Valmont Industries 25th Annual Diversified Industrials & Services Conference

Awesome. Thanks, Garrick. Thank you very much everyone for having us today. Thanks, D.A. Davidson. I know that some of you that are joining us may not be as familiar with Valmont, so we wanted to just walk you through a brief presentation to help with that understanding. Quickly, a reminder that our presentation and discussion today is subject to our disclosure on forward-looking statements, which is outlined here on the slide. With that, who is Valmont? We'll start by sharing that we are celebrating our 80th anniversary as a company this year. Valmont's story began in 1946 in Valley, Nebraska, which is just outside of Omaha, and it is still home to our largest facility and our manufacturing footprint today. In the early days, our founder, Robert Daugherty, saw an opportunity to help farmers become more productive.

In 1954, Valmont founded the mechanized irrigation industry with the center pivot, and we remain the market leader today. From there, we've really built on our expertise in steel forming and manufacturing, and in the '60s, we expanded irrigation tubing into tapered light poles, which really laid the foundation for what has now become a much bigger infrastructure business. We became a public company in 1968 and began expanding internationally, both organically and also through acquisitions that added new capabilities and geographic reach. We think that history matters because the Valmont of today was really built around our core strengths and our core values. We excel at solving difficult problems for our customers. We also engineer products for very demanding applications, and we manufacture reliably at scale. Over time, those capabilities have really given us leading positions in irrigation and infrastructure markets with very durable demand drivers.

Today, Valmont is about $4.1 billion in revenue. That was in 2025, and we're between $9 billion and $10 billion in market cap. The most important takeaway, I think, from this slide is the shape of the company and how well it really aligns with the opportunities in front of us. Infrastructure now represents about 75% of sales, and that segment generated adjusted operating margins of 17.3% last year. Agriculture represents the other 25% of sales, and while that market has been at a cyclical low for the past few years, we do hold a global leadership position with the Valley brand. This really gives us a solid foundation to improve the consistency and quality of earnings through the cycle.

At the enterprise level, North America is about 75% or three-quarters of our revenue, which gives us significant exposure to the strong utility investment cycle, which I'll touch on a little bit more in a few minutes. We've really improved the earnings power of Valmont significantly over the past several years, and we believe we're still in the early stages of realizing our full potential. Our portfolio is aligned with durable global needs and secular growth drivers, such as more power, more connectivity, more resilient infrastructure, and greater productivity from limited resources. Starting with power, after decades of pretty flat electricity demand, load growth is expected to more than double over the next 5 years and likely beyond that. Data centers and AI are certainly important drivers, but the demand is really broader than that.

It also reflects onshoring, industrial expansion, electrification, and the need to connect new sources of generation to the grid. Our transmission and distribution and substation solutions, along with our telecom solutions, really help move that power and information where it needs to go. More than 70% of the U.S. grid is over 25 years old, and so utilities are also investing in resiliency and ways to replace those aging assets and improving reliability. Our engineered structures and coding solutions also support that work, and our lighting and transportation products help modernize other essential infrastructure. In agriculture, the challenge is really producing more food with the same amount of land, and the same amount of water, and energy, and labor. Protein demand is expected to increase about 20% by 2035.

Our irrigation systems, our center pivots and linears, and our technology help growers improve yields while using fewer inputs. It's clear that these markets provide a very strong backdrop. But we also know that demand alone does not create earnings. Our ability to execute is what we believe differentiates us, and we're highly focused to do just that. So how are we doing that? Our customers operate in pretty mission-critical environments where delays or failures can be extremely costly, and they need confidence or trust that a supplier or partner can really solve either the engineering challenge or the manufacturing-at-scale challenge and deliver a quality product when promised. That's really a lot of the value that Valmont provides. It starts with our commercial relationships. One example in infrastructure, we have really deep technical expertise and longstanding partnerships with many of the leading utilities.

Those relationships also help give us early visibility into projects and standards and changing requirements. In agriculture, we have a network of more than 600 dealer locations, and that really gives us unmatched proximity to growers and also supports the equipment throughout its life. Engineering is another very important differentiator. We have more than 40 years of utility structures engineering experience. Every project can involve different soil conditions, different wind loads, resiliency requirements, choices of material like steel or concrete, and our teams really know how to work through that complexity and develop the right solution in an efficient way. Finally, we do have a scaled global manufacturing footprint and also integrated capabilities that are difficult to replicate at scale. It supports cost efficiency, but it also allows us to reliably deliver these large, complex projects because we have that flexibility.

When you put it all together, it's our commercial teams that are understanding the need of our customers, our engineers are solving for it, and our operations deliver at scale. It really is that whole system that helps us win in the marketplace. The result of that is trust. Trust is really central to how we do win and grow. I just want to touch briefly on this slide. This kind of shows how those capabilities that I just described really translate across our portfolio. Within infrastructure, North America utility is our largest business. It was nearly $1.5 billion of sales in 2025, and it is our primary growth engine over the next several years. We just had an investor day back in June where we outlined the path to that.

We serve transmission, distribution, and substation applications, and that really places us at the center of the grid investment cycle. Our coatings business also participates in that growth opportunity. It was about $236 million of revenue last year. That's really just custom sales. Our coatings business also supports our internal needs as well. Both of those businesses really are benefiting from similar market drivers like grid investment, data centers, et cetera. The rest of infrastructure provides diversification and opportunities to improve performance. North America lighting and transportation, about $500 million of sales last year. Telecom, just under $300 million. Then we have about a $600 million international infrastructure business that kind of encompasses all of the products that we offer. Agriculture was about a billion, just under a billion of sales last year.

That business, again, is primarily center pivots, linears, corners. We also have a strong aftermarket parts business. We also have tubing products and then a growing portfolio of technology solutions. This overall diversification, we believe, has really served us well over the years and helped us remain resilient through market cycles. At the same time, we're very clear about the direction that we want to take each of these businesses. We're investing to capture growth in utility. We're applying greater commercial and operating discipline across both segments to improve margins and returns. Before I turn it over to John, I just want to go a little double click deeper on the utility opportunity in front of us. Here's where you can really see the scale and visibility of that opportunity.

Utilities in this country expect to invest about $1.4 trillion through 2030, and nearly half of that spending relates to transmission, distribution, and substations, which as I said, are the areas where we play. Within that broader capital plan, we estimate a cumulative $53 billion serviceable market for the structures and solutions that we provide. We then narrow that to a $6.7 billion Valmont specific pipeline through 2029. This pipeline is really informed to us by our customers. They have long planning cycles. We have that visibility that they share with us through our alliance relationships and partnerships. We work with customers very early in the engineering and planning process, which again helps us understand what they expect to build and what they will need. It's that pipeline that helps give us confidence in the opportunity ahead.

Coupled with our very deep customer relationships, we expect this demand to support North America utility sales of about $2.5 billion by the end of 2029. That represents about a 13% annual growth rate, about $1 billion of incremental revenue from where we are in 2025. I think just the last important point that I will make is these drivers really go beyond 2030. Some of the drivers that I mentioned earlier really do create a long runway for continued investment over time. With that, I will turn it over to John to walk us through the financials.

Thank you, Renee. At Valmont, we see a clear and achievable path towards delivering $35 in EPS by the end of 2029. As compared to earnings per share in 2025, that represents a compound annual growth rate of 16.4%. This outlook is based only on organic initiatives that are already underway. The underlying drivers in our businesses are very durable, and although the projection goes through 2029, as Renee mentioned, the opportunity horizon stretches far into the next decade. Each of Valmont's businesses has a role to drive value creation in this path to $35 of EPS. Our primary driver is capturing above-market growth in the utility business. We see approximately $1 billion of incremental sales potential by capturing the demand in this utility super cycle. We consider this growth driver to be our most significant opportunity, and this contributes approximately $10 of incremental EPS to our outlook.