Perimeter Solutions, Inc. Q3 FY2024 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Perimeter Solutions’ third quarter 2024 earnings call. Speaking on today’s call are Haitham Khouri, Chief Executive Officer; and Kyle Sable, Chief Financial Officer. We want to remind anyone who may be listening to a replay of this call that all statements made are as of today, November 12, 2024, and these statements have not been, nor will they be, updated subsequent to today’s call. Also, today’s call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements made today are based on management’s current expectations, assumptions and beliefs about our business and the environment in which we operate, and our actual results may materially differ from those expressed or implied on today’s call. Please review our SEC filings for a more complete discussion of factors that could impact our results. The Company would also like to advise you that during the call, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. The reconciliation of and other information regarding these items can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, both of which will be available on our website and on the SEC’s website. With that, I will turn the call over to Haitham Khouri, Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you for the introduction, Seth, and for your ongoing excellent work on the Spruce step deck. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. I'll begin on Slide 3 with an outline of our strategy. Our objective is to carry out our important mission by offering our customers high-quality products and outstanding service, while achieving returns reminiscent of private equity with the liquidity of the public market. We aim to reach this goal by acquiring top-tier businesses and enhancing their long-term strength and value through consistent improvements in our three key operational value drivers: first, profitable new business; second, ongoing productivity enhancements; and third, appropriately pricing our products and services based on the value they deliver. Alongside these operational drivers, we strive to maximize equity value creation by focusing on how we allocate our capital and manage our capital structure. Slide 4 gives an overview of our three primary product lines: retardants, suppressants, and specialty products, all of which possess highly attractive structural characteristics. Each one plays a crucial role, where failure is not an option. Each is a market leader. Each one serves a particularly challenging and intricate end market with an integrated solution that encompasses product, equipment, and service. Finally, each has a compelling potential for organic or inorganic long-term growth. Before we dive into our strong financial performance for the third quarter and year-to-date, I want to discuss our operational performance. I'll start on Slide 5 with retardants. The retardant market operates at the intersection of extreme importance and complexity. Regarding importance, failures in our industry have serious consequences measured in lives and property. When we deploy an air tanker, we're safeguarding firefighters battling active wildfires or protecting communities at risk from approaching fires, often all at once. The stakes are high, and we must ensure 100% reliability, every time, in every location we operate and for every customer we serve. Slide 6 highlights the distinct challenges we face in fulfilling our mission. We are required to consistently meet exacting service standards in difficult and often harsh environments, characterized by significant variability and unpredictability. Given this unique mix of critical need and complexity, customers around the globe partner with Perimeter Solutions for their life-saving missions. Moving to Slide 7. The reason every significant retardant program worldwide collaborates with Perimeter is due to our unwavering service record. I'd like to share a couple of recent real-world examples illustrating how Perimeter serves our customers and fulfills our mission. In August 2023, the Canadian city of Yellowknife faced a dire wildfire threat, leading to an evacuation order for all 20,000 residents. Yellowknife is remote and is the capital of the Northwest Territories, with only 44,000 total residents. There’s just one two-lane road for evacuations, stretching 680 miles to Alberta, which posed a critical challenge for the Northwest Territories Forest Management division. Keeping this road secure was essential for the evacuation. We were operating in a highly remote area amidst the busiest wildfire season in Canadian history. Nonetheless, Perimeter was ready and responsive. We efficiently provided a continuous supply of retardant to six air tanker bases in the Northwest Territories: Yellowknife, Hay River, Fort Simpson, Fort Smith, Norman Wells, and Inuvik. The Norman Wells base could only be accessed by barge during the summer, but due to low water levels, the barge couldn’t operate. Instead, we airlifted totes of liquid concentrate to keep the base well-supplied throughout the evacuation. The evacuation route was secured, and residents were able to return home within a few weeks. Yellowknife exemplifies Perimeter’s commitment to its mission, demonstrating our capabilities amidst high-stakes and complex scenarios. I could mention numerous similar instances from around the globe, including North America, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Asia. Additionally, I want to highlight an operational example from this current year. The Western U.S. faced significant fire activity in mid-July 2024. All our air tanker bases were operational, but customers sought more resources. In response, we deployed twelve Mobile Retardant Bases across California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. These bases are typically positioned in hard-to-reach areas close to active wildfires to boost firefighting capabilities. We can deploy an MRB in under a day in any suitable location with a water source, offering immediate retardant mixing and loading facilities, as well as dip tanks for helicopter use. Each MRB is staffed with up to ten employees and can stay operational for weeks supporting firefighting efforts. In addition to the twelve MRBs, we deployed ground-applied retardant units, including five to the Coffee Pot Fire in California. We also activated our fixed Channel Islands air base to successfully assist in deploying several C-130 air tankers under the U.S. Air Force’s Modular Airborne Firefighting System program, often referred to as MAFS. This emergency program kicks in when commercial air tankers are fully deployed but additional help is needed, activating the Air Force’s C-130 fleet from our Channel Islands base. The intersection of criticality and complexity we encountered in July was perhaps unparalleled, with over 100 active air bases, a dozen MRBs, numerous ground-applied units, and the MAFS program running from Channel Islands. Yet, as always, Perimeter stepped up to support our customers in their vital missions. Regarding Suppressants on Slide 8, our Suppressants segment shares numerous characteristics with our Retardant business where criticality meets complexity, satisfying customer needs with a comprehensive solution that includes product, equipment, and emergency response. Perimeter has emerged as a clear leader in suppressants, thanks to our groundbreaking R&D in fluorine-free foams and systems. This leadership translates into a remarkable success rate in transitioning customers from fluorinated to fluorine-free systems, boasting around a 99% success rate at FAA 139 compliant airports. Given the typically razor-thin margins of the Suppressants market, where aftermarket foam sales are linked to installed equipment and service, our project success rate is generating a substantial base of customers for future aftermarket sales. We are very proud of the performance of our Suppressants division and their impressive financial results. Slide 9 discusses Specialty Products. This sector also requires us to consistently meet stringent customer and regulatory requirements while providing a comprehensive solution encompassing product, equipment, and service, with Perimeter leading the market with over 50% of all installed OECD capacity. We take pride in our Specialty Products division's operational execution; in 2024, we delivered around 10,000 bins with very few product issues or returns. This low issue rate in a global environment with strict product specifications and complicated logistics illustrates our team’s exceptional performance. Specialty Products’ financial success this year also speaks volumes. Now, moving to Slide 10, we can review Perimeter's adjusted EBITDA history over the past 15 years, highlighting an 18% CAGR during this time. For 2024, we’re using an adjusted EBITDA figure of $259 million as a placeholder. The significant improvement in our adjusted EBITDA over the last two to three years is largely due to rigorously applying our value driver-focused operational model. This is evident when comparing LTM periods to 2020 and 2021, which saw around 36% more and 7% less acreage burned outside Alaska than the LTM period, respectively. Yet, the LTM period achieved approximately 85% to 90% higher adjusted EBITDA than in those years thanks to successfully implementing our operational value drivers. These comparisons clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our operational strategy. As I have continuously stated, our implementation of this operating model is a journey, not merely a destination. We will maintain our momentum and are confident in achieving higher adjusted EBITDA in future years with similar market conditions to the LTM period. I’ll conclude on Slide 11 with a discussion on capital allocation. Enhancing shareholder value through high IRR capital allocation is a fundamental aspect of our strategy. As I have mentioned previously, we plan to utilize all our free cash flow, along with the extra leverage capacity generated from organic EBITDA growth, towards the highest expected IRR opportunities in internal reinvestment, mergers and acquisitions, share repurchases, and special dividends. Our balance sheet comprises more than $200 million in cash, with a net leverage ratio of 1.7 times, and we anticipate 2025 to be another robust year for free cash flow. Our capital allocation priorities are outlined on Slide 11. Our foremost priority is always to reinvest in our business via both OpEx and CapEx to best support our customers' missions while funding high-return profitable new business and productivity initiatives. We anticipate achieving the increased 2024 CapEx budget we set earlier this year. This year will see a record level of reinvestment into our business through higher CapEx and several important OpEx items, including R&D and field service. We will continue this higher investment level. However, we expect to generate significantly more free cash flow and leverage capacity through organic EBITDA growth than we can reinvest internally. Therefore, we will seek opportunities beyond internal reinvestment. Our next capital allocation priority is M&A, as evidenced by the improvements we’ve made in Retardants, Suppressants, and Specialty Products. We believe our value-driver-focused strategy will add significant value when applied to the right business. We are actively exploring targets that meet our economic criteria where we can significantly enhance EBITDA and free cash flow using our operating strategy. We won’t hesitate to pursue opportunities when the right ones arise. Our next priority is share repurchases. During our three years as a public company, we have demonstrated our commitment to Perimeter when attractive market opportunities appear. Lastly, in the unlikely event that we cannot adequately allocate capital toward internal reinvestment, acquisitions, and share repurchases, we may return capital to shareholders through special dividends. With that, I will hand over the call to Kyle.

Thanks, Haitham. I'll kick off on slide 12, where growth figures shown are versus the prior year comparable period. For Fire Safety, third quarter revenue increased 113% to $251.8 million, and year-to-date sales increased 97% to $375.5 million. Fire Safety Q3 adjusted EBITDA rose 181% to $157.5 million contributing to the year-to-date increase of 208% to $212.9 million. The majority of the increase in Fire Safety's Q3 and year-to-date revenue and adjusted EBITDA is attributable to our Retardants business. The year-over-year increases were driven by a combination of end market normalization as the 2024 fire season was significantly closer to normalized severity compared to the 2023 season, as well as the impact of our value driver focused operating model. As Haitham noted, comparing our 2024 results with our 2020 and 2021 results largely isolates and captures the financial impact of our operational value drivers. Our Suppressants business also grew in Q3 and year-to-date as we continue to benefit from the transition to fluorine-free foam where Perimeter is the clear market leader. In our Specialty Products business, Q3 sales increased 50% to $36.6 million helping to drive a year-to-date sales increase of 37% to $99.2 million. Specialty Products adjusted EBITDA grew 137% to $12.9 million, while year-to-date adjusted EBITDA increased 111% to $34.5 million. The market recovery we experienced in the first half of the year continued into the second half, and we're now comfortable that 2023's de-stock activity is behind us and believe that 2024 represents a normalized end market demand year for Specialty Products. On a consolidated basis, Q3 sales increased 102% to $288.4 million and year-to-date sales increased 81% to $474.7 million. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA increased 177% to $170.4 million in the third quarter and increased 189% to $247.4 million in the year-to-date period despite record spending to support our customers in areas such as research and development and field service, which we expect to remain elevated for the foreseeable future as we invest in our capabilities in support of our customers' missions. Moving below adjusted EBITDA, slide 13 shows our long-term assumptions regarding free cash flow, which we define as cash flow from operations less capital expenditures. Q3 interest expense of $10.1 million, depreciation of approximately $2.6 million and amortization expense of $13.8 million were consistent with our long-term assumptions. While cash paid for income tax was $27 million in Q3, we expect our full year cash taxes to more closely reflect the 26% rate assumption. Our cash taxes in any quarter or year often vary due to the timing of payments. Capital expenditures were approximately $3.9 million in Q3, an acceleration in spending consistent with our increased goal of investing $10 million to $15 million of capital expenditures in our business in 2024. Our team drove substantial working capital improvements over the course of 2024, notably on inventory which declined $37.3 million year-to-date in accounts receivable. On ARR, while our sales increased nearly $145.8 million in Q3 2024 versus Q3 2023, our ARR for the comparable periods increased only approximately $25.5 million due to improved collection procedures. We expect that we will generate cash from net working capital in 2024 in contrast to our long-term assumption of consuming cash as the business grows. We will revisit and update as necessary each of our long-term assumptions on our Q4 call. Our free cash flow for the third quarter was approximately $179.1 million. The seasonality of our business limits free cash flow generation early in the year, while Q3 and Q4 tend to be cash generative. Year-to-date, we have generated free cash flow of approximately $185.3 million. Capital allocation for the quarter included our increase in capital expenditures where incremental capital spend is tied primarily to productivity or profitable new business projects with IRRs at or above our long-term return target. The inflection in our LTM EBITDA has both validated our operational value driver strategy and created the necessary financing capacity to fully pursue M&A. Our team is actively searching for targets and after CapEx, we view M&A as the highest return generating use of capital. We repurchased de minimis shares in Q3. Year-to-date, we purchased approximately 3 million shares for approximately $14.4 million. Since our share repurchase program's inception, we've repurchased approximately 14% of the initial share count of the company at IPO at an average price of $5.90, generating a 137% return through last Friday on the approximately $127.4 million deployed. Finally, turning to our corporate structure, we expect to complete the re-domiciliation of our parent company from Luxembourg to Delaware in November. This move will better align our legal structure with our US operations, which generate the majority of our revenue and EBITDA. We expect the transaction to reduce our regulatory and reporting complexity, streamline legal, accounting and cash management and generate an improved tax profile.

Our first question is from Josh Spector with UBS. Please proceed.

Yes, good morning and congrats on the solid results in the quarter here. I wanted to ask kind of where to from here as we think about fire safety. So, I assume given the strength in the fire season, you probably couldn't fill all the orders you had. So, were your volumes maximized and that you sold everything you possibly could? Or how do you think about that relative to the fire season? And then longer term, what would drive higher volumes for you in that business over time?

Yes, hey Josh. Thank you for the questions. This is Haitham by the way. Thanks for the question and very good question. So it depends on the timeframe; there were certainly periods in Q3 where the entire aerial firefighting industry was running at max capacity. One of the best pieces of evidence for that, by the way, is the activation of the Air Force's MAX program which can only happen when all commercial air tankers are accounted for. So, you can't generalize and talk about the 90 days as sort of a monolith, but there were certainly periods where we could have sold more Retardants had there been more industry capacity. Now, on a go-forward basis, there is capacity very consistently being added. A big part of that comes from our partners in private industry, the air tanker companies that are consistently adding capacity to the air tanker fleet. Not only do you have more air tankers, but you have bigger, faster air tankers and therefore, it's quite attractive from the total industry capacity perspective. You have our public customers adding capacity as well. CalFire is very roughly planning to double capacity over the next few years and put the first large air tanker into service in the 2024 fire season. And then you have our own investments. We're working extremely hard to increase our capacity at our air bases. That means adding more loading pits. That means upgrading our equipment so we can load planes faster. That means upgrading lab bases to add VLA capabilities, all sorts of things. So these are all long-term secular processes. You're not going to see a huge inflection in capacity one year to another. But if you look historically, you've seen significant year-over-year growth, consistent and significant year-over-year growth in industry capacity. All the secular investment drivers behind those are intact and we most certainly expect to see that continue going forward.

All right. Thank you. And if I could just ask on the cash deployment side of things. I mean obviously you're pretty clear, you're looking at M&A and other options. But, how do you think about the timing of when you think about a special dividend or doing something else to get leverage back to your target, versus waiting for the right M&A target? So should we expect something either M&A or something to return your leverage to the target range, in the next quarter or so? Or is that more of a longer-term thought process?

More of the latter, Josh. We're going to be patient appropriately, patient with capital allocation. On both sides of the ledger, by the way, right? You saw us optically highly levered a year ago, yet we repurchased $100 million of our stock. You see us clearly under levered today. And if we need to be patient waiting for the right M&A opportunity, we'll do so. Now you can't do that forever. An efficient capital structure is like an efficient SG&A base. It's just a prerequisite to drive shareholder value. It's sloppy to run our capital structure any other way. And therefore, if over the passage of time, we do not believe we can allocate significant capital to internal reinvestment, M&A, and attractive buybacks, certainly, we'll eventually lever up and return capital to shareholders via a special dividend.

Our next question is from Nate Hilton with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Hey, so firstly, congrats on a great quarter. Looking at it now, we're roughly halfway through Q4. And so far, like data on US, ex-Alaska acres burn has been above the historical average trends fairly meaningfully and substantially. And we also appreciate that Perimeter has strategically relocated assets to different regions based on the different fire seasons whether that be the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere. So given those factors, we're hoping that you could comment maybe on whether or not US ex-Alaska wildfire activity quarter-to-date, could potentially drive an increase in Q4 year-over-year fire safety results.

Yes, Nate, you’re new on these calls and so I applaud you for trying, but we are not going to comment on an in-process quarter.

Got you. No, that's all right. Just generally speaking, can you also remind us on which regions Perimeter focuses on outside of the peak US wildfire seasons, and also the general timing of the historical peak severity wildfire seasons in those regions?

Sure. It's very broad. Central America, is a good market for us although the seasonality there tends to run very similar to North America. South America, certain locations within South America have been excellent long-term markets for us and run counter seasonal to North America. So they are just entering their peak wildfire season. Europe, the Middle East, Asia are important; many countries in those markets are very important for us. And then, Australia is a very important market for us. Australia, like South America runs counter seasonal to the US, Europe, and the Middle East in that we're just entering their fire season.

With no further questions in the queue, I would like to hand the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you, operator and thank you to our shareholders for the continued support. We very much appreciate it. We continue to work very hard for you and will speak next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.