Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings, Inc. Common Stock Noble Capital Markets Virtual Equity Investor Conference

Awesome. Thank you, Joe. Pleasure to be with you all, and really excited to talk to you today about Bridger Aerospace. I will flip through slides here and give you an overview of the company, some background, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Bridger Aerospace is an aerial firefighting company. Our mission is to protect lives, property, and the environment. It influences everything we do from our early days, and our mission has grown stronger than ever through the years. We've been a pretty rapidly growing company and really taken the industry by storm. We're one of the premier national aerial firefighting companies, and even in the globe as we expand. What we offer in services is quite simply, we deliver water and intelligence and modifications and services to other aviation providers. We deliver water via our Super Scoopers, which are the most efficient purpose-built aircraft.

We have the largest privately owned fleet in the world. We can scoop and drop water and deliver a large amount when seconds matter, when lives and homes are threatened. We provide real-time aerial surveillance intelligence from overhead, an eye in the sky, both with command and control missions with government officials on radios, helping ground crews and air assets provide suppression and containment efforts, as well as real-time intelligence with sensor technology that we live stream down to the ground. Also we offer integration solutions for our defense sector customers, a lot of which we bring into fire and then vice versa, which is a pretty solid part of the business and growing. Just as way of reference for our revenue last year, about 65% of it was suppression. Mods and integration were around 17%, and surveillance was 15% of that.

We operate all over the U.S., fighting fire. We're based in Belgrade, Montana, which is near Big Sky Country at the Bozeman Airport, and we have a location in Huntsville, Alabama. Our customers, which I'll talk about a little bit more, are primarily federal and state agencies, as well as other branches of the military. We have about 100% renewal rate on our fire contracts, and we have 100% collectability, so the resilience of our revenue is there and growing and improving over time. Our investment thesis, what's kind of set us apart, what makes us different is obviously our Super Scooper fleet, which is the largest private fleet of Super Scoopers. We have eight in total. Six of those are based in the U.S., and there are only 10 in total in the U.S., so we have six of them.

There was a RAND Corporation report in 2009 which largely influenced our business to get into the scooper world, and that said that at the time, 43 scoopers at least were needed to serve the U.S. to scoop and drop water. Bridger Aerospace saw our entry point, and convinced the OEM at the time to restart the Type Certificate and receive six of them into the U.S. We ended last year with getting two of them from the Spanish military and plan to bring those into the U.S. as well. We have 20 total aircraft. It continues to grow as we see unmet demand across the country for suppression and surveillance, both driven by Mother Nature as well as the agencies and the government funding stepping up to commit our aircraft to provide protection year-round. We continue to see national headline-grabbing fires, unfortunately, like the Palisades fire in California in January.

Texas was the year before in February with the Smokehouse Creek fire, which are driving change with unfortunate events to fortunately benefit Americans with how fire is managed, and Bridger Aerospace is at the tip of that. By way of reference, we see unmet demand near 50% for our scoopers and some of our surveillance planes, meaning there's just not enough aircraft to go around. That's largely driving how we look at organic growth and buying planes and continuing to grow. This is against a backdrop of the aerial firefighting market as well, seeing continuous growth in demand year-over-year. Underpinning that is the high performance that these aircraft can do and the profit that they bring on a standalone basis, with nearly 40% pass-through to the bottom line. Really quickly, just a visual representation of both our aircraft and what we do in the field.

You can see the mix of our aircraft and what they do specifically. They each perform different missions, and we've used them as both a feeder program to grow internally as well as to capture market share for what we call the fire stack, which is on the right-hand side of the screen. What we do is operating in theater from low altitudes. The scoopers drop about 100 to 150 feet above the ground, they'll drop water, just above tree lines to be effective on dropping water. Then up above them, we have surveillance planes which are doing command and control, both with ground crews and coordinating suppression efforts below them.

Even above that stack, we have our sensor-enhanced aircraft, which this year we introduced our King Air with multiple sensors to do both command and control with thermal detection, real-time video, downlink with Starlink, and as well perimeter mapping so that we can predict what fires are doing and then understand what makes ground crews and suppression aircraft effective in managing the fire. The scoopers, which are the flagship of the company, are pretty incredible machines. There is a very scarce supply of them worldwide. The production line is now restarting with orders to be delivered through the 2030s. But those orders are all accounted for by provinces and countries. Bridger Aerospace and our one competitor, we own the entire private fleet of the modern versions. Bridger Aerospace grew that, like I mentioned, from six to eight last year.

We continue to look for ways to grow that while the new platform is still yet to come online and serve the demand we see in the U.S. and even around the world. The purchase price or the average market value of these Super Scoopers is $35 million. That is for return to service and near zero-time machines. The new DHC-515, which is next gen, is around a sticker price of $60 million. We really have a unique airplane that is very effective in creating revenue in a short payback period and very effective and wildly popular at what it does.

As you can see on the screen, it scoops on an open body of water, about 12 seconds, a 1,400-gallon tank of water, and can continuously drop water on fire until it needs to land and refill for fuel, which is unique because, in a day, a couple of these Super Scoopers can drop hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and only need to land and refuel once. Sets us apart from a lot of our tanker competitors, where they need to land at a tanker base, refill with a hose with retardant, and then return to the fire, oftentimes costing an hour in total turnaround time. So very effective and a lot of incident commanders, now that they have Super Scoopers in the U.S., request us by name specifically to control fires. A little bit of our strategy and how we have grown the company is shown on this slide.