NCS Multistage at Sidoti Conference: Strategic Growth and Expansion

On Thursday, 21 August 2025, NCS Multistage Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:NCSM) presented at the Sidoti Micro Cap Virtual Conference, outlining its strategic growth initiatives and recent acquisition. The company is focused on technology-driven expansion and international market penetration, despite challenges in the U.S. oil and gas sector. CEO Ryan Hummer emphasized both the company’s robust financial performance and the strategic challenges it faces, such as declining U.S. rig counts.

Key Takeaways

• NCS Multistage’s revenue grew by 14% in 2024, with international revenue doubling from 5% to 10%.
• The acquisition of ResMetrix enhances the company’s tracer diagnostics capabilities and expands its presence in the Middle East.
• NCS’s current valuation is considered undervalued at 3.7 times enterprise value to estimated 2025 EBITDA.
• A strong balance sheet and free cash flow generation position the company for future acquisitions.
• The company is targeting unconventional developments in international markets like Argentina and the Middle East.

Financial Results

In 2024, NCS Multistage reported a 14% increase in revenue, adding $20 million to its top line. The company’s gross margin improved to approximately 40%, marking a 200 basis point rise from the previous year. Adjusted EBITDA saw a $20 million increase from the post-COVID trough in 2020, with incremental margins at 35%.

• Free cash flow conversion is expected to be between 50% and 60% of adjusted EBITDA, with an anticipated $7 million to $11 million for the year.
• The balance sheet remains strong with a net cash position, including $25 million in cash and $17 million available through a revolving credit facility.
• NCS’s valuation stands at a 30% discount to its peers, with a potential increase in equity value if the valuation multiple expands.

Operational Updates

NCS Multistage served over 200 customers in 2024, with fracturing systems contributing to 60% of revenue. The company has made significant inroads in the Canadian market with its Repeat Precision technology. The acquisition of ResMetrix is expected to bolster NCS’s tracer diagnostics product line, particularly in high-growth regions like the Middle East.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead to 2025, NCS Multistage anticipates continued revenue growth despite market challenges. The company plans to leverage its strong balance sheet for strategic acquisitions and potential capital returns to shareholders. Expansion efforts will focus on unconventional resource development in regions such as the UAE and Kuwait, with enhanced oil recovery applications driving growth in tracer diagnostics.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, CEO Ryan Hummer addressed the importance of geographic diversification, especially given concerns about the U.S. short cycle. The company is actively targeting growth in international markets like Argentina and the Middle East. Tracer diagnostics, although a small market, presents opportunities for accelerated international expansion. Hummer emphasized the company’s strategic use of cash for acquisitions similar to ResMetrix, with potential capital returns if no suitable opportunities arise.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Sidoti Micro Cap Virtual Conference:

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Sidoti’s Virtual Investor Conference. I’m Steve Furazani, an analyst at Sidoti. I’m seeing people still entering the room, so I do wanna give it a few seconds. But but during this time, I can remind everyone, and I’m sure you’ve all heard it before. If you have questions, press that and a button at the bottom of your screen, type them in, and we expect to have some time permitting.

We’ll get to as many as questions as we can with the allotted remainder time. I don’t wanna take up too much time because I think we have a really exciting presentation for you this morning. We’re joined by NCS Multistage Holdings. The ticker is NCSM. And we’re joined by CEO Ryan Hummer.

And with that, let me turn it over to you, Ryan.

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: All right. All right. Thank you, Steve. I hope everyone’s having a great day so far. I wanna thank Steve and Sidoti for inviting us to present today.

I wanna thank everyone that’s taking the time to watch the presentation. I’ll move quickly through the disclaimer and just pause here for a second. So before we we really jump in, I’ll spend a little bit of time talking about who we are and where we’re focused. So we are a technology focused oilfield services and equipment company. We’ll sell directly to oil and natural gas producers, companies like Chevron, Conoco, Oxy, BP, Equinor, and in Canada, CNRL, Tourmaline, Whitecap and similar customers to those.

And we will typically compete with Schlumberger or SLB, Halliburton, NOB, Innovex, Core Lab and others, typically taking on larger and more established competitors. And within that market, we focus on certain areas where we can obtain a leadership position and earn attractive margins. And over time, this has led us to four product lines, all with a common theme. The products and services that we provide enable capital efficient unconventional resource development. Historically, this has primarily been in North America, but increasingly taking place in global regions as well.

We focus on innovation and partnering with our customers to bring new solutions to market, Typically, solutions that will save our customers time, save them money, or both, and also solutions that can help them make better and more productive wells. And we pair this focus on research and development and innovation with what we call a capital light business model. So we outsource the manufacturing of most of the components that go into the products that we sell. We’ll perform the perform the assurance checks on the components and oversee the assembly of our products to ensure quality and reliability as we take them out to the customer well site. And this enables us to minimize our capital investment requirements and has also allowed us to generate meaningful free cash flow through business cycles.

The charts at the bottom of this slide provide our revenue by geography, our product and service mix, and also our revenue by product line. I will highlight that we worked for over 200 customers in 2024 and have limited concentration in in our customer base as a result. And before I leave the page, I’ll note that we’re traded on Nasdaq with the ticker NCSM. Our recent market capitalization and enterprise value are both currently just below $90,000,000, with a trailing twelve month EBITDA and free cash flow of $26,000,000 and $10,000,000 respectively. So a relatively low trading multiple, but also a very robust free cash flow yield on the business as well.

So I’ll walk you quickly through our product lines. I know this is not an energy specific audience, so I’ll try to focus primarily on the value that our products and services bring to our customers. Fracturing systems on the top left represents about 60% of our revenue. And through this product and service offering, we help our customers to maximize resource recovery with a more controlled approach to well completions. We sell the sliding sleeves that you see in the graphic for this box, and the customers will buy additional sliding sleeves for each new well that they complete using our technology.

Within this product line, we also provide service, whereby our personnel will utilize the service tool while they’re out on location, and they’ll be working together with the customer and other customer and other service companies at the well site. We believe that we are the global leader in this product line. We’ve got an extensive track record and differentiated features that allow us to operate in highly technically demanding environments. About 30% of all oil and gas wells completed in Canada use our technology, and we’ve successfully expanded to international and offshore markets as well. To give you a sense for the potential scope of a well utilizing NCS fracturing systems technology, We recently completed a well that included over two ninety of our sliding sleeves with a sleeve placed approximately every 40 feet in the lateral section of the well.

We utilized a single service tool during the completion in an efficient and continuous operation, and we supported the customers as they placed over 23,000,000 pounds of proppant into the formation on that well. Turning now to Repeat Precision on the top right of the slide. This is our second largest product line, and it serves a large addressable market, especially in The United States. Basically, if a customer isn’t using our fracturing systems technology in their wells, they’re utilizing project products that Repeat Precision can supply. And Repeat Precision has consistently expanded its product offering to grow its addressable market over time, which is something that we’re focused on.

We’ve long been known for having one of the highest performance composite frac plugs on the market and have added through this product line dissolvable plugs to the portfolio, allowing us to capture additional work with our customers. We’ve also introduced a composite plug with a new feature, which is designed to improve performance when used in customer well pads employing what’s called simulfrac operations. That’s a technique that our customers are using to be more efficient, and it can lead to some some unintended consequences. And this feature helps them to avoid, disruptions to operations and enables further operational efficiency for the customers. In addition, we’ve made good inroads in introducing Repeat Precision’s technology to our Canadian customers, where we’ve rapidly gained market share.

So while we may be present on about 30% of all Canadian completions with our fracturing systems technology, we may be present on another 5% to 10% of completions in providing the plugs to the customers that are operating using plug and perf completions. Tracer Diagnostics on the bottom left is a business that we acquired in 2017. Through Tracer Diagnostics, we provide our customers with a reliable and cost effective service to help them improve their well designs and to optimize their field development strategies. The learnings from a low cost tracer study can help a customer create millions of dollars in value. So I’ll explain how we do this.

Typically, we will pump a unique tracer chemical into individual stages in a customer’s well, and then we’ll collect and analyze the samples that are taken from that well and other wells in the area. And we do this analysis at our own laboratories in The US and in Canada. And after the samples have been analyzed, we provide the customer with a report that they can use to make operational decisions, either decisions related to the well that had been traced or that they can deploy onto future developments. So our customers will utilize the information from this service to evaluate changes to well spacing, changes to completion designs, all in service of trying to maximize resource recovery and improve financial performance. We announced I think it was, July 31, we announced that we acquired a business called Resmetrics, which is a competitor in this product line.

And I’ll speak more to that transaction, you know, why we think it’s great for NCS here in a moment. On the bottom right, well construction is our other product line. The core technology within our well construction portfolio is the airlock casing buoyancy system. In our industry, customers are drilling ever longer laterals, which helps them improve their economic return. And in some instances, it’s it’s not just a longer lateral, but a lateral with a different shape shaped like a j or a u as opposed to your traditional well.

And the airlock system helps to ensure that our customers can take maximum maximum advantage of these longer laterals. It gives the customer the assurance and saves them time in installing the well, and it more for pay more than pays for the cost of the product as a result. So as I referenced in the introduction, the key connection across our product and service portfolio is that we help our customers to maximize their return on investment from unconventional resource development. In North America, this has typically been focused on enabling operational efficiencies, although in some instances, we do enable better production results as compared to competing technologies. In international markets, we’re helping to accelerate our customers’ learning curve in unconventional developments and applying these techniques to help customers maximize the value of mature assets and also from existing infrastructure.

So this slide outlines our three core business strategies. This strategy was introduced in late twenty twenty two, and we’re benefiting from the results. So the first component to the strategy is to build on our leading market positions. For us, these leading market positions include our position in fracturing systems on a global basis, where we believe we’re the market leader our presence in the Canadian completions market and our strong resulting customer relationships and our global capabilities and presence in tracer diagnostics, now including ResMedrix. The second strategy is to capitalize on offshore and international opportunities that we’ve been pursuing and investing in over time.

This is a focus for us because international markets are growing faster than North America. International and offshore customers tend to buy based on technical characteristics where we shine versus simply on price. There’s an ability to build stickier customer relationships. And also, as a result of all of these, we can be better compensated for the value that we provide to our customers in these markets. The third strategic component for us is to commercialize innovative solutions to complex customer challenges.

And this is really the core to what we do. Right? We obtain and understand the voice of the customer and emerging market needs, and we deliver a solution that brings tangible value to our customers. One highlight for NCS in 2024 was our growth in markets outside of North America. Our international revenue more than doubled as compared to 2023 and increased from 5% of our total revenue to 10%.

This was achieved by leveraging our leadership positions in fracturing systems and tracer diagnostics, by capitalizing on long term business development efforts in international markets, and by enhancing our service delivery capabilities for offshore wells. In addition, kind of pointing out some of the success around commercializing innovative solutions to complex customer challenges, we kicked off a project in the middle of last year to create a fracturing systems suite of technologies on the sleeve and service tool side and seven inch casing. That development took less than a year. We got the product out to the customer for field trials within a year from when the project kicked off. We had a very successful first field trial, and the customer followed up by ordering five additional wells worth of a sleeves for that application.

So I will say the strategy in general is also, guided by two guiding principles at the foundation. The first is to maximize financial flexibility. We accomplished this through our capital light business model, which has allowed us to maintain a strong balance sheet, a net cash position, and generate free cash flow across industry cycles. And the second guiding principle is to uphold the promise. This is a set of commitments that we make to our varied stakeholders, including our people, our customers, our vendors, quality standards, and shareholders.

You’ll see in the appendix of all of our investor presentations, we have the promise, which you can look at in more detail. In general, we believe that this strategy will allow us to continue to create value for our shareholders over time. And this is this is demonstrating how we’ve done that. So delivering on the strategy has produced favorable financial results. We grew revenue by 14% or $20,000,000 in 2024 and expect that we’ll grow revenue again in 2025 despite what I generally characterize as a challenging market environment for oil and gas activity.

Our gross margin of approximately 40% reflects the value of the products and services that we provide to our customers. With our outsourced manufacturing model, our cost of sales is highly variable in nature, but we were able to improve gross margins by approximately 200 basis points in 2024 as compared to 2023 and continue that momentum through the 2025. Our SG and A, however, is relatively fixed. And the team at NCS has done a great job of controlling SG and A expense over the last several years. The relatively fixed SG and A provides us with attractive operating leverage as we grow the top line and grow those gross profit dollars and allows us to grow our EBITDA faster than either revenue or gross profit.

And you can see the impact of this over time. We grew revenue by approximately $56,000,000 from our post COVID trough in 2020 to 02/2024. And during the same time, our adjusted EBITDA increased by approximately $20,000,000 providing incremental adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 35 over that period. In addition, the capital light model provides us with the ability to generate free cash flow. And over time, we expect that we convert approximately 50% to 60% of our adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow.

So this slide benchmarks our balance sheet through total debt and total book to total book capitalization and our current enterprise value to estimated 2,025 EBITDA based on analyst consensus figures, which compare our performance to a group of publicly traded peers with a market capitalization of approximately a billion dollars or less. So this is sort of the small to mid cap universe that that we compete in in the investment universe. And we believe that our favorable growth and balance sheet profile is not reflected in our trading multiple, which at 3.7 times enterprise value to estimated 2,025 EBITDA is about a 30% discount to the peer median of 5.3. Although our shares have performed relatively well over the last year or so, in which we’ve presented and discussed these measures, the improvement has been almost entirely due to higher underlying adjusted EBITDA and the increase in our net cash position as we’ve generated free cash flow. To put some of the upside in context, an expansion of our multiple by one turn, in this case, it would be the 4.7 times enterprise value to EBITDA, would result in increased equity value of nearly $24,000,000 or approximately $9 per share as compared to recent trading levels of 30 to 35 or $36 per share.

We believe that as we continue to perform well operationally and deliver on the financial benefits of our growth strategy, as we discussed earlier, that we can earn that higher multiple over time. I’ll now spend just a few minutes reviewing the strategic acquisition of ResMetrix. ResMetrix is a provider of tracer diagnostics technologies and services and built an excellent business that we believe is highly complementary to our current tracer diagnostics product line. Rosmetrics’ success has resulted from its end to end scientific approach, which includes precise chemical manufacturing, precise tracer injection and sampling programs, and really robust chemical portfolio performance testing. And this approach has enabled ResMetrix to deliver more quantitative results from cost effective tracer diagnostic studies.

The ResMetrix business complements our existing tracer diagnostics product line in many ways. And together, we’ll have a broader service offering, which enhances our ability to serve our customer base. In addition, the team at ResMedrix has expert expertise in designing and executing tracer diagnostics projects for enhanced oil recovery applications, such as water floods, and for high temperature applications such as in, steam assisted gravity development in Canada or geothermal applications, which we believe will be crowing markets for this service line over time. Both NCS and ResMetrics have some unique tracers that are utilized. In time, we believe our customers will also be better served with a larger combined portfolio of high performance chemical tracers, which can enhance the value of those diagnostics projects.

Although NCS and ResMetrix have historically competed head to head for tracer work in The U. S, our customer bases have limited overlap, and we believe that each of our respective current customer bases will benefit from that broader service offering of the combined portfolio. And in addition, with that larger customer base and geographic footprint, the new service and product developments we have underway in this product line will be more scalable and more impactful to NCS and better compete for capital, within the NCS portfolio. Internationally, the addition of ResMetrix expands our presence in The Middle East into The UAE and also into Kuwait through strategic partnerships with service companies operating in the region. And we pair this with inroads that we’ve made to other markets in The Middle East, and I think we’ve got a great portfolio, of customers and and applications for tracer diagnostics in the region.

We’ve been very impressed with the team at Resmetrics while evaluating the transaction and planning the upcoming integration. The focus of the transaction is to create the leading global tracer diagnostics business and to establish a strong platform for product and service development around reservoir diagnostics more broadly. We’ll be measured in our integration, which will take some time and will entail extensive laboratory analysis to confirm what we’re able to ultimately offer to our customers. While the transaction is not predicated on cost synergies, we do believe that in time, we’ll benefit from the implementation of best practices as we seek to optimize chemical usage, realize economies of scale and better utilize the skill sets of our employees. So this slide provides some of the specifics on the acquisition.

You know, through everything that I spoke to earlier, that’s at the core of how Resmetrics built their profitable business with trailing twelve month unaudited revenue through June 2025 of over $10,000,000 with an EBITDA margin of over 30%. So I’ve referred in the past to our balance sheet as a strategic asset, and this transaction is really a great example of that. Our strong balance sheet, our capital light business model, our free cash flow generation, has enabled us to utilize cash on hand to fund this acquisition while maintaining a net cash balance and maintaining robust liquidity. By deploying cash on hand for the strategic acquisition of a growing and profitable business, it enables us to improve our return on capital and we believe positions us to create additional value for our shareholders over time. As the North American E and P business matures and our customers consolidate to benefit from economies of scale, we believe that oilfield services providers in the industry will need to do the same, engaging in strategic horizontal combinations like this one.

At NCS, we believe that the capabilities of our people, our infrastructure, the breadth of our product lines operating in the right geographies, along with our strong balance sheet positions us well to supplement our strong organic growth strategy with complementary transactions like the ResMetrix acquisition over time. So, you know, in short, I believe that NCS is a compelling investment opportunity. We’ve got an attractive organic growth track record, and we’re focused on increasing our presence in growth markets for unconventional resource development. We’re delivering revenue, gross profit and EBITDA growth with strong incremental margins. We continue to bring innovative technology to our customers, especially for technically demanding applications that leverage our engineering capabilities and provide an opportunity for higher margins.

Our capital light business model minimizes capital investment and allows us to generate free cash flow through industry cycles. And we have a strong balance sheet and expect to further strengthen it through free cash flow this year. At June 30, we had approximately $25,000,000 in cash and approximately $17,000,000 available through our revolving credit facility. And that positions us well to opportunistically participate in industry consolidation as we demonstrated with the Resmetrics acquisition or to evaluate a framework to return capital to shareholders in the future. So, Steve, that concludes the presentation.

Happy to take any questions from you and the audience.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Thanks so much, Ryan. I’d just like to let the audience know Mike Morrison, CFO, is also joining us if you have any any additional questions that he can address. We do have several questions in the queue. I will remind everyone if you joined late, if you do have questions, press the q and a button at the bottom of your screen and type them in, and we’ll get to as many as we can. First question is is is regarding your your geographic mix.

You’ve had success on the international side. Obviously, there are concerns on The US short cycle. We’ve seen rig count declining. Could get you know, there’s some projections that it could get much worse as this year goes on. How critical in this environment and you were doing this before now.

How critical is it to you to provide a broader geographic mix in this in this world we’re in?

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. No. It it it’s a really good question, Steve. And the the one thing that I will point out, there’s certainly certainly some industry metrics that are relatively easy to to find and report on. Rig count is one of those.

Frac spread count is one of those. But I’d say with with our business, we’re really levered to the footage, the unconventional footage that gets drilled and completed. So as drilling and completions get more, get more efficient, the rig count is maybe not the best indicator of activity in The US. But but I do take take the question and the point. I just say, you know, I I don’t think activity in The US is falling to the same rate that you would see through some of the more commonly cited metrics.

But the North American market for unconventional development is certainly maturing. Our our customers are pursuing, you know, value over volume. You’re not you’re not really looking at large prod production growth targets. So with a portfolio of technologies, products, services that are oriented towards helping to make international or unconventional development more efficient, we certainly do need to be forward looking and understand where those growth markets are and be able to participate in those. So we’ve had a multiyear effort to participate in, you know, the Argentina market where the Vaca Muerta is a is a world class resource to participate in the Jafurah unconventional gas development in Saudi Arabia.

We’re targeting certain other unconventional developments in The Middle East and other areas as well. The other area internationally, which has been a big bright spot for us, has been the North Sea. And we’re we’re going into areas that have been produced historically that are depleted, but where there’s existing platforms and infrastructure. And operators in the North Sea are just now starting to deploy completions with stimulation, whether that be an acid stimulation or a proppant stimulation. And, you know, we’ve we’ve worked initially with a couple of, anchor customers in that market.

Five years ago, we had maybe two customers in the North Sea. Last year, we worked with five customers in the North Sea. This year, it’s seven customers in the North Sea. So we’re finding that as another, you know, great market for us as far as deploying what’s historically been, you know, North American onshore technology, you know, to help operators take advantage of those assets, those brownfield assets they have in place. So so, yeah, I mean, not to, not to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky and skating where the puck is going, but we we do need to be present in those international markets that are, you you know, driving further unconventional development and where you’re gonna see the production growth over the medium to long term.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. We also have a few questions. I’ll try to combine them a bit, asking about both the acquisition and adoption of Tracer Diagnostics. Mhmm. Can you can you talk a little bit about your position in that market, your growth expectations, and how the acquisition helps you?

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. So tracer diagnostics, I I’d say it’s overall, it’s it’s a relatively small addressable market, you know, sort of contrary to the rest of our our product lines where if you’re completing a well, you’re gonna utilize either our fracturing systems technology or plug and perf. You’re gonna use products that we can provide through a well construction product line to help, land that casing. The use of tracer diagnostics is discretionary by the operator. So they’re they’re looking for an answer through deploying tracer diagnostics.

Either a simple answer of is the tow portion of my well producing, to a much more complicated answer of what does my production profile look like within my wellbore. So if I if I deploy, you know, an individual tracer into each stage in that well, and then, you know, as I as I recover that tracer in the laboratory and create my report, can I create a production profile that matches up with what the customer is seeing from their drilling logs and other information to your really high profile and and high value studies, which looked to well to well communication, which could drive a customer to change their well spacing designs, and or something called AB testing, where a customer might be trialing a couple of different completion designs within a single well to really try to accelerate their learnings? So we think tracer diagnostics is is, you know, a a product line that will continue to grow with us. It’s one in which we do have a bit of a a fixed cost investment. The laboratories that we have, we make investments in, you know, the mass spectrometers and chromatographs, the instrumentation that gets deployed in that service.

So so having additional scale to be able to leverage across those fixed assets makes you know, is one of the, you know, kind of really important aspects in driving value from the combination. But Tracer Diagnostics has also been one of those product lines for us where we’ve been able to accelerate our entry into those international markets. And part of the reason is that the same chemicals that we’ll utilize in a Tracer study in The US or in Canada, we’re using those exact same chemicals, whether it be in Argentina or in The Middle East or Australia or the North Sea. As opposed to with fracturing systems, if if we move to a new geography, the customer may have a different design that they want us to, you know, test through engineering and field trial. They may have different metallurgy.

It’s just a longer sales cycle for some in some instances, taking other product lines internationally. So if we can get into a market with Tracer Diagnostics, build a nice foothold, gives us the time to build a market and, pull through those other product lines in time. So it’s it’s really strategic for us both within the segment itself, but also within, you know, kind of the, you know, the view on NCS more holistically.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Excellent. We do have a question about your cash position and cash flow generation expectations for the year.

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. So, I don’t know that it’s in this slide deck. Think it’s in our our the one we did with earnings. But our expectation for free cash flow for the year, was seven to eleven million dollars after distributions to our joint venture partner. So we do have a joint venture, and, you know, we we run that and distribute cash whenever we can out of that.

So, you know, at the midpoint there, call it 9,000,000 of cash flow to the equity, call it a 10% free cash flow yield. We’d expect that, you know, with the acquisition as we move forward next year, Resmetrics had very similar characteristics from a free cash flow generation standpoint. So they were about 3,000,000 of EBITDA, the trailing twelve month period. So you can scale up going forward the the ability to generate free cash flow going forward.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Given that given the environment we’re in, the fact that there’s obviously more scrutiny with small cap OFS right now on their balance sheet and whether they can generate free cash flow in this environment. You are doing that. Can you talk a little bit about how much your limited CapEx helps you on that? What’s what’s a typical CapEx year for you?

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. Over the last four, five years, we’ve we’ve been between 12% of revenue is what we’ve been spending on on CapEx. And, you know, I think we can continue that. Maybe there will be years where we we expand it up to two or 3% if we have specific investments that we’re looking to make. But, you know, the reality is that, you know, our our business, especially on the fracturing systems and well construction side, doesn’t require much in the way of capital investment.

We will invest in our our tech center, some of our testing capabilities. Will be some capital needs in the tracer diagnostics business as we refresh our instrument portfolio. There will be some capital needs at Repeat Precision as we, you know, continue to to upgrade our machining capabilities there. But we’re pretty comfortable in that kind of one to 2% in the on the run rate basis, you know, percentage CapEx to revenue. Again, may maybe a year where it rises, you know Yeah.

Because of a specific project. But but, yeah, you know, that that sort of capital discipline together with the discipline we’ve had on the s g and a side kinda maintains our ability to have good operational leverage in the business and then also to generate that free cash flow.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: So and I know you you you briefly mentioned this is where we’re wrapping up, but I think it’s probably a question a lot of investors are asking you. Given your clean balance sheet, given the fact even in this year, you’ll generate some level of cash flow, You noted the stock’s trading less than four times EBITDA. A lot of people would argue the best return on investment would be just to buy back your stock.

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Mhmm. Yeah. And I I consider that probably the secondary use of cash. The first use of cash would be for something strategic. Can were we to be able to find something similar to ResMetrix?

Yep. You know, obviously, we we don’t love where our stock is trading. We wish we traded at a higher multiple. But, typically, m and a transactions will come at a discount to public multiples. We are able to find that here and find it in an acquisition that’s in one of our existing product lines and where we think we can get some synergies over time.

So deploying, in this case, call it 7,000,000 of cash that was sitting on the balance sheet that would earn a 4% return, so 300,000 a year, to buy a business that’s generating 3,000,000 of EBITDA where there’s synergy potential on top of that, we’ll we’ll do that all day long. Sure. Now to find an acquisition, you need a willing buyer and a willing seller right at the right price at the right time, and and that doesn’t always happen. So so to the extent that we’re we’re looking at deals and, you know, we we don’t find the one that works, that’s when we would kinda turn and and look at return of capital strategies. And and, certainly, any deal that we look at on the m and a side, we will it it will need to compete versus buying back our own stock in the first place.

I do think there are opportunities that are that are out there. But, again, if if we don’t find the one to execute on, I’d I’d be certainly happy investing in NCS myself.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: I mean, everyone says we need consolidation across the office space. Yep. You’re one of the few smaller companies that is in a position to use cash to do it. How much of an advantage is that right now, whereas others would have to use equity at a significant discount. Does that put you in a really good position right now when consolidation is necessary?

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. Look, certainly in in an m and a environment, cash is king. And a lot of the opportunities that we look at, you know, we we, you know, we wanna preserve our balance sheet Mhmm. Even post post the transactions just to the extent we, you know, only use cash in a deal. It’ll be relatively limited in size and scope.

You know? But there are a lot of businesses out there that could be a potential fit. There are a lot of private equity owned businesses that are challenged for an exit. And if you’re if you’re private equity that’s owned a business for five, six, eight years and you’re looking to exit, you want cash. You don’t want Yeah.

Equity in return. So I think having that balance sheet certainly is a strategic asset for us as we look at those m and a opportunities.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Great. I think we’ve run a little bit long, Ryan. Let me give you a chance for some closing comments before we before we wrap this up.

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Yeah. Well, look, Steve, appreciate again, SODY having us, here to present. Appreciate the the viewers joining and the questions. Great dialogue. Looking forward to to doing it again.

And to the extent that any of you weren’t able to set up one on ones versus in this conference, just reach out to us via our investor relations website, and we’ll we’ll set up those conversations.

Steve Furazani, Analyst, Sidoti: Excellent. Or you can reach out to us at Sidoti, and we’ll certainly pass it along to to to Ryan and the team at NCSM. Alright. Perfect. Hope everybody found the half hour as informative as I did and enjoys the remainder of Sidoti’s virtual investor conference.

And thanks again to Ryan Hummer from NCSM. Thanks, everyone.

Ryan Hummer, CEO, NCS Multistage Holdings: Thank you.

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