ITG, Inc. Class A Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for today's second quarter 2026 financial results webcast.

Joining us today are myself, Chris Mecray, Chief Financial Officer, and Andy Parrott, Chief Executive Officer. Yesterday after the market closed, we issued a quarterly results press release, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website at itgcomm.com. We also posted a separate shareholder letter with more detailed operational and financial commentary to accompany our earnings release. The commentary is intended to provide much of the detail typically included in management's prepared remarks. Accordingly, we will provide an overview of ITG, discuss the principal drivers of our second quarter performance and initial outlook, and then turn the call over to Q&A.

Please be advised that information shared on this webcast is current as of today's date and may no longer be accurate as of any replay of this event at a later date. This webcast will include forward-looking statements qualified under the safe harbor rules established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements reflecting expectations, intentions, assumptions, or beliefs about future events or financial performance. These statements involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict or beyond ITG's control, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied on this webcast. We will also discuss historical and forecasted non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these historical financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and accompanying shareholder letter. Please refer to these statements for additional information regarding our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Andy.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning. We're pleased to be with you today for ITG's first earnings call as a public company. Our second quarter performance reinforced our confidence in the strategy we outlined during the IPO process and demonstrated continued progress against our long-term growth objectives. As you know, on July 2, we concluded our IPO, which raised $323 million in net proceeds we used to repay debt and strengthen our capital structure. Completing the IPO was an important milestone for ITG, and I want to thank everybody involved for their dedication and commitment. We have been building and executing ITG's growth strategy for more than a decade as a company, and our transition to the public market provides additional financial flexibility as we enter the next phase of our development.

We remain focused on disciplined organic growth, strategic acquisitions, operational execution, and long-term value creation, and we welcome our new public market shareholders. I'd like to briefly introduce ITG and explain what differentiates our platform before discussing the quarter. We believe ITG is well-positioned to benefit from our customers' interest to outsource more of their infrastructure requirements because we can provide a broad range of services across geographies through a scaled operating platform. Our ability to support customers across the infrastructure lifecycle is a differentiator that can create multiple entry points for future work. Our scaled platform leverages technology through Fuse 360, our proprietary ERP and operating system. Fuse 360 helps us manage the entire business, enabling consistent execution and visibility. Our operating model is predominantly MSA contract based, supporting durable customer relationships and providing meaningful visibility to our future activity.

Individual work orders and timing remain subject to customer authorization and project schedules, so backlog should not be viewed as guaranteed revenue, but our relationship, reoccurring service activity, and backlog provide a strong foundation for growth and revenue visibility. We operate two complementary service lines, engineering and maintenance, or E&M, and infrastructure deployment. In E&M, we are the national leader in offering fulfillment, maintenance, engineering, design, consulting, and adjacent market services to our customers, such as wireless. This business leans towards high volume, smaller reoccurring service orders. The business can be operationally complex, requiring effective scheduling, work order coordination, geographic density, and consistent execution. Our scale, local presence, and Fuse 360 platform enable us to manage that complexity well, which we believe differentiates ITG from smaller regional providers. In infrastructure deployment, we help customers expand and upgrade their broadband networks through fiber deployment and network expansion services.

This business benefits from continued investment in fiber to the home, network expansion, and increased bandwidth requirements. Data centers and hyperscale computing offer significant growth opportunities for ITG. Cloud computing and AI are increasing the need for high capacity fiber connectivity between data centers as well as across broader support networks. ITG helps build the fiber backbone and related infrastructure connecting data center campuses, network routes, and end markets. During the quarter, we saw a significant increase in activity and revenue with data center customers. We believe our fiber deployment capabilities, geographic reach, and ability to execute complex projects position us well to support data center customers. Our customer new wins during the quarter also illustrate the breadth of the platform. We received new or extended MSA awards from eight customers, including a significant award from Ziply Fiber, a leading fiber broadband provider serving markets across the Pacific Northwest.

Intrepid Fiber Networks, a developer and operator of next-generation fiber broadband infrastructure. The awards support large-scale network expansion initiatives by these customers and their respective service areas. They also reflect both new opportunities and existing relationship expansion and demonstrate how ITG supports customers across multiple phases of network deployment. Digital connectivity is increasingly essential to the public infrastructure of daily life. Our customers investing to improve network reliability, expand broadband access, and support growing bandwidth requirements. We believe ITG is very well positioned to support those investments. Before Chris comments on second quarter, I'd like to note that we completed our first acquisition post-IPO this week. We have purchased certain assets of a company very much in our wheelhouse of digital broadband services called Full Circle Fiber.

We are pleased to have completed this tuck-in transaction in a very short timeframe and expect the business to contribute positively to ITG out of the gate, including a rapid integration of their people, assets, and contracts into our system. Chris will now comment on the quarter and outlook.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for listening. Regarding second quarter results and key drivers, second quarter revenue increased 38% year-over-year ahead of our plan, driven primarily by contribution from acquisitions as well as double-digit core growth in E&M, offset partly by slower core infrastructure deployment activity. E&M benefited from higher core customer volumes, new customer expansion, and growth in new service lines. Infrastructure deployment reflected some impact from a slower spring ramp-up after a cold winter and timing around the ramp of new awards and projects, all of which was anticipated in our plan. Adjusted EBITDA was $52.2 million, ahead of our plan for the period and up 21% from the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 12.9%, compared with 14.7% a year earlier and 10.9% in the first quarter.

Their year-over-year margin decline reflected new business startup costs and revenue mix changes related to acquisitions completed in the second half of 2025. The sequential lift was driven principally by increased volumes, including the normal seasonal pickup. Free cash flow under the adjusted EBITDA minus CapEx definition was $44.8 million, compared with $27.2 million in the prior year period. This year-over-year change primarily reflected earnings growth. The timing of growth and ramping volumes, coupled with the pre-IPO capitalization impact, translated to a use of cash from operating activities in second quarter. Looking ahead, we continue to expect positive cash flow and also anticipate stronger working capital outcomes in the second half of the year, including seasonal increases in cash collection. Next 12-month backlog was $1.5 billion at quarter end, increasing 6% sequentially and 21% year-over-year.

E&M next 12-month backlog increased 11% sequentially and 24% year over year, while infrastructure deployment backlog increased 5% sequentially and 42% year over year. The sequential increases reflected new and extended MSA awards from eight separate customers, including the Ziply and Intrepid awards discussed earlier. Just to frame our overall visibility, which we believe extends well beyond the 12-month period, total backlog beyond the next 12 months was approximately $3.3 billion, up some 33% from the prior year period level of $2.4 billion. We have introduced guidance for the third quarter and full year 2026, the details of which are in our releases, but clearly are reflective of strong growth expectations, including 35% full year revenue growth and 36% adjusted EBITDA growth. Our outlook reflects customer activity we anticipate as of today, the expected timing of project ramps, and normal seasonality in the business.