Great Lakes Dredge & Dock at Small-Cap Virtual Conference: Strong Performance and Strategic Focus

On Thursday, 18 September 2025, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation (NASDAQ:GLDD) presented at the Small-Cap Virtual Conference, revealing a robust strategic outlook. Despite challenges such as dry docking, the company reported strong performance, driven by high utilization and effective project execution. Management emphasized a solid backlog and upcoming opportunities, while also addressing government funding and private sector demand.

Key Takeaways

• Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation has maintained a $1 billion backlog, supported by government funding and private sector demand.
• The company is nearing completion of a $550 million new build program, enhancing its fleet with new vessels like the Acadia.
• Financial performance in the first half of 2025 exceeded the previous year, with higher revenue, gross margin, and EBITDA.
• The company plans to focus on debt reduction and strategic growth investments.
• Government funding is expected to remain strong, potentially reaching a record budget.

Financial Results

• 2024 was the second-best year in company history for EBITDA.
• First half of 2025 saw higher revenue, gross margin, and EBITDA compared to the first half of 2024.
• Trailing 12-month revenue and EBITDA, if standalone, would be the best in company history.
• Liquidity at the end of the quarter was approaching $300 million and is now over $300 million.
• The company is free cash flow positive in 2025.
• Leverage ratio is well under three times, with no debt maturities until 2029.
• Average weighted interest rate is under 7%.

Operational Updates

• Completed a $550 million new build program, with $50 million remaining.
• Delivered Galveston Island in early 2024 and Amelia Island recently.
• Acadia, a subsea rock installation vessel, is expected to be delivered in early 2026.
• Won three large LNG jobs totaling nearly $700 million.
• The dredging market in 2024 reached a record $2.9 billion.
• Acadia secured contracts with Equinor’s Empire Wind 1 and Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind projects.

Future Outlook

• The backlog supports projects through the end of the year, with the 2026 calendar nearly full.
• The next deepening cycle along the East Coast is expected to start soon, including the New York Harbor project.
• Maintenance capital expenditure is projected between $15 million and $25 million annually.
• The company’s first priority is to reduce debt by about $100 million.
• Acadia will be marketed internationally for cable and pipeline protection projects.

Q&A Highlights

• Government funding is expected to remain strong under a continuing resolution.
• The company is in constant contact with LNG developers for future dredging opportunities.
• Amelia Island features advanced automation and Tier 4 engines for environmental safety.
• Acadia is expected to be delivered on time and will start with existing projects before moving internationally.
• The company is focused on deleveraging and evaluating future capital allocation opportunities.

In conclusion, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation is poised for continued success with a strong backlog, modern fleet, and strategic growth focus. For more details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Okay, good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining the Sidoti & Company September 2025 Small Cap Conference. My name is Julio Romero, and I cover building products, industrials, engineering, and construction here at Sidoti & Company. We’re really pleased to be able to host Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation. Their ticker is GLDD. Great Lakes is here fresh off of two straight quarters of particularly strong utilization and project execution, despite the headwind of a heavier than normal year of dry docking in 2025. It is timely for them to be here. With us today, we have Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Eric Birge, Vice President of Investor Relations and Finance. If you have any questions for Great Lakes, please type them into the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen, and I’m happy to ask on your behalf.

With that, Scott, Eric, thanks so much for being here, and the floor is yours.

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Great, thank you, Julio. I really appreciate you having us, and thanks everyone for joining. A couple of things I want to touch on before we open the Q&A. I’ll give an overview of the company and then get into some of the numbers. A number of highlights here. I’m going to get to most of this throughout the presentation. The punchline here, it’s been a phenomenal two years at the company. Performance has been extremely strong, and we’ve been able to maintain a backlog of $1 billion over this time. The gravy train is not going to stop anytime soon. We are teed up for this strong performance to continue for the foreseeable future. It also comes on the backdrop of us finishing a very large investment, a new build program with the delivery of a couple of vessels, and soon to take delivery of our final vessel.

I’ll get into all of that as we go through. Who are we? Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation is the largest dredger in the United States. We’ve been doing this for a very long time, over 135 years, and have maintained that position as the leader for a very, very long time. The business, the work that we do, it’s port deepenings, it’s protecting coasts, it’s rebuilding beaches. Most of our work on the dredging side is for the federal government, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, though we do a number of jobs for state and local governments and private, such as utility companies and LNG producers. We’re working on a number of large LNG projects right now. We’re also moving into a new line of business, offshore energy, and I’ll talk about that in a little bit.

On the dredging side, there’s really three different types of projects that we can execute. The first is called Capital. That is the large deepening and widening of ports. As larger ships are being built and coming in, the requirements are to deepen the harbors to allow those ships to come in. We have seen a very large deepening happening in the Gulf right now, and there is more deepening to come later on this decade, well into next decade. This is very complex work to do, and they come with higher margins, and we’ve been very successful in winning a large number of capital projects. The next type of work is coastal protection, and that is the creation of beaches, but then also the rebuilding of beaches after they get decimated by storms.

There’s been a lot of activity on the coastal protection front, a large number of storms over the last few years up and down the East Coast, and that work is starting to come out now to rebuild those beaches up. Finally, there’s maintenance. There’s natural sediment that occurs. When you deepen a port, you do need to go back on a very regular basis to maintain those waterways. This is just recurring revenue that comes all the time. Typically, we have about a third of our revenue coming from each one of these categories, but the deepening cycle has been so strong we’ve been able to get a lot more of that work, and those do come with the higher margins. Currently, all of our vessels are in the United States. The U.S. dredging market is very, very strong.

We do have a long history of working internationally on international dredging projects, so that market is always open to us as well as the U.S. market. There are three different types of dredges. We have the largest fleet by far in the United States. We also have the most diverse, where we have a large number in each one of these different categories. Hopper dredges are ships. They self-move. That is where we have invested recently. We have the largest hopper fleet in the United States by far, and these typically are the larger moneymakers as well. We also have four mechanicals. Those are clamshell dredges sitting on a barge. They can move into tight spaces. They’re very helpful on a lot of our projects to do a certain scope of work. Finally, we have hydraulic dredges. We have seven of those. Five of them are large ocean-class vessels.

They’re very good at cutting up rock, and they’re supported by boosters, and then you can take the material onshore or offshore. The diverse fleet allows us to execute projects. We put many vessels on for all different classes, depending on what, so we can do the best tool for the specific work that we’re doing. It’s not unusual for a large job for us at various times to bring all three different types of vessels on to get the most efficient execution of that project. As I mentioned, we are the largest dredger by a long shot with 17 dredges. We also have the largest market share. Over the last three years, we’ve taken just over 30%. That does not include the LNG market. We have won three very large LNG jobs over the last couple of years, combined almost $700 million.

When you add that to this, our win rate gets much closer to 40%. We have maintained the mid-30% market share for a very long time. Let’s talk about the dredging market. As I mentioned, this is mostly government work. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is who oversees most of these projects. It has been a very lucrative market over the last couple of years for the Army Corps. In 2023, they had a record budget and at the time had a record bid market, the work that we bid on. That got smashed in 2024 with even a higher budget and a record $2.9 billion dredging market. We were very successful in winning a lot of projects during that time, and that’s the backlog that we’re executing now.

Looking at this year, as everybody knows, this entire fiscal year, which ends in a couple of weeks, has been operating under a continuing resolution. We don’t have an approved budget. What that means for our business and for all government agencies is they do get access to the funding that they had in the prior year. As I mentioned, it was a record budget in 2024. We have not seen any difference in how we thought the 2025 bid market would play out, and it’s working just like that. In addition to the normal budget that the Corps gets every year, a couple of years ago, there was an additional $1.5 billion supplemental fund approved. That is to rebuild the beaches for the storm damage that occurred. A lot of the work that is coming out now is being funded by this.

I briefly want to talk about the Water Resource Development Act. This comes out every two years, and this is what authorizes the studies of the next very large projects. The one I want to point to is the WERDA 2022 from a few years ago. That is what authorized the study of the next large deepening in New York for New York Harbor. Our expectation is that project will start in the next few years. It’s going to be a multi, multi-billion dollar dredging project. It will go on well into next decade. It looks like there’s more deepening coming. In addition to New York, there are a number of authorized projects already, marks in yellow here, that will kick off likely in the end of the decade and going well into next year.

While this current deepening cycle in the Gulf is coming to a conclusion, we’ll work off that over the next couple of years. It looks like it’s going to dovetail very nicely into the next deepening cycle that looks like is going to kick off on the East Coast. I mentioned the very robust market in 2024. We were extremely successful in that market. We won three of the top four largest projects and six of the top nine projects that came out in 2024. You can see from the backlog chart, it is mostly in the high margin capital work, and that’s the projects we’ll execute for the rest of this year and well into next year. I mentioned we are in the very late innings of our extensive new build program. Overall, we had about a $550 million new build program over the last few years.

We’re down to the final $50 million. We built two new hopper dredges, the Galveston Island we took delivery of early in 2024. Her sister, the Amelia Island, was delivered about a month ago, went straight from the shipyard to work, and is doing extremely well. Really glad to have those two vessels in our fleet. We’ve also invested in some emission upgrades to a couple of our vessels. We have added numerous support equipment, which helps execute the jobs. Our final new build is the Acadia, which is the first and only Jones Act-compliant subsea rock installation vessel. It can hold 20,000 metric tons of rock, and it can lay it on the seabed for things that need protection. That’s wind cables, that could be wind turbines, that can be oil and gas pipelines, telecommunication cables, power cables.

Anything that needs scour protection to put rock over it, the Acadia can do. The Acadia is being built in the Philly Shipyard and should be delivered in the first part of next year. It is the only Jones Act vessel, so we have a big advantage for U.S. offshore wind in the United States. We have two contracts already in the United States that we will execute next year once we take delivery of the vessel: Equinor’s Empire Wind 1 project and Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind. These are two permitted projects that are moving forward. Construction has already begun on both of them. Those projects will continue to go forward. It’s no surprise that there has been a slowdown in U.S. offshore wind. We’ve been preparing for that possibility for quite some time and have been marketing the vessel overseas now for a couple of years.

It’s a very lucrative market in Europe, Asia, and other places as well. We’ll take the utilization in 2026 in the United States. We’ll likely then go international for a couple of years until offshore wind returns back to the United States. The graphic here shows the forecasted capacity of vessels needed to keep up with the demand internationally for new offshore wind farms. The horizontal bar in orange represents the vessels like the Acadia that can execute all the work. There is an undersupply of these vessels worldwide. That is why we built this vessel for the United States market, and we think that market will come back. It’s a big ocean. There’s a lot of work out there, and we’ll work it internationally until the market comes back. In addition to offshore wind, as I mentioned, this vessel can put rock over anything that needs protection.

There are a couple of other markets that we’re targeting. One is cable protection, and that could be power cables or telecommunication cables. I’m sure everybody has seen over the last year or so, there has been a number of instances of sabotage of anchors being dragged over cables. Putting rock over that protects it, and putting rock over an oil and gas pipeline also protects that from potential rupture. There is a very large market for the vessel like the Acadia. Moving on to the numbers. I mentioned our backlog. We’ve been sitting at this billion-dollar number for quite some time. Before this big boom in the bid market, our historical backlog average is $550 million and have almost doubled it. Just as important is the construct of that backlog. The orange number is the capital backlog.

We’re sitting at capital backlog numbers right now that exceed where we have historically been on total backlog. This is good visibility for us that the performance that we have seen in the past should continue into the future. 2024 was the second best year in company history from an EBITDA standpoint. You can see the first half of 2025, we have blown past what we did in the first half of last year. Higher revenue, higher gross margin, higher EBITDA, higher EBITDA margin. That’s despite, as Julio mentioned at the beginning, this was a very heavy dry dock year for us. These vessels are required to do regulatory dry docking. The way the calendar fell, there was a large number in 2025. Despite having a number of vessels at the shipyard doing their dry docking, we’ve still been able to print these kind of numbers. Just some historical financials.

If you look on a trailing 12 months basis for both revenue and EBITDA, if this was a standalone year, both would be the best in company history. I do want to talk a little about CapEx. As I mentioned, we did a very extensive new build program. That is winding down now. We expect, as we move into 2026 and take delivery of our final vessel, the Acadia, CapEx will start looking more normal. Our maintenance CapEx is typically anywhere between $15 million to $25 million, just depending on what we have going on that year. We have no plans to invest in building new dredges in the foreseeable future. Our dredging fleet is in very good shape. We may do an occasional upgrade here and there, but that would all be relatively small dollars, easily done with cash flow. We’ve done the heavy lift.

We’ve spent money on it. We’ve gotten the fleet that we have, and now our priority is to start reaping the cash benefits of having a very, very modern fleet. We’ve been able to maintain a very strong balance sheet while we’re in the middle of this new build program. Liquidity at the end of the quarter was approaching $300 million. I can tell you, as we sit here today, it is over $300 million. Despite writing some very big checks for the new build program, we’re actually free cash flow positive so far this year, and balance sheet in really good shape. We’ve gotten our leverage ratio well under three times. Despite the new build program, we have no maturities on our debt until 2029. Our average weighted interest rate is under 7%. We have an undrawn $330 million revolver right now. Balance sheet in really good shape.

Cash flow profile is going to change drastically as we wrap up the new build program early next year. Here’s an illustrative example of what cash flows could look like going forward, using the trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA as a proxy for operating cash flow. As I said, on a go-forward basis, I’ll go on the high end, maintenance CapEx of $25 million. Currently, our cash interest is $30 million. Our first priority on the other side of the new build program will be to de-lever, so I expect that to come down. We still have some old NOLs that will prevent us from being a cash taxpayer, at least for the next couple of years. The story is now we will start generating cash.

I said first priority is to pay down debt, and then we’ll have a lot of options with the additional cash going forward that we will have to make at that point. Good problem to have. A couple of things in the appendix. We will post this deck on our website, so it’ll all be there. In the interest of time, I’ll stop it there. Julio, I can turn it back over to you to see if there are any questions.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Excellent. Scott, thanks so much for the overview. Again, if folks have questions for Great Lakes, type them to the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Happy to ask on your behalf. I’ll kick it off here with some questions around government funding. As we’re approaching the end of the government fiscal year here on September 30, just if you could speak to how much funding you have visibility to expect to be released and awarded in the near term.

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, so we’re going to finish this year with a 12-month continuing resolution, and I think it’s very likely that we continue the next fiscal year in a continuing resolution. Continuing resolutions are not unusual. Most years begin with them. What was unusual this year is that it lasted the full year. Full expectation will enter this new fiscal year with it. I’m hoping, and it appears this one could be short. What I’m hearing, this could be a couple of months one, but they’ll try to work something out within there. That being said, we’ll still have access to the funding that we had in 2024, so I don’t see funding to be an issue. The preliminary budgets that both the Senate and the House have put together, put forward once it’s approved, is shaping up to be a new record budget for the Army Corps.

We have access to the prior year’s one, but assuming the ones that are on the table now get passed, it will be a new record budget. Funding, I don’t believe, is going to be an issue for us, even if it is another prolonged continuing resolution.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Excellent. Great call there. Can you speak to maybe what you’re seeing in terms of private demand and what you’re seeing on the LNG front?

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, so in a couple of years, a year ago, we won the two very large LNG projects that we’re executing right now. In the second quarter, we announced that we won our third LNG project. That was the Woodside Louisiana LNG. We’ll start executing that maybe at the end of this year, but that’ll be mostly a 2026 story. We definitely are in constant contact with all of the LNG developers. I don’t have anything shorter term that’s on our horizon for new dredging work. I think there will be some additional trains that will come out, but the dredging for that is probably already done. We have a team that follows that market, talks to them. I do think there’s an opportunity, you know, maybe longer term for some additional LNG dredging, but in the short term, I don’t see any, but that’s fine.

We’re pretty full right now with the three projects that we have.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Understood. Your business is fairly capital intensive. You have periodic investments into new vessels and upgrades to existing equipment. Investors often ask how to best frame CapEx either as a percentage of sales or profit or some other metric. I want to kind of throw that question back to you guys. How would you have investors think about CapEx over not just 2026 to 2027, but rather over kind of a longer time horizon that will inevitably have periods of reinvestment?

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, no, it’s a good question, one we talk about a lot here. As I mentioned, we’ve just invested a lot of money in the new fleet. One of the advantages of having a new fleet is that the maintenance requirements on a new fleet are much less than on an older fleet. You’ll have natural decreases on a per-vessel basis of just normal CapEx maintenance going forward. That also goes for less downtime for mechanical failures and stuff. It’s all done by design. As I mentioned, we’re not building any other dredges going forward. It’s just doing the maintenance on these vessels. The life on these vessels is 40 plus years. We have a number of vessels that are over 40 right now and doing very well. However, we are very mindful that there does come a time where you’re throwing good money after bad.

We do have some of our dredges that are probably at close to end of life. It was part of the build strategy that we had. Right now, this market is so strong that we can, the market can support the vessels that we have in our fleet right now. We have an order of vessels from top to bottom, and some of the older vessels will be the first ones out when it just doesn’t make sense to put in the capital that’s needed for a 40-plus-year-old dredge.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Very helpful. Just contextualize that a little bit further. Just, you know, what does, you know, CapEx look like during a three-year period of replacement of those vessels? Say it’s in 2030 or something like that versus a period, you know, of non-new builds, kind of steady state CapEx.

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, so, you know, I mentioned, and I think I was being conservative when I say maintenance CapEx of $25 million a year. If you look at the last two years, we were about $15 million a year on maintenance CapEx. The $25 million is accounting for those ebbs and flows where maybe you have to put a little bit more investment. I do think $25 million is a good proxy on average as you look over a period of time. I did mention we potentially do an upgrade that we’re working on the engineering right now for one of our vessels. That, again, we haven’t made that decision yet, but that likely happens. As far as new builds, we have by far the youngest hopper fleet in the industry right now.

Not only did we just take the Amelia Island and the Galveston Island, the Ellis Island, which is the largest dredge in the United States, she was built six years ago. That fleet is in really good shape. This upgrade program that we’re looking at, as opposed to building, is we think we could take some of our very capable dredges, modernize them as opposed to buying new, and get like new vessels for a much cheaper price. We took care of the hopper fleet. We may do one upgrade. The fleet is in really, really good shape, Julio. We took into account when we built the Amelia Island and the Galveston Island, the older vessels that will likely come out. The two that we just built are the replacements for the one or two that we may take out over the next handful of years.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Very helpful. Thank you for that. Kind of segues into, since we’re talking about Amelia Island, congratulations on taking delivery of that recently. The press release you guys put out noted the high level of automation of that vessel. Can you maybe just talk about one or two examples of that automation and the ship’s capabilities?

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, excuse me, choking on my water here. The Amelia Island, it’s a sister to the Galveston Island. On all these new dredges, and that’s another good reason to do it, they all have Tier 4 engines. Excuse me, very environmentally safe. When it comes to the topside equipment, there are really neat automated things on the vessels that just allow us to be much more efficient. One thing I do want to mention as well, as part of our upgrades to the fleet and the new fleet, and the automation that we’re not only able to put on the new vessels, but that we have already put on some older vessels, we have started doing a lot of stuff on the vessels, looking at productivity, analyzing how we’re doing, how we can get better in our corporate office here.

Earlier this year we did open up a remote operation system. The vessels still operate with a crew there, but in-house, we are able to take our subject matter experts. They can view the performance of the dredges 24/7, make little tweaks, suggest little tweaks to the guys on the dredges, because we can see real-time how production is. That’s just another example of how we’re using technology to improve performance.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Very interesting. Thank you for that. Maybe just squeezing in one on the Acadia, which is the under construction subsea rock installation vessel, still on track for delivery in end of Q1, more or less, and then assuming delivery on time. Like you said, the two projects are kind of good to go. Would you expect that? I think you had $52 million of offshore energy backlog. Would the assumption be that that’s all 2026?

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, that’s correct. That’s the two projects we have. As I said, we are bidding a ton of work internationally right now. The plan would be to do Empire Wind 1, go straight to Sunrise Wind. That takes us towards the end of 2026, and then mobilize overseas and operate the vessel there.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Gotcha. On capital allocation, you talked about first priority would be to delever. Any other kind of thoughts around capital allocation that you guys could share?

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, I mean, it’s a conversation that we have with the board, but everybody’s on board. Let’s delever. We do have, again, a very good balance sheet right now with some long maturities, but we do have an opportunity towards the end of the year, beginning of next year, to start taking some of that out. We’ll do that as first priority. I think we’ll probably take about $100 million of debt out. I do have $325 million notes that don’t mature until 2029 at a 5.25%. We’ll probably leave those as is, take out the $100 million. We have a lot of options at that point. Those will be all conversations we’ll have internally and bring to the board. We’re very mindful. We spent money for a purpose, and now it’s time to start reaping the benefits of that with the positive cash flow.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Perfect. With about 30 seconds left, if you could just close out with some closing thoughts and what folks should take away from today.

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Yeah, the last couple of years, the performance has obviously been extremely strong. We’ve been very successful on our bid strategy. The execution of the projects has been phenomenal, and that’s leading to these returns. I said this is not close to over. We have the backlog to support finished this year. The 2026 calendar is filling up very nicely, almost full. We’ll start working on filling 2027, and that is going to come on the backdrop of the next deepening cycle along the East Coast. It is just working out exactly as we thought that it would. This will continue. Having the new build program behind us, we were able to achieve everything we did while writing some very big checks. Those are behind us now. This becomes a very lucrative, positive cash flow profile company going forward.

Julio Romero, Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Very exciting to leave it there. Scott, Eric, thanks so much for taking the time.

Scott Kornblau, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation: Great. Thank you, Julio. Thanks to everybody for joining.

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