Ascent Industries Co. (ACNT) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ascent Industry Company's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Kenny Herring, Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Therese. Good afternoon, everyone. Before we continue, I would like to remind all participants that the discussion today may contain certain forward-looking statements pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on information currently available to us and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. ASCENT advises all of those listening to this call to review the latest 10Q and 10K posted on its website for a summary of these risks and uncertainties. Ascent does not undertake the responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Further, the discussion today may include non-GAAP measures. In accordance with Regulation G, the company has reconciled these amounts back to the closest GAAP-based measurement. These reconciliations can be found in the earnings press release issued earlier today and posted on the investor section of the company's website at www.ascentco.com. Please note that this call is also available for replay via a webcast link that is also posted on the Investor section of the company's website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Brian Kitchen, Ascent's CEO, to discuss third quarter results. Great. Thanks, Kenny, and good afternoon, everyone.

We are encouraged by the progress we saw in the third quarter, not because of any single performance metric, but because the improvement was broad-based. Revenue and adjusted EBITDA improves sequentially. year-over-year and on a trailing 12-month basis. For the past two years, we've focused on strengthening our foundation, optimizing our portfolio, improving efficiency and margins, scaling through commercial execution in our core technologies, and allocating capital to the highest return opportunities. Our strategy has not changed. What is changing is that we are seeing these capabilities produce measurable results. Q3 shows both the progress we have made and the work still ahead. Ryan will discuss the financial results in greater detail, but the headlines are straightforward. In the third quarter, net sales increased 37.8% year-over-year to $27.1 million. Organic sales, excluding the Midwest graphic sales acquisition, grew 26.3%. Adjusted EBITDA rose $2.1 million to $3.5 million. Sequentially, revenue increased 5.7%. Rose profit increased approximately 28.3% to $7.1 million and adjusted EBITDA increased approximately $2.1 million to $3.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded from 5.7% to 13%. We are improving the business and its ability to generate earnings. Through September, net sales increased 28.5% to $72.2 million. Notably, $11.9 million, or 21.2%, of the growth was delivered organically, excluding the impact of the Midwest acquisition. Adjusted EBITDA improved by $3.43 million to $4 million. On a trailing 12-month basis, continuing operations, including Midwest Graphic Sales, generated $91 million of revenue, an increase of $16.7 million, or 22.4% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.86 million compared with $0.02 million in the prior comparable trailing 12-month period. These results should be reviewed in the context of our business's built-in seasonality. Portions of our legacy custom manufacturing portfolio experience normal program turnover in seasonal patterns, particularly in the fourth and the first quarters. We're working to grow out of that seasonality over time, but it remains a near-term characteristic of the business. Customer schedules, product mix, and production timing can shift results between the quarters, making the trailing 12-month view helpful in assessing our broader trajectory. Even with quarter-to-quarter variability from seasonality and program timing, the broader results show that we are building a better business, not simply a bigger one. We've delivered material year-on-year growth in a muted market, with significant contributions coming from new products and processes. Supporting that level of growth takes coordinated work across commercial, technical, quality, and operations, from qualifying raw materials and establishing processes to preparing our systems and people to service our customers reliably. Our priority is to scale efficiently while executing flawlessly. Our Q3 business wins provide another measure of progress. During the quarter week, we converted 12 opportunities across eight customers into approximately $2.8 million of annualized revenue. Nearly half of the revenue came from our focused growth markets, 25% from coatings and 25% from oil and gas. Approximately 84% of that revenue came from sales, and half of the wins came from new customers. Our average win size is also increasing and is now north of $200,000 of annualized revenue. Our seven-and-a-half-month average sales cycle reflects the technical challenges Customers bring us, and the time it's required to develop and validate solutions in the lab, in the plant, and in the field. For the quarter, our conversion rate was approximately 13%, with specialty – within the specialty chemical industry benchmark of 10 to 15%. Our active selling project pipeline ended the quarter at approximately 135 million, near record levels, and nearly 60% higher than one year ago. A strong pipeline creates potential. Discipline conversion into profitable, repeatable earnings creates shareholder value. We are managing SG&A with discipline while preferentially investing in market-facing talent across sales, technical service, and product development to accelerate growth in our focused markets. At the same time, we're aligning operational resources around the highest value opportunities to improve gross profit. Earlier this year, we set a goal of $3 to $5 million of annualized gross profit improvement at run rate by year end, measured against our first quarter 2026 baseline. We remain on track, supported by actions already realized and initiatives in flight. Excluding Midwest, gross profit averaged approximately $5.8 million in the second and the third quarters, as compared with $2.8 million in the first quarter. The improvement reflects discipline pricing and mix management, strategic sourcing, Process R&D, engineering, and network and logistics optimization. We are seeing these efforts translate into operating gains. In Tennessee, process engineers reduced cycle time on a product line from four and a half days to four hours, a 96.3% reduction. In Virginia, they improved yield by 14.7% on a specific process. These are examples of a broader pipeline spanning operations, logistics, quality, process R&D, and commercial initiatives. Our focus is to sustain these gains and build on them to strengthen gross profit and earnings conversion. We are beginning to apply our commercial capabilities and operating discipline beyond our legacy platform. In the third quarter, Midwest secured two new pieces of business. Expected to deliver more than $500,000 of annualized revenue at full run rate. We are also seeing early benefits of Ascent's marketing capabilities. SEO is driving a surge in web inquiries, and trade show preparation has generated dozens of promising prospects. Customers have committed to advancing several selling projects into lab and production-scale trials, and a manufacturing transition into Ascent's network remains on schedule. By combining Midwest application expertise and customer relationships with a sense of marketing capabilities and broader manufacturing network, we are now pursuing opportunities that neither business could access on its own. Before I turn it over to Ryan, I want to leave you with one final thought. Our strategy hasn't changed. We remain focused on improving the quality of our business through stronger commercial capabilities. Greater operational discipline, and disciplined capital allocation. The progress this quarter, sequentially, year-to-date, and across our trailing 12-month performance, shows that the capabilities we have built are translating into measurable results. Our next priority is to convert more of our growth into stronger margins, more consistent cash generation, and higher returns on invested capital. We're not waiting on the market to improve our business. We are improving it through disciplined execution, continuous improvement, and thoughtful capital allocation. That is how we create lasting value for our shareholders. None of this would be possible without the dedication of our employees, the trust of our customers, and the confidence of our shareholders. To each of you, thank you for your continued support. And with that, I'll turn it over to Ryan to review our financial results and capital allocation in greater detail.

Thanks, Brian. The third quarter gives us reasons to be encouraged while also keeping our focus on the work still in front of us. Revenue and earnings improved meaningfully, and importantly, our cash profile improved as well. Our objective now is to make that progress more consistent and durable by converting more of the growth already in the business into margin, cash flow, and returns. Third quarter net sales were $27.1 million, up 37.8% from the prior year. As Brian noted, that growth was broad-based, with strong organic growth in sales excluding the Midwest's graphic sales acquisition, alongside positive contribution from the Midwest. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $3.5 million, or 13 percent of sales, compared with $1.4 million, or 7 percent, a year ago. We also continue to demonstrate SG&A leverage. SG&A declined to $5.3 million, or 19.6 percent of revenue. From 31.7% in the prior year quarter. Over time, we continue to believe a run rate SG&A level around 15% of revenue is achievable as we grow the revenue base, standardize processes, and create additional operating leverage. Turning to gross profit, we generated 7.1 million in the quarter, an increase of 21.9% year-over-year, While gross margin improved approximately 460 basis points sequentially to 26.2 percent. We are pleased with that progression, but we are not viewing one quarter as a finish line. Gross margin remained below the prior year period, driven primarily by higher material costs, even as gross profit dollars increased and conversion costs improved as a percentage of revenue. Pricing and mix have been important contributors to the improvement we have seen. The opportunity from here is to complement that commercial execution with greater benefits from sourcing, process consistency, automation, productivity, and better utilization of our cost structure. As revenue and volumes continue to grow, we have a larger base over which to improve absorption and standardized execution, which should help reduce the impact that customer schedules, production timing, and asset utilization can have on an individual quarter. At the same time, as Brian noted, Normal program turnover and seasonality remain part of the business as we move through year-end and into the first quarter. For that reason, we continue to believe the trailing 12-month view is the clearest way to evaluate the direction of the business through normal quarterly variability. On that basis, continuing operations, including Midwest, generated approximately $91 million of revenue. Up more than 22% year-over-year, while gross profit and adjusted EBITDA improved, and SG&A continued to leverage against the larger revenue base. On a trillion-12-month basis, SG&A declined to approximately 25% of revenue from approximately 31% in the prior year period, an improvement of more than 600 basis points. Adjusted EBITDA increased to approximately 2.9 million from essentially break-even in the prior year period. We believe that progression better reflects the underlying direction of the business and the opportunity to convert a larger revenue base into stronger margins, cash generation, and returns over time. Turning to cash, we ended September with $28.7 million of cash and no borrowings under our revolving credit facility, with $21.1 million of remaining revolver availability. More importantly, operating cash will have turned positive during the quarter. Cash use and operating activities improved from approximately $7.7 million through June to $5.5 million through September, meaning the business generated approximately $2.2 million of operating cash during Q3. That improvement is particularly important when viewed alongside the capital we deliberately deployed earlier in the year. Through September, we used approximately $13.6 million for the Midwest acquisition, $6.9 million for share repurchases, and $2.3 million for capital expenditures. Working capital remained a use of cash, led by receivables as revenue grew, but the operating cash inflection in Q3 is encouraging, and the cash use rate has moderated materially from the first half. Subsequent to quarter end, we received the full $4.55 million Bristol Metals escrow holdback, which is additive to the September 30th cash balance. We remain focused on further improving cash conversion, particularly through inventory discipline, vendor terms, and collections. At our current scale, we continue to estimate that each five-day improvement in the cash conversion cycle could release approximately $1 million to $1.5 million of cash, depending on the mix of improvements. Consistent with the outlook we provided last quarter, the ESCO release brings cash into the low to mid $30 million range before any additional discretionary capital deployment. Together with more than $20 million of available borrowing capacity at September 30th, that supports total liquidity in the low to mid-$50 million range and preserves meaningful flexibility as we move through ERA. That brings me to capital allocation. Our priorities remain the same and, importantly, remain in order. First, liquidity. Second, working capital. Third, internal investments. Fourth, strategic M&A. And fifth, opportunistic share repurchases. The order does not take M&A or buybacks off the table. It means we intend to protect the balance sheet, improve the cash efficiency of the business, and fund the investments in people, process, automation, maintenance, and high-return growth that can strengthen the earnings power of the platform before deploying incremental capital elsewhere. We believe that discipline is particularly important at this stage of the sense development. The third quarter demonstrated the earnings potential of the revenue base we have built and provided an encouraging improvement in cash generation. The work now is to make those results more repeatable, improve the quality of the conversion, and continue building the flexibility to invest when attractive opportunities arise. With that, I'll turn it back to the operator for questions. Thank you.

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and then wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your questions, please press star 11 again. Please stand by where we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Mr. David Siegfried. Your line is open.

Hello, guys. Nice quarter. Thank you for taking my call. Yeah, pleased to see the legacy business having a good quarter and growing. I had a question about the Midwest acquisition. Why was there a negative $200,000 adjusted but a contribution in the quarter from that?

David, that's largely due to the corporate allocation that we burden the business with now. So, if you remove that along with the escrow, that's also carrying on that business. It's roughly break-even. So, that's what's right.

Okay. And then the Midwest Field Trial, has that, how has that, has that advanced toward commercial production?

Yeah, we've actually had several field trials, David, with one, two, three, at least three different customers, and we're progressing each of those projects through the sales cycle. So we're commercial on one of them. We are not commercial on the other two. So the pipeline continues to grow. I mean, we're incredibly pleased with how the pipeline is shaping up. There are opportunities, you know, over the past two weeks that we've gotten our eyes on that we didn't even have access to two months ago. So very pleased with how Midwest acquisition is beginning to shape up.

Got it. Now, I think if I looked at Q2, the pipeline was at 140, and then the Q3 pipeline, I think, was like 135. Conversion rate, 26%, Q2, 13%, and Q3. So, will you just expect a variable conversion rate going forward? You never really know how the customer is going to accept. You know, the formula or whatever that you've been working on?

Yeah, it's largely a function of the mix of the projects that we have in the pipeline at that point in time. I mean, what we're seeing now, if you remember, what, two years ago, the selling project cycle time was much lower than what it is today. And it's expanded or extended largely because of the technical challenges that we're being presented with and the time that it takes to innovate a solution, develop that, put it through our lab, Get it qualified in our customer's lab, then get it qualified in the field, and then take it to full commercial scale. So it's really just a functional mix, not discouraged by it.

Yeah, okay. And then, you know, you talked about the legacy business having seasonality. So, not that I'm asking for guidance, but do you think that you can consistently deliver and generate quarterly profitability going forward?

Yeah, I think from a revenue standpoint, David, I mean, I would look for this Q4 to be better than Q4 of 2025, certainly. From a profitability standpoint, look, I mean, we're still going to have that funky mix that we have built into the existing book of business that we're still trying to grow through. So margins will be compressed without question in the fourth quarter. Ryan, I don't know if I want to add any additional color to that.

No, I mean, I think, yeah, you're going to see until we're able to kind of build the business a little bit differently, you're always going to have that ramp in Q2, that peaks in Q3 with some of the product mix that flow through. And like Brian said, I think we'll see a little compression in earnings in Q4 compared to Q3, but I don't believe what we're seeing today is that it will be less pronounced than it was last year. We do believe, ultimately, that the profile we're building that we've shown in Q3 can be built upon. Right now, we're still seeing that Q3 bump, and then we'll always have that kind of Q4 until we can kind of build the business a little bit.

Got it. And is that a function of just needing to grow the revenue, you know, $30 million a quarter, $35 million a quarter before, you know, you could… Optimize the margins and kind of get rid of the seasonality.

That's part of it, certainly. I think one thing that we're encouraged by, I think, you know, referenced earlier in the script that, you know, we still have work to do. And I think one of the things that I'm encouraged about is just how much improvement runway we have operationally to unlock additional earnings through optimization, things like cycle funds, things like waste elimination, other structural costs. Look, we did a lot in the early days of the transformation, but there's still much more to be done. I mean, look at it through the lens of one of the examples I gave earlier. We had a product at a four-and-a-half-day cycle time, and we were able to take that down to four hours. Now, that might be an extreme example, but nonetheless, there are a number of opportunities that we have across the business to optimize.

Good, yeah. And then, you know, SG&A, so I think you said 19%, this Q3, the goal is 15%. Is that something that can be achieved down to the 15% level, like in 2027 as you grow your top line and optimize? You think you can get there sometime in 2027?

Yeah, I think what we flashed initially was when we're at that kind of 120 to 130 mark, we should be in that 15% range. We're a little bit ahead of the curve right now. Like I mentioned earlier, anytime that we can find incredible sales folks, we're going to go out and we're going to bring them on because that return on that investment is enormous. But I think we're growing into our SG&A. It's exactly what we said we were going to do a couple of years ago. We're not quite where we want to be yet. And we're going to have to go on to it.

Yep. And then, you know, just capital allocation. So it looks like share buybacks are essentially, you know, if you could be opportunistic, obviously, but protect the balance sheet, which is wise. Would you be opportunistic on a acquisition if the right one came along? I mean, is there anything you could talk about on that subject?

Go ahead, Ryan. Sorry.

Yeah, I mean, you could hear we were both aligned there. So yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's kind of what we're focusing on right now. It's working capital, and to win some business, we had to give some terms, and that required a little bit more working capital than we've historically needed for the business. So we're comfortable knowing that that's where it's at in AR right now. So it's really all about protecting the balance sheet and leaving us with optionality. So if the right acquisition comes along, we're always looking and it supports the growth of the business in our targeted markets. We've left ourselves the ability to go do that. So we'll continue to look at that. If this share price provides an opportunity to, we'll be opportunistic there as well. So I think really it's about, you know, focusing on that optionality and looking for internal investments to drive the margin growth through process automation and things like that. It's really, those are kind of the priorities we're looking at.

Got it. Okay. Well, thank you for the nice quarter. Thank you for the time. I appreciate it. Have a good day.

Great. Thanks, David.

Thank you. Our next question is from Eric McCarthy with InLight Capital. Your line is open.

I thank you, guys. And just to echo David, great results. David did. I'm going to address a number of the questions that I had, but maybe just to dig in on them a little bit more. When you quote the sales pipeline number of, I believe it was 112, 120 million, is that to be taken as something that's an annual number that could become recurring in the future?

Yeah, it's an absolute value of the overall selling project pipeline that we've built up. So, you know, the way in which we look at our pipeline, Eric, nothing makes its way into the selling project pipeline unless it's driven by an expressed. customer need. And what does that mean? Well, we don't have projects in there just as fillers. We're not saying, well, we're going to go develop a product and hope that we sell it to, you know, 50 different customers. These are very discreet product-customer combinations where a customer has said, I have a need for X, Y, and Z. Can, in a sense, you help us? So, you know, there's ebbs and flows every month, you know, in and out of the pipeline. But what I'd say right now, I think one of the things that I'm most encouraged about is the quality of the pipeline continues to improve month on month, quarter on quarter. We're starting to see the pipeline really begin to be structured around our focused growth markets versus buckshot. I'm also encouraged to see that our average new win is increasing in size and scale. We're north of $200,000 right now for each new win. So for us, the Sully Project Pipeline, I mean, it's 100 plus projects deep. There's going to be some singles in there, there's going to be some doubles in there, some triples, and then Few and far between, there'll be that, you know, that home run. So, again, encouraged by how that thing is, you know, beginning to be developed and structured by the commercial team.

And then with respect to Midwest and the integration of the acquisition, is there a particular portion of that pipeline that you could allocate to Midwest that shows the benefits of its acquisition and the potential that it still has in front of it?

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a couple of things. So if you look at the overall pipeline itself, over $50 million of the selling project pipeline is structured around Midwest. So those are relatively new entrants that we put into the pipeline post-acquisition. Pipeline size is certainly important, but that conversion is also incredibly important. So, we've already, within this past quarter, we've already won two new pieces of business that will generate over a half a million dollars a year of annualized top-line growth. So, these are good quality pieces of business. So, yeah, very exciting.

Great. Thank you. And then just the last question for So to unpack some of the seasonality in the business, what's the primary driver of that? Is it the industries in which you serve the end customers? Is it some sort of inventory, restock, destock phenomenon? What drives the seasonality across the quarters?

I mean, the primary driver for the outside Q2, Q3 versus Q1, Q4 is built-in seasonality around there's some ag business that we have, a couple, two, three pieces of ag business. That, you know, squarely sit in Q2, Q3. There's also some legacy jet fuel additive business that's inside of Q2, Q3 as well. That coupled with normal Q4 destocking, especially when you're looking at it through the lens of contract manufacturing, those are really the two primary drivers for that built-in seasonality. So our challenge is simple, right? We've got to grow out of it. It's not just grow with size and scale, but it's to find the right pieces of good quality business to put into the mix.

All right. Well, thank you, and keep up the good work.

All right. Appreciate it, Eric.

Thank you for your question. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by for just a moment. We're showing no further questions at this time, so I would now like to turn it back to Brian Kitchen for closing remarks.

All right, great. Thank you, Therese. We'd like to thank everyone for listening to today's call, and we look forward to speaking with you all again when we report our fourth quarter 2026 results.

This does conclude today's conference. You may now disconnect.