Good afternoon. Our next presenting company is Smith-Midland, ticker symbol SMID on the NASDAQ. It's been a multi-year client of Three Part Advisors, anyone that is interested in learning more about them, please feel free to contact us after the conference. Like I said, a leader in the precast concrete space. If you go anywhere around Times Square, where we're located today, and you see big white cement blocks with the NYPD letters on them, these are the guys that make them, and a lot more other safety products made out of concrete. Here today to present on behalf of the company is Ashley Smith, the company's CEO. With him is Dominic Hunter, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Ashley? All right. Thank you. Appreciate it, John. Good to see everybody here this afternoon. Thanks for taking time to stop by and listen to the presentation. If there's only one thing that you remember about this presentation today, that is that all of the concrete safety barrier, highway barrier, across the U.S. is in process of being replaced. I'll say that again. All of the concrete barrier that's on the highway today across the U.S. is in the process of being replaced. We'll talk a little more about why that is and what that means for our company. Our company was founded in 1960 by my grandfather, and we make precast concrete products. What that means is, we have three factories. We make the product at our plant. We store the product until it's needed on the construction site. Our products are used for highway, bridges, commercial construction, mid-rise, high-rise building. All of the products that you see listed here, the J-J Hooks Barrier, the SlenderWall Cladding System, the Easi-Set Concrete Buildings, and the SoftSound Absorptive Noise Wall, all those products are the number one branded product across the U.S. for those product lines. The J-J Hooks Highway Barrier is the number one barrier used across the U.S. We'll talk a little bit about our licensing model later on. The SlenderWall Cladding System is a lightweight cladding system. It's a Class A high-end exterior precast concrete panel, but it's lightweight because we have a light gauge steel stud backup frame. We pre-insulate the panel at the factory. We can pre-install the windows at the factory and have them delivered and installed on the project. The SoftSound Absorptive Noise Wall is a wood aggregate product that we apply to the face of a concrete noise wall that absorbs 80% of the sound. There's only a handful of producers of that product across the U.S., and we also make it in our factories on the East Coast and license that technology. The Easi-Set Concrete Building, that is a prefabricated, pre-engineered building. We make it, assemble it at the factory, take it to the job site, and install it. Over the past five years, we just finished our five-year strategic plan, and our top goal was to double the size of the company. Five years ago, we were around a little over $40 million in revenue. In 2025, we were at $93 million in revenue. Then also, we hit all of our EBITDA targets. In 2025, EBITDA was a little under $20 million on that $93 million of revenue. We have a strong backlog of $48 million. Our goal over the next two - three years is to double the backlog to $100 million. That would enable us to make sure that our factories are running at a high capacity. The higher capacity we run the factory, the more cash that we generate and put on the bottom line. We're in the golden age for infrastructure, and this was a quote by Larry Fink in his 2025 letter to shareholders. Today, the tailwinds that we have in infrastructure, I haven't seen in the whole time I've been in business, which is a little over 40 years. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which is coming to an end, put more money from the federal government into infrastructure than any previous infrastructure plan. Right now, today, Congress is working on the next iteration, and there's going to be, as far as highways and bridges, the money that they're looking to invest is going to be at least equal to, if not more, than what was in the just previous IIJA. Continued strong revenue investment from Federal Highway Administration and across most of our sectors. We have our branded products that we showed you earlier. We also make custom decorative security military projects. The nice thing about precast concrete is whatever an architect, an engineer designs, we can make forms that take the shape and make the concrete fit whatever the architect has designed. We have three parts of the business. We have manufacturing, which is growing. We also have licensing, and we have barrier rental. These are our three strategically located manufacturing plants. We have North Carolina, South Carolina. The headquarters is Virginia. You probably know or would not be surprised to hear that North Carolina and South Carolina are two of the fastest growing states in the country. People are moving to the South and to the East, so we're in one of the hottest spots for growth in the whole country. There's a large amount of investment from the highway departments in all of those states. Also, the use of public-private partnerships has expanded. We've seen more of that kind of work in South Carolina, North Carolina. There's a large project in Tennessee where toll roads are being built near Nashville. It has a lot of noise wall and barrier on that project. With these three plants, we can reach basically from New York, New Jersey, down to Georgia and even into Florida. We can hit a large part of the country. At this point, I'm going to let Dominic talk a little bit about our rental division. Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Ashley. As Ashley noted, we have three parts of the business, the manufacturing side, the royalty side, and the barrier rental side. As you can see, we clearly provide barrier for highways. Our target at this slide was 575,000 linear feet. In 2026, we're targeting an inventory of about 850,000 linear feet, which is about 161 miles of barrier. That's a lot of barrier. We maintain a barrier for the different types of projects that we do, and you can break it into two types: special barrier rental projects and standard barrier projects. We break this out in our 10-K as well. Special barrier projects, very lucrative, very high margin. They're usually one to two weeks, and they're tied to an event. We're in the D.C. area, and you can infer what types of events those are. Some of the other events that you know about, like FIFA, and the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, they all require barrier for security, and we consider it a barrier service, but it's really a security service. A lot of those special barrier projects have a big impact on our financials from a top and bottom line perspective. They're more like concierge service. You're there 24/7, quick response time. You're not dropping a barrier, walking away and coming back and picking it up in three or four months. You're with it and you're moving with the security teams in place. That's special barrier projects. We also have standard projects, three - six months or a year, or up to three years in which we're providing barrier either under Department of Transportation or for private construction work. Those types of projects we get paid up front. You'll see our deferred revenue is about $14 million at the end of Q1. We're deferring that revenue across the life of those projects. A good business to be in. We target our utilization of our barrier fleet between 85%-92%, depending on what's going on. A lot of barriers coming back on a long-term project that may sit for a while before it's deployed in other projects. High margins, we really shift from barrier sales to barrier rental. Even though we're not really marketing our barrier for sale, marketing it explicitly, a lot of the players in the market have come to us. Even in Q1 of 2026, we had higher barrier sales than in Q1 of 2025, even without marketing it. It definitely creates a stability in our overall earnings and the cash flow. It's a business you can't deny that getting cash for a contract that's three years up front, I don't know too many contracts that work like that, it's good business to have. The only other thing that we're well-positioned for some of the opportunities coming up here in 2026, but they're much smaller in comparison to the special barrier projects that we had in Q1 of 2025 and Q2 of 2025. Obviously, being in the D.C. area and being the barrier producer there, it's going to be hard to replace that type of income. We're well-positioned for all the special projects that are coming, and it's a great business to be in. To that, I'll hand it back over to Ashley. I'll talk a little bit about the comment that I first made when I started. All the concrete barrier across the U.S. is in the process of being replaced. Right now, we're about in the second inning of that cycle. The reason that we're replacing the barrier is the Federal Highway Administration, every 10 - 15 years, has a requirement, a higher crash test requirement, on any roadside safety feature. Guardrails, signs, light posts, concrete barriers, anything on the side of the highway has to get crash tested to a new standard. The reason the standard changed is because the type of vehicle on the road changed. We all know that the trucks are getting bigger. Everybody has an SUV now. The requirement started in 2020. Different states adopted at different time periods. For example, the state of California has been a little slow to adopt and put in place this new crash test level. However, starting January 1st of 2027, in the state of California, any new barrier has to be the new style. We have a licensee, one of the biggest producers of concrete barrier, precast concrete products in the West. They have several plants in California right now, today, and actually starting about three or four months ago, their factories in Northern California, their factory in Southern California, has been cranking out J-J Hooks Barrier every day. The demand is only going to get higher as California basically replaces everything that's out there. We get calls almost every week from contractors, from pre-casters in California that want to make J-J Hooks. We direct all of those inquiries to our licensee. We also call our licensee and tell them that we got a call because we want to make sure they understand the value of having the J-J Hooks license. We also want to make sure that they have enough capacity that we're not losing any work. If we had to, not that we want to, we want them to they have been really good partners with us. California, also Nevada, they make our barrier in Nevada. We're not going to lose any work, because we don't have enough production capacity. We're going to work with them. At some point, if they decide they don't want to buy new forms or don't want to double pour, we'll work to find another producer out there to make sure that we have enough capacity to sell all the J-J Hooks Barrier that is needed in California. That's driving our licensing part of the business. We also license our SlenderWall panel system. We also license our SoftSound Absorptive Noise Wall. We also license our Easi-Set building. All of those have a high profit margin. That's 100% gross margin. That's a small revenue stream over all the business, but highly lucrative, and growing. You can go back and look at the past few years and see the growth rate. We expect that to keep on that trajectory for the near term. We make six percent royalty. We have 75 licensed producers making all of our products. We have about 45 that are making the J-J Hooks Barrier. We have a few spots out in the West where we still have some states that have approved J-J Hooks, and we need to find licensees out there. We have a prioritized list of where we are going to go out and find new licensed producers. These are just some of the tailwinds. We talked about the new MASH TL-three. That is also, besides being a driver for our business, our licensed business, it is also a driver for our rental business. The majority of our rental business is in the Mid-Atlantic, basically from Delaware, Maryland, parts of West Virginia, D.C., and Virginia. What is happening right now is in those states, like the rest of the country, the contractors have own barrier that is becoming obsolete. The contractors have to decide, once that barrier is obsolete, they cannot use it. Do they want to reinvest three, five, $6 million and buy a new barrier? Or we now are in the position because, as Dominic was talking about, we have 160 miles of rental barrier. In the past, if a contractor in our area needed 100,000 feet of barrier, we did not have it. We could not supply those jobs. We made those contractors buy barrier from us. Today, if they need 100,000 feet of barrier to rent, we can rent that. We are seeing more of the contractors go to rental. If you drive by a highway construction site, you will see rental on the equipment. In the 1950s, 1960s, all the contractors owned their own equipment. It was like bragging who had the biggest, most expensive earth-moving equipment. Today, there is less of that. We are positioning ourselves to have an answer and have a solution for them. Now, we talked a little bit about California. It has the second most highway miles in the U.S. Most states are targeting 2030-2032 to make that transition. California has done it faster than some of the other states. We also developed a couple of years ago a low-profile barrier system, and it has been on our R&D list for quite a while. We were doing some research on the market in Texas, and we found out that almost half of the barrier used in the state of Texas is low profile. Why is that? Low profile just means it is a shorter barrier. It is used not on interstates. It is used on secondary roads where the speeds are less. When you come to an intersection, they did not want a tall barrier. They wanted something low that you could see over. We went down to investigate the current state system that was approved, and once we saw that, we knew that once we got J-J Hooks design-approved, crash tested, that we would hit a home run, and we have. That investment that we made in the low profile, which is approved in Texas, we have been able, through royalties, to pay off that investment in about two years. From here on out, that is going right to the bottom line. Low profile is big in Texas. It is big in Florida. We are trying to get it approved in Florida. We are developing, as we speak, a new barrier system called limited deflection. We did our first crash test two months ago in Texas. That is where we do most of our testing. The barrier passed. However, the deflection, we wanted the barrier only to move sideways 30 inches. It moved 40 inches. We had done computer simulation, but we know after the crash test, you see what the weak part of the system is. We're redesigning it right now. Once we get that design approved by Federal Highway, we have to pass the crash test first. We get Federal Highway approval, and we get state approval. We're targeting the state of N.Y. because our system is going to cost about 10%, 90% less than the current limited deflection barrier in the state of N.Y. Again, we believe it's going to be a home run. We're also starting to see more and more states require a limited deflection. That would be used in a place where there's not a lot of room on the side of the highway. You have construction workers behind the barrier working. You don't want the barrier to be able to slide into the work zone. We're seeing more states adopt that. It's real important to get this test run as quickly as possible and pass it, then go for state approval. Our company, we're very unique, very different in our precast industry. We develop, market, license proprietary technology and services. There's nobody else in our industry doing what we're doing. That creates a high barrier to entry. For a precaster to do what we do, to go out and crash test a new barrier design, they're not going to do it. Number one, they don't know how. We've been through the cycle three times over the past 20 years. We sit on all the committees where all these requirements are being discussed and put into place. We know that when we invest in a crash test, we can spread this cost across our entire licensed producer. It's a barrier to entry, it's a very lucrative part of our business. Also, we're seeing a lot more public-private partnerships. There's a large project right now that's coming out for bid in Tennessee. It's a toll road that's being built between Nashville and Knoxville. There's a lot of precast concrete bridge beams, noise wall barriers down there. We're getting a lot of calls from contractors asking us to participate in that project. Also off-site modular construction. There's a big problem in the construction industry today. There's not enough workers to build everything that needs to be built. It's been a drag on the home builders. There's not enough people to build the homes. Also, for commercial constructions that we're involved with. Developers, contractors, architects are looking at off-site modular panelized systems to help fill the gap. Precast concrete, that's what we do, make it off-site, store it off-site, ship it to the job, then use a crane to put it into place. We've been ahead. This is how the company started in 1960. We can put up our panels a lot faster than they can be installed on the job site. We can pre-install the windows at our factory, so when that panel goes up, the windows are already in place. Right now, we have one of our research and development groups is working on a system that's going to allow us to set our SlenderWall panels. Today, we set about six or seven panels a day. I've challenged the group. I said we need to figure out a way to be able to do at least twice that many a day. Typically, when that panel's picked up by the crane, the crane holds it on the side of the building while the panel's attached, usually welded or bolted. We're creating a system where that panel can be temporarily landed. The crane can be unhooked, go pick up the next panel. The goal is to go from six or seven to 12 or 14 or 16 panels a day. The building owner likes it because their building gets enclosed faster. The trades inside can finish the inside of the building. Renters can come in and start paying rent on it. We like it because we believe if we can speed up how fast we can erect, we're going to be able to provide more value, give a better price, and sell more SlenderWall. All right. I'm going to let Dominic talk a little bit about the revenue and backlog. Thank you. Revenue, as Ashley had noted, 2025 was the company's highest year in revenue at $93.4 million. Our revenue is broken out into our products, manufacturing, which includes shipping and installation, of course, our barrier rental business, and then royalties. Which comprise in 2025, we had the largest special barrier projects in Q1 and Q2 that really bolstered that year. Trailing 12 months, right now it's about one percent less. The results of Q1 of 2026 was posted recently out on the market. We believe it's basically a continuation of our execution of our strategy. We have historically high revenue, and in Q1 of 2026, we closed that quarter of $21.6 million. It was 4.8% lower than Q1 of 2025, but Q1 of 2025 had very large and profitable special barrier projects. We really consider Q1 of this year as a great win for us. Product revenue was 29% higher in Q1 compared to the prior quarter of Q1 2025. Overall, we think this is successful execution of our precast product business. Excited for that quarter. Royalties were about even, and obviously the barrier rental, even though it was significantly lower in quarters where there were no special barrier projects, Q1 of 2026 was in line with those quarters. We consider it overall a successful quarter for Q1 2026. Regarding the backlog, we recognize the optics. The backlog is ticking down as we're working through some very large projects. Our sales team has been successfully bolstered up. We're supplementing the sales team as well as going after a lot of quick turnaround business. The company, as you noted, Ashley mentioned earlier about the research and development work we do. We're a problem-solving company. We have on-staff engineers and drafters. we actually bring solutions to customers and have found opportunities where we're actually bidding, winning, and executing within a quarter. you can see a time in the future where backlog goes down or revenue actually goes up because of these types of opportunities. If you look outside, you'll actually see NYPD written on the side, the remnants of that opportunity. we actually got a supplement to that contract. we look for more of those opportunities, and we can talk backlog all day long, but if our revenue is showing the success of that type of work, we'll take it. The next slide. earnings per share. we ended the year at earnings per share of $2.36 per share. For the quarter of Q1 2026, we ended at a quarter of $1.3 million of net income, which is about $0.25 per share. as far as just overall for the company, for Q1 2026, we ended that quarter with cash of $13.2 million, which was up from $11.9 million from the year. we still maintain a low debt number of $4.3 million. from EBITDA, as Ashley noted earlier, $20 million of EBITDA for 2025. Again, one of the elements, successful execution of our product sales, but also buoyed by special barrier projects in the first half of the year. Trailing 12 months, we're at $17.7 million. Gross margin for Q1 was a little lower than average at 20%, but really because of product mix, and we see opportunities to continue to improve on that. we know because we have a variety of products and we're executing SoftSound projects in other markets like Georgia, that we'll see some temporary compression of margins as we're opening up new markets, doing larger projects. we're very excited for profitability for the future, and future quarters should be in line. talking about our outlook. 2026 outlook. SoftSound, Easi-Set, Easi-Span, and utility sales are expected to be higher. I'll drill down into utilities, our vaults that we do for data centers. We've already met our annual sales target today, so we're well beyond where we thought we would be. We had, I know the comparison with 2024 and 2025, we were talking very positively about utility sales, and you couldn't see it in the numbers. If you look at Q1 compared to the prior quarter, we're higher, and we expect that to continue through 2026. SlenderWall and architectural panel sales we think will be similar to prior years. These are opportunities you bid and win, and they're project by project basis. barrier sales are expected to be lower overall again, even though for the quarter, our barrier sales were higher in Q1 of this year than Q1 of last year. We're not actively marketing our barrier sales. We don't want to put a competitor in place in any of our markets that we rent barrier. we do see some general contractors and construction companies that are looking for barrier in that new MASH standard. royalty revenue is anticipated to be higher. It was about even for Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025. It was a little lower. We think that the barrier. Sorry, the royalty that Ashley had noted about in California as the barrier MASH standard becomes picked up and our licensee really starts producing that new barrier standard and ramps that up based off of what California's doing, we expect that revenue to really ramp up as we go through the year. Total revenue, we again talked about Q1 and Q2 of 2025 and having special barrier projects. I think we recalled Q1 having the big beautiful barrier projects that occurred in that quarter. We're obviously not going to repeat that in 2026, but we believe we have all of the markings of a very successful year in 2026, despite special barrier projects. What we're seeing in Q1 gives us validity that we're on the right track. Ashley? All right. Thanks, Dominic. Our time's up, but there's just a couple of things that I wanted to point out. We've gone through these. These are our investment highlights, but just a couple of additional points. Growth of the data centers, Dominic talked about that. We also have recurring revenue. All of the royalties are recurring revenue, and they don't show up in backlog. That's about $5 million a year that you can add to our backlog. In our backlog, $48 million, the only thing we have in there are signed contracts that we haven't produced yet. We're in process of engineering. We have between $5 million and $7 million a year of just sales, product sales that come and go that never make it into backlog. We also have $5 million - $10 million of barrier rental that never goes into backlog. That's another chunk that you can add to the backlog. You can look at our balance sheet and see the deferred revenue. When we rent a barrier job, we get all the money up front, like Dominic was talking about. If it's a three-year project, we spread the revenue, amortize it over those three years. You can look at our deferred revenue and see in the future how much additional revenue we're going to have. With that, I'd like to say thanks for everybody being here. Glad to answer any questions at the back of the room. I think another group's coming in now. Thank you very much.
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