our supply chains are fairly regional in nature, you know, meaning European products, you know, main, or the European manufacturing sites are buying most of their materials from, you know, Europe. And then in the US, it's a bit more North America centric, but USMCA really protects us there. So it's not that we don't have any exposure, I would just say it's limited. We certainly don't have, you know, I think the more complex problems of, you know, truly global supply chains where, you know, products are really hopping around to a number of different countries before they come to the US. But it's one watching closely, you know, some of the, I'd say, lengthier mitigation plans, and we saw something more significant with the really moving manufacturing. And when I say that, that doesn't necessarily mean moving a plan, but it means moving the production of goods, say, from country A to country B to mitigate that tariff. And if you think about using maybe the armor business as an example, we have production facilities for armor in the US and Mexico, Canada, UK, as well as Lithuania. So we have a number of options when we start to think about where, where we produce what products. So that gives us some flexibility. But those movements do take a little more time. Those aren't just flip a switch and move it over in a lot of cases, because the high quality standards and in some cases, certifications, it takes a bit of time to get those ramped up and running at typical efficiency.

speaker
Mark Smith
Analyst, Lake Street

Last question is just just looking at new products, kind of any updates on kind of your your mix and performance of new products. And have you seen any change in kind of buying patterns or adoption around new products? And this is across the board through all of your businesses.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Yeah, when you look at, you know, what you launched in the last 24 months, you know, when we look at what we call our tailgate zeros, which is the initial step in that new product development process, you know, we're pleased with the estimates that we made back then and where we thought what we thought we could achieve overall. So whether it was all the way back when we launched HyperX and what HyperX has been doing, which is our tactical carrier system is done extremely well. Our new ballast duty holster line has started out really strong overall. As I mentioned on the remarks, we've done very, very well on the consumer holster side, even though the market has been soft when you look at, you know, nick checks and gun sales on that side of things, which is really a testament to us in terms of just that, you know, leading brand and a brand that, you know, our committed customers look up to and really focus on. And the new products has also helped from that perspective. So you look across the board and, you know, we're happy with the products that we've focused on and the time and energy and capital that we put into them and as we go forward.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Matt Caronda with Roth Capital. Your line is live.

speaker
Matt Caronda
Analyst, Roth Capital

I guess I guess it's too for me. Curious to get your thoughts on cars integration now that you've had it for about a quarter or so, you mentioned sort of bringing the leadership teams together from nuclear, any commercial synergies, I guess, that you're uncovering that might help with growth in the aggregate across your nuclear businesses and just thoughts on the timing of those potential opportunities.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Yeah, so, Matt, I would say it's early at this point for us to, you know, to call out or pick out specific ones. But the team had a list of five overall commercial areas that they wanted to go and take that next step and dig even more into to really determine if we think there's, you know, some commercial synergies there across the board. You know, these things range from everything from, you know, single face at trade shows, because some of the businesses and some of the brands have stronger relationships in certain regions of the world where others don't. You know, some have stronger product positions and some don't. Some have relationships with customers where other of the brands just, quite frankly, don't even have a foot in the door. So there's there's discussions like that that they've had across the board. But, you know, that was step one. Get the list together. Have each business unit share about each business. That was the other piece. They haven't done that in the past. Even the ones under the cars side of things, even though they were under the same company. So that gave an opportunity for them to share what the business is. What's the current state? What do they do? What are the products? You name it and go deeper there. So, you know, we're a little ways away from having that list and saying we're going to action it at this point.

speaker
Matt Caronda
Analyst, Roth Capital

OK, got it. And then maybe just for Blaine, the midpoint of the revised EBITDA guide seems to be factoring in maybe slightly lower margins than the prior guidance. Is that change due to sort of higher margin projects that are being pushed out? Or is there something you're incorporating now from from acquisitions that maybe is eroding that a touch?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

No, it's really the first thing you mentioned that, which is some of those large opportunities Brad's talked about, you know, were were better mix. And now it looks like they're pushing into 2026.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

OK, understood.

speaker
Matt Caronda
Analyst, Roth Capital

I'll leave it there.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Ron Epstein with Bank of America. Your line is live.

speaker
Ron Epstein
Analyst, Bank of America Securities

Hey, good morning. This is Jordan on for Ron on backlog. Could you guys give us what the organic backlog growth was the quarter?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, organic backlog was flat sequentially. Yes, the majority of that increase is really just acting in the Zurich Lake Cars Engineering Division.

speaker
Ron Epstein
Analyst, Bank of America Securities

OK, and then. I guess how much of that is it any of the contracts that got pushed out that are no longer being included or just flat demand?

speaker
Blaine Browers
Chief Financial Officer

So the contracts that Brad's talked about would have not been in backlog, those were not orders in the system that then got pushed out. These are orders that we would expect to receive the back half of this year early 2026, and that's when we would reflect them in backlog.

speaker
Ron Epstein
Analyst, Bank of America Securities

Got it. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude our Q&A session here for today, and I would like to hand the call back over to Brad Williams for any closing comments.

speaker
Brad Williams
President

Thank you, operator. I'd like to thank everyone again for joining us on today's call and your continued interest in cadre holdings. Thank you.

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Thank you. And this concludes today's conference call. Have a great day.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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