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Gordon Thanisch

Thanks, Travis, and good morning, everyone.
We're pleased with our first quarter results and the progress made in growing our business. As Travis highlighted, consolidated revenue increased over 17% to $189 million and adjusted EBITDA doubled to $8.2 million. In the first quarter, marine revenue was up over 19% and concrete revenue increased 13%. Our disciplined bidding standards and refined approach to business development contributed to the strong growth in both segments.
Consolidated gross profit margin increased to $23 million or 12.2% of revenue, up from $15.5 million or 9.7% of revenue in the same period last year. The 250-basis point increase in consolidated gross margin was driven by improvements in marine profitability partially offset by lower concrete margins.
SG&A expenses were $22.5 million, up from $19 million in the comparable period. As a percentage of total contract revenues, SG&A expenses increased to 12% from 11.8%. Incentive compensation, legal, IT, and operating lease expenses largely accounted for the increase in SG&A. While SG&A expenses have increased as we have invested in our growth, we expect to benefit from operating leverage as we continue to expand our top line. As a result, we expect SG&A as a percentage of revenue to improve in the near future.
Turning to profitability, Adjusted net income was $300,000 or $0.01 per diluted share in the first quarter compared to an adjusted net loss of $3.6 million or $0.11 per diluted share in the prior year period. First quarter net income included $1.7 million or $0.05 per diluted share of adjusted items. GAAP net loss for the first quarter of 2025 was $1.4 million or $0.04 per diluted share. EBITDA for the first quarter increased to $6.3 million while adjusted EBITDA grew to $8.2 million.
Adjusted EBITDA the margin improved 180 basis points to 4.3%, up from 2.5% last year. During the first quarter, Adjusted EBITDA margin in the marine segment was 8.6% compared to 0.9% last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin in our concrete segment was negative 4.4% compared with positive 5.7% in the prior year period. Last year's first quarter exhibited unusually low marine margins due to project delays and unusually high concrete margins due to project write-ups.
This year's first quarter is more typical and in line with our expectations. Concrete experiences seasonally lower productivity in the first quarter, and we expect over the remainder of the year to see better margins in that business. As a reminder, as we continue to build scale in our business, our medium term goal is to generate Adjusted EBITDA margins in the low double digits for marine and high single digits for concrete.
Moving on to bidding metrics, in the first quarter, we bid on projects worth approximately $761 million winning $299 million. This equated to a contract value weighted win rate of 39% and a book to build ratio of 1.59 times for the first quarter. We expect to see continued progress capturing our opportunities and growing our backlog, but given the timing of Project win, there may be some variability in our win rate from quarter to quarter.
As of March 31, our backlog was $840 million compared to $729 million at the end of the prior quarter and $757 million at the end of the first quarter last year. Breaking out our first quarter backlog by segment, $607 million was related to our marine segment, and $232 million was related to our concrete segment. As Travis mentioned, we are off to a strong start in 2025, and our end of quarter backlog plus awards subsequent to quarter end is $891 million.
According to cash flow, in the March quarter, we reported negative $3.4 million of cash from operations compared to negative $22.8 million in the prior year quarter. Cash flow can vary from quarter to quarter due to the timing of project mobilizations and completions. We ended the March quarter with $13 million in cash. Total debt outstanding was $23.3 million and we had no outstanding borrowings under our revolving credit facility at the end of the quarter.
Beginning this year, we made the cutover from our legacy systems to our new IT systems and processes for our operations and back office. With the heavy lifting behind us, we are now working to fine tune these systems. This project was a key initiative to position the company for greater growth. By having our business segments on the same financial platform, we will have clear line of sight across the entire business. These tools will facilitate information sharing and offer valuable insights into the status of our projects significantly enhancing our ability to monitor and manage operations in the field.
As our operational enhancements take hold, we anticipate achieving greater efficiency, supporting ongoing business expansion while capitalizing on the benefits of fixed cost leverage. We are also investing in our people and facilities. We are currently in the process of consolidating our Houston area offices from three down to one. In late June, we will co-locate our marine, concrete, and shared services teams in an office building that was constructed by our concrete segment in the East River Mixed Use Development near downtown Houston.
During the first quarter, we incurred about $400,000 of incremental lease expense during our finish out of this facility. The leases of our vacated facilities will end during the third quarter, resulting in the elimination of this bubble cost and lower ongoing facility cost. Looking forward, we are excited by our improving performance and expanding pipeline. As Travis mentioned, a key indicator of the continued ex execution of our strategic plan will be our backlog growth in 2025, which will include winning projects for delivery in 2025 and beyond.
Our first quarter performance was aligned to our expectations, and we are reiterating our guidance for the full year 2025. We expect revenue to be in the range of $800 million to $850 million with adjusted EBITDA in the range of $42 million to $46 million. This translates to a range of $11 to $0.17 for adjusted EPS. We are also maintaining our 2025, CapEx guidance in the range of $25 million to $35 million as we invest for the opportunities ahead. In closing, our first quarter performance reflects the strength of our business model, the discipline of our execution, and the dedication of our team.
With a solid foundation in place and a clear strategy for growth, we are well positioned to capitalize on the exciting opportunities ahead. We remain heads down on execution to drive sustainable value for our shareholders, and we look forward to sharing our progress next quarter.
We'll open up the call for your questions. Go ahead, Michael.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. (Conference Instructions)
And the first question comes from Aaron Spychalla with Craig Hallum. Please go ahead.

Aaron Spychalla

Yes, good morning, Travis and Scott. Thanks for taking the questions. First, for me on the defense side of things, seeing some good movement on defense spending, ship building, some of these RFPs do seem like they're starting to see some traction. Are you still thinking, late this year and into 2026 for awards there, curious if it could be, maybe sooner than that, and then if you could just frame, the opportunity, what that could look like for you in the coming years.

Travis Boone

Yes, there's usually quite a bit of visibility, especially in some of these big federal contracts, Erin, so I don't expect that it will get sped up too much more than what we're, what we were thinking, probably late this year early next for, to be anything concrete there, unless something changes with the administration or something like that, it's probably going to be going to be in that time frame.

Aaron Spychalla

Alright, and then just you know maybe kind of can you talk about the just kind of the size of that opportunity that you're seeing, potential, multiple RFPs, just any other color you could provide there on how that maybe looks for you in in the coming years.

Travis Boone

Sure, there's a couple, a couple of Project pursuits that we are working on for later this year kind of into early next year, size in the, Let's call it $500 million range. And there's a couple of them kind of in the hopper now with the expectations that a few more will, get hot in the in the next couple of months.

Aaron Spychalla

All right, thank you for that. And then, we just on concrete, good to see strong order activity in the quarter. Can you just talk about the outlook for that business for the rest of this year?
It doesn't sound like you're seeing a slowdown there since early April or anything. So if you could elaborate on that and then just speak to kind of confidence in the margin expansion goals that you've kind of laid out there.

Travis Boone

Sure, we haven't, with our bidding activity and award activity we haven't seen much slowdown. That's not to say that continued uncertainty with what's going on might slow things down a little, but we're not seeing it yet, so, I guess knock on wood we don't. We're hopeful that there's not going to be a change in the activity we've been seeing over the first quarter.

Gordon Thanisch

And on the margin that question, as we've had some pretty strong winds at the beginning of the year, we're going to see nice volume coming out of that business and again, the operating leverage that we've kind of got built up into the business, I think it's going to help with those margins improves considerably.

Aaron Spychalla

All right thanks and then maybe one last for me just on you know the private downstream energy markets, it seems like we're starting to see some traction there too activity starting to pick up just curious you know if you're seeing that and kind of the outlook there.

Travis Boone

Yes, I think what we've seen is kind of increased bullishness by some of the Petrochem clients that have been maybe a little more reserved over the past administration, just being a little more bullish about their plans to move forward with projects.
So we're optimistic that fair amount of activity is going to happen. I think everybody's watching the global oil prices and things like that could impact some of those projects moving forward, but I do think that we're going to see more activity happening here in the near future.

Aaron Spychalla

All right, thanks for taking the questions. I'll turn it over.

Operator

And your next question comes from Julio Romero with Sidoti and Company. Please go ahead.

Julio Romero

Thanks. Hey, good morning, Travis and Scott. Hope all is well.

Gordon Thanisch

Morning.

Julio Romero

Okay, so, can you maybe speak to the margins posted in the marine segment? I know, Scott, you mentioned that this quarter's margins for both segments are more typical of the first quarter, but nonetheless in Marine just really strong segment margins. Can you speak to the drivers there and can the margin strength continue in the quarters ahead even as we have kind of lumpier quarter to quarter sales?

Gordon Thanisch

Yes, I think so, and you're right, we do have varying performance quarter to quarter as the project makes changes as you roll through the quarters, and this was a particularly strong quarter on a number of projects in the marine business. So that that's why you see somewhat elevated margins there. We do think that these are margins that the marine business can achieve on a regular basis, but probably it is a high point for the kind of current year, but we will see.
Continued growth in that business and similar to the concrete business, the growth will drive some further marginal improvement. Within this quarter we had really good performance on Hawaii on Grand Bahamas Shipyard, which are two of our larger projects and so those are more impactful to the results.

Julio Romero

Got it. That's very helpful. And then it sounds like you've been very proactive in tariff mitigation strategies, just given your exposure to the public work to government contracts, can you talk a bit about how your contracts are structured, you know how you're differentiated as a specialty contractor, especially on the marine side, and if that allows you any competitive advantages in this uncertain operating environment.

Travis Boone

On the tariff front, we do a fair amount of work with the federal government as well as other government agencies that require, either Buy America or Buy American that is either US fuel or our allies, so that helps a lot with the tariff question on other projects where we're more free to buy steel from other locations. We, as I said in my comments, we've been pretty careful starting last summer when started thinking Trump might win this thing and everybody knows Trump equals tariffs, so we were preparing for that and we had a contingency in place for projects that we were bidding that that had foreign steel and things like that. So we were making sure we were prepared for the scenario that we're seeing in front of us now.
What was the second part of your question, Julio?

Julio Romero

Just thinking about you guys on a competitive basis, how you're a little, any factors that might have some differentiation versus competitors and competitive behavior in this environment?

Gordon Thanisch

Well, I think probably our most significant competitive advantage in this particular arena is our strong supplier relationships, and we are a key customer of a number of steel suppliers who we have strong relationships with and an important part of their business. So, we're in constant dialogue with them and we have in the past gotten our best pricing from our best partners.

Julio Romero

Really helpful. Thanks for the call.

Gordon Thanisch

Thanks Julio.

Operator

And your next question comes from Brent Thielman with DA Davidson. Please go ahead.

Brent Thielman

Great, thanks. Good morning, I guess I just wanted to ask a little more around concrete this quarter and the loss. I know there's some seasonal factors that play into this but just wanted to understand the moving pieces around that. And then, how does the does the outlook contemplate a return to profitability here going forward?

Gordon Thanisch

Yes, so as you said, we have typically lower results in the first quarter of the concrete business, as in Texas there's less workable days during that time frame, and so that is, kind of what you see in the results. And so, there's just a natural seasonal improvement that you'll see in quarters going forward that that can help concrete margins as their revenue comes up and their utilization of their indirect goes up.
And so, as we kind of progress through the year, we'll see, our concrete business gets back to profitability over the course of the year. And although we haven't really given segment specific guidance, this is all kind of aligned to our top line guidance of 42 to 46, so we feel comfortable that the concrete business is on track for our expectations for this year.

Brent Thielman

Okay. Yes, and I guess the follow up, I mean, at least in the last couple of years you've been sort of more back half heavy on revenue and earnings and EBITDA. Is that the expectation this year as we're thinking about, ramping execution on this this book of business?

Gordon Thanisch

Yes, that's right. I mean, if you just kind of take the 42 to 46 and subtract the first quarter, you can see that the remaining three quarters are going to have a higher average and that's the typical pattern for us and as well, as we continue to grow the business, there's just a natural up into the right movement of the of our of our top line over time so. So as we move through the year, you'll see bigger quarters and more profitable quarters and that's all kind of aligned to where we see the year finishing out.

Brent Thielman

Got it. Maybe just one last one if I could sneak it in. You've got some pretty sizable pursuits, you talked about on the federal side and what you've already, booked in terms of backlog thus far is the balance sheet and capital position in the place you want it to be in order to support getting those, that sort of work going forward?

Gordon Thanisch

Yes, that's a great question. As I mentioned, we had no draws on our revolver at the end of the quarter. The capacity on that is, it's an ABL, so it ranges up and down, but $40 million to $60 million of capacity generally. So we do feel like we've got the dry powder we need to take on projects, mobilize and kind of fund project cash flow.
As for kind of just further growth of the business, we're in constant dialogue with financing partners and, our lender is always stands ready to help, as they say, as we look to acquire equipment, we expect that we could potentially borrow some more money to do that. We think that those will be high RIC investments.

Brent Thielman

Great, thanks.

Gordon Thanisch

Thanks Brent.

Operator

Again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. The next question comes from Liam Burke with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Liam Burke

Thank you. Good morning, Travis. Good morning. Scott.

Travis Boone

Good morning

Liam Burke

I guess, Scott, the operating cash flow or negative cash flow was $2.4 million versus $22 million last year. Understanding that first quarter is typically a weaker cash flow quarter and there's variability based on project flow, but is this a trend when you're considering you had 17% sales growth? And much better operating cash flow. Is this a trend that we could expect as you balance through the four quarters of this year?

Gordon Thanisch

In terms of increasing cash flow as our top line increases, absolutely we the improvement on a year-to-year basis is probably a little larger this quarter because the first quarter was somewhat adversely affected in cash flow from investment in the Hawaii project. But yes, we expect to continue to see improving cash flow and over the course of this year, we expect our cash flow will turn off.

Travis Boone

Okay, great.

Liam Burke

You talked about tariffs, government regulation, not affecting the revenue or the bidding process. You talked about existing supplier relations being stable.
When I look at input costs and eventually your pre-buying or pre-investment is going to run its course, do you anticipate any kind of pressure on input costs as we go through the year or into next year?

Travis Boone

I mean, we'll be as we bid projects, we'll be bidding, we do expect cost to increase on steel and other products that we're buying, and as prices increase and as we bid projects, we're bidding the higher costs in there so there will be, bids will increase across the board, but as far as our risk goes associated with increasing costs, our approach to mitigating the risk is not going to change. We're either going to, you know. Have a contingency in place or manage it in other ways to protect ourselves.
Okay.

Liam Burke

Thank you, Travis.
Thank you. Scott.

Gordon Thanisch

Thanks Liam.

Operator

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Travis Boone, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Travis Boone

Thanks I'd like to close the call by thanking our team for working safe every day, working out in the elements in the mud and the rain and the wind and the dirt, and they work really hard and without them doing their jobs every day, we couldn't do ours. So really appreciate our teams out in the field working every day. Really appreciate our partners and clients for great relationships and continued trust. And also thank our investors for their support of our business.
Thank you. Have a good day.

Operator

The conference has now concluded.
Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.