Zedcor Inc. (ZDC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. My name is Joe Diaz, and I will be the conference call operator. Welcome to the Zedcor Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Amin Ladha, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Also joining me on the call today is our President and CEO, Todd Ziniuk. Last night, after markets closed, Zedcor issued a news release announcing our financial results for the 3 and 6 months ended June 30, 2026. This news release will be available on our website under the Investor Relations tab and is filed on our SEDAR+ profile. Please note that portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and assumptions. This discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements appended to our news release. Please view our press release and Zedcor's reports filed on our SEDAR+ for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projections. We use terms such as gross profit, gross margin and adjusted EBITDA on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these measures, please refer to the definitions set out in our MD&A. In addition, reconciliations between adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in our MD&A. One important non-GAAP measure we use is adjusted EBITDA. The company believes that adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful financial metric because it measures cash generated from operations that can be used to fund working capital requirements, support future growth initiatives and service future interest and principal debt repayments. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income determined in accordance with IFRS. Also note that all financial information is provided in Canadian dollars unless noted otherwise. Following the prepared remarks by Todd and myself, we will conduct a Q&A session during which questions will be taken from analysts. Moving on to a review of our financial performance for Q2. Some highlights for the first quarter (sic) [ second quarter ] include record quarterly revenue of $22.7 million, up 68% year-over-year from $13.5 million in Q2 2025, supported by higher tower count and continued expansion in the U.S. as we continue to add new customers and expand within existing accounts. We also diversified our customer base and reduced the contribution of any one customer revenue. We also achieved record adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 million in Q2, up 77% year-over-year due to higher revenue, effective cost controls and greater scale. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded to 39% for the quarter, up from 36% in Q2 2025 due to the previously mentioned initiatives. We deployed over 600 solar MobileyeZ in Q2, up from 475 in Q1 2026 and 316 in Q2 2025. We averaged over 45 per week and production capacity currently sits at 45 to 50 towers. We are well positioned to meet customer demand and our fleet growth targets with the ability to scale further at relatively low CapEx if needed. Our total fleet stood at over 3,850 towers at the end of the quarter, which more than doubled the fleet. Notably, over 2,200 or 57% of these towers are located in the U.S., which accounted for 54% of our quarterly revenue. Our U.S. operations generated more revenue in the first half of 2026 at $21.9 million than they did for the full fiscal year of 2025, which was $21.1 million. Our U.S. fleet grew 180% year-over-year, highlighting the exceptional growth we continue to experience south of the border. Year-to-date, our results are tracking well. Revenue for the first 6 months of 2026 stands at $42.1 million, up 68% compared to the first 6 months of fiscal 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $16.4 million for the first half of 2026, up 81% year-over-year, representing 39% of revenue. Before we move into the specific details regarding our Q2 2026 performance, I want to take a moment to highlight some operational and corporate milestones we achieved and previously reported on. Consistent with our never-ending commitment to innovation and continuously driving better security outcomes for our customers and their communities, we deployed direct-to-dispatch and license plate recognition capabilities across our entire fleet, becoming the first mobile security tower company and first video monitoring center to have deployed such features across its entire network. Due to our unique vertically integrated model, we were able to do this after just a short trial period. These capabilities alongside our robust and complementary monitoring and security services contributed to over 3,200 crime deterrences and over 160 arrests in Q2 2026 alone, providing insights into the impact we have on a daily basis. Consistent with these outcomes, our customer count eclipsed 1,000 during the quarter as we continue to diversify our customer base and geographic exposure across the U.S. and Canada. Of those 1,000 customers, over 500 are in the U.S. We are also growing within multiple industries, including now supporting data center development for leading construction firms. We are also awarded a purchase order from a top 5 U.S. construction firm to provide security monitoring services for a coal-to-nat-gas power plant conversion project with 15 towers initially deployed. Subsequent to that news release, we've added more towers as well, and the project is expected to span multiple years with potential to realize additional tower deployments over time. Diving a bit deeper into the income statement for the 3 months ended June 30, 2026. As previously mentioned, revenue was up 68% year-over-year with U.S. revenues of $12.2 million, representing 54% of the total. Gross profit increased to $13.3 million, up 56% from Q2 2025, and that represents 59% of revenue versus 63% for the prior period. The decrease as a percentage of revenue is due primarily to increased depreciation expense related to a larger fleet, increased hiring and training support for the U.S. expansion and monitoring capabilities as we continue to grow. Adjusted EBITDA grew 77% year-over-year to $8.8 million with adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by approximately 300 basis points, demonstrating our platform's operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA per share was $0.08 compared to $0.05 for the prior year, and it was driven by higher revenue and tighter cost controls, partially offset by a higher share count due to completed equity financings. These strong results demonstrate the significant investments we have made in our business and competitive advantages are compounding returns for shareholders. As we position for sustainable growth in the years ahead, we expect further economies of scale, improved monitoring services, new product innovations and conversion of growing pipeline of enterprise customer prospects to continue driving shareholder value. Turning to our balance sheet. We note that Zedcor's access to liquidity remains robust with $3 million of cash on hand at the end of the quarter and additional $25.3 million of undrawn credit facility capacity available at the end of Q2. In February 2026, we expanded our credit facility from $50 million plus a $25 million accordion to $75 million plus a $25 million accordion. And also, we completed an upsized $30.5 million bought deal equity financing. The strong liquidity position provides the funding we need to continue growing our MobileyeZ fleet and to develop innovative services for customers and prospective customers and markets. Net debt to last 12-month trailing adjusted EBITDA was just over 1.6x at the end of the quarter, which we view as conservative leverage ratio that allows for expansion as nondilutive debt financing is used to support growth initiatives. Property, plant and equipment ended the quarter at $138 million, an increase year-over-year from $62.7 million, primarily due to the manufacturing of new security towers and consolidation of facilities in Houston. Now for an overview of our cash flow and capital expenditures for the quarter. Adjusted free cash flow before noncash working capital impacts was $7.6 million in Q2, an increase of 72% compared to $4.4 million in Q2 2025, demonstrating the accelerating cash flow generation capacity of the business. In Q2 2026, CapEx was $28.7 million, and that reflects our investment in the business in order to grow the fleet of our security towers and invest in other areas of the business, including software development. Maintenance CapEx continues to represent a small percentage of that total CapEx. In Q1 and for the first half of the year, we also recorded a $2 million purchase of investments, reflecting the direct investment we made in our video management software development partner in order to assist with controlling the development and ownership of the IP and monitoring capabilities that further strengthen our suite of security solution and competitive advantages. I will now hand the call over to Todd, who will provide an operations update and share insights into our Go-Forward strategy.

Good morning, everybody. As you can see, another great quarter, Q2, very pleased with where things are out. I think the biggest thing that's making us more and more efficient as we keep growing is the quality of our team, our culture where it's -- we're just adding more and more good people to the team and the efficiencies that we're seeing across the board are extremely impressive. One that's really impressing me is the alarm count. The fleet is growing, the alarm count is going down. That's a blend of a couple of things: technology, better quality controls in place. It's really been -- it's obviously as well helping the profit side of the business as well. A couple of other things. Amin touched on a lot there. We're still at the 45 to 50 towers. We're finding a lot of efficiencies on that side of the business. I think as prior calls, we've talked about moving into the bigger facility. We've got our supply chain streamlined. Everything is in place. We have no bottlenecks. I don't see any pricing increasing any time soon in that area. So we've got a very good handle on that. If anything, the tower costs should continue to come down. Canada has been a great -- has had a great quarter. It's like a light switch turned back on up in Canada. Things are going wonderful. The brand is strong up there. The U.S., we're right on track with our platform. We're going to exit this year with about -- we're going to have 20 branches across the United States, 6 in Canada. These branches will be fully staffed across the U.S. We've strategically placed them to provide the service levels that Zedcor realized that we need to give to all of our clients and how important that is. We renewed our contract with a very large retailer in Canada. I think that speaks volumes to the Zedcor service and the culture that we have at the company. We have a 3-year contract. We just signed another 3-year contract with them. And the contract is going to continue to grow. We have a lot of enterprise clients that have come on board here in the last couple of quarters, and they start out slower with a few towers, but they're starting to really get traction and really quite grow. I think we've got quite a few valued on that are getting up over the 100-tower mark, which is impressive. And it's a lot of the teamwork, and you're going to prove to these clients what you're capable of. In the industry, there's other tower companies that say they can do what they're going to do and they don't do it. So once you get out there, prove to these clients, and a lot of them may have had a bad taste in their mouth from their previous competitors. So we deliver quick responses. We have the ability to deliver our towers. It's not 2 weeks out. It's within the same day or within a couple of days anywhere in North America and [Technical Difficulty] see the benefit from that. And if a client needs a tower on a Saturday, we'll have it there Friday night or Saturday morning. It's not we got to wait until the next week. So the team has done a great job on that side. I'd like to just finish off before we go to questions. I'd also like to welcome Michael Chan to the Board. It was his first Board meeting. We look forward to working with each other. Michael has always supported us even when he's on the other side on the investment side, and it's a bright future at Zedcor. I'll pass it back to you, Amin.

Thanks, Todd. This is our update for Q2. I'll now hand it back to Joe, and we'll open the call up for questions.

Thank you, Amin. We'll now take questions from analysts only. And the first question comes from Doug Taylor from National Bank.

I want to drill down a bit on the particularly strong deployments in Canada that you referenced there. Can you speak a little bit more about what you're seeing in the decision to ship more of your units north of the border? That's the first question. The second, any reason to think that the Canada deployments wouldn't come with a very strong incremental margins or higher margins than U.S. deployments as they may have historically?

So for the Canadian deployments, Doug, I think we'll allocate capital wherever there is demand. And it's kind of historically been slower in Q1, just given the nature of that country. It seems like everybody gets back to work a little slower after Q1. But Q2 and beyond, like we're hitting daily record revenues, and we're not going to slow down growth just because we want to focus on the U.S. or anything. Like Todd mentioned, the brand is strong there. And like you mentioned, the margin profile there is quite good. So we're not in the -- we're not going to play the game of, oh, we'll just slow down growth in Canada or anything like that. We'll continue to add units. They have a big project coming up in Toronto, the CNE, which gives us a bunch of kind of visibility as well for a few weeks. So we're going to continue to do that. So yes, Canada has been a shining star. I know the Q1 results, we were all kind of -- I don't want to say disappointed with, but they were lower than we expected, but now it's back on track, and it's not slowing down at all.

That's great to hear. Utilization rates, you've said, are over 90%, both Canada and the U.S. And you previously communicated a preference for sort of, I want to say, mid-80s range as being healthy. So I know that's a good thing, but you previously talked to creating some slack to be able to move quickly on some larger opportunities. Anything we should take away from that or think about and perhaps it's a good enough time to talk about some of those larger enterprise opportunities you're chasing. Maybe you can refresh us on that pipeline as well.

Yes, for sure. The 85% to 90% is just a target range. I think we're pretty happy with where the manufacturing capacity is at as well, like, we're not going to necessarily slow anything down just because the customers want the units, right? So if the utilization is a bit higher, we'll definitely take it. We have the capacity to add additional growth in the manufacturing center if we needed to. Todd, do you want to talk about the enterprise?

Yes. On the enterprise stuff, Doug, we continue to -- we're still doing pilots in different places. But as far as the enterprise goes, we have a lot of enterprise clients that came on board. Especially in the construction industry, 2 of the largest homebuilders in the United States, they're growing very quickly. We're seeing huge traction there. Construction side, we've got one of the largest top 5, like you said, doing MSAs with them that are now taking -- using us in Canada, U.S. The retail side, we continue to keep plugging away there. You know what I mean, and it's a long process, Doug, on that side. I know that everybody keeps hearing that on these calls. And the reality is we're extremely happy with the growth of the company is right now. We're well diversified. Our customer base is very well diversified. We don't have a client that's back in 2023, where we were made up. Our revenue was 72% of 2 different clients. I think we've got that well-structured. And we're -- we just keep doing what we're doing. And we're getting new clients every day that are -- and these guys are all enterprise clients. These are big machines. Amin?

Yes. Even in the logistics space, and we landed a couple of enterprise clients in the property management space as well in Phoenix area -- sorry, in the Phoenix area, but those have the opportunity to grow nationally as well, so. And those clients move at different paces. They have different decision makers, but we've definitely seen that kind of funnel expanding into different verticals as well. Obviously, retail is the slowest, but I don't want people to take the impression that just because utilization rates are higher, we're not having those opportunities. It's just getting deployed into those opportunities. It's not necessarily the easiest thing to bundle those up into a press release, and we kind of do that in those ops updates we give every now and then.