Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings, Inc. Common Stock 0 Earnings Call

We've been going on now since 9:30 A.M. This is "The Vertical Economy" RedChip Virtual Investor Conference, we have yet another great company for you. This one is Bridger Aerospace Group, ticker BAER on the Nasdaq. Presenting today is the President and CEO, Sam Davis. Hi, Sam. Hey, thank you for having us.

Hopefully, you can hear me okay.

Yes, I can hear you.

Perfect. Please put your presentation on the screen while I get some preliminaries out of the way.

Perfect. First of all, let's do the safe harbor statement.

This segment may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management, constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact should also be considered forward-looking statements. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. As always, participants, we welcome your questions. Get to us by clicking the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, then type your question into the text box. Sam, if you're ready, you can jump right into it.

Absolutely. Perfect. Thank you. Go to my first slide here. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Sam Davis, Chief Executive Officer at Bridger Aerospace. Wildland firefighting is a dangerous mission, but one that's continuing to grow in importance year-round and worldwide. Bridger, since our founding in 2014, we've never changed our mission, and it's never been more important. We're here to save lives, property, and the environment, and it guides everything in what we do. We're an aerial firefighting company headquartered out of Bozeman, Montana, where I'm at today. We provide suppression and surveillance, not only with the safest, most effective aircraft in service, but also the most high-performing, mission-centric team in the industry. That's not my personal opinion. I think we have the high reputation to back that up.

We couple our services with in-house integrated capabilities, with a certified repair station and an engineering division that's able to constantly introduce new technology in use of our high-tempo operations as we deploy across the nation. We're able to deliver real-time intelligence to combat wildfires and large amounts of water. With only four scoopers in the U.S. on contract, we restarted the type certificate and worked to get two from the OEM a year to receive six scoopers here in the U.S. by the year 2022. Just last year, we were able to purchase an additional two retired Spanish military aircraft over in Spain that we helped to return to service, so now we have a fleet of eight.

Early on, our funding included notable firms such as Blackstone, JP Morgan, Barings, and mostly this was around the purchase of six scoopers and the build-out of the infrastructure. Also, we were able to contract a lot of these surveillance planes and equip with technology as we grew the fleet. In 2023, we acquired a software company that we put into use today with our contract award that provided wildland firefighters on the ground with real-time situational awareness, and coupled that with Bridger's aerial intel. In 2024, we acquired a defense-based aerospace engineering company that allowed us to have integrated services that we brought both into our firefighting fleet, as well as allowed for them to continue to pursue non-fire missions that are very mission-centric to what we already do.

They've continued to help us grow both sides of the business quite well and a lot of potential there for the future. I joined the team in 2019 as employee number 43. I've worked through a lot of different roles as we've grown. Stepped into the role as interim CFO or CEO, sorry, in 2024 when our founder ran for and was elected to U.S. Senate. Then stepped into the permanent position in early 2025. In 2025, we were able to complete a refinance for most of our debt led by Bain. This allowed us to expand our fleet with the two Spanish Scoopers, two King Airs, and brought two PC-12s onto our balance sheet. We also did a sale-leaseback of our hangar to free up more of the capital and delever.

Most exciting for me, we also were able to facilitate a deferred draw facility that allows us to grow our fleet. This year, we focused on continuing rolled out of new planes, adding aircraft, increasing contract capacity. We brought on a C-suite to position for growth, which I'll cover in a minute, and continue to build on our task orders, our long-term contracts, and the guaranteed work, which I'll also cover later. Next slide. A quick overview of our fleet. We show a growing base of the most effective platforms available. We have the largest privately owned fleet of Super Scoopers in the world, and we're one of three owner-operators globally, with being one of two with the modern turbine versions. All other scoopers are owned by sovereign entities worldwide.

The Super Scoopers are in high demand based on their rapid and remote deployment capabilities and their highly effective suppression abilities. Year after year, we've seen higher utilization and increasing commitment for these aircraft. Our Air Attack fleet has been the consistent roots of the company, the eye in the sky that assists government officials as they coordinate firefighting assets. It's acted as a feeder program as we've moved into what we call our multi-mission aircraft, where we put sensors on planes, and they're changing the industry. In the early days, you can see the picture in the middle. That's what an incident commander or an ATGS would look out the window and see. Now with sensors, we can peer through smoke and read a license plate from nine miles away.

We can detect lightning strikes the size of a basketball laying underneath pine needles in the forest, before it bursts into flames. We can act on the danger before a human eye can detect anything, and it really fits our mission because we champion being the best intelligence available, being able to detect fires faster with our surveillance planes and act on them faster with our suppression planes in that really critical 48-hour window. Next slide. Of significant importance for us is the continued build-out of what I believe is the world-class management team, carefully selected for their expertise in aviation technology, capital markets, and compliance. We all joined Bridger to get behind the mission, but we're also focused on what we can bring to the table because we see the convergence of all this opportunity in front of us.

Our focus this year and beyond is building resiliency, scalability, and sustainability. The backgrounds of the team that we now have really speaks for itself. I will start with Anne. She is our former Audit Committee Chair that joined in 2023 and saw Bridger's need for a CFO as our previous CFO moved on. She has extensive background in audit and finance and had a lot in private equity and venture capital at Quadrant Capital. She is really helping us position for growth with her expertise and building a bulletproof back office. Bill Andrews joined shortly after Anne. He came from Lockheed Martin as VP of Programs, is a former C-130 commander in the Air Force, and he has helped us already focus on consistent, safe, scalable operations as we grow our number of aircraft and the diversity of our programs.

The last add to the team was Justin, who joined after Bill, to fill our GC role, and he has brought an extensive background from Bristow Group, continues to lay our public company foundation, and has brought a lot of aviation expertise for us as we scale. Last but not least, we have Rob, who has been on the team for quite a while, and he has now flourished in his role as we promoted him to commercial growth. He has extensive backgrounds for decades in the aviation industry, even coming from De Havilland, our OEM, and is really key on helping us look for those new opportunities as we grow. Next slide. Just to cover some of the defining things that set us apart, both macro level and then specific to Bridger, we have structural demand tailwinds that have really converged all at once for us to have a long-term growth picture we saw early on, but we have now seen come to fruition.

We are a leading provider of very essential aerial firefighting solutions in the U.S., and we have competitive moats around our scoopers, which are difficult to obtain, as well as with our technology, which we have integrated into our services. We have a resilient contract profile with 100% renewal rate, and we have chipped away from our early days of being only call-when-needed contracts to now exclusive use revenue. Like I mentioned, we have scarce and hard-to-replicate Super Scooper fleet that we are the best at obtaining, returning to service, and operating in the field.

We have a strong financial profile that has shown considerable growth and resiliency. Despite any sort of seasonality that remains in wildfire, we have really shown the ability to predict and take advantage of the opportunities out there. We have continued to diversify, especially as we have gone into technology, sorry, and that has opened up the door for a lot of similar mission sets for us. As I just mentioned, we have a very robust, seasoned leadership team with a proven track record and positioning us for growth. Next slide. The aerial firefighting industry has evolved very rapidly from the early days. We saw early on the growing threat of wildfire and the need for robust, safe, and innovative solutions in aerial firefighting. Often we had to make investments at risk and on a small scale to push the industry in the right direction.

Today, we've seen that paid off in a meaningful way because now we see the effects of climate change continuing to drive up temperatures, creating longer lasting and more intense drought conditions, and exacerbated fuel loads, which causes megafires, and that continues the cycle. I believe there's over 100 million acres of untreated forest fuels that continue to grow faster than we can treat, and so we have to interact on them. Forest fires are natural, a natural part of the ecosystem. With the pace that this is growing as a worldwide threat from coast to coast, and the effect of folks moving into wildfire-prone areas is only making the problem worse. As many on the phone or on the call can probably appreciate, passive management's no longer an option. We see wildfires grabbing headlines in L.A., the Texas Panhandle, Paris.

There's smoke in Boston, as I understand it, and New York, year after year. We need to act on wildfire when it matters, which is quickly. We believe that the number of fires will continue to grow, but we see our job as a municipal fire station in the sky. It's what matters. Funding is now there to manage our forest properly. Long-term commitments are materializing. An understanding of having sophisticated, well-capitalized aviation programs is growing in importance. Bridger has always had an eye on this, and we've always had the most advanced solutions, and we continue to lead. We would not have been here had we not positioned for it in our early days. Next slide. A quick touch again, a little bit more on the structural demands we see. The intensity of fire season continues to grow.

Although, of course, there's going to be a peak of activity in the summer months. We no longer can only be ready for fire season. We have to have a considerable portion of our fleet ready year-round, and now there's customer funding and commitment to make sure that that happens. Some of the largest disasters are happening in the winter months when folks are unprepared, and things are unexpected. Unfortunately, with those events, this is leading to the right changes for the country, to have pre-positioned, staffed aircraft, readily deployable and positioned across the country when it matters. I think just this morning I read an article where already this year is the second warmest year in 132-year record. Although we've seen a relatively slow buildup in activity, we see these continued trends continue to combine and exacerbate our need to respond.

This coupled with some of the news on super El Niño weather, it seems that these patterns are building upon themselves. Next slide. We've worked very hard to ensure that the health of our revenue is strengthened over time with both obviously our reputation, our customer performance on contracts. We have 100% success rate on our contract renewals, and this has led to a very strong mix of federal and state contracts and a solid competition for our existing fleet. That's important because it not only drives up utilization for the fleet that we have, it also has continued to open the door for on-contract growth as we add more aircraft. We put very concerted effort into the resiliency of our revenue. In the early days, we had planes almost entirely on call-when-needed contracts.

We called it, or I called it the field of dreams mentality, where we would build it when it was call-when-needed. This meant we'd wait for the start of fire activity for a dispatch, and we're unsure when we'd be sent home. Now we have the backdrop of national fires grabbing headlines and really guaranteeing that work is in our hands for pre-positioned aircraft ready to deploy. It's been driven by major agency changes, including agency consolidation, standards of cover, and so on, minimum response times. That's led into appropriations, even in winter months, that has helped us with that guaranteed revenue. Of the planes on contract today, we have eight of our nine surveillance planes on guaranteed work and four of our six Scoopers.

In the early days, all of the Scoopers were call-when-needed, and this year we now have four on 160-day task order. Next slide. Within fire, we have two basic aviation services, the surveillance and suppression side of the business. Suppression is our Scoopers, highly effective and scarce assets in high demand, the only purpose-built firefighting aircraft in the world, and we have the largest privately owned fleet in the world. They can mobilize nearly anywhere and scoop and drop water within 20 nautical miles of any fire. With about a mile of open water and about six inches deep of water, they can skim the surface of a lake and fill with 1,200-gallon tanks. Their ability to turn and return to the fire without stopping to refuel means they can drop water in a four-hour period and can drop hundreds of thousands of gallons in a day.

The Scooper was engineered for firefighting. It was designed to be high-performing and highly available. It doesn't have D checks like commercial aircraft. We're able to stage our aircraft and make sure that maintenance is done in field, and we have that uptime. We can maximize utilization, which is really important as we continue to operate year-round. The dynamics on the contract allow for increasing pass-through margin the more the aircraft work. More work doesn't mean proportionally the same variable cost, which has been incredible for us as we continue to focus on increasing utilization. We have Bridger's core. The economics of our fleet, the Scoopers are the flagship with scarcity. The barriers to enter remain strong there, and we own the largest fleet, so we have a real corner on the market, in our opinion. The supply chain for the new 515 is constrained.

It's called the 515. We believe it'll be later in the 2020s and 2030s before these first 20 orders are delivered to provinces and countries. We have increasing demand for a scarce fleet out there. We benefit from this because there's about 95% plus compatibility with our current fleet with the 515. We're looking for opportunities like the planes that we acquired in Spain to continue to grow our Scooper fleet. The margins are very impressive there. The payback period is less than five years. Maintenance CapEx is, like I said, in the field and mostly associated with labor, so we're able to really take advantage of highly contributing assets. Next slide. One of the things we're most excited about, which I mentioned, is our integrated tie in technology with our software platform, IGNIS. This has a threefold proposition for us.

It increases our demand with our aircraft utilization. People are specifically ordering us up for this software platform. It provides stickiness with our brand, it's continuing to unlock a world of opportunity in wildfire. We're setting the standard for this. The industry's looking to adopt technology and looking to private industry to offer consolidated solutions, which has not quite existed to this point. We've seen our flight hours increase considerably because of this. We've received aviation orders, like I mentioned, that have specifically requested it. We're seeing continued use of this even through the winter months, which is different than what we've seen in the past.

Coupled with our real-time imagery of our aircraft, we have tools within this platform, both mobile and desktop, to invite volunteer firefighters to an incident, without logins, have points, lines, polygons, evacuation routes, blue force tracking to allow us to make sure our firefighters in the field are safe. Even now, predictive modeling to show rate of fire spread and what might happen next. Next slide. Just a quick highlight of this. The landscape in front of us is one in increasing demand at the federal and state level for all aerial firefighting. This is something that we see even amongst our competitor landscape. None of us have, we believe, enough aircraft to answer the call for the demand that we see out there.

One other thing to highlight is that we consider all of the other operators out there fellow operators because we all have a different mission. We're all tools in the toolbox. We operate alongside tankers, helicopters, drones in the same theater or fire stack or flight restricted area over the fire. There's a need for what we all do together over the country and year-round. Some of our direct competitors only have a portion of their fleet, like the four scoopers that compete directly with our six in the U.S., although we believe with 48% unfilled task orders for the 10 combined in the U.S., there's more than enough work to go around. In terms of sensor aircraft, again, we're leading the edge there with what we're introducing on a regular basis in technology.

Last but not least, if we go to the next slide on financial performance, we've been very consistent and concerted in our effort to increase our fleet, increase our revenue, and manage our costs so that we have improving margins. This has been evident since inception, most recently in the last three years. We've really also seen a very large advantage in economies of scale as we continue to grow our fleet and focus on expanding the programs that we have. I'm sorry, I lost my spot here. We've been able to ensure that with our focus on scoopers and the portion of revenue that those add to our base, that we can continue to grow that, we do see a very large potential in the sensor world as we can grow those aircraft, and the margins that they contribute is very attractive as well.

As we continue to look at the opportunity in our enterprise value, we have already three analysts who have us in a consistent buy rating. We believe in that, and we believe there's more to unlock there, especially as we continue to add assets with our deferred draw facility and deliver as they become immediately accretive to what's in front of us. The opportunity, again, is one that we believe we can meet. Potentially there's a lot more upside there that we haven't even yet realized. With that, I'll open it up for Q&A before I run out of time. I tried to rush through, but appreciate you hanging with me.

Really appreciate it. We do have several questions already.

Okay. First one, wildfire activity appears to be becoming more severe and more frequent.

How has the market evolved over the past several years, and why do you believe we're still in the early innings of a long-term structural growth opportunity?

Great question. Early innings is a very good way to characterize it. We see, again, the convergence of tailwinds of what Mother Nature seems to be doing consistently, unfortunately grabbing headlines that are making change happen. But those things are now being memorialized in even just a mindset at the federal and state level of we need to act aggressively to manage wildfire. We've seen a lot of that materialize already in our change, like I mentioned, from call-when-needed contracts to guaranteed work year-over-year. I will say that the reason I believe that's in early innings is because that's still against the backdrop of a lot of introduced appropriation fundings, consolidation of agencies, and standards of cover that are still being defined, meaning those changes are already taking place.

I think once they're solidified and defined even more, it becomes a more resilient demand signal for us as we continue to see, again, fires increase year-over-year.

What is the company's long-term plan with its preferred equity and capital structure?

Yeah. Also a great question. I mentioned at the end of 2025, we executed on three strategic initiatives, our sale-leaseback of our campus. We paid down our hangars for approximately $49 million and used that to help refinance our prior very restrictive municipal bonds. We put into place $331 million of a financing package led by Bain, which included a $210 million term loan to refinance our debt that existed, as well as a $100 million deferred draw facility that allows us to grow. We immediately put that into effect by acquiring two Super Scoopers, two King Airs, and bringing onto balance sheet our two PC-12s.

We're continuing to focus on the growth of the business based on our trend as well as even our outlook for 2026, so that we can be positioned for optimizing and taking advantage of the opportunity in front of us, and that includes adding aircraft and increasing our contributions there. Then, of course, focusing on our market visibility through our analyst coverage, telling the story that we believe is out there, that we're currently undervalued on the public markets based on some of the multiples that we see in our outlooks moving forward.

Bridger often talks about moving from simply fighting fires to managing the entire wildfire life cycle. Can you explain that evolution and where you believe the company ultimately fits within the broader wildfire ecosystem?

Yeah. Also a great question. We see the entire wildfire management or even forest management as, one, our social responsibility. We believe we're well-positioned with what we have in early detection and initial response and initial attack, we call it, with our scoopers. Outside of that, now with the industry realizing that the critical 48-hour window is when to respond, we see the opportunity to do what we do even more enhanced with our sensor capabilities, our software platform, and some of what we can do to help prevent, detect, suppress, and even respond to the threat of wildfire. It's all contained within a one-data ecosystem. We believe we have a special leg up in what we've built thus far, as well as sensor planes that can cover that entire life cycle and use data and intelligence to manage it appropriately.

Suppression assets are a very critical part of how quickly you respond and how quickly you interact on that fire threat. Bridger's looking at that in terms of the entire lens of growth, not just how many planes we can add to our existing contracts.

Technology has become a much larger part of the story, particularly with your sensor-enabled aircraft and the launch of IGNIS. How should investors think about technology changing both your competitive positioning and the economics of the business over the next several years?

Yep. Okay. I mentioned it earlier, the way I look at the software component and technology component of our contracts is threefold. Near term, it's increasing the utilization of our current aircraft that we couple this with. Second, it is enhancing the stickiness of what Bridger can bring to the table. If we have data and intelligence, but we can't deliver it real-time to the customer, it's not quite functional real-time and within that 48-hour window. Third and final, it unlocks a lot of ability to have data in one ecosystem that can be interacted on. Our mission is to protect and serve the general public, but also we focus on ground firefighters. Military-grade technologies existed out there for decades to let us know where ground firefighters are and how we can support them from the air.

We're now delivering that in one platform where ground firefighters can join an incident, and we can see where they are, and they can see where aviation assets are. We are very proud on what we're introducing there and how disruptive that is into the industry because it's never been something that could be funded, and there was never any focus or ability to accept it. That's making a huge difference already.