Badger Infrastructure Solutions Q2 2026 Earnings Report

Badger Infrastructure Solutions EPS Results

• Actual EPS: C$0.98
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Badger Infrastructure Solutions Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $365.33 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Badger Infrastructure Solutions Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2026
• Date: 7/30/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Friday, July 31, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 9:00AM ET

Badger Infrastructure Solutions (TSE:BDGI) Ltd is North America's provider of non-destructive excavating services. Its key technology is the Badger Hydrovac, which is used primarily for safe excavation around critical infrastructure and in congested underground conditions. The Badger Hydrovac uses a pressurized water stream to liquefy the soil cover, which is then removed with a powerful vacuum system and deposited into a storage tank. The company manufactures and designs its truck-mounted hydrovac units, giving an opportunity to incorporate feedback from its hydrovac operators into its existing and future design and manufacturing processes.

Badger Infrastructure Solutions Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Record Q2 performance: Revenue increased 23% year over year to CAD 257 million, while Adjusted EBITDA rose 25% to CAD 66.1 million; the 25.7% EBITDA margin improved 40 basis points.
• Positive Sentiment: Revenue per truck per month reached CAD 47,731, up 14% year over year, supported by higher fleet utilization and emerging pricing gains. Management expects further opportunities to improve utilization and pricing.
• Positive Sentiment: Badger is growing its hydrovac fleet at the high end of its 7%-10% 2026 target, ending Q2 with 1,822 units, and plans to build a second U.S. manufacturing facility in late 2027 or early 2028 to support growth, reduce tariff exposure, and diversify production.
• Neutral Sentiment: Management said investments in hiring, training, Operational Excellence, and new service lines reduced Q2 gross margins by approximately 50-70 basis points. Although margins are expected to move back toward the 25%-30% range, management cautioned that improvement is likely to be gradual, with the target still expected to approach in 2027.
• Positive Sentiment: The company strengthened liquidity through a CAD 300 million five-year unsecured bond issue, leaving its credit facility largely undrawn and leverage at 1.5x EBITDA. Badger said it has ample capacity to fund expansion, new service lines, the U.S. plant, dividends, and share repurchases.

Presentation

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Badger Infrastructure Solutions second quarter 2026 results call. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. For those that have dialed into the audio portion of this call, to ask a question during the live question-and-answer session, please press star one to raise your hand. Please wait for the operator to say your name and company before asking your question. For those listening through the webcast, attendees will be in listen-only mode. If you need technical assistance, please submit your request under the tech tab in the window on the right-hand side of your computer screen. As a reminder, this event is being recorded today, July 31st, 2026, and will be made available on the investors section of Badger's website. I would now like to turn the call over to Anne Plasterer, Director of Investor Relations.

[Anne Plasterer, Director of Investor Relations at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, welcome to our second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on the call this morning are Badger's President and CEO, Rob Blackadar, and our CFO, Rob Dawson. Badger's 2026 second quarter earnings release, MD&A, and financial statements were released after market close yesterday and are available on the investors section of Badger's website and on SEDAR+. We are required to note that some of the statements made today may contain forward-looking information. In fact, all statements made today, which are not statements of historical fact, are considered to be forward-looking statements. We make these forward-looking statements based on certain assumptions that we consider to be reasonable. Forward-looking statements are always subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied.

[Anne Plasterer, Director of Investor Relations at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

For more information about material assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that may be relevant to such forward-looking statements, please refer to Badger's 2025 MD&A along with the 2025 AIF. I will now turn the call over to Rob Blackadar.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thank you, Anne. Good morning, everyone, thank you for joining our 2026 second quarter earnings call. Before we get into the details, I'd like to take a moment to talk about safety, which is how we start all of our meetings here at Badger. Safety is not only a value here at Badger, it's one of the key reasons customers choose to work with us. Every day, our teams operate in complex environments around critical infrastructure where planning, communication, and safe execution are essential. Our strong safety culture and our Make Safety Personal annual safety campaign helps protect our people, supports our customers' objectives, and reinforces the high standard of service we deliver across North America every single day. I want to personally thank all of our Badger team members and customers for their continued commitment to working safely together. Now on to the quarter's results.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

The Badger team delivered another record quarter of double-digit organic growth in revenue and Adjusted EBITDA. Building on our positive momentum from Q1, the second quarter top-line revenue of CAD 257 million represents 23% growth over the prior year, driven by our extremely diverse end markets. Some of the projects that began or are currently underway include LNG plants, semiconductor manufacturing plants, new hospital construction, several airport expansions, energy storage facilities, including solar, new automotive manufacturing plants, sports stadiums, chemical processing plants, power generation plants, oil and gas pipeline work, fiber and communication expansions, wastewater treatment plants, data centers, food and beverage manufacturing plants, pharmaceutical plants, transmission and distribution mega projects, non-residential construction, utility maintenance, several transportation and rail projects, and heavy civil infrastructure projects, just to name a few. Needless to say, we are seeing broad-based end market healthy demand.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We successfully met this demand through increased utilization and continued fleet expansion. The Badger team's ability to deliver top-tier customer service is setting the foundation for the remainder of 2026. Adjusted EBITDA grew 25% year-over-year to CAD 66 billion. We continue to invest in our teams and our branch network, positioning Badger to benefit from our competitive advantages. As fleet utilization rose through the second quarter, we began to realize pricing opportunities across all of our markets in which we operate. We achieved RPT, or revenue per truck per month, of CAD 47,731 in Q2, up 14% compared to last year. This reflects our utilization and pricing efforts. Badger ended the quarter with 1,822 hydrovacs, an increase of its average fleet count by 8% compared to last year, while still achieving greater year-over-year RPT performance.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Additionally, our expanded fleet enhances our ability to take immediate advantage of our planned growth for the remainder of 2026 and into 2027. Our Red Deer plant delivered 80 hydrovacs this quarter versus 51 units in the same quarter last year. We also retired 36 units and refurbished 12 units in the quarter. With a noted extraordinary demand and opportunities across all of our end markets, our full year fleet strategy remains on track. As we shared last quarter, we are growing our fleet at the high end of the 7%-10% range for the full year 2026, and we intend to refurbish between 30-50 hydrovacs and retire between 130-150 units.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We also announced in our release that we are underway with a second manufacturing plant to be located in the U.S. We expect that plant to come online the back half of 2027 or early into 2028, and Rob will speak a little bit more on that. Before I pass the call over to Rob Dawson, I'd like to share one last thought. Our enthusiasm is not only tied to the strength of the demand environment, but it is rooted in Badger's ability to capitalize on it as we have proven through our performance over the last several years. With our industry-leading fleet capacity, vertically integrated manufacturing capabilities, extensive branch network, and highly trained workforce, we believe we have competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate and best positions Badger to support our customers on all of their critical project needs.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

With that, I will turn it over to Rob to give our financial update, then we will go straight into Q&A after Rob's comments.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thanks, Rob. Our second quarter results reflected the strength of customer demand, the effectiveness of our operating strategy, and the continued commitment of our team to deliver profitable growth. As Rob noted, we grew revenue and adjusted EBITDA by over 20%, demonstrating the ongoing execution of our roadmap of building scalability at every level of our operations. Strong performance was also driven by continued fleet investments to capitalize on increased demand across our entire branch network. Our adjusted EBITDA improved to CAD 66.1 million, an increase of 25% compared to 2025. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 25.7%, up 40 basis points from the same period. Adjusted EBITDA margins have returned to growing as revenue growth, improved efficiency, and utilization of our fleet, as well as operating leverage offset the near-term impact of our ongoing investments we have been undertaking.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

As we discussed in the first quarter, we are well underway on investments to add to Badger's long-term scale, diversity, and profitability. The acceleration of hiring and training of operators that we discussed in the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of 2026 moderated in the second quarter and was a key factor in our ability to absorb the levels of demand we have been experiencing. The rollout of Operational Excellence and the launch of two new complementary service lines continues to proceed in line with our expectations. While we make these investments for the longer term, they have reduced our second quarter 2026 gross profit margins by approximately 50-70 basis points. General and administrative expenses were CAD 11.4 million or 4% of revenue, compared to CAD 10.8 million or 5% of revenue in the prior year.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Finally, adjusted earnings per share was CAD 0.69 per share, up 15% compared to last year. Turning to the balance sheet. As you know, Badger has, for a long time, maintained a strong balance sheet combined with conservative financial objectives, including relative leverage, available liquidity, and debt maturity profiles. This has served us very well, allowing us to fund our growth largely from cash flows while continuing to return capital to shareholders through dividends and the NCIB. In line with these objectives, during the quarter, Badger executed our inaugural unsecured bond issue, raising CAD 300 million of 5 3/8% five-year senior notes. The proceeds of the offering were used to pay down our credit facility, leaving us with ample long-term committed liquidity. We were very pleased with the strong support from our new Canadian fixed income investors.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

With this undrawn capacity on our five-year credit facility and our compliance leverage at 1.5x EBITDA, the midpoint of our 1x-2x targeted range, we have lots of flexibility to continue investing in our organic growth, to support investments in new service lines, to fund our plans to develop a second manufacturing facility in the United States, and to continue to return capital to shareholders. Year to date, we have purchased and canceled 80,676 common shares under the NCIB at a weighted average price per share of CAD 63.18. We intend to renew the NCIB in August, maintaining our ability to make share purchases in addition to returning capital to our shareholders through dividends. With those comments, let's turn it back to the operator for questions.

[Operator]

Our first caller is Yuri Lynk from Canaccord Genuity. Go ahead, Yuri.

[Yuri Lynk, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity]

Good morning, gentlemen.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Good morning, Yuri.

[Yuri Lynk, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity]

Morning. Just want to talk a little bit about RPT. Obviously strong in the quarter. I've got your LTM RPT at around 44,000, and I think, and maybe Dawson can help me on this one, I think your Investor Day target converted to the new calculation was just under 43,000. You're above that. How do we think about the sustainability of RPT on a trailing basis? Is there anything different you're seeing in the market now that might argue for that 43,000 target being higher or lower in the future?

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yuri, great question. A couple of comments on RPT. I would say the addition of our data platform and a number of significantly positive changes we're making in how we approach capacity availability for our customers. One example would be leaving our trucks parked at a customer site versus having them return to our branch, just as one example, has increased the availability of our fleet for revenue-producing activities. As a result, our utilization has really been one of the drivers of our RPT to be above what we thought was possible even a few years ago at our Investor Day. I would say, yes, we're very pleased with where that's gone. We don't believe that there is likely to be a lot of downturn in that number on a last trailing 12 months basis, as you've indicated.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

In fact, I think there remains some opportunities to improve utilization, and as we'll talk about, there is opportunities for further pricing improvements as well as our utilization on the fleet continues to rise.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I'll add one other thing to Rob's comments, Yuri, that might be helpful for you. When we did that Investor Day, which was March of 2024, we had announced at that Investor Day that we were launching this thing called Badger Analytics Platform. It was very early stages, and it was just underway. The data and the amount of analysis we're starting to get out of the fleet metrics and the ability to move the fleet faster and get more efficient, is allowing us to actually just get higher and start to move that trend higher.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I believe that we're going to continue to see that going forward, because the amount of analysis, and our customers, we're actually sharing some of that analysis with our customers, because the goal for us is to be digging holes. It's not to be driving back and forth and commuting. Most of our customers pay port to port. Our best opportunity to show greater efficiency than any competitor is to actually share that data with the customers, and they really love it. You're going to see us continue to have a really strong focus on RPT. I wouldn't say at this point it needs to have some major re-rating from that Investor Day, but I would tell you it remains a big focus in the company and will remain going forward as well.

[Yuri Lynk, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity]

Rob, how would you characterize the pricing environment? Because we've picked up that in some markets, you might be a little bit behind on pricing in recent months. Do you feel you talked about some upside to pricing? Is that what you're referring to? You've got some room to play catch up in some markets?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah, absolutely. The way we're viewing pricing is the pricing environment continued to be under a fair amount of pressure back half of last year and through Q1 of this year. We identified in the months for second quarter as it was going on. In April and May that there were some pricing opportunities, and in some instances, Badger was able to capture the pricing, and in a few others, we were not as nimble as we felt we could be. Since that time, as the quarter went on for the second quarter, we started to pick up more and more momentum on the pricing.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I think on a go-forward basis, you're going to see just tied to the demand, the end markets, everything happening within. You saw the laundry list of projects we're on that is so broad, that if you can't get pricing in this environment, we're doing something wrong. We started to see it as the quarter went on toward the end of the quarter. My opinion, we were probably a little slow at the beginning of the quarter. The opportunity, though, is really on a go-forward basis. We're pretty enthusiastic about how it's not just the leadership team, Yuri, but the whole company is leaning in on the pricing opportunities to where we're not just covering inflationary pressures and cost, but we're actually going to be exceeding.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Because the market is here, now is the time, as the industry leader, we should be leading that pricing, and you'll see more and more of that. We also, for the way we frame it up, because we have not just competitors who listen to these calls, but also customers, is Badger has always got to be giving extreme value. If we're going to be the pricing leaders, we have to be giving extreme value and efficiency and safety and reliability. You're going to see more us continue to be amping up in all those areas. Pricing is definitely going to be a nice opportunity. I feel pretty comfortable we're going to be capturing the back half of the year and then going forward into next year, Yuri.

[Yuri Lynk, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity]

Thanks for the color, guys. I'll turn it over there.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thanks, bud.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tim James at TD Securities. Go ahead, Tim.

[Tim James, Analyst at TD Securities]

Thanks very much. Good morning. My first question. You called out the new service lines and that it's progressing as expected. I'm just wondering if you can provide us a little more kind of detail on customer response, how that's fitting into the business, kind of the returns that you're seeing or anticipate from those two new service lines.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Tim, it's Rob Dawson here. We've launched principally one of the two service lines. The other one is going to get going in the second half of this year. That first one being our industrial cleaning. It's very adjacent to a lot of the work we're already doing. It's got a similar customer list and a similar list of assets. The returns are similar to what we see from Hydrovac. It just allows us to get a lot more long-term recurring contracts on a maintenance basis on industrial facilities, whereas in the past, we would be working on a project basis on those facilities during larger turnarounds or debottlenecking work. This is just circling those plants with a little more assets, a little more service, and giving us a stickier presence with those customers. So far, we're very pleased with the way it's gone.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

It's all proceeding as we had penciled it out, I guess, as far as our Excel business plan, and we're looking forward to having it develop a little more.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Tim, I'll add just a little bit of color about the customers and the adoption you were asking about. What we're realizing and very, very pleased about this is every time we have launched one of these industrial cleaning branches in the various cities, and we go sit down with customers, and we start talking about Badger's capabilities, and again, it's beyond hydrovacing inside these industrial plants.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

They're actually coming to us. Instead of us kind of pushing to get into more of their manufacturing plants to do our work, they're actually starting to pull us in and asking, "Can you do more across the large industrial manufacturing owners across their whole portfolio?" Think of chemical plants and pulp plants and power plants where they're saying, "Could you do some of this work across our whole footprint?" We're very, very pleased how quickly we're being adopted into the markets in which we've already launched. Regarding the margins, again, still very early days, but a few quarters in, the margins are playing out to exactly how we had planned. Obviously it makes the return profile on the investments we've made, we're pleased with it.

[Tim James, Analyst at TD Securities]

Okay. That's great. That's helpful. Thank you. My second question, just returning to the U.S. manufacturing facility or potential U.S. manufacturing facility. Forgive me, my line cut out for a minute, but is there any way you could kind of give us a bit of a sense for what the capital requirement could be for that facility? Is it reasonable to assume that CapEx that goes along with it, the kind of return associated with that is effectively from avoiding the tariffs that are currently being incurred?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. I'll start a little bit about kind of where we are in the process, and then Rob, if he wants to add any more about kind of the return or tariff comment. Right now it's still relatively early. We started talking just slightly about this on, I believe it was during the Q&A for the last quarter, about a second manufacturing plant being contemplated by the management team and the board. Since that time, we've been off working alongside of the management team, alongside of a small subcommittee of the board, to run to ground which markets we want to potentially locate and land the manufacturing plant in.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Just think in terms generally of where is Badger doing a lot of business. It's the southern part of the U.S., and it's more, if you were to decide, it'd be somewhere, let's say between, let's say Texas, Oklahoma over to the I-75 north-south corridor, in that range, that area. As far as being able to give a CapEx guidance, we have a pretty broad range of which we've been contemplating internally and shared with our board of directors. It's too early for us to say, "Okay, we think it's going to be between X number of millions and X number of millions," because it really does depend on the cost of the land, the cost of the development, or if we buy an existing facility, which there are some out there. If we buy an existing facility, what can we actually get it at?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Rob can talk a little bit about how we might finance that and maybe tariffs and stuff.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. When you think about the economics of a new facility, I would just ignore tariffs at the outset and say our growth profile, the size of our existing fleet and where we feel it's going to grow to over the next several years, even just the replacement capital for that fleet, risk management when you have a single facility, logistics for having it in two facilities and two markets to serve different areas. There's ample return available to justify a new facility. When you think about the current tariffs we're paying on the trucks that we're producing in Canada and then importing into the U.S., that just increases those returns to make it pretty easy to get there.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

The strategic need for the facility, the growth of the business, and the returns that our current organic growth strategy is offering us justify the facility in its own right. These tariffs recently, I think, are just a little cherry on top of those economics. As far as funding it, as I mentioned, we have ample available liquidity on a largely undrawn credit facility. Our balance sheet is just in the midpoint of our leverage target range of 1x-2x. We've got plenty of capacity to be able to finance this without any concerns.

[Tim James, Analyst at TD Securities]

Okay. That's super. Thank you very much.

[Operator]

Our next caller is Ian Gillies from Stifel. Go ahead, Ian.

[Ian Gillies, Analyst at Stifel]

Morning, everyone.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Morning, Ian.

[Ian Gillies, Analyst at Stifel]

A follow-up on the U.S. manufacturing facility. When you look out to 2028 and 2029, would the intention be that you run both the Canadian and the U.S. facility concurrently because that's where you see demand going?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. We've actually been having really good discussions with our manufacturing plant up in Red Deer, which by the way, is performing extremely well. We're having the best quality of trucks, I actually believe, in Badger's history coming out of the plant right now. Our manufacturing team is very engaged. We've been having discussions both with that plant, as well as we're building out and continue to evolve our three to five-year plan because we look at it just constantly, both Rob and I, on where is the business going and what are we going to need resource-wise. We believe, at a minimum, we're going to need these two plants both up and running and performing. Think in terms, Ian, of when I came into the business just around five years ago, we were in that 1,200 to 1,300 truck size for hydrovacs.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Now we're 1,800, moving toward 1,900, and the business will continue to scale, we believe, over the next three to five years, if not longer. We're going to need both the plants. We're pretty excited about that. We're building the plants. Once the U.S. plant is up and running, we'll continue to say, "Okay, how can we drive the most efficiency between the two?" It just gives us the capacity to continue to scale the business. It also, there's one other factor that a lot of people think you have the potential for tariff avoidance or just building the trucks. It also gives us a little bit of a risk mitigation factor by having a second plant, that if for whatever reason one of our plants were to go down, you have a little bit of a backup factor.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

It's just good practice to not have all your eggs in one basket. There's just multiple reasons that this second plant makes a lot of sense. We probably, and you never say never or anything, we just don't see a pathway at all anytime soon of just having one single plant or going back to one single plant.

[Ian Gillies, Analyst at Stifel]

Understood. The other one, to ask bluntly, do you feel like the hydrovac industry in the U.S. is finally capacity constrained? As we think about that comment, should we be thinking about EBITDA margins, the improvement accelerating year-over-year as we go through the back half of the year? You just had a good quarter, and I just wouldn't mind getting an updated view there.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. I would say it's not necessarily constrained because hydrovac in the U.S. continues to be just a really good adoption story. Obviously, Ian, you're talking to a guy who's been in the business around 35 years in construction and construction equipment businesses. It reminds me a lot of the early days back in the rental industry, is the concept is still being adopted. Certainly, at least it is our belief, that competitive manufacturers are building and pushing on their plants to build as many hydrovacs as they can. Obviously we have competitors who have taken delivery.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Badger, while we're not at full capacity today, we continue to grow our manufacturing and you saw how we've moved within our own range from the low to mid-point of the range to now we're at the higher end of the range of what we're giving guidance on for 2026. There's still some capacity out there. I believe the hydrovac industry will continue to just evolve and companies like Badger and other manufacturing companies will continue to build more and more capacity. A lot of people think in terms of the way hydrovac used to be back in the oil and gas days, or there's some ability that, okay, there's just going to run out of places for people to use a hydrovac in the oil and gas or the oil field services.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Right now, just think of the script that I just shared with everyone on the call. The amount of different applications is almost limitless of how you could leverage a hydrovac to make a project safer, more efficient, and move without any incidents on it. For us, we're pretty excited about not just our positioning, but where we're going. Like with everything, Ian, as there's higher utilizations, and certainly we're seeing Rob talked about this in his comments, but good utilization. You'll also see every manufacturer continue to ramp up production. Another way to think about this, Ian, is we're fortunate that our customer base are some of the largest of the large construction and industrial firms in the world. Their work that they're doing in North America, many of them are public. Many of them, I'm sure some of the analysts on this call follow.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

They have historical record backlogs, historical record performance, and business happening right now. A lot of the backlogs that they're sharing with us, and we're not getting them off their calls, they're actually telling our national accounts people that their work will be taking them to the early to mid-point of the 2030s. Today it's 2026, but they have projects that are going to be starting in 2028, 2029, 2030. I named some of the projects we're on now, but a lot of those projects, there's more to come behind those and beyond those. It's a long tail, Ian. It's a pretty exciting time. I'll let you, if you want to talk a little bit about the margins and what that might look like, Rob.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. Ian, I would caution anyone from thinking that margin improvements are going to start to accelerate. The phase we're in from Q1 of 2025 through to today, our quarterly growth has gone from 8% to 11% to 13%, 15%, 18%, and now 23%. We've been accelerating on our top line and the size of our market and the opportunity in front of us. We've also been investing during that period. I know there were some concerns from some people about the heavy investment we were making in new operators and training those operators in the fourth quarter and the first quarter, the last couple of quarters. We would not be able to be delivering the level of service we are to customers today and meeting their needs if we hadn't have done that.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We are continuing to focus on longer-term value and growth, and we're not stepping aside to let margins be a focus. We are continuing to grow profitably, don't get me wrong at all. We are going to continue to invest in the business and ensure that we can continue to scale up efficiently and effectively the way we have been. One good example of that is in the United States, we've just recently increased the number of regions we have from three regions to four regions so that we can have enough people focused on the density of opportunity and not get spread too thin. That being said, we do think that we will, and we still remain very confident that we will start to proceed to go back into that 25%-30% EBITDA margin range.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We still feel that the guidance we gave out on the last call, where we'd start to see that approaching those numbers in 2027 to be still the case.

[Ian Gillies, Analyst at Stifel]

Understood. That's incredibly helpful. Turn the call back over. Thank you.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thanks, Ian.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next caller is Maxim Sytchev. Go ahead, Maxim.

[Analyst]

Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. I wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind reminding us about your data center exposure, and maybe just a general comment around how the spending in that space is creating tightness in everything else that you're doing. Obviously, I'm fully on board with the excitement around LNG, petrochemical, et cetera. I guess any qualitative comments you can provide, that'll be super helpful. Thank you.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Obviously, it is the topic of the day that a lot of various folks ask us about. We continue to be in that same range we talked about coming out of Q1, and what we realized in Q2. I think, in Q1, we were in that 11%, 12%, 13%-ish range, and we're just right around sub 15%, I think it's 13%, 14% as we went through Q2. It wasn't materially moving or driving our business in some kind of an outsized way, or we cycled it up in any kind of a dramatic way. Max, the way we think about data centers is we're here every day to support our customers, and if our customers are calling and they need help, and they want to use Badger, well, we're here. We work for our customers every day.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

What do you need, and what can we do to provide you an excellent level of service? If that happens to be on a data center, we're going to work with them on a data center. If it happens to be on an LNG plant or a wastewater treatment plant or a chemical plant, we're going to go work for them. To give you a perspective, though, kind of the origin story of Badger, and I'm not sure, Max, if we've ever visited with you on this, but the origin story of Badger was we were an oil and gas field services business. For the longest time, we were greater than 50% of our revenue was oil and gas. Today, that represents around just a tick under 5%, 4%-5%. It wasn't necessarily that we're anti-oil and gas.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I even named that in the list of projects that we're in the middle of right now. We just don't have any one particular area as our main focus. I want to be very clear, we're not anti-data center, but that's not the focus of our business only. We believe it's going to be around in that 15% range. Again, plus or minus whatever as data centers continue to be built out. I'll also give a data point that is very interesting that a lot of people aren't aware of. When we look at all the available opportunities in every part of every project being bid for 2026, 2027, and 2028, we use a service you've heard us talk about, but called Dodge and PEC Reports. These are bidding services that all the construction firms use.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Data center bidding and work contributes or consumes about 44% of all the upcoming Dodge projects that are being bid right now. Us giving you the perspective of if we're sitting in that 13%, 14% range right now, clearly, we're not focusing only on data centers. We're not saying no to it. It's just not a core tenet. We're always mindful not to get too heavy. I don't know if you want to add anything on that, Rob.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I would say these data centers are certainly constraining the capacity in our customers' ability to deliver. It's also a lot of the projects that are on that list that aren't data centers, and it's in the trillions, non-data center work. They're largely nondiscretionary and are very or highly likely to occur. If they don't occur this year or next year because a data center gets prioritized, it's very likely that they'll happen in two or three years. Our enthusiasm for the longer-term opportunities that exist for Badger continue to be very high.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah.

[Analyst]

Yeah. No, that's helpful. Thank you.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Hopefully that helps you. Yeah, it was there. Yeah.

[Analyst]

Yeah, absolutely. Then I had a quick operational question, if I may. As you're getting more data just overall from machines and branches, et cetera, can you maybe talk about qualitatively around the delta between kind of the top and bottom-performing branches and how much of an opportunity to potentially closing that gap could represent in terms of utilization? How should we think about the direction of travel there? Thanks.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. Great question. We are leveraging a lot of the data that in the past prior to our Badger Analytics Platform or BAP. That's kind of our data mainframe repository and our Oracle ERP system. Prior to us having full good access to that and it being such a good, robust data set, we were doing a lot of this very manually on Excel spreadsheets. Now we're able to identify real time on a daily basis where there's opportunities for improvement. We are engaging actively on those branches that have historically either underperformed or they're going through some kind of a cycle. Maybe some customers or projects have moved away, making sure that those branches are right-sized, both with their personnel, the number of personnel, the number of trucks, et cetera.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We're able to do that in a much faster, robust manner than we've ever been able to. The cool thing about all of our business is our operators are fungible. Our operators, they can go and operate the same Badger truck or a different Badger truck because they're all the exact same controls, the same training, same everything. They can move between branches, between markets, and we actually encourage that. As well as the assets are very fungible. They just move across markets. Rob, if you want to add anything.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Max, it's such a great question. The opportunities that we have don't just reside in utilization either, where we're getting such huge returns. Our Operational Excellence programs, we're able to see on a daily basis what's the maintenance and reliability by truck, by branch, by market, by region on a monthly, daily, weekly basis either per engine hour or per dollar of revenue. What's our direct labor utilization? What's our direct labor hours per billed hours? All of these different data points we're feeding to our branch managers and our general managers that run our smaller markets on a daily and weekly basis. The spread between low and high is wide, and the opportunity is big on all of those measures.

[Analyst]

That's a great comment. Yes. Thank you so much.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thanks, Max.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Krista Friesen at CIBC. Go ahead, Krista.

[Krista Friesen, Analyst at CIBC]

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering more on the competition side on some of these bigger projects and maybe what your national accounts group would address. What are you seeing from competition? Are people starting to get a little bit more aggressive here? Are you seeing more competition on these projects? Any color would be great.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. Hey, Krista. Good morning. We certainly like competition. Badger, again, I just celebrated my fifth year, and the competition is as much as we've ever had. I wouldn't say it's either ramping up or down. It is interesting that it feels like there's certain players kind of on the way up as competitors, and then there's a few players that a few years ago that were pretty strong competitors that feel like they are struggling because they're not backfilling or refreshing their fleets at the rate that Badger is. Again, I'm not familiar with the reasons why, and you'd probably have to go ask them. As far as on projects and national accounts, we just don't have any competitor that has the same footprint that we have. It's just a huge differentiation and differentiation factor that Badger offers that no one else has at this point.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I'll also share, we talk about this all the time with the leadership team, is we have to remain hungry. We have to understand that competitors will always be out there. If we ever take our eye off the ball or we get a little less hungry, or to quote someone recently, "If you become kind of fat, lazy, and happy," that's where companies, they lose their edge, then they start losing their market position. For us, Krista, on let's just use some projects, really large projects that we're on. We're starting to realize that Badger, not only do we bring a leading safety record and safety culture process to these projects on these mega projects that most small or regional, because there's no other national service provider that does what Badger does, these smaller regional guys, they don't have that level of sophistication.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

There are a few regional ones that are decent. They're pretty good regarding their safety programs. When a customer says, "I need 25, I need 50, I need 75 hydrovacs on this project," no one else can do that. If they say, "Okay, we'll provide 25 trucks on this project," that is half their fleet or 3/4 of their fleet, or in a few instances, we've watched it happen, where customers will say, "You know what? We think we can get it cheaper from one of your competitors. We think we're providing a competitive price." They try the competitor, normally within, I'd say seven, 10 days, two weeks, we're getting a call back saying "We really need you back, and we're willing to pay what now we're realizing what Badger is worth." Krista, we like that positioning.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Again, though, we're not naive enough to think that competitors don't have the ability to get stronger or combine or whatever, the Badger team's pretty hungry and focused. I don't know if you have anything else on that.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I've got nothing else to add.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Okay. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of color there, Krista.

[Krista Friesen, Analyst at CIBC]

Thanks. Yeah, that's great color. Just a second one from me. I know we talked about this on the last call, any updates on ability to provide a bit more of a backlog and maybe just as it relates to some of these larger projects that are longer term. Are you able to quantify that in any regard?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. We don't have a backlog in the traditional sense of a construction firm would have. We are getting a lot more visibility because the projects are so large, and they're starting to realize that if we're going to call and say, "Hey, Badger, I need 25, 30, 50 trucks," while we can definitely provide that, they're not just sitting around waiting on the phone call. It takes some logistics, some movement around, and some time. We're getting a lot more notification, a lot more visibility on what the revenue streams are going to do, more than we've ever had, Krista, and obviously, we're very pleased about that because it helps Rob and I be able to forecast along with the rest of the leadership team, what our manufacturing needs are going to be, our capacity.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

It also helps us on our pricing and understanding should we be pushing pricing in these markets or holding pricing or getting more competitive on pricing. We have a lot more visibility. The concept, though, of an overall backlog, I don't know at this moment if we're ever going to have a traditional sense like you might get from a general contractor. Anything on that one?

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I think as we also become more of a utilities and infrastructure service business as well, we're working very hard on how we can portray what the types of revenues we are seeing and what the longer term nature of those are. We're being quite, I think, pragmatic in making sure that we don't say things that aren't actually defensible and long term true.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

I understand your maybe impatience on this question, we're making sure that we get it right.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Krista, I will give you something, though, we've been doing a lot of work on, and you're going to hear. I was hoping to have it here sooner rather than later. I just don't know if it's going to be ready to roll before the end of 2026. It may be a 2027-type discussion with analysts and investors. This concept of recurring revenues. The reason, as you know, we have these national account contracts. Many of them are two years, three years to five years in nature. They all have pricing escalators, proper payment terms, et cetera. We have a proven track record, in many cases, north of 10 years with some of these large utilities. It's the same way that these other large utility contractors, I'm not going to name them on our call, but you know who I'm talking about.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

They view those as long-term contracts that recur year after year, and we're having the same benefit out of that. We've just never identified it and put it out as a recurring revenue stream and actually identified it that officially. We are internally working on that, and more to come on that. I think you're going to get more visibility, which may help you as well, Krista, as you're looking at Badger, not necessarily as a backlog, but more of a, "Okay, this much of Badger's business is truly recurring," or it's under an MSA that goes on for three years. I believe that investors and analysts would see a lot of value in that visibility. Hopefully that helps, Krista, with what your question was.

[Krista Friesen, Analyst at CIBC]

Thanks. Yeah. That's certainly helpful and definitely sounds like the visibility is improving versus a couple of years ago, that's great to hear.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yes, absolutely.

[Operator]

Thank you, Krista. Our next call comes from John Gibson at BMO Capital Markets. Go ahead, John.

[John Gibson, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets]

Morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just had one more on the U.S. manufacturing. Just wondering, Red Deer does or can do up to 350 trucks a year. I guess when both are up and running, would you expect a significantly higher level of new builds going forward, or maybe just kind of give some guidance on how you expect that facility to ramp and the potential number of trucks it can put out both in the U.S. and Canada.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah, I love that. John, we're looking at it as we know the capacity, it's actually very focused, very clear what the capacity is of Red Deer. We also know how we can continue to improve the capacity levels and gain more capacity out of Red Deer. As we're looking at the U.S. second campus for manufacturing, we actually want the variability of it to where, obviously, it could produce at even just a minimum of what the Red Deer campus can do, but having somewhat of tremendous amounts of scalability. There's multiple ways you can do that when you're building out a manufacturing plant. You don't have to build it all at once. We don't have to front all the capital and build some mega plant for the next 30 years.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Rather, we're working with a couple of outside advisory and engineering firms that are guiding us on this. As long as you make sure you have the plant for what you need today in the next three to five years built out, but with the ability to expand, we believe that would allow Badger to have kind of infinite capabilities. The cool thing about that is, again, I share this all the time with our internal Badger team, John, is Badger will never be as small as it is today. Next week, we're never going to be as small as it is then.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

As we continue to scale and grow the business, we are going to have more and more need for additional capacity, and we just want to make sure, as Rob and I discussed with our board of directors, we are being very measured and thoughtful on this process rather than just knee-jerking, trying to put something together quickly and it is not very well thought out. Clearly, you can tell we have been contemplating it, but you are on the right track. I just can't give you those numbers. A little bit of it is for competitive reasons as well, because we know we have competitive companies that listen to our calls and we are not going to tell, "Okay, here is our exact capacity on a second plant," because we don't want someone trying to trump us. If that makes sense, John.

[John Gibson, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets]

No, that's helpful. I think it's fair to assume that builds should go higher over the next few years with the new facility. That's helpful. Just shifting to Canada, we haven't talked about it much. It seems like we're in the early innings of a pretty significant project build-out as well. How are you thinking about the Canadian market? I know it's a bit smaller now, but is demand there now, or do you see it coming?

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. We're very pleased for the second quarter, and actually the last few quarters of, just as you're suggesting, there's a lot of projects that are being let and started and underway here in Canada. We're very pleased with what we're seeing there. A lot of our customers are now starting to report mega billion-dollar, in many cases, nation-building projects. Them actually winning those projects, putting them in their backlog officially. Again, we work for a lot of those customers, and they're great customers of ours. We're like their biggest cheerleaders as they continue to win bigger projects, because we believe over time, Badger can support them in all their projects. We are seeing improvement. Now, at least for Badger, it's still relatively early innings on a turnaround, and I'm sure there will be lumpy months from time to time.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

This month's a little off or this month's outsizing what it's been. The trend right now is positive. Anything else on Canada?

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah. I would say Canada is growing, maybe not at the same pace as the U.S., but it's definitely well into the double digits.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

We're very pleased with where it's going.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah.

[Rob Dawson, CFO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and the West Coast.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Yeah, West Coast of B.C. and all that.

[John Gibson, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets]

Thanks a lot, guys. Very helpful. I'll turn it back to you.

[Operator]

Thank you. It appears that we have no more callers, so I will turn it back over to you, Rob Blackadar.

[Rob Blackadar, President and CEO at Badger Infrastructure Solutions]

Thank you, operator. I'll close with, on behalf of all of us here at Badger, we want to thank our customers, our employees, our suppliers, and our shareholders for your ongoing support that drives Badger's ongoing success. Operator, you may now end the call.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's event. Thank you for your time and participation today.

Participants

Executives

• Anne Plasterer, Director of Investor Relations
• Rob Blackadar, President and CEO
• Rob Dawson, CFO

Analysts

• Yuri Lynk, Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
• Tim James, Analyst at TD Securities
• Ian Gillies, Analyst at Stifel
• Analyst
• Krista Friesen, Analyst at CIBC
• John Gibson, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets