Bombardier Inc. (BBDB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bombardier Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the discussion over to Mr. Francis de La Fleche, Vice President, FP&A and Investor Relations for Bombardier. Please go ahead, Mr. Francis de La Fleche.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bombardier's earnings call for the fourth quarter and full year 2025. I wish to remind you that during the course of this call, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the financial performance of the corporation. There are risks that actual events or results may differ materially from these statements. For additional information on forward-looking statements and underlying assumptions, please refer to the MD&A. I'm making this cautionary statement on behalf of each speaker on this call. With me today is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Eric Martel; and our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Bart Demosky, to review our operations and financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. I would now like to turn over the discussion to Eric.

[Foreign Language]. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Each year, when we come together to reflect on our achievements, I am reminded that it is our people who drive our success. So to all Bombardier colleagues listening from around the world this morning, your engagement and skill make everything possible, and I want to thank you for that. 2025 was a landmark year for Bombardier. We successfully completed our turnaround plan. For those who follow us closely, you will remember that in 2021, we set ambitious financial objectives for where we wanted to be in 2025 and further lay out the foundation for our future. Our targets included $7.5 billion in revenue, over $500 million in free cash flow and approximately $1.5 billion in EBITDA and a net leverage of about 3. I must see at the time, we were met with some skepticism. Looking at where we are today, I am so proud to say that we've delivered top to bottom. Even on metrics we reset upward in 2023 halfway through the journey. Whether it's deliveries, revenue, more than $900 million of free cash flow or our 2 to 2.5 net leverage ratio targets, the entire team can take pride knowing the results are on the board. Clearly, our strategy is working and our disciplined approach has set Bombardier apart from its peers. We have transformed the business, reinforce our competitive position and establish a clear and disciplined track record for growth, which will carry forward. The results of our historical turnaround have drawn global attention and also external recognition. I am proud to say that we have become the subject of a case study for both Harvard Business School and also Columbia University. As we look forward, we are entering our chapter with a lot of momentum, supported by strong 2026 guidance. I am pleased with the outlook we are sharing today, focusing on growth, profitability and sustainable cash flow generation. When it comes to the immediate future, Bart will cover the 2026 details and financial results in a moment. But before that, it's important that I share some color on our overall mindset and plan going forward. Our guidance this year sets the tone for a new Bombardier. Our transformation has set foundation to approach each year with a consistently bullish year-over-year growth mindset. We will push the envelope on top line revenues, margins and cash generation, thanks to new growth phases for the services business as well as our manufacturing footprint overall capacity. It's a future that will be diversified and opportunistic, thanks to our defense business and also M&A opportunities, and we will, of course, keep a very active focus on continuous product improvement with the high return on invested capital mindset we outlined at our Investor Day in 2024. When it comes to free cash flow generation, our transformation has given us the ability to be a consistent cash flow generating engine. We now have a solid and recurring cash generation base that can better handle inherent variability from market seasonality or geopolitics. With this, we have given ourselves the luxury of optionality on cash allocation and can shift our mindset away from being purely focused on that. I would also like to highlight some major accomplishments from the past year that paved the way for what comes next. The Global 8000 entered into service in December, setting a new benchmark by reaching a top speed of Mach 0.95 and lowest cabin altitude in the industry at 2,691 feet. Achieving these performance targets while securing approvals from Transport Canada and [ DSA ] and as well as EASA starting this year, shows that we can deliver the best product without compromise and on time. We also delivered the 1,000th Challenger 300 Series aircraft, reinforcing the reliability and consistency of one of the most successful platform in business aviation. Bombardier Defense continued to gain momentum on a global stage. As more nations strengthen their defense capabilities and turn to our solutions. We achieved record defense sales and further expanded our role as a trusted partner to government all around the world. We were honored to be selected by the Canadian government to support critical national missions with a contract to deliver 6 Global 6500 multi-role aircraft to the Royal Canadian Air Force. As I said, this year has really been about momentum. Key partner who have chosen Bombardier products to build next-generation capabilities have also notched impressive milestone based on the Global 6500. One highlight was the Republic of Korea, choosing the L3Harris, which is a real vote of confidence in the world, our teams are doing together. Saab continue to succeed around the world with the GlobalEye, which celebrated another new strategic customer, France. Finally, we celebrated a major milestone with our partners, Hensoldt and Lufthansa Technik on the PEGASUS program for Germany, with the platform leaving our Wichita facility on its way to further testing and full operational readiness. In the U.S., we continue to deepen our collaboration with Sierra Nevada Corporation, we signed a 10-year smart service agreement this year for 2 Global 6500 aircraft equipped with the RAPCON-X technology. At the same time, we are continuing to develop new opportunities through partnerships and collaborations. The agreements with Leonardo and Safran will pave the way for new capabilities. When it comes to our record service performance, it came on the heels of expanding our network to meet growing customer demand, and we will continue to do so. To give you an idea of scale, we have more than 5,200 aircraft in service, record customer visit across our network and centers operating at full capacity. We achieved the highest business aviation service revenue in our history, reaching $2.3 billion, which represented a growth of 13% compared to the year before. In 2025, we began a large scale expansion of our U.S. service network, rolling out plans for new centers in key regions, including a major new service center in Fort Wayne International Airport in Indiana. We also continue projects around the world and will continue to be where our customers fly, and it is most convenient for them. A perfect example of our agile and strategic approach is the acquisition of Velocity Maintenance Solution in the U.S. Adding their team, mobile resources and hangar to our network is aligned with our desire to continuously improve our customer responsiveness. Our industry recognition reflects these efforts. Bombardier earned the #1 ranking for product support in both the Aviation International News and Professional Pilot Corporate Aircraft Product Support surveys. We are now seeing the compounding benefits of our service expansion with higher capture rate, a larger worldwide footprint with more technician added each day, and an increasing program enrollment, which all translate into record revenue and resilient margins through the aircraft life cycle. For fleet operator who rely on our service and reliable product, overall demand continues to grow, and flight hours are also increasing across the market. Notably, we achieved a historic milestone with our first-of-a-kind agreement with Bond for a 50-aircraft firm order and service agreement valued at $1.7 billion with delivery starting in 2027. The order also includes 70 new aircraft purchase options. And if all options are exercised, the total aircraft and service value would reach more than $4 billion. And our strong sales momentum has also carried through the first quarter of 2026, as you recently saw with the order from our long-time customer, VistaJet. Overall, the team at Bombardier really executed well despite a difficult global supply chain. The amazing work we have done to address issues proactively is paying off. As I've said many times, we have taken proactive steps to reduce the impact of supplier disruptions. While we see benefits, further recovery will take time. In the second half of 2026, we anticipate more improvements, although challenges, particularly some headwind that I've alluded to that our deeper issues will persist for the immediate future. We will keep our teams embedded within our supply chain to continue managing this proactively. Overall, our focus on stability also carried through our order activity, supported by strong and consistent execution of our sales team. Demand and market conditions remain strong across our portfolio, with a backlog reaching $17.5 billion at year-end and a unit book-to-bill of 1.4, with disciplined order intake, strong customer engagement and a backlog mix that continues to support margin durability. Deliveries grew year-over-year at a measured pace, bringing us to a comfortable operating volume. We delivered 157 aircraft, an increase of 11 units compared to last year. At the same time, we are now evolving our manufacturing footprint through disciplined phase investment that will provide greater flexibility across our portfolio for 2027 and beyond. From a financial standpoint, revenue increased 10% year-over-year to approximately $9.6 billion driven by solid execution across the board, which resulted in historic cash generation for the company with a free cash flow reaching $1.072 billion for the full year. We also continue to lead the industry in profitability margin with adjusted EBITDA margin reaching 16.3% and adjusted EBITDA increasing 15% year-over-year to $1.56 billion. I am very happy with where we are and where we are going. There is clear upside for many of our business segments, which we can explore with disciplined capital allocation and the right strategies. With that, I'll turn it over to Bart to walk through our 2025 results in more detail and provide additional color on how we are thinking about 2026 guidance in today's landscape. Bart, over to you.

Thank you, Eric, and good morning, everyone. It's truly a privilege to speak with you today on behalf of all Bombardier employees who have banded together to deliver another exceptional year for the company. This represents more than simply exceeding a set of targets. 2025 was a defining moment that capped off an exceptional 5-year turnaround, and the financial results speak for themselves. Starting with our balance sheet, net leverage finished at 1.9x, even better than the low end of the 2 to 2.5x range we had set for 2025. For the first time in more than a decade, we achieved a Ba3 rating from Moody's and BB- rating from S&P Global Ratings, clear recognition of our disciplined execution, the strength of our balance sheet and the strong path ahead of us. And speaking of the path forward, the fundamentals of the business aviation market remains strong, and our $17.5 billion backlog extends well into the future, providing us visibility on revenues, earnings and cash flows for years to come, with an added opportunity to further increase production to meet pre-sold demand. Our P&L also shines bright. Our EBITDA margin of 16.3% leads the industry, and our adjusted net income, which was negative just a few years ago, now drives an EPS of $7.72 per share. And of course, as I've said on these calls many times, cash is king. And on that front, we've generated $2.4 billion of free cash flow from continuing operations over the past 5 years, including almost $1.1 billion in 2025, which is the highest cash performance the company has achieved in over 15 years. And even better, all the tools are now in place to continue generating meaningful and repeatable free cash flow going forward. Focusing on the 2025 results, we delivered double-digit year-over-year growth in backlog, revenues, EBITDA, EBIT, net income and EPS. We also generated almost 5x more free cash flow than in 2024. We continued to diversify our top line with services and defense revenues, both reaching new all-time highs. On the balance sheet, we repaid or called over $900 million of debt, including the $500 million that will be redeemed on February 17, as well as refinancing another $750 million at more favorable terms. Our liquidity stands strong at $2.5 billion, and provides us with flexibility as we begin our strategic transition from a deleveraging phase to a capital allocation phase. We have several great capital allocation options ahead of us. And we also have a robust and carefully thought-through ROIC-focused framework for making those capital allocation decisions. Our team will continue to stick to this framework and act with the same discipline that we have demonstrated over the past 5 years. Now I'll provide a bit more color on our capital allocation plans for 2026 shortly. But first, let's take a closer look at the 2025 financial results, beginning with our revenues. Full year revenues came in at close to $9.6 billion, surpassing our guidance of greater than $9.25 billion for a growth of 10% versus the prior year. We delivered 157 aircraft in 2025, which is an 11 delivery or 7.5% year-over-year increase. The growth in deliveries, along with increased pricing and greater defense content, largely explains the $617 million year-over-year growth in our aircraft manufacturing and other revenues. Our defense business took a giant leap forward last year, crossing the $1 billion in revenue threshold on the back of 16 deliveries, putting us several years ahead of our growth plan, and well on our way to our long-term objectives for this business segment. Our services business also delivered with another year of double-digit revenue growth, setting a new record of $2.3 billion for the full year 2025. This represents an impressive 13% increase from the prior year and highlights both the success of our expansion strategy and the growing service offerings we are providing to our customers. Combined, our services and defense businesses accounted for 35% of total revenues last year, up from approximately 30% a year earlier, which is an important step forward in our objective to further diversify our top line. Our backlog of $17.5 billion increased by an impressive $3.1 billion or 22% versus the end of '24. This growth stems from a 1.4x unit book-to-bill supported by additional momentum from services and defense modification orders and provides us with a solid forward-looking visibility into both our top and bottom lines. Shifting to profitability, full year adjusted EBITDA totaled $1.56 billion, in line with our guidance and representing a 15% year-over-year increase. Our EBITDA margin was 16.3%, which is an increase of 60 basis points compared to the prior year. Our margins grew in 2025 despite facing the highest supplier disruption costs we've seen over the past 5 years, which pressured our margins by more than 150 basis points. We were able to offset some of these headwinds through strong incremental revenue conversion and services, better performance in defense, and utilizing our R&D investment credits. A special note on the fourth quarter where we delivered 64 aircraft, which is an all-time record number of globals and challengers delivered in a single quarter. We also had an all-time record in defense and services revenues. The combination of these items resulted in an adjusted EBITDA of $658 million and a margin of 17.8%, which is 130 basis points higher than in Q4 of the prior year and is in itself another new record, making at Bombardier's highest-margin quarter since the launch of our turnaround plan in 2021. Congratulations are certainly in order to all of our teams for this outstanding achievement. Looking at our other profitability metrics. Our adjusted EBIT for the year also surpassed our guidance and finished at just under $1.1 billion, up 20% from the $915 million reported last year. Our adjusted net income was $805 million, 47% increase from the previous year driving an impressive increase of adjusted earnings per share of 50% or $2.56, reaching $7.72 for the year. We expect our EPS to continue growing at an accelerated pace as we leverage our significant tax attributes to convert EBITDA growth directly into net income with very little leakage. Moving on to cash. This year was just outstanding. Our free cash flow for the year exceeded the upper end of our guidance range, driven by robust performance in the fourth quarter. In Q4, we generated $1.388 billion in free cash flow, resulting in just under $1.1 billion for the full year. This is a remarkable performance, and it also highlights how certain working capital items can meaningfully influence our results relative to cash flow guidance. Bridging our 2025 free cash flow from the $1.56 billion in EBITDA, our main uses of cash were net cash interest of $423 million, CapEx of $153 million and an investment in inventory net of accounts payable of $272 million. This was largely offset by an increase in customer advances of $579 million, which is the result of higher progress payments and deposits on new orders, led by higher Global 8000 orders in particular. As we look ahead to our 2026 guidance, the fundamentals of the business aviation market remains strong, and the progress we've made across the board positions us well for another solid year. We expect to deliver more than 157 aircraft in 2026 as we deliver our backlog, and we expect to continue to see a strong growth trajectory in our services business. Pricing should also be a tailwind to revenues. Combined, we expect these factors will push revenues to greater than $10 billion. Turning to profitability, we are expecting adjusted EBITDA to be greater than $1.625 billion. This outlook reflects a strong margin conversion on our incremental revenues as well as a partial recovery of supplier disruption costs starting in the second half of the year. These positives will be partially offset by some incremental strategic investments to improve our operations as well as support our expanding defense and services businesses and some higher R&D investments year-over-year. Moving to free cash flow, we expect to have strong generation again in 2026. Our guidance of $600 million to $1 billion provides for a range of outcomes, mostly around working capital. As we've explained over the years, order activity, order mix between challengers and globals, supply chain performance and production rates can all affect our working capital in a given year. Overall, our cash plan is based on a normalized order environment versus 2025, continued strong conversion of EBITDA into cash flow and decrease in cash interest payments and higher CapEx. Regarding CapEx, we've been managing this below $200 million for the past few years. In 2026, we will start making incremental investments in our products, in our facilities and to support our growth. As such, we expect CapEx to be closer to the $300 million mark. In terms of other capital allocation priorities for the year, we will remain focused and opportunistic on interest expense reduction which will give us even more capital allocation flexibility. We are very pleased with crossing below the 2x net leverage level, and we believe that there is more opportunity to strengthen our balance sheet and transfer additional equity value towards shareholders by reducing our net leverage towards 1.5x over time. We will also be monitoring for opportunistic M&A focusing on the tuck-in variety. The recently announced acquisition of Velocity fits this approach perfectly, as a strategic acquisition that enhances our customer service offering and fits perfectly into our U.S. services expansion plans. Finally, a quick note on quarterly profile. Again, this year, we expect our quarterly aircraft delivery profile to be similar to last year, with deliveries skewed to Q4. For the first quarter of the year, we expect similar deliveries to last year, although aircraft and customer mix may somewhat negatively affect our year-over-year quarterly EBITDA profile. This is simply a timing event only that is fully reflected in our full year guidance numbers. So to conclude, 2025 was another year of meaningful progress for Bombardier. We executed on our plan, delivered strong financial performance, advanced our strategic priorities, strengthened our balance sheet and continue to build a more resilient, diversified and profitable company. I am extremely proud of what our team has achieved this year, and we look forward to continuing this momentum as we enter 2026. Well, thank you, everyone. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Francis to begin the Q&A session. Francis?

Thanks, Bart. I'd like to remind you that the Bombardier Investor Relations team is available following the call and in the coming days to answer any questions you may have. For the Q&A period, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. With that, we'll open it up for questions. Operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] And first, we will hear from James McGarragle at RBC.

Congrats on another strong quarter here. So I just wanted to ask on margins. You talked about the 150 basis point headwind to '25. But can you just give us some color on what level of supply chain costs are embedded in your 2026 guidance? And then anything you can share on the visibility you have into those costs eventually exiting your cost base in the back half of the year?

Great question, James. Thank you. This is definitely a top of mind here for us as a challenge that's been carried on for a few years now. But let me characterize this a little bit, okay? We are still building the aircraft with what we call in the industry shortages. A shortage is a part number that should be available to build in the right sequence, that is not. Just to characterize it, about 3 years ago, we were operating with about 5,000 shortages. We've been successful decreasing it at the end of '24 to around 2,000. And even further this year, we ended up with about 500 shortages, so which is 10x less than 3 years ago. This being said, your shortages needs to be characterized in 2 different group, one that is noncritical and one critical. The one we call noncritical are the one that will not really affect your will or very likely. The critical one are the one that will continue to affect you and will either you're going to have to stop production completely. And then this is when the inefficiencies comes in. We've made great progress in terms of the overall number. We have made progress with most of the engine OEM, except one, and I won't name who, but except one. And this one still carries a lot of impact on our assembly line, and I'm telling you we are extremely focused. We've put more people supporting them in their Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 supplier. And it's been a challenge, but we are all over this. So, but this is costing us today, millions and millions of dollars, okay, which we were impacted with last year. And which greet me good comfort that if we can fix that issue we're going to see definitely our margin improving here because we're not talking about small dollars. Again, those are millions and millions, and it gives me comfort that along the way, if we fix the problem, you're going to see our margin improving across the board. I would say this is the biggest issue we have right now, everything else pretty much deliver where we want it to be online. So that's the real focus of the team right now.

Yes. And James, Bart here. Just to kind of, on a numbers basis, you mentioned -- I mentioned 150 basis points. I mean on $10 billion of revenue, that's $150 million of EBITDA. Now, we are expecting to start recovering some of that in the back half of this year. That is built into our greater than $1.625 billion guidance. We're going to have $0.5 billion more of revenues. We'll have good margin conversion on that. As Eric just described, we'll continue to recover on supply chain. Although offsetting that, we do have some strategic investments and higher R&D expense, as you'd expect, as we start to deploy capital here. And those investments are to support our growth areas. It will help us with cost reduction as well as well as some IT projects to even drive greater efficiency for the company. So we're putting the dollars to work in the right areas.

Appreciate the color. And then as my follow-up, just on the services segment. Obviously, things are going really well there. Your guide out there from the Investor Day, obviously, things are trending well above that. So just given where activity levels are now, potentially higher production longer term, your recent acquisition, bringing on new operators like Bond. Are you still kind of guiding to that high single-digit type of range longer term? Or do you kind of see some near-term upside to that into 2026 and '27? And I'll turn over the line up for that.

Yes. I think in the near term, the continuation of around or just under double-digit growth year-over-year is the right way to be thinking about the services business, particularly as we start to deploy some capital into tuck-in M&A. There's opportunities out there. We do have a pipeline of these small tuck-ins that we're looking at regularly. As you know, we just also brought on Sandy Hodgkinson, who's bringing a ton of experience in the M&A area who's going to be leading this effort with us along with Paul Sislian, who heads up our services business. So we were up 13% in 2025. We're up to almost 25% of our total revenues now coming from the services business. We talked at our last Investor Day of a range of $2.8 billion to $3.5 billion potential. And I think as Eric and I are looking at each other, we're excited about the opportunities to be aiming for the upper end of that range or maybe even higher as we continue to work on developing the business through the end of this decade.

And I think, James, despite we've grown significantly over the last few years, the opportunity remain extremely interesting ahead of us. It's not -- we understand the organic growth. Of course, we know we have 5,200 airplanes. We know when they need to go to maintenance in 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years down the road and what they will need pretty much and it makes our business very predictable there. But on top of it, there is potentially through acquisition or building capability, new capability ourselves to go even deeper and what we can do today in the maintenance scope of every single plane.

Next question will be from Fadi Chamoun at BMO.

Congrats on the strong finish last year. A couple of questions. One, does share buyback or dividend enter the capital allocation framework this year or you're still kind of focused on deleveraging in the immediate term? And the second question is, you highlighted defense being the $1.5 billion opportunity, I think by 2030, that was at a recent panelist there I think it was a couple of years ago. Clearly, a lot of changes in the macro of the defense business. And obviously, you're on a strong footing now with $1 billion already this year. When you look at the pipeline, you look what's kind of happening in that business, what do you think the opportunity is in defense 3 or 5 years down the road? How big can this business become?

Yes. Maybe I can take that one first and then I'll -- maybe I'll get you on, for the other one, Bart. So Fadi, on the defense business, I am extremely pleased to where we are. First of all, we grew this to last year, contributing significantly last year faster than I thought 3 years ago. And that's exactly what you're saying. When you look at the environment, of course, there's more dynamic. And this being said, that pace of growth was great to achieve it earlier and will continue. But we have also to remind ourselves that every one of these contracts are complex. They take time despite the willingness of every country right now to go faster. So I think we're still thinking of the $1.5 billion by 2030. But I think there's some potential also to maybe do better there. So I think I would not be able to declare this today. But I think the potential upside is there. Again, I said 3 years ago, I didn't know we were going to be at that point for 2025. For 2025, it went faster than I thought. So the opportunity is there, too. But I think clearly, the $1.5 billion is in reach.

Yes. Fadi, on capital allocation, we're not in a position today to declare that we're going to start returning cash to shareholders this year. But what I would say is we're right at that beginning of the transition from the deleveraging phase to capital allocation. I mentioned in my prepared comments that we are going to continue to reduce that, that is a priority for us. We feel that is a good way to transition equity to our equity shareholders. We're going to deploy and are deploying a very ROIC-focused framework for making our capital allocation decisions, and that will allow us to look through the lens of the shareholder as well, when it comes to returning cash, and we'll make announcements at the right time as to what that might look like. So very excited now about starting to deploy capital in a very disciplined way, and we'll remain focused on being opportunistic as we move forward.

Next question will be from Gavin Parsons at UBS.

At the Investor Day, you talked about 150 aircraft deliveries sort of through the end of the decade. Obviously, demand has been really strong. You're already a little bit above that 150. So I'd love to hear how you think about kind of where the underlying demand is now and where maybe you think you can take production rates?

No. Clearly, the market has been strong. I think our backlog illustrate that we've been successful also and excited about capturing some of the fleet operator opportunity that were available. We've just announced early this year an investment of increasing our ability to build more planes. So, we're definitely getting ready for that. I think it was a question for us to make sure that the supply chain is robust enough so that it's not just assembling the plane, but we need to make sure we get all the parts on time for doing that. But clearly, I think the opportunity is there, so that we can -- the proof is that we built more than 150 last year, and we're guiding for even more this year. So I think the opportunity is there. It's a question of making sure we're solid, making sure where the supply chain follows. But clearly, the market is giving us that opportunity.

And apologies if I missed this, but what is the defense revenue expectation in 2026?

We -- thanks, Gavin, but we don't guide on revenues for that particular business segment. It's built into the base part of the business.

Next question will be from Myles Walton at Wolfe Research.

Louis on for Myles. I guess you guys did have this benefit in the fourth quarter on the tax credit. So I was just curious as we look ahead to the EBITDA margins, have they peaked? Or are you still going to have a headwind next year as this comes down?

Are you -- is the question whether our EBITDA margins have peaked?

You had I think it was 155, you had $155 million of tax credit benefits that flow through from R&D? How do we think about that going into next year?

Yes. So we have -- I think as everybody probably on the call knows, Louis, we've got over $12 billion of tax attributes and significant R&D tax credits Think about R&D is, we're in a business that requires us to constantly spend on R&D. So that's an area where we'll continue to replenish tax credits. When we look at our business, we'll be -- we're now in a position because of the strong and high growth in net income and profitability of the company on an annual basis, take advantage of these tax credits. So you should think about us having kind of a base amount built into our earnings and EPS per share each year going forward. We don't talk specifically about how much that will be. But generally will be somewhere in line with how those tax credits have come into the P&L over the last 2 years. If you think of it in those terms. And in terms of overall EBITDA and EBITDA margin growth, we certainly see more potential. We're talking about EBITDA growth this year greater than $66 million versus $25 million. And as well, we see opportunity to grow our EBITDA margins overall because we'll be working, as Eric described to start to take out costs that's been caused by the supply chain. And that's another tailwind for us to grow both EBITDA and EBITDA margins in the coming years.

Any way to think of the Velocity impact to the year...

No. So Velocity is a strategic acquisition for us in terms of contributing to better customer support and giving access to more of our parts and everything. But it's part of the rollout right now in terms of what we're planning for services and part of our growth plan.

Yes. It will have some EBITDA accretion, Louis, but that will start probably more in 2027 than 2026.

Next question will be from Konark Gupta at Scotiabank.

Congrats on the great quarter. Just maybe first one to begin with on Q4 free cash. Clearly, you guys exceeded your own expectations for the quarter and the year. And like there is some nuances around like R&D, ITCs, et cetera, that you flagged. But was there anything outsized in nature that led to that strong free cash generation in Q4. I see like the book-to-bill seems to have exceeded 1 time in Q4. But anything else besides the book-to-bill that would have contributed like mix, maybe or defense or something?

Well, I mean, look, the free cash flow generation was extremely strong, you know, almost $1.1 billion. So yes, a fair chunk above the high end of our guidance. As I was describing in my comments, Konark, we do have what I would characterize as a fairly consistent amount of variability year-over-year in free cash flow due to working capital items. So in any given quarter, depending on the pace of activity, you could see a little bit higher release of working capital, so inventory, depending on how we're doing things. Obviously, mix of sales in the fourth quarter, I mentioned, was very strong towards Global's particularly 8000. So they attract a higher upfront deposit than any other aircraft. But -- and it's all of those things combined. But there was no onetime items in free cash flow. It was just very strong performance across the entire business and very strong performance by our sales team on new order activity. So it was a combination of all of those things.

And I think, Konark, if I may. I think that -- that's why we're guiding this year from $600 million to $1 billion. There's always, as Bart just said, a little bit of variation. And we were successful in Q4 to pretty much bring everything home before year-end. But you're just 1 transaction away to have a differential of $150 million or a 2 transaction actually about 3 months ago, we were evaluating as our ability to close it for year-end as low ended up happening, okay? So here, you are hundreds of millions better, but that's why our guidance range is a little bit more wide right now because this variation is the nature of our business.

That makes sense. And if I can follow up, more sort of a strategic question on the capacity side of things. I mean, clearly, the demand is there today and you can, I don't know, maybe hit 160 aircraft or what not soon enough, perhaps. But I always thought you guys have more capacity then the demand is in the current context. And the recent investment you announced at, Dorval, to expand challenger capacity. I guess, like is it more sort of speculative capacity expansion on your part, meaning you're anticipating more demand down the road, whether it's business jets or defense? Or you're spending money just on the basis of the demand on the orders you have seen? I mean, like are you building more flex in the system? Or are you just meeting the demand?

It's actually clearly based on our backlog and our demand forecasting right now. Believe me, I'm building this building because I know I'm going to need it. So we are all aligned right now to get ready. The backlog is solid, the demand is solid. And again, the fleet order are important. We anticipate that fleet will be probably where the demand is going to grow the most in the next 5 years, significantly. We know high network individual all not want to have to buy their own plane. A lot of them wants to go and operate and use a fleet operator. And so we believe growth will be significant on the fleet operator side. We're well positioned. As you know, we own majority of that market. We like that market also because then after they fly more, more -- it's more maintenance business. That's how we've been thinking about it. But clearly, right now, our investment is aligned, with pretty much what we already have in the backlog, what we are anticipating with the fleet operator and how we foresee the market for the next 5 to 10, actually for the next 10 years.

Next question will be from Cameron Doerksen of National Bank.

I just wanted to touch again on the free cash flow guidance. Just if you can talk a little bit about the wide range, obviously, there's working capital as a swing factor, as you noted. I'm just wondering what your assumption is here for order activity or book-to-bill that gets you to the free cash flow guide?

So as we do every year from a planning basis point of view, we start with an assumption of a book-to-bill of one times. So in, baked in there with the $600 million to $1 billion is an assumption of what I'll call a normalization of order activity from 2025, where we were at 1.4x. So obviously, if the market is more robust and the mix is right, there's a good opportunity to do well on free cash flow generation overall. The range is entirely based on what we now know or have known for some time is a normal amount of working capital variability for us. Based on all those factors, we just described whether that's order activity and mix itself, the supply chain performance and then where we land on production rates and need to build inventory if we are growing our production as we've done every year since 2022.

Okay. That's helpful. And if I could just follow up. I mean, I think in the past a discussion around the potential to kind of smooth out that, that working capital or perhaps smooth out some of the deliveries, so it's not quite so back-end loaded. It sounds like we're going to have a kind of a similar profile in 2026. Just wondering your thoughts about whether it's eventually going to be possible to smooth out some of these working capital swings or smooth out the delivery profile during the year?

Yes. The working capital particularly around inventory has been impacted by 2 things, and pushed us in a way where we're delivering more aircraft in the fourth quarter than we would ultimately desire to. And the first one is supply chain that Eric described. When we have lateness to line of key components, you can't deliver the aircraft without them. So that's one of the reasons. And the second one simply is that we've been increasing production every year. And so we've had to add inventory to build more planes. So those have been uses. So stabilization will come when we get back to, I'll call it, normal profile for delivery of those key components, and we take the lateness to line out of the system. And if we reach a position where we're not growing production anymore, then we'll get even more stability out of those 2 things. But the nature of our business is we'll always have a greater number of deliveries in the fourth quarter than in other quarters, partly because we have such a strong customer base in the U.S., who -- many of whom want to have their aircraft delivered in the fourth quarter to take advantage of the accelerated capital depreciation that they can do in the United States.

Our last question will be from Jordan Lyonnais at Bank of America.

On the Global 8000 received EASA certification early in January. How should we think about the delivery cadence for the 8000 and on the same vein of certification, how are you guys engaging with the FAA post the President's social media posts about decertifying Bombardier jets. And what's -- has it changed how you're engaging with them and what are you hearing?

Yes. That's a great question. And of course, there was quite a bit of noise in the last 2 weeks around that. But I think I'll summarize it that this was clearly an issue that Bombardier is not involved in right now. It is between Transport Canada, somehow the FAA and our competitor that they need to work together to get this to the bottom line. So I guess, you've seen the same information. I think there was some public comment yesterday made by the FAA that things are tracking. So we saw that as maybe a threat against us, but I think that situation is going to soon get resolved, and we're going to be back to normal business. Between now and then anyway, it's been a regular business. We've been delivering airplane and our airplane are flying. So that's how we've been looking into that.

At this time, we have no further questions registered. Please proceed.

Okay. Thank you all for joining us today. 2025 clearly has been a strong year for Bombardier on the global stage. Our results reflect the resilience of our business model, the unmatched quality of our product and also services and the dedication of our people all around the world. We entered 2026 with clarity and momentum and also confidence. Our strategy is working and our teams are engaged. Bombardier is exceptionally well positioned to continue shaping the future of business aviation, delivering long-term value for our shareholders, elevating the experience for our customers and creating also a meaningful opportunities for our people. Thank you again for following our story, and I look forward to speaking with you all throughout the year.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines. Enjoy the rest of your day.