Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the BMI Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. I will now hand the conference over to Barbara Noverini, Head of Investor Relations. Barbara, please go ahead.

Thank you for joining the Badger Meter Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. I'm here today with Ken Bockhorst, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Rockledge, our new Executive Vice President of North America Municipal Utility, and Dan Waltseen, our recently appointed Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we made the earnings release and related slide presentation available on our website at investors.badgermeter.com. As a reminder, any forward-looking statements made on this call are subject to various risks and uncertainties, the most important of which are outlined in our news release and SEC filings. On today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics, including certain base metrics. Use of the term base for these purposes is intended to refer to certain financial metrics excluding the smart cover acquisition. Our earnings presentation provides a reconciliation between the most directly comparable GAAP measure and any non-GAAP or base financial measures discussed with that i'll turn the call over to ken thanks barb and thank you all for

joining our call turning to slide three we delivered solid financial results in the fourth quarter capping off another full year of record sales profitability and cash flow we continue to see robust demand for our industry-leading cellular ami solution and the recent addition of smart cover to our blue edge suite of smart water management solutions positions us well for long-term growth across the water cycle. I'm thankful for the dedication and perseverance demonstrated by the entire Badger Meter team during a year marked by global trade uncertainty, an exciting acquisition integration, and many ongoing AMI projects in various stages of deployment. I'll be back to provide a recap of the year and discuss our outlook later in the call, but for now, I'll introduce you to Dan Weltsin. As announced in December, Dan became our new CFO on January 1, 2026, following seven years as Vice President and Controller. Dan, welcome to the Earnings Call. Bob Rockledge is also here today in his new capacity as Executive Vice President, North America Municipal Utility. Bob will join me later in the call to provide more detail about the significant AMI project for PROSA that we mentioned in today's press release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dan to cover the numbers.

Thank you, Ken. I'm truly honored to serve as Badger Meter's Chief Financial Officer. I've benefited personally and professionally from the strong relationships I've had with both Ken and Bob for many years and remain excited by the opportunity we have ahead of us to build upon our long track record of market leadership and success. So let's go ahead and start by reviewing another quarter of solid financial performance. Turning to slide 4, total sales of $221 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 represented an increase of 8% year-over-year or 2% base sales growth. Total utility water product line sales increased year-over-year by 9% or 2% excluding smart cover. As expected, fewer operating days in the fourth quarter and previously communicated project pacing effects resulted in a 6% sequential decline in utility water sales versus the third quarter of 2025. The term project pacing is intended to describe typical variation in activity driven by periodic changes in our active customer base and whether or not we act as prime contractor in what we refer to as turnkey projects. Simply put, the sequential quarterly sales decline between the third and fourth quarters of 2025 has everything to do with the calendar and quarter-specific customer and project mix and very little to do with other influences, such as underlying market conditions, customer demand trends, utility budgets, or the broader funding environment. On the last point, though not all that relevant to metering, recent congressional actions support funding of state revolving funds consistent with historic levels. This should allay some broader water industry funding reduction concerns. Sales for the flow instrumentation product line were flat year-over-year, with modest growth in water-focused end markets, offsetting declines across the array of de-emphasized applications. Turning to profitability, we were very pleased with the year-over-year operating earnings growth of 10%, which outpaced revenue growth. Operating profit margins increased 40 basis points from 19.1% to 19.5%. 5%. Base operating earnings increased 9% year-over-year, expanding base operating profit margins by 140 basis points to 20.5%. Gross margins expanded 180 basis points to 42.1% in the fourth quarter from 40.3% in the prior year quarter. Gross margin continued to benefit from structural mix driven by ultrasonic meters, cellular AMI, water quality, and smart cover sales, which were all above line average profitability. It's also important to mention that the same project pacing effects that impacted utility water sales also benefited margins in the fourth quarter. This is because when we act as prime contractor during certain turnkey projects, sales often include pass-through activities, such as outsourced meter installation labor and ancillary meter pit supplies, which tend to have a lower margin profile. Separately, while we now have largely reached price-cost parity on 2025 tariff and trade-related cost impacts and related price mitigation actions, we do expect global tariff and trade conditions to remain fluid in 2026. In addition, we expect elevated prices of copper and certain other components of our bioloy ingot material cost to be a gross margin headwind in 2026. We factor all of these components, along with other puts and takes, into our normalized gross margin range of 39 to 42 percent and into ongoing and routine price mitigation actions. SEA expenses in the fourth quarter were $49.9 million, with the $6.4 million year-over-year increase driven primarily by the smart cover acquisition. When excluding smart cover related expenses, including $1.6 million of intangible asset amortization, base SEA expenses increased $1.3 million, or 2.9% year-over-year. The year-over-year increase in base SEA expense was mainly driven by higher personnel costs to support normal course growth of the business. The income tax provision in the fourth quarter of 2025 was 24.8 percent versus the prior year's 27.1 percent. Consolidated EPS was $1.14 versus $1.04 in the prior year quarter, representing a 10 percent year-over-year increase. Primary working capital as a percentage of sales at December 31, 2025 was 20.9%, largely consistent with the comparable prior year period. Record quarterly free cash flow of $50.8 million increased by approximately $3.4 million year-over-year. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Ken.

Thanks, Dan. For those of you who followed our story and interacted with Bob over the years, you've certainly experienced the passion and knowledge he has for our business, extending well beyond the traditional CFO focus. Badger Meter will benefit greatly from Bob's business acumen, customer focus, and growth mindset as the leader of our largest line of business. I'm now going to hand it over to Bob so he can talk specifically about the Puerto Rico Sewer Aqueduct Authority, or PRASA, AMI project.

Thanks, Ken. From the CFO's chair, it's been gratifying to be part of more than doubling our top line revenue over the past seven years. In my new role, I'm excited about further expanding our market leadership as cellular AMI technology continues to increasingly be adopted by North American water utilities as the industry standard for AMI. Consistent with our Choice Matters Blue Edge portfolio, we continue to enable our customers to walk up the technology curve at a pace that's right for them. Our blueprint for GOATH begins with cellular AMI as the foundation to real-time insights and analytics and expands through the Blue Edge suite of smart water management solutions, enabling visibility and efficiency throughout the entire water cycle. A very recent example of our success with cellular AMI is the announced award for the PRASA AMI project, which will be one of the largest deployments in the world. An overview of the project is provided on slide 5. This transformative multi-year project will include E-Series ultrasonic meters, Orion Cellular AMI radios, and Beacon SAS across the island of Puerto Rico, representing approximately 1.6 million service connections. Badger Meter's role in the project will be supply only, and we will not assume any prime contractor or installation or ancillary product supply responsibilities. Those activities will be handled by others. We will be utilizing our Racine, Wisconsin facility for production. Over the past year, investors have understandably focused on assessing the installed base of AMI and the remaining AMI adoption potential in North America, along with the underlying customer demand drivers and typical time horizons for AMI projects. To provide color on these factors, let's use the PROSA Award as an example of a large project. PROSA's planning for the project began over five years ago. That planning materialized into a technology pilot in RFP, which Badger Meter, along with its partners, first participated in beginning in 2021. The pilot deployment began in 2023, and the project award occurred in 2025. We expect the process of project to translate into product shipments in 2026, with an initial ramp earlier in the year and more meaningful revenue contributions in the second half of 2026, when project deployment begins as expected to begin in earnest. To be clear, project awards of this nature, PROSA or otherwise, underpin our long-term, high-single-digit outlook over the next five years, and the PROSA project specifically is not additive to that either in a single year or over the long-term horizon. While we don't regularly share customer-specific wins and project awards, we're highlighting PROSA due to its scope and scale to illustrate the drivers behind the uneven project nature of our business and to acknowledge that even today there are many process project variables known and unknown that will influence near-term 2026 revenue contributions the year-to-year project pacing thereafter and the duration of the project deployment explicitly stated for these reasons we will not be sizing the revenue impact of this project on 2026 or more broadly on that note i'll

pass it over to ken for his closing remarks thanks bob i'd like to take a moment to review our full year 2025 performance against a five-year trend line please turn to slide six in 2025 we delivered 11 sales growth surpassing 900 million dollars in revenue this reflects a 17 compounded annual growth rate over the past five years our software revenue which includes smart cover now exceeds 74 million dollars and represents eight percent of sales software revenues largely driven by cellular AMI have grown at a 28% compounded annual growth rate over the past five years. In 2025, operating profit margins expanded 90 basis points to 20%, despite the initially dilutive impact of the smart cover acquisition. Base operating profit margins increased 200 basis points year over year. Over the last five years, both gross margin improvement and SEA leverage contributed to 470 basis points of operating margin expansion. And finally, we continued to manage our working capital intensity and again generated free cash flow in excess of 100% of net earnings. Our clean balance sheet, with more than $225 million of cash on hand, continues to provide significant financial flexibility to reinvest in our business both organically and inorganically. In the third quarter, we increased our dividend for the 33rd consecutive year, and in the fourth quarter, we opportunistically repurchased $15 million in shares when the market price implied an attractive long-term return on capital. Turning to slide seven, I'm proud of what we accomplished in just 11 short months as we integrated Smart Cover into the Badge-O-Meter organization. SmartCover delivered $40 million of sales in 2025, or 25% on an annualized basis. Over this time, SmartCover's profitability improved, driven by both higher sales volumes and focused cost management. We successfully transferred SmartCover's manufacturing operations to our facility in Racine, Wisconsin, and were on track for earnings accretion in 2026 as expected. And finally, I'll conclude with some thoughts on both our near-term and long-term outlook. As we mentioned in our press release this morning, the second half of 2025 included a concentrated mix of concluding AMI turnkey projects, resulting in base revenue growth of 6%, which was lower than our five-year forward outlook. We expect this project pacing dynamic to extend throughout the first half of 2026 until several awarded projects, including PRASA, begin multi-year turnkey deployments. We'd like to remind investors that it is not unusual to experience certain quarters or even whole years that are above or below our expectation of high single-digit sales growth over a five-year forward period. Quarter-to-quarter variation in project pacing is typical in our industry and attempting to precisely time it can cause those who follow us to miss the big picture. Our products and solutions support critical elements of the water infrastructure and the long-term secular trends impacting the water industry will continue to influence our customers to plan for better resiliency. We are actively involved in enabling that change. For example, we created the market for cellular AMI against an incumbent technology and have since demonstrated success at gaining share. via acquisition and internal development we've expanded our opportunity set to include solutions across the entire water cycle long enduring secular trends support demand for smart water management solutions when speaking directly with our customers we have not seen meaningful evidence that real or perceived federal funding constraints will impact our ability to generate high single digit sales growth operating profit margin expansion and free cash flow conversion in excess of earnings over a five-year forward time horizon. In summary, I'm proud of our performance in 2025, look forward to what's ahead in 2026, and see great opportunity for the execution of our long-term strategy to compound value for both our customers and shareholders. With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Robert Mason with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. And congratulations, Bob and Dan, on your new roles. Ken, just, you know, to touch on, you know, the topic around the, you know, the timing of projects, understandable that, you know, it's not going to be always an even flow there, but I'm just curious, did we see the full impact of the conclusion of those projects in 4Q? Just trying to think about maybe, you know, we'd normally see a sequential, you know, rise in the number of operating days in the first quarter, you know, how that dynamic may play into the, you know, the first part of 2026.

Yeah, so first off, Rob, there's several projects that can be at play at any given time, some large, some medium, some small. So it's hard to really nail down exactly that point. But if I could take just a little look back to some of the earlier calls, If you recall in Q2 of the year, we talked about project pacing and timing and some of those issues that we thought we might see in the second half. And then additionally, we talked about the fewer working days that you start to see in Q4. So it isn't unexpected to us that the second half of the year was a lower growth than the first half. So nothing specific on any individual project, but just the nature of the business that can be uneven from time to time.

But fair enough. I guess, you know, did we, I guess, did more of those conclude in the third quarter versus the fourth quarter? You know, if we're looking at another step down as those, you know, have now fully concluded.

Yeah, so what I would think about if you look at 2025 and how it played out in 2026 and how we see it happening, You know, the first half started out with a higher growth rate The second half of the year with a lower growth rate I think the way we see 26 is a lower growth rate in the first half And a higher growth rate in the second half And that's something that is driven by the confidence that we have in projects that are in flight Awarded projects that haven't yet started So we have visibility to some of those projects And we do see how they're layering out in the year

Your next question comes from the line of Nathan Jones with Stiefel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. I guess I'll start. I know you don't want to talk about the size of this Puerto Rico project. So maybe I'll ask another question that you have answered previously. I think, Ken, you've said over the years that the size of the U.S. market is about 6 million meters per year. and Badger's share is roughly about 30%. Are those numbers still accurate for what the size of the overall U.S. market is?

Yeah, give or take. You know, 85% of the market every year is replacement. It's roughly in that space, yeah.

Okay, so Badger ships give or take 2 million meters a year. So Badger ships about, you know, give or take 2 million meters a year is the rough way that would break down for what the overall U.S. market is.

Yeah, it's not far off. Again, the indicated general volume that you alluded to flexes year-to-year. It's probably a little bit higher than $6 million. That reference figure is dated. But at the same time, the share element that you mentioned is still relevant.

Got it. I'm just trying to give people a general sense for, you know, how big a project, 1.6 million connections used for budget beta, even every three to five-year period.

Yeah, and Nathan, one thing is, you know, Now, the reason we mentioned PRASA is because, as you know, we don't get into the habit of announcing projects because there's so many. But obviously, this one is pretty meaningful in size, as you point out. And to just give it some reference, and the reason we're talking about it more publicly, is we never announced the win in the project that we did recently complete in Orlando. So everyone's aware Orlando is a pretty large city. to put it in scope and scale, the PRASA award is the equivalent to eight Orlandos.

That's extremely helpful. My next question is going to be around gross margins. Obviously, gross margins are very strong. There's probably a few headwinds as we go through the year. I mean, second half of 26, you're talking about some more term-key projects, which will be headwinds to gross margins. You've obviously seen a big spike in copper prices that will come through your business on a delay, but the first half is, you know, as you said, it's going to have an absence of some of these turnkey projects, which is a tailwind for margins. Any help you can give us with how we should think about, you know, first half, first second half gross margins in terms of that mix or how we should think about the full year for gross margins, given you are at the very high end of the gross margin target range in 2025.

Yeah, Nathan, this is Dan. I think a couple things to point out. I think as we think about it quarter to quarter, there's nothing that we would specifically point to to say there's going to be variability from quarter to quarter. But I think you're thinking about the right topics being we continue to see structural mix impacting margins in a positive way in 2026. And I think you highlighted a couple of the areas that we're continuing to watch, which are the commodity input costs into our ingot recipe. And then certainly tariffs is, you know, something that we continue to monitor. We've gotten to price cost parity on tariffs in 2025, and we'll continue to manage whatever comes our way in 2026 from that perspective.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Rive with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for all the color thus far. I have another one on the Puerto Rico project. I mean, this is a really sizable win. Can you walk us through the typical timing and phasing of a large AMI project like this? How do the deployments ramp? Are they smoother, chunky? How much is in, you know, year one, two versus three, four, five, just over the life?

Andrew, that's a fantastic question. And I would say you're a straight man for why we don't provide guidance from quarter to quarter. You know, the project ramp-ups, oftentimes, you know, there's a plan. There's so much that goes into an AMI project in terms of going through all the budget cycling and then having to align all the resources because you need people out on the street doing installations. And then you might have weather factors from quarter to quarter. So it's not as smooth as people might think that it would be to do a large deployment, And whether that's something the size of Puerto Rico or something the size of a, you know, medium town anywhere in the United States. So typically people look at these things and they expect them to be done over a five-year period. If everything goes really smoothly, it could potentially go faster. If you have issues, it could go longer. But there's no real blueprint. But generally we're thinking of this over a five-year horizon for PRASA.

Got it. And I think you said in the prepared remarks, meters are being manufactured in Racine, not your Mexico facility. Is there a margin differential happening there?

Yeah, I mean, I think you can imply just from, you know, labor cost differential there would be a potential margin impact. Of course, that was all contemplated in the contracting stage. And so ultimately the location of manufacturer is being driven by U.S.-made manufacturing requirements. So that's part of the reason why we made an investment in that facility and continue to invest there. That's what dictates where it's made, and we understand that cost footprint, and we're able to engage and embed that, if you will, into the RFP process.

Yeah, and I'm sure I'm jumping the route here on anticipating the margin question on the project, which of course we won't uh which we won't disclose but you know since we're not since it's not full turnkey and there's a whole lot of different factors in here but this is one where i think we've struck a really good value proposition where process sees their value and what we're offering and they're happy to buy it and we're happy to sell it at the margin it's

going for your next question comes from the line of andrew krill with deutsche bank your line is

open. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks. Good morning, everyone. So, I want to go back to the outlook for sales. One of your competitors yesterday suggested, you know, their revenue could be slightly to modestly down year over year. I think you used the word growth rate for this year. So, I just wanted to confirm, you know, I think that would, you know, you feel pretty confident sales should grow this year even if they're below that five single digits through the cycle target yeah

so so real quick I know people really enjoy the read-throughs and and trying to do the comparisons and see how things will work first of all there could be inherent unevenness in their business that's different than the mix of customers that we have that that is hard to do just to begin with industry-wide secondly the particular competitor you're talking about I think we have several differences that have been that have been built over the last several years you know we have an industry leading ami offering that has several in-flight projects and awarded not started projects informing our view we've got a really exciting software business at eight percent of our revenue now that's a hundred percent recurring we're really excited about what's happening with sewer line monitoring and water quality monitoring and network monitoring and these are things that I believe the competitor you're talking about doesn't have. So the read-through that people are getting, I would say, isn't the same. So when we look at all those factors that we're talking about, again, I would think you should view 26 as the inverse effect of 25 like I talked about before. But we feel confident given what we're seeing. And, you know, our conviction on high single digits through the five-year horizon is as strong today as it was yesterday as it was three months, six months, or 12 months ago based on all the same factors we use to think about that five-year horizon. You know, but some years – and one thing, not to follow it all up here on this question, but everyone who's talked to us before, you know, we've never pegged and said every single year is going to be 8%. We've said some years might be 12, some years might be five. We just came off a six that I'm pretty proud of, and I think this next year is going to be exciting, and our five-year conviction is as strong as it's ever been.

Great. Very helpful. And then a quick one on pricing, and, you know, you don't disclose that exactly, but just can you remind us, has it been primarily or all list price increases thus far to deal with tariffs mostly, or have you been using surcharges as well? And in the event, you know, tariffs were ruled illegal. Like, do you expect you can hold on to this price looking for it and any conversations with customers, you know, looking for kind of some discounts at this point?

Yeah, so in our pricing, keeping in mind 75% of our revenue is sold direct. And so when we're in a constant state of doing, you know, project pricing based on real-time outputs. So that helps us in some ways. Two, yeah, we do list price increases. What we didn't do was, you know, temporary tariff add-ons or tariff issues that could be challenged in court or could be reversed once a customer says tariffs are gone or could be demanded back because tariffs have been rolled back. So ours is pretty clean, I think, compared how other people have handled the pricing aspects of tariffs your next question comes from the line

of james cole with jeffries your line is open please go ahead uh good morning uh thanks for

taking questions uh i guess i wanted to kind of follow up on the project pacing dynamic here so what was this like dynamic kind of extending into first half 2026 expected or is this something new kind of developed and kind of how much confidence do you have in kind of project converting into revenue in second half 2026 yeah there can always

be some variability so in full disclosure some of the projects that are starting in the second half we thought would have started in the first half so so things can slide sometimes from a quarter or two out this is why we talk so much about the five-year horizon I'm absolutely confident all those things are going to happen within the five year I'm confident what's going to happen in the year but trying to peg it from quarter to quarter can be can be difficult i just want to

clarify too that when ken says a project slides you know to the right for example it's not related to funding uh each one of these projects is different every customer is different there's contracting phases there's initial deployment areas there's full full rollout so there's multiple steps to these projects and and everyone is different and that's the largest impact to the

time in of them I think the point that I would that I would like to maybe emphasize here is that these aren't hoping for backlog increases these aren't hoping for things to happen these are known awarded not started projects that even if they have some variability and where they move they're in our pocket

got it yeah thanks for the caller and I guess similar questions are you kind of reiterated high single-digit kind of organic growth over the four or five year horizon so like how much of that outlook is kind of supported by awarded but not executed project versus kind of broader the funeral opportunities well

so it's a great question I mean this is how we you know when we think about our five-year view and what we've talked about you know in several several meetings is you know we're looking at you know several segmentations of how many people are looking working with consultants and working on budget which which are items that turn into revenue three, four, and five years out. We've got the whole bucket of things that are in RFP today that become revenue in the next year to two. Then we've got in-flight projects. We've got awarded, not started projects. So it's this whole funnel of activity that we look at. But what underpins it all that's really helpful for us is we're confident that no matter what happens with these project cycles, 85% of what we're going to take orders and ship for every year are replacement by nature in terms of meters and radios. So the project stuff is all very interesting, but the bottom line is very strong. And then, of course, the software continues to grow the last five years at a 28% CAGR. So it's a multivariable equation and one that we feel good about how those come together.

Your next question comes from the line of Bobby Zopla with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. It looks like there's about $1 billion of metering projects in the ARPA data, which all needs to be spent by the end of 2026. How have you reflected that in your 2026 commentary?

So we haven't. I mean, so when we sit here and we talk about what's fueled our growth for the last five or six years, It's really informed by the buckets I just walked you through. And when we look at who's planning for projects, who's actually doing our piece for projects, what we have in known projects, there's so many ways that funding is done, especially around the AMI side, whether that be SRFs, SWIFIA loans, rate base increases, municipal bonds. That is one factor, you're right, but it certainly is not an outsized consideration for us at all

when we think about our forecast i'd also be cautious about taking something that's listed in an arpa database with reference to the word meeting metering and assuming that that whole total of money is related to metering it's oftentimes considerably larger than the actual metering spend so a headline grabbing number or question like that is not necessarily indicative of the true metering content on those line items all right i appreciate it and then i have a two

part question on the process project I guess one how is process funding that project and then secondarily what is the legal status of that project yeah the

first part of that question shouldn't surprise anyone part of the project purpose and intent is in response to Hurricane Maria which took place in 2017 so over eight years ago and so the funding of that project in part is coming from FEMA dollars. And so that is a FEMA funded project which ultimately drives the Buy American requirement I mentioned earlier, which then drives our location of manufacture. In our, to the second part of your question, in our, first of all, we don't comment certainly on litigation of ourselves or and or the legal status, if you will, of even our customers or potential customers. But in the direct sense, in our comments area, we mentioned there's a lot of variables related this project and certainly those variables could impact the pace at which the project gets deployed whether it be here in the immediate term of 2026 or thereafter and so I'm not making that statement generally not specific to your legal question but ultimately there are a lot of variables at play but what is known is the award and our participation in that award your next question comes from the

line of Scott Graham with Seaport Research Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. I want to understand a little bit more, Ken, about some of your statements in the press release and then follow up on the call here about the first half versus second half. It seemed in the press release to suggest that your second-half growth was slower than your high single-digit long-term and that that decrement was either because of the roll-off projects, as you've discussed, and the days in the fourth quarter, and that the first half of this year will essentially be the same, you know, the roll-off of the projects. Does that suggest, Ken, that the organic growth that you're expecting in the first half of the year will be the same amount lower on a percent basis as the second half was versus the high single?

so uh scott uh as you i'm sure expect we're not going to get that granular with you but when i when i mentioned previously that i think you'll see 2026 play out in a similar fashion except the inverse of how 2025 did i would just expect a lower growth rate in the first half of the year and a higher growth rate in the second half of the year i had to try okay so um you know

So, the stock is obviously seems to not be reflecting what you're saying in this call. And I'm just wondering, you know, you've been buying back some stock the last couple quarters. Is the plan here with that, you know, the stock where it is, is there an opportunity to maybe restrain some costs from the first half of the year to boost earnings, or will we continue to see share repurchases to boost earnings or both?

Yeah, so a couple things. So first off, you know, obviously with our great balance sheet, we still feel 100% positive about our capital allocation priorities. So we're going to continue to invest organically and inorganically in the business. So what that means is we'll do the right things to continue to drive long-term strategy and growth. So we would never do any short-sighted, cost-cutting type things to try to short-circuit a result. So we're going to continue to invest in the business. Two, returning cash to shareholders. That's traditionally for us been, you know, 33rd consecutive year of increased dividends. We did buy some shares back in Q4, as we talked about, And certainly we have the authorization to purchase more, and, you know, if we thought it was attractive in Q4, I'm not, you know, forecasting anything for you, but I would think you'd think we'd think it's attractive now too to repurchase shares. And then on the M&A funnel, you know, we're really, really thrilled with the deals that we've done over the last five years, and we continue to have a really exciting funnel. So the capital allocation priorities are still going to be aligned to support growth, return value to shareholders, and do more M&A.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Fairbanks with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking our questions. My first question is on SmartCover. So I was up 25% annualized and profitable in 4Q. I guess now that the integration is 12 months in, can you just give us an update on what you now see as the potential in that business and how we should think about the growth algorithm there going forward?

Yeah, you cut out there a little bit, but I think what you asked was we saw 25% growth in Smart Cover, and you're asking how we see the future of sewer line monitoring growth rates. So the thing that we were excited about Smart Cover to begin with is that, you know, before we acquired it, it was growing at a 20% CAGR for multiple years. So that's the first point. Second point is we're still so early in adoption of sewer line monitoring that there's still so much more room to grow, which is why we really wanted to get into that space. And acquiring a known brand like Smart Cover, the leader in North America, was really important to us. So we fully, fully expect to continue to grow our sewer line monitoring at a higher rate than average.

Great. Thank you. And then on Prasa, can you maybe just talk about how you could use essentially an AMI deployment like that to expand the reach of the other offerings in the portfolio, just in the BlueEdge portfolio broadly? Thank you.

Yeah, and in fact, the answer doesn't even need to be Prasa-specific. I think we have multiple examples where AMI adoption by a utility ultimately serves as the catalyst to the extension of other beyond the meter technologies. Essentially AMI becomes an implementation that in many cases a utility grows into having data availability and the insights and analytics to influence how they run primarily their meter billing operations but then having cascading effects into the remainder of the utility. And once that kind of capability or core discipline is in place, it then becomes very clear that marrying up that meter and flow data with other pressure management and or water quality data becomes a very valuable value proposition, if you will. And so whether it's PRASA or any other AMI customers of ours, that's oftentimes the foundation or the springboard to the broader beyond the meter technologies. We often talk about Galveston. We've talked about Galveston historically over time, but that is the exact scenario that played out there. AMI was the first technology adoption, and then other use cases followed in short order as data and analytics became a primary point of emphasis with the utility.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now pass the call back to Barbara for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Badger Meter's first quarter 2026 earnings release is tentatively scheduled for April 16, 2026. In addition, please save the date for Badger Meter's Inaugural Investor Day, which will be held on May 21st in New York City. During the event, we will provide greater color and tangible examples of the evolution of our Blue Edge portfolio, along with the discussion of the key drivers enabling growth of our comprehensive suite of smart water management solutions. Information about how to attend and what more to expect will be available in early March. Thanks for your interest in Badger Meter and have a great day.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.