11/6/2025

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Okay. Participants are loading. So while they're doing that, I think we're going to get started. Uh, good morning, afternoon. Um, and welcome to the Sumatrix Q3 financial results webinar. Uh, the results were very good and presenting today. It would be Randy Buhmauer. Who's the president CEO of Sumatrix, uh, Marie Josie Canton, who is the CFO and out of Chicago is Jordan Wolf. who's the president of Mix On Site. So again, congratulations. And with that, Randy, I'm going to turn it over to you and the team.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Thank you, Grant. Much appreciated. We're really excited to be here with all of you today to share with you some information about our company and our financial results for Q3 2025. As always, there's a disclaimer here. We'll make some forward-looking statements so that you understand the context of those. We always like to start with this slide, which I kind of view as a bit of an executive summary, key investor highlights, key things that an investor should know. So number one is we're an innovative cellular concrete solutions company, leading provider of lightweight, cost-effective, durable cellular concrete for infrastructure projects. We have a strong competitive advantage that we'll cover off in an upcoming slide and work primarily as a subcontractor for major North American general contractors. We're in a position of financial strength and overall growth trend. Sorry, I had trouble getting that out. We've had revenue cumulative annual growth of 24% since 2017, which is very impressive. Our margins have been improving. We've met our record 2025 commitment already in Q3, and 2026 is forecast to be another good year. I like this chart here on the right here because it really shows kind of the key metrics that we follow. 2023 being our record year. 2024 is a step back year, but still profitable. And then 2025 focused on profitability and delivering a record year already. So there's a significant market opportunity in front of us. We're an industry leader. The global cellular concrete market is significant and is expected to continue to grow. And there's just increased tailwinds around infrastructure spending, both in Canada and the US. And we see more and more federal and provincial and state budgets just adding more fuel to the fire of increased infrastructure spending. So I'm going to hand it over here to Jordan next, who's going to cover the next couple of slides.

speaker
Jordan Wolf
President, Mix On Site

Thanks, Randy. And hello, good morning and good afternoon, everybody. So I'm going to just take you a little bit through the team and corporate timeline. We were just Management was introduced just a moment ago by Mr. Howard. So we are also led by a board of directors, including Manaz, Patrick, Steve, Anna Maria, and John, who offer valuable insight with all of their experience across many different industries. Insider ownership in our company is strong, roughly 10% of the 150.2 million outstanding shares, 166.8 fully diluted. The largest insiders include myself with 12.2 million and Randy with 1.8 million shares. In the lower right corner, we like to show this company timeline. It just kind of shows you everything that we've been through as a company from being founded in 1999, going through many different scenarios, challenges from financial crises, oil price crashes. And over the last five years with the pandemic, the Ukraine outbreak causing global shortages of cement, we've been through it all, but here we are persevering and flourishing with record level of earnings. So next slide, please. All right, so let me give you a little, recap or explanation cellular concrete 101 if you will uh the product description is cellular concrete is basically made mixing water cement and a foaming agent that looks like a everyday noxema shaving cream the foam agent basically creates a bubble inside the mixture and it holds its shape long enough until the cement and water harden around it leaving a cellular structure that has many different air pockets and causes a lightweight effect The key properties include being cost effective and it is low density and lightweight. It has a high bearing capacity. It's extremely pumpable. We've pumped upwards of 14,000 feet before, to give you an idea. It's highly flowable, self-leveling, self-compacting. It has thermal insulating properties that help out greatly in colder climates. It's very durable and it's very excavatable. And these are just key properties. There's others. well that i'm not mentioning primary applications would include a lightweight engineered fill this is the bulk of the work that we do otherwise known as load reducing fill and has many different names one of those would be a mse or mechanical stabilized earth retaining wall backfill others include lightweight insulating road sub bases flowable self-compacting fills pipe culvert abandonments, tunnel and annular grout applications, shallow utility, foundation installations. And again, this just names a few. There's several others that we rarely get involved in, like roofing and flooring applications, as well as underwater placement applications. So this just, again, highlights the primary applications that we do. And, you know, our competitors, our customers and competitive advantage, our key customers would include some of the largest companies, general contractors, and engineering companies in the North Americas, including your Bechtel's, Kiewit's, PCL's, I could go on and on. We pretty much work for them all. We'll occasionally contract directly with an owner, but the vast majority of jobs that we work on, we are always a subcontractor. And for our competitive advantages, our reputation is probably the most important. We've been successfully delivering cellular concrete solutions on time and on budget. uh for uh 25 years i often tell uh people that our production team is actually one of the greatest assets of our sales team because we do so well in the field uh it really speaks volumes when when general contractors and owners uh come to us or come to gc's and say they'd like to use Mix on Sight, Simatrix, Pacific International Grout because of our experiences. So it's really important. And that reputation, of course, is built on our team and experience having 200 years, over 200 years of experience in our field across our employees. Our equipment gives us a great advantage being the largest fleet of technologically advanced equipment producing cellular concrete. And we actually with our existing equipment have capacity to grow. Our size and scale helps tremendously. We have multiple locations coast to coast, and we can successfully complete projects across Canada and US in a manner that our competitors are not quite fit to do. And we're more sustainable, generally more environmentally friendly than legacy products that we replace. And just to give you an idea, one ready mix truck that can come down the road with 10 cubic yards, we can take that 10 cubic yards and turn it into 35, 40, 45 when we're doing wet mix applications. The same is true when we do dry mix applications. We can take one tanker that delivers roughly 50 tons and we can turn that into around 125 cubic yards of material depending on the mix design. But you can imagine having Only one truck versus, you know, 12 trucks on site. Not only does it help be more environmentally friendly, but it also adds a safety element as well, having less construction traffic on site. And with that, I'll pass it off to Randy.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Thank you, Jordan. Really good job. You know, one of the questions we get quite a bit is just how big is this opportunity? How big is the market? And it's very tricky to to nail it down. Really, the best way to do it would be add up every single bid that came across cellular concrete in and across all the markets and across all the applications. But that's practically impossible to do. So what happens is third parties estimate the size of this market. And so we've seen estimates from as low as $4 billion from market research future to as high as $27 billion from allied market research. Now that would be worldwide. It would be every single application for cellular concrete, even some that we don't pursue like roofing and flooring applications that Jordan mentioned. But I think the bottom line is the opportunity is pretty big. And then all these sources agree that the market for cellular concrete is growing. And then if you look at the market for other lightweight fills or competitive products, that market's even bigger, which means the market that we can capture is a multiple of the sizes that we would estimate. The other thing that we've chatted about already and it's really important is infrastructure spending. So infrastructure in Canada and the US is aging. It needs to be repaired and replaced. Populations continue to grow, requiring new infrastructure. and also placing additional load on existing infrastructure and so because of that spending on infrastructure is expected to continue to increase now and into the future and we see this kind of budget cycle after budget cycle for governments even the Canadian government recently just came out this week with you know a focus on putting more investment into infrastructure spending now it's really hard for us to tie those bills to very specific cellular concrete projects but we know in general with there's more money spent on infrastructure That's going to be ultimately more opportunities that pop up that require cellular concrete based on the properties of the material and based on the applications and geotechnical needs of the situation. So just a quick summary here of our financials. MJ is going to get into the details of Q3 here, but I just wanted to highlight we are forecasting a record year for 2025 and we're very careful about the words we choose. You notice we didn't say we're forecasting a record revenue year. We forecast our record year and we've hit that achievement already in Q3 by delivering EBITDA that's higher than our best year ever of 2023. Despite stepping back in 2024, we have an overall growth in revenue. So the company continues to grow. So the cumulative annual growth rate of the company since 2017 has been 24% per year. And we will grow revenue this year as well. We have a positive bottom line and we're generating cash. So we've got a record $5.9 million in 2025 year-to-date adjusted EBITDA and we've got a record $5.6 million of 2025 year-to-date cash flow from operations before working capital adjustments. We have a healthy balance sheet with low leverage. We've got $9.9 million in the bank and no long-term debt as the end of Q3. So the things that are important to understand about our business is that the revenue growth will be lumpy. Everybody I talk to would love to see a staircase, but that's just not the way it works in construction, and it's not the way it works especially in specialty construction because we don't control when our scopes of work start and stop. And so because of that, our revenue can move quite a bit or be variable quite a bit based on when large projects start or stop. But the overall trend, as we've mentioned many times, is one of growth. For our business, because we operate primarily in northern climates, it's a seasonal business. So we're going to have higher revenues in warmer months. And I think we've all experienced that where construction activity picks up in the summer and into the fall. If you look at the last five years, we've averaged 18% in Q1. 18 of our revenue in q2 36 in q3 and 28 in q4 now obviously each year is different they're not they're not all 18 they're not all 36 but it gives you an idea of how our revenues spread out through the year we're a specialty contractor so because of that margins tend to be higher than general contractors but we have more bench time and fixed costs to cover So that's an important concept to understand. Project size impacts margins. So when we bid larger projects, there's more competition for those for obvious reasons. Everybody wants to win the big ones. And then when that happens, the margins that we recognize in those projects will always be lower because of that extra competition. And we do have excess capacity. We have excess capacity in our equipment that Jordan mentioned quite a bit where we could easily do two to three times the revenue we're currently doing. And we have excess capacity in our staffing levels. We can't do two times revenue with existing staff levels, but we could do two times revenue without a significant increase in staffing. So I'll hand it over to MJ who will go through our Q3 financial highlights.

speaker
Marie-Josie Canton
CFO, Sumatrix

Thanks, Randy. So let's talk about revenue. So revenue for the quarter was 15.3 million compared to 10.1 million in 2024. That's a 51% increase. For the first nine months of 2025, we did 32.6 million in revenue compared to 25 million last year. So that's a 30% increase. Gross margin is up at 34% compared to 27% last year for the quarter. That's a 7% gross margin increase. And year to date, we had gross margins of 33% compared to 26%. That is also a 7% gross margin increase. Operating income is 2.8 million in Q3 compared to 700,000 last year. So that's a 2.1 million increase. Year to date, we did 3.9 million in operating income compared to a loss of 100,000 in 2024. That's a 4 million increase. Adjusted EBITDA was 3.5 million in Q3 compared to 1.4 million in 2024. That's a 2.1 million increase. And as Randy mentioned, we have a record adjusted EBITDA year-to-date at $5.9 million compared to $1.8 million, which is a $4.1 million increase. Cash flow from operations, both positive for the quarter and the year, 3.2 in Q3 compared to 1.3 in Q3 of last year. That's a $1.9 million increase. And year-to-date record as well, $5.6 million. compared to 1.7 year-to-date last year, so that's a $3.9 million increase. So we've ended up the quarter with almost $10 million in cash, which is similar to what we had at the same period of last year. Looking at these graphs, so on the left hand side, you can see our revenue and the trend line is growing as Randy mentioned. So just as a reminder, in teal you see a full year numbers and in orange you see year to date. So we basically did quite the same as last year and past previous years. So our revenue line is growing, which is great. Gross margin percentage is improving over the last few years. So, year-to-date, it was 33%, largely due to the higher revenue that we experienced, as well as key contract structure that we'll talk in a minute. And maybe, what can I? Oh, sorry, sorry. All right, so 32%. Apologies for that. Debt and interest, no longer debts on our balance sheet, but we have an equipment financing loan for 1.6 million. So aside from that, there's nothing else. We've gone a long way since 2017. In our share structure for Q3, we had 150.2 million shares outstanding, 5.9 million of options outstanding. 2.4 million in RSUs and 8.2 million in warrants. These warrants are set to expire at the end of July 2026. So fully diluted, we have 166.8 million financial instruments. Let's talk about our backlog a little bit. So we had announced 43.6 million in new project awards since the beginning of the year. In Q3 only, we announced 17 million, and these awards are for various applications for our product. Our backlog is growing. It continues to grow with sales success. So at the end of the quarter, we had a backlog of 75 million. And that's compared to 69.6 at the end of the quarter last year. So that's a 5.6 million increase. So I'll pass it back to Randy.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Thank you, MJ. So one thing that we wanted to highlight for investors, from our perspective, the numbers are the numbers, but I think when you're trying to do comparisons, it's important to understand this. So we had a large contract in 2025 that was going on through Q3 and continues into Q4, where we made the arrangement to allow the customer to buy the cement themselves. And the deal was that we would make the same amount of gross margin dollars. Because of that, our revenue and cost of sales was lower than would be versus comparable contract structure, and our gross margin percentage was higher. In this chart here below, we've shown you what it would look like if we had entered into a traditional contract structure with this customer and the impact it would have had on revenue and gross margin. So you can see that revenue would have been $4 million higher up at $19 million and gross margin would have been seven points lower at 27%. And then you can see on a year-to-date basis, our revenue would have been $36.7 million and our gross margin would have been 30%. So again, the numbers are the numbers as reported, but if you're trying to do comparisons and understand what's happening with revenue growth or understanding what's happening with gross margins, it's important that you understand this contract structure so yeah so just we always like to end just like we like to start is you know if you're a potential investor or an investor why should you invest in some matrix and these are the five points that we believe are are key to understanding that number one is we're an industry leader we're really well positioned to capitalize on the large opportunity in the growing infrastructure construction segment We are a growth company. We have growing revenue, 24% annual cumulative growth rate since 2017. We have positive adjusted EBITDA, record levels all time, positive cash flow from operations, and we have a really strong balance sheet. We believe that we're currently undervalued based on traditional valuation metrics, whether that be forward revenue or forward EBITDA multiples, we still think the share price is under where it should be. We don't have to raise any capital in the short term or long term to fund a burn rate. We're self-sustaining now. Any new capital would only be raised in support of an accretive acquisition. And we don't have an accretive acquisition in the short term or near term here that's being contemplated. And lastly, we do have capital to deploy. And we're adding to that capital because we're generating positive cash flow. And so we're looking for opportunities to grow organically or to grow via acquisition if we can find the right opportunity. On the right hand side here is our investor relations contacts with the Howard Group and the Bristol. And then we have one analyst covering the company from Beacon Securities, who is Russell Stanley. So then I think that will take us to the Q&A session. Just before we get into the actual questions, just wanted to cover a couple of things that I think may come up or that I've been thinking about. Number one is just as an investor, like diversification is important. And so if you have a portfolio of stocks, I'm sure you've heard stories of people that invest everything they had in Tesla or Bitcoin or some other stock and made out like bandits. But what you don't hear as much about is people who did the same thing in other names and lost everything. So no security in your portfolio should be more than 5% or 10% of your holdings as an investor. It doesn't matter how great any company sounds. You don't want to risk everything on one company. If you do, that's not investing. That's gambling. So don't do that. So Matrix, we're slow and steady. We're a traditional bricks and mortar infrastructure stock that is focused on profitable growth. We're focused on building and running a profitable business that puts the needs of our customers first. Because we know if we do that, that the share price is going to follow. So we're less concerned about the day-to-day or week-to-week fluctuations of the stock price. We know that if we run a good business, sooner or later, the share price is going to follow. And we've seen that happen this year. And so the final thing I'll say is we care why the share price goes up. We know that some stakeholders and some shareholders don't care. They just want to see the price go up. They don't care if it stays there as long as they can exit and make money. We don't want that. We want a share price that makes sense, trading based on fundamentals. I want every investor in Sumatrix to make money, but we do that by focusing on the customer and the three things that we're obsessed with, safety, quality, and profitability. So that's it. With those kind of comments, Grant, I'll turn it over to you and we can go through the Q&A.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Thank you, Randy, MJ, and Jordan. And that was a good wrap, Randy. Or wrap up, not a wrap. We've got about 13 questions already in the queue. And you were mentioning Russell Stanley, who happens to be the managing director. Director of Equity Research at Beacon Securities. And the first few questions are from Russell. His first one, outside of the contract restructuring, was there anything unusual in the quarter, such as revenue pulled in from Q4, from faster work, or pushed out to Q4?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, good question, Russell. I mean, it's very rare in construction to have revenue move forward. That just, it almost never happens. So that would be the exception rather than the norm. The norm is that projects and start dates push. And so we definitely saw some revenue push into Q4 and we've seen some projects that we originally thought might go in 2025 that have pushed into 2026.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Next question is about project size. Can you talk about what you are seeing now in terms of projects starting in 2026? Understanding you see a very wide range of project sizes, how do the jobs you are bidding on and winning compare in size to what you were seeing a year ago? With respect to demand, have you seen any specific projects in the pipeline get trimmed back in scale and or pushed out, perhaps out of caution? How does your level of optimism now compare to what you had a year ago on the demand front?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Okay, we're testing my memory there. That's a lot of questions. I'll do my best here. If I've missed part of it, just let me know, Grant. So in terms of contract or project size, right now we are actively executing the two largest contracts that we've ever had in the history of the company. One being the project in North Carolina, which we talked about quite extensively, that started in Q3 and it's going to continue into 2026 and likely spill over part of it into 2027. The second was the tunnel grouting project in the Midwest that we started in Q2, we're working on in Q3 and we'll finish this quarter. uh so we we don't see many projects of that size i will say we're seeing more and more projects in the five million dollar size um and i would say in general we're seeing more opportunities for cellular concrete where cellular concrete is spec'd in and we're finding more opportunities where other lightweight products are spec'd in and we're working to actively flip them so from an overall market perspective and kind of consistent with the earlier slide we just see the market for cellular concrete continue to grow and more and more people are getting exposure positively to cellular concrete and seeing the benefits that it can provide in solving their geotechnical challenges. So we're really optimistic about where the business is today, really optimistic about 2026, and really optimistic about the future in general.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Well, that answers the latter part of Russell's long questions or series of questions about your level of optimism. You just addressed that. I think the only thing you might want to touch on here more is with respect to demand, have you seen any specific projects in the pipeline get trimmed back in scale or pushed out?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

We haven't really seen that. I think, and I tried to talk about this earlier, is people always try to get us to draw direct lines between administrative directions or administrative changes at the federal government level. And we never see that. I think you would more see that at the GC level. When we see projects that kind of get to the point where they're engaging subcontractors, those projects generally are green lit and they're moving forward. So I haven't seen anything to indicate that there's any kind of slowdown in infrastructure spending. In fact, what I would say is all the tailwinds point to more money will be spent on infrastructure.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Russell's next question. Can you talk about what you are seeing on the M&A front? In the past, you've noted your first choice would be another cellular concrete player. in the U.S. with complementary products technologies representing Plan B. How has that environment evolved since the August call?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, I would say really there's no change, right? There's nothing's changed there. Our first priority was executing on our commitment this year to deliver a record year. And we really are trying to get the share price fixed to where we're much closer to a fair value because any acquisition we do would be primarily cash. but we would want to have an equity component as part of that. And so until we kind of get the first part of the job done, which is deliver this year and get our equity more fair valued, we're not really engaging in deep conversations with potential targets.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Next question, but not from Russell. Could you please elaborate more on your comment that you mentioned in the press release? And then the quote was, Looking forward into the fourth quarter, we will be very busy in the first six weeks of the fourth quarter and then slowing down in the last six weeks, consistent with the normal seasonality in our business.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

yeah i mean this this feels like a sort of a tricky way to ask me for like more specific guidance on the fourth quarter and as you know grant we just don't do that i would just say the fourth quarter is traditionally our second best quarter and i would expect this this year to be really no different um and and that's always the pattern it's always busy for the first six to eight weeks as october november is a big push to get things done before winter hits And then once winter hits and we hit into the Christmas season, we always slow down. There's exceptions. Sometimes like in 2023, we're really busy over the Christmas season because there was a big push on Trans Mountain Project to get that finished. But generally speaking, that's the that's normal pattern that's that's in our business since, you know, since we started these companies.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

I know this was addressed during the presentation and in some way, but the question is, is any percent of your revenues due to residential business?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Not really. I would say sometimes we might be working on infrastructure related to residential development, whether that's a gas line or a banding in a pipeline or supporting road infrastructure. But we don't do residential work specifically.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Since AI is such a big topic these days, as well as data centers, the question is, do you see any demand coming from data center construction?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, so I've gotten this question probably the last two or three calls. And what I would say is it always depends on the geotechnical situation. So you can't say if there's a billion dollars in data centers, there's X percent that's going to be for cellular concrete. It doesn't work like that. You could build 10 data centers and have no need for cellular concrete. But you could build a data center in a situation where there's weaker unstable soils or it's in an environment where they're worried about lateral load or they've got some annulus to fill or pipes to abandon from an existing site and there could be lots of cellular concrete. So what I would say is I always go back to is just any increased spending and infrastructure sooner or later is going to result in an opportunity for cellular concrete. But it's not going to be like every data center is obviously going to have a huge electrical component. So there's a one-to-one correlation. There's not going to be a one-to-one correlation with data center construction and cellular concrete usage. It doesn't work like that.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

How much of your labor costs are variable?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, we really think about labor costs as fixed. But there's an element of our labor that does fluctuate with revenue. So for example, overtime costs are going to be higher during the peak periods and overtime costs are going to be lower in the slower periods. I think that just makes sense and is common sense. But we spend a lot of time and money training our employees and their experience in the field it really to what Jordan mentioned earlier is one of our key competitive advantages so we don't want a lot of turnover in that team and so as a result even when we're slow we keep those employees employed because if we don't then we can't execute projects successfully in the future and that really gets back to our comment around understanding the margin as well is when you're a specialty contractor When you work, you get a higher margin because when you're working, you're not just paying for that day's labor, you're also paying for all the labor and the bench time. It's a very similar model that you would see in consulting or any other specialty construction business.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Question about the stock and have you considered a reverse stock split or another way to put it is a consolidation of the stock?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, it's funny. You know, I could ask 10 different people for their advice and I would get 10 different answers. And so I believe it or not, there are people that are advocating that we do a stock consolidation. But the vast majority of the experts I talk to don't recommend that. And so we don't anticipate doing that anytime in the near future. It's not something that we're actively considering. It's not something that we're looking at. We're really focused on just running and building a good business. Because again, as I said many times, I know if we do that, the share price will follow. I know it's very frustrating for some of our long-term shareholders myself included, Jordan included. Jordan is the largest shareholder in the company. I'm the third largest shareholder in the company. So believe me when I tell you that we feel your pain when the share price doesn't respond the way we expect it to respond. But we also know that if we do the right things for the business, over time the share price will improve. All you have to do is look at this year. Earlier this year, we were trading at 16 or 17 cents. And even though we've stepped back today on the share price, we're up significantly from that low. We're up significantly from last year when I took over as CEO. And we know that if we continue just to run a good company, grow revenue, be profitable, that share price is going to follow. And it'll probably take longer than we all hope. But it will follow because it will be based on fundamentals. It won't be based on some hype or press release. It will be based on us actually doing a good job for our customers and our customers recognizing that good job and rewarding us with more work in the future. That's how you build a good company.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Next one. What does the pipeline look like today versus this time a year ago?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, I mean, we had a similar question like this, but I would say the pipeline today looks better than it did a year ago. We're seeing more opportunities to bid. We're actively chasing more opportunities. We're investing more in business development so that we're uncovering opportunities we didn't see in the years past. and so our bidding activity is higher this year than it was last year so we remain extremely optimistic and i think you can see that success in our sales results so we've uh we've so far this year sold more revenue added it to backlog than what we've delivered and we're on track for a really good year for revenue so that's that's pretty impressive and i think indicative of what's happening in the marketplace for us

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Question about earnings per share. Maybe MJ, a specific question was what is the EPS for the third quarter? If you have that.

speaker
Marie-Josie Canton
CFO, Sumatrix

I do. The EPS for the third quarter was 0.012 cents. And year to date, we are at 0.015.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

And again, Grant, I would say there's all kinds of fancy metrics that the spreadsheet analysts can come up with, but it always boils down to the same thing. There's certain constants in the numerator and denominator, and we know if we increase the numerator by making more money, all of those metrics are going to improve. So people can ask us about free cash flow, return on capital employed, return on assets. It all boils back down to the same thing. Fix the numerator, and I guarantee you that calculation gets better. And that's what we're focused on. We're going to make more money, and all those metrics that you can dream up or think about are going to get better.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Well, I think the fact you've had a six-point bump in your gross margin is incredibly positive. And the fact you're sitting on almost $10 million in cash and virtually no debt speaks volumes in itself. Do you have an estimated contract size that generates the best return for Symmetrix?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

uh i i don't really because it's very situational right so if if you had a situation where you just had a large fill or a large hole to fill and it's just an open pour literally grant you and me could probably go buy a piece of equipment and run it and and have a good chance of executing that project but if you talk about grouting a tunnel that's underground where you're pumping thousands of thousands of feet then you need specialized equipment and you really need to know what you're doing. And so the margin that we would get is really dependent on the situation, the complexity of the task, who could compete in that area, how far is it from one of our offices. And this is an area that we've really made a lot of strides in in the last five years in terms of trying to get better at recognizing those factors so that we can price that project appropriately. So if it's relatively simple and straightforward, uh but big we know there's going to be a lot of competition on it and we know the margin is going to have to be tight if it's uh very complicated very sophisticated very sensitive we know that's going to rule out many if not all of our competitors and so in that one we can and should demand a higher margin so it it very much is very situational and the answer is it depends okay you do have some major projects underway right now and this individual is just asking for an update on those projects Yeah, no different than Procter & Gamble wouldn't give you an update on crest sales in the U.S. We're not going to provide information on specific projects because we don't want to help our competitors. What I will say is both those projects are going well and kind of as expected from our perspective.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

A couple of questions on share buybacks or the normal course issuer bid. what's the status of that and any plans to continue buying?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

So the status is, you know, we've purchased 700,000 shares all in Q2 related to that, as we've disclosed. The NCIB remains in place. And if in discussions with the board, we think there's an opportunity to buy more shares after looking at the best use of capital, we could potentially do more than that. I personally, this is not necessarily a company's position, but my position, I'm a fan of the NCIB. I think in situations where we think the shares are undervalued, I think it's a good use of capital if we don't have an active acquisition. We will never buy back the maximum. I don't see us deploying that much capital into that, but I do see us hopefully doing more NCIB purchasing in the future.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

With the proliferation of MSE wall construction, have you seen an increase in contracts speccing cellular concrete as backfill material?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yes. No other elaboration. Yes. Yes, we have seen that. And I think you can see that in our numbers. That's part of what's contributing to our growth. We make a lot of sense in that application in terms of ease of construction and often we can be cheaper than EPS. So it makes a lot of sense for us.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Sure where this one came from, but do you feel confident on collecting accounts receivable that is aged over 90 days? Could you share a little color on that?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

100% we do. As we talked about earlier, our customers are almost always the large general contractors that operate in North America. Almost all of them have really good credit. And there's lots of legal security around these projects, whether it's liens, whether it's payment bonds, whether it's holdbacks. So we have very rarely... had any ar related losses when we do it tends to be on a very very small job so we do a five five cubic meter job for randy's pools and randy turns out to be uh you know not a reputable guy so that that's where we run into sometimes occasionally uh an ar issue but we almost never run into it on a very large project because of the protections that are built in the construction industry um

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Another question on buybacks, which you've already addressed. I guess the only other part of it is whether or not those are filed on SETI.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, so there's no requirement to file NCIB purchasing on SETI. We are required to disclose it in our financial statements and our MD&A, which we do every quarter.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

I already know what your answer is, but what does Randy think the fair share price should be at present?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, I don't want to speculate. Just my personal opinion is it should be higher, right? And you can use whatever valuation you want to use, whether it's a discounted cash flow, whether you want to look at peers, whether you want to look at a forward multiple, whether you want to look at a forward multiple of EBITDA. I would say in almost every one of those, you'll come up with a share price that's probably higher than where we're at today. And what I would say is, you know, we're lucky enough to be covered by Russell Stanley out of Beacon, who's a financial analyst who does this for a living. And, you know, I think you could take some guidance from what he's put out there.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Have you heard of other players in the cement industry, cellular industry, such as Martin Marietta Materials or Aztec? Do you compete with them?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

So obviously we've heard of those guys for sure. Some of them will have a project or a product that's similar to cellular concrete. But generally speaking, you know, commodity players struggle in what I would call the more specialized or technical sales. So if you sell cement, you're almost like an order taker. So someone phones you up and they say they want so much cement and you say, here's the price and here's when we'll deliver it. Cellular concrete is a much more complicated sale because you sometimes have to convince people to use it. And you've got to go through the technical qualifications about why it makes sense. So it's a much more complicated sale. So we don't really compete against those guys. Much like we see general contractors trying to self-perform work, you often see cement companies trying to figure out how they're going to make more money or grow their business. And sometimes they'll dip down into specialty construction around cement products. But our experience is they're generally not successful because it's just a different sales process. So I would say we don't compete against those guys.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Interesting one around national defense. Federal government has said it's going to spend up to 2% of GDP on national defense and 5% by 2035, we'll see. But anyways, a significant part of this would be updating defense infrastructure are you seeing or expecting any demand from national defense

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

It's a good question. I'm not sure I've seen anything specifically, but examples I could think of is if, for example, the Canadian military or somebody wanted to upgrade a port, there could be applications for cellular concrete there. We've done some work down in the Houston area around upgrading a port where cellular concrete, again, because of the geotechnical situation, made a lot of sense. So it really is, it's definitely possible. It would have to be like a physical infrastructure as opposed to the equipment for obvious reasons. So I wouldn't expect that to be a big opportunity for us but there could be opportunities that come about for that.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

And this was addressed in the presentation and Randy you've commented further but any growth plans like acquiring any other companies and I believe you said at this point there's nothing on the horizon.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

I'd say there's nothing imminent, Grant. My hope really was that at Q3, the results would come out, the share price would reflect the progress we made, would reflect the commitment that we achieved by having a record year already in Q3. we'd be in a better spot to come to go talk to some of these players more actively. But what I don't want to do is engage in a conversation and not have the ability to complete the conversation. So, you know, we're still kind of waiting to fix the equity. Any acquisition we did because the types of company we're targeting is going to be primarily cash-based, but we would want some kind of equity component as part of that.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

Okay. You've talked about this, but what are the key catalysts investors should keep an eye on in coming quarters? I think you're probably going to say, watch the fundamentals.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, exactly Grant. I mean, when we manage the business, we focus on revenue. How's revenue growing? What are gross margins? What's the bottom line? What's adjusted EBITDA? How is cash flow going? And then we're looking at what investments do we have to make to continue to grow our business or maintain our business? And so the things that we show investors are the same things that we use to track the success of our business. So we really are fundamentally a fundamentals company, right? And I believe strongly that as those fundamentals continue to improve, that's going to get reflected in the share price. You know, one of the things I really like to see is to get less how do I say, more institutionals or more long-term shareholders, long-term shareholders involved. So there are some people who have been in shareholders for a long time and those people are definitely frustrated because many of them have a cost basis that's higher than where we're at. But we need more people that believe in the long-term view of the company and hold and so that we don't have as much trading that happens around announcements or as much emotional selling or buying that happens around the company. I'd really like to get more of our shares in the hands of people that are long-term holders and see the future in the company so we can get some of the volatility out of it.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

With that, we've got a couple more, but they've been addressed already or they've been addressed. We don't have any other questions. Team, any closing comments?

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Yeah, maybe I'll just, I'll let MJ and Jordan do some closing comments and I'll do something right at the end, Grant.

speaker
Jordan Wolf
President, Mix On Site

I don't have much to say other than thank you for the opportunity to present and, you know, we're really looking forward to the future here, not just with Q4, but 2026 and beyond.

speaker
Marie-Josie Canton
CFO, Sumatrix

I echo what you say, Jordan. Pretty excited for the future.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

And I guess I will just kind of pile on there is we're all equally excited. I think as people that are owners of the business and people that run businesses for a living, when we look at where Sumatrix is, we really couldn't be happier. Like we're growing revenue, we're generating cash flow, our customers are happy with us, our employees are happy with us, and we're focused on the same things that our investors are. So I would say just keep on believing. I think the people that stick with Sumatrix and continue to be investors are going to get rewarded over the long term.

speaker
Grant Howard
Moderator / Investor Relations, The Howard Group

The shareholder of 15 years, I keep on believing. So with that, thank you very much to all of those who attended. And thank you to the Sumatrix team. And we'll see you next quarter. Thank you. Thank you, Grant.

speaker
Marie-Josie Canton
CFO, Sumatrix

Thank you.

speaker
Randy Buhmauer
President & CEO, Sumatrix

Bye, guys. Thank you.

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.

-

-