Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming. I would like to introduce Ramesh Nuggihalli, President and CEO of Fuel Tech. Good afternoon, everyone. I will just start off with a very small introduction, and then I am going to go through the rest of the presentation. That is the actual picture of mine, taken two years ago. Nothing has changed since then. Just my background. I started my career in Canada working for industrial companies and power companies. Went very deep into the energy sector, working for companies like Babcock & Wilcox and General Electric. I have kind of seen all aspect of the power industry, all sectors of the environmental sector as well. Once I got my business degree, I joined GE Energy, which is GE Vernova today, in the mergers and strategy group. Spent several years going very deep on the strategy and M&A growth. I took that game to AMETEK, which is a highly acquisitive industrial company. Spent a few years at Tyco doing the same commercial role. Then I got my first break to go run at P&L in Middle East. I was based in Dubai for four years, serving oil and gas petrochemical plants. After that, briefly, I took a role at Xylem as well. I was based in Singapore for four years in the water sector. My last role at CECO Environmental, I came in as an outside advisor and support the board of directors and the CEO of the company and helped them put together a enterprise strategy and an M&A playbook. The board asked me to join the company, to go run the company for them and implement the strategies that we put on a piece of paper. Started the journey, and around the time the stock price was around $5, and four years later, we were $35+. Company went from $300 million to $600 million. It was all about transformation and value creation at a public company at the speed of a private equity company. When I got a call to join Fuel Tech, I kind of knew the company, and what I saw was a company which had a highly diversified portfolio of product and services catering to more than several vertical markets. I kind of looked at it as a diamond in the rough. I was hoping to come and do the same thing that was able to replicate not only at CECO Environmental but different sizes of company. The one big mandate for me from the board is one word, that is growth. That is what the board is expecting from me, and I am all energized and thrilled to go do that at this company. When we talk about Fuel Tech simplistically, we look at this company along three vertical markets. We have the air pollution controls market, which caters to all the pollutant that comes out of the industrial sector that needs to be cleaned. That is a long cycle business. It is a project business for us. The second one is chemical technologies, which is an annuity-based high margin business. That is a short cycle business for us. Finally, we have an emerging water technology business where it is still in the preliminary stages of introducing a product. That combination of having the long cycle, the mid cycle, and the system business bodes well for us. Irrespective of how the economy is going to play out for us, this is certainly going to help us to continue the trajectory of growth and profitability. We have been around for 40 years. We play in 37 some odd countries. For a company of our size, we are global. We have a set of talented team. Let me touch upon the financials as well. This year, for the first time in a long time, we are going to be ending the year with a big backlog. We still are bidding, we still have several months left in the year. We are hoping that we could add some more so that backlog is going to look north of where we are today. Revenue-wise, we are certainly going to be north of $26.5 million. That's what was reported last year, where it's a project business. We are looking at how we are going to complete some of the project recognition so that in Q4, very soon, we feel that the revenue is also going to be ticking high towards the end of the year. So investment thesis. Let me hit upon a couple of bullets here, just to see how our company is going to play in all these end markets, which are pretty rich today. First and the foremost thing, we have the broadest suites of product and technologies, and we also have a service business. We cater to the power market, the industrial, which is the paper and pulp, the chemical, the process industry, and we have a presence in the secular water industry as well. That's a good thing, depending on how the economy plays out. More than anything else, our business model is, I kind of say that we are a house of engineering and we are a house of products. We have a bunch of product, we have a bunch of engineering, and combined with the supply chain that we have built over the year, this is going to help us to keep the low-cost structure that we have. But our ability to scale certainly increases because the constraint is not on the front end. The constraint for the industry is on the back end. As we are building this partnership, and some of our partners in the manufacturing and supply chain, they have been with us for more than 10 years, and that's a good thing, by the way. They are exclusively supporting us. If we get the project, we have a supply chain aligned with that. We talked about the strong balance sheet that we have, and the mandate, again, for us is to continue the growth, starting with reinforcing the core business and deploying the capital the most appropriate way. I am going to be touching on it in the coming slides. Not to go through the history, but we do have a long history. What fascinates me is, for a company of our size and sophistication, we had north of 100 patents a while back. Today we still have 32 patents that the company owns. We were one of the first companies to get the technology from EPRI in the '70s for all the pollution control equipment. The goal for us is to take all this history that we have today and focus it on the right end market, so that we can commercially be savvy enough to take all these technologies, put a commercial offering, and continue the growth trajectory. We did talk about some of the end markets that we play in today. Our core end market is still in the energy sector, the power and the oil and gas. If you look at the demand characteristics of the power today, just to sustain the GDP growth of the country, at least for the foreseeable future, we see a huge demand in the power. If you sit today, if you look at any of the gas turbine manufacturer, their order book is completely full until 2031. And they are taking orders for then in 2035. If the richness of the power industry is great and we play a huge role in that. If the chemical and the petrochemical and the process industry, anything that we do on the power side is transferable to some of these end markets. Because there you see the combustion, you see the pollutants coming out, you have water in there. Some of the product and technologies and the services franchise that we have is applicable to that as well. And finally, the water. We are slowly getting into the water side. And if we have this proven technology prove itself, that opens up as well in the water and wastewater side, which is probably 5x of what we are catering today, which is in the aquaculture industry. The next few slide, I am going to briefly touch upon the three segments that we have today, starting with the air pollution control. End of the day, simplistically, whatever the exhaust that comes out of the gas turbine or a recip engine or whether the aeroderivative engine, they have pollutants. And our products and our technologies removes 90% of the pollutants. And you can simplistically think in terms of the dust particles that comes through or the SOx and the NOx, these are sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and CO, pretty bad for the environment. We clean that up. And that is essential and that is good because that can be transferable to the industrial side as well. Today, we do not touch upon those. We are still predominantly on the power side. We have a funnel. We are working through a funnel up close to $150+ million. Part of the commercial excellence I am going to be talking about in the value creation is to keep expanding that funnel. Today, it is good, and we already booked close to $15 million in backlog. We may see another $5 million-$7 million by end of the quarter. But the funnel is so big, depending on how the customer wants to close the project, our backlog and booking profile going into next year is going to look really good for us. Again, I do not need to go through this chart. We found this study from McKinsey, and basically, essentially the power market is going to continue to grow. There is a lot of news on the data center, and I do not think it is like reading the tea leaves. Depending on what newspaper you see, either it is a bad news or it is a good news. But take a step back. These thing, the data center that we cater to is not AI. It is a data center. Data centers are used for multiple reasons. The power island, the captive power island we service, it all goes to the data center. Irrespective which way this is going to play out, even if 30% of the data centers are not going to get built, there is still going to be a lot of business for us. This article is saying 7x. I will take 3x. We don't need 7x. The momentum in the power sector is going to play good for us going forward. Again, not to belabor this, but simplistically, this is what our technology does. On the bottom right-hand side, there is the flow of the exhaust that comes through with all the pollutant, and it goes through our systems and out comes the emission, which is all cleaned up. Where we differentiate is in modeling all this in-house. We have a bunch of engineers, a bunch of PhDs. For a company of our size, we are just 80 employees. We've got 35 - 50 people with advanced degrees. We have five PhDs cranking away on this model. Why is that so important for us? If you look at some of the other companies, everything is outsourced engineering. What's happening in all the data center is there's a horse trading going on. Depending on the week, they're changing the systems left and right because there is not too many turbines available there. This is where we come in and we are able to respond back to the customer fast. There's a lot of conversation going on, week in, monthly. That gives me hope. The timing of the projects I don't dictate and we don't dictate. What we do feel good about it is the customers are talking to us every week. That gives me hope. That gives the permission for us to continue to talk to them so that we can pull in a couple of this project before end of the year. This is another pictorial view of how it looks like behind the gas turbine. It looks like a big box. But that's where the magic happens, where we take all the pollutants, and we've been doing this for such a long time. So we have the right to honor that business. When customers are going from the heavy duty gas turbine to other forms of energy because all the gas turbines are solidly booked, this is where we come into play. This is where we want to earn our business, and this is where we want to deploy all the commercial resources so that we continue to take this slice of the market and gain market share. Then I'm going to go into the next one, which is our chemical technologies. Again, this is a business that goes back to the earlier days of Fuel Tech where we have our own formulation of chemical technologies, which allows to improve the efficiency of combustion. People talk about this technology as if it only applies to coal. No. Wherever there is a burner, wherever the burner is used in a boiler system where there's slagging, our technology improves the efficiency. Not many people know the ROI on a big unit, whether it is a paper and pulp, whether it is a steel mill, whether it is a coal-fired plant. If you improve the efficiency by 1%, the output for them is incredible. For us, this is an annual typical. This is our SaaS model. We sell chemical as a SaaS model, and if we just incrementally with one or two of the customer, what it does to our income statement is just incredible. This is where I get excited when I see where else can we take this, what else can we do? Because paper and pulp, steel mills, cement mills, untapped territory for us. Again, coming back to our commercial model, how do we take all this savvy engineering bench strength and take them commercial to different marketplaces? Water. The water story is also very similar. We have two patented technology that caters to the aquaculture and very soon, we have been doing some pilot and for 100 reasons our team picked aquaculture. They could have picked wastewater, they could have picked us mine water management, they could have picked polymer, but we picked aquaculture. Not the most easiest industry to get in, but we are there. But we need to prove the proof of concept here. If we do, this is another one, unlike the previous one, we can take into the other markets that we do not play today. We have patented technology, and we can partner with other people, and I am hoping, we will keep the fingers crossed. We have a couple of pilots going, and once we commercialize this is another one that is going to help us continue to grow. Look, here are the four levers as the growth leader coming into the company. I have spent three weeks. I probably had 30 some odd one-on-one calls, and I am thinking, I said, "Wow." I said, "There are things we can do." These things are not rocket science. We are a smaller company. To scale a company of our size compared to a few billion-dollar company should be relatively easy, you would think. But I am also playing with a set of people and a set of resources that I need to effectively use to focus them on two or three things, not 10 things. When you look at private equities, when they get into companies, they do not implement 10 things. They pick the lever on two or three things, and these are the four levers that I am working on with three weeks of experience. So give me a break there, okay? The first tranche, we have a great business. We got to strengthen our business. We have runway. It is not like we have 90% market share in any of the things that we play in today. Incrementally, it should not take us too long or too effortful to get penetration in our core market, and that is where at least the initial tranche of my strength and my experiences and the focus for the team is going to be on the first lever. The second one is we got to accelerate growth. Whether it is talking to the OEMs that we do not talk today. We have been comfortable with one or two, but there are three or four still available for us. How do you go get that? Or how do other companies go build that momentum in business development or commercial development or project pursuit, which converts it into a booking is where the resources and support is going to go from my side. Deploying the balance sheet on M&A. To do that, you need to start formulating a strategy, and once you get the strategy, you got to start building your adjacent marketplace. Once you find the adjacent marketplace, we as a micro-cap company, compared to the big guys, it's a guerrilla warfare. We are much more effective to win those games. The big boys are not going to compete with where I compete. I don't need $50 million-$100 million deals. I need a $2 million EBITDA company that's going to fill a product gap or a channel gap, and that's going to significantly improve the P&L for us. That's something that we are actively looking for. Driving operational excellence. We're a house of engineers. Engineers love creating something new every day. One of the things, I'm an engineer too, so I have my policies, but somewhere I transition to become a business guy. Customization to standardization. When you do customization and the customers are not willing to pay for customization, don't do. Standardization is what you do. You can standardize 10 of the customization and you can start to get leverage and the speed at which you deliver to the marketplace increases, the margin profile increases, and your product profile increases. We're going to go start doing that in our company. Lastly is deploying the capital, not just on the money side. That's the easy part. We got cash sitting there, clean balance sheet. We're going to go figure that out. We're going to find the companies. We're going to do it. Equally important organically, getting the commercial excellence that we're going to go tap on the new end markets, go tap in the OEM markets, go tap in some of the projects. That doesn't mean we're going to increase our SG&A cost. That is not the model for us. The model for us is to the people that I used to work in the past to bring in advisor, no different than how a private equity brings in a couple of operating managers and operating directors, parachutes them, and gets the engine going. That's our model for us. That's my team. Team A. Look, some of the team members have been with us for quite some time, and what I'm really impressed with is the background they have, the time they spent in the field. We have a CFO who went to Chile and executed an EPC project. We have a head of engineers who went and executed in the field some EPC project. My job is to take all this strength and to see how do we get growth out of this company. The story is not about, oh, boy, we don't have product line or product sucks and the vitality is low and we got to fix up. No, that's not the story at all. We have all that. It is, how do I take this team or bring in people that are going to commercially take this product to the next level? That's the game for us. In the coming months, weeks, quarters, you'll start to hear that. Just in closing, look, we are in good end markets. We have good product lines that are out there. If you do not have, that is a tough game to play. In my case, that is not the case. We have all that. We have a pipeline that you are working with. Frustration is the timing of the pipeline, but that is not the game at all. I am not even worried about this quarter. What I am worried about is next year, that pipeline has to look twice as big, and how do we go get it? Where do we go get it? Building the pipeline, my job is once the order gets in and it is booked, we are going to deliver. It is getting to the funnel. Good companies chase the funnel. Smart people chase the funnel, and that is where the team is going to be focused on. Strengthening our core business is not fixing it. Nothing is broken. It is just strengthening it. Getting the M&A engine going for us. That is a skill in itself. Some companies do well, some companies suck at it. It is not that we are going to go and pull a trigger on a humongous deal. That is not the story either. It is earning our way into certain things so that as we build the momentum in the marketplace, we fill the product gap with a couple of nice ones so that it is accretive, where we build the capabilities in-house, IT, HR, engineering, project. All those things have to come in as we start bringing in M&A targets. Again, the backlog, $20 million, highest historically in the last four or five years. Would love to see that grow. That is all, again, heavily dependent on project timing. That is the nature of our business, and that is the not so good part of any project business. If you keep the funnel big, hopefully the backlog improves. Finally, the story is all about growth, and that is what I have been hired for, and that is what excites me. That is what gets me going every Monday morning, and I will be traveling. I will not be in the office because we will be chasing growth. That is it. Any time for questions? Yeah. I can bring a mic over if you have questions. Thank you, Ramesh, for a great presentation.
Loading workspace