Prepared remarks
Good morning. Welcome to Flowco Holdings, Inc.'s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded. We have allocated 1 hour for prepared remarks and questions and answers. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Andrew Leonpacher, Vice President, Finance, Corporate Development, and Investor Relations at Flowco. Thank you. You may begin.
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us to discuss Flowco's second quarter results. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements. These statements, which are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are detailed in this morning's press release as well as our filings with the SEC, which can be found on our website at ir.flowco-inc.com. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements or information except as required by law. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information. We use non-GAAP measures as we believe they more accurately represent the true operational performance and underlying results of our business. Presentation of this non-GAAP financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP.
Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures can be found in this morning's press release and in our SEC filings. Joining me on the call today are our President and Chief Executive Officer, Joe Bob Edwards, and our Chief Financial Officer, Jon Byers. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Bob.
Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin today's call with a review of our second quarter performance and key highlights. Jon will then discuss our financial results, segment performance, capital allocation, and balance sheet in more detail. I'll conclude with our perspective on the current market environment and our outlook for the third quarter. Flowco delivered solid results in the second quarter, generating adjusted EBITDA of approximately $94 million while maintaining our top-quartile adjusted EBITDA margins of roughly 40%. Revenue increased 13% quarter-over-quarter, while adjusted EBITDA grew 10%, reflecting solid execution across the business. These results were supported by better-than-expected performance from recently acquired Valiant, continued growth in rental revenue across our Surface Equipment and Vapor Recovery businesses, and a stronger quarter in Downhole Components product sales.
Flowco generated $50 million of free cash flow during the quarter, further enhancing our balance sheet and reinforcing the strength of our business model. Fifty-six percent of our revenue in the quarter was generated from rental revenue, which provides a high degree of revenue visibility, while our asset-light sales businesses continue to generate attractive returns and strong cash conversion. This balanced model enables us to consistently generate meaningful free cash flow while we invest in Flowco's long-term growth prospects. Overall, I am very pleased with our execution during the quarter. While we experienced the cost headwinds discussed in our mid-quarter update, which Jon will discuss in greater detail, our team remained focused on the factors within our control: superior service quality, efficient execution, and delivering the solutions that help operators generate more attractive returns from their existing assets.
This disciplined approach enabled us to deliver results within our original expectations. Our second quarter performance reflects the demand for Flowco's production optimization technologies and the critical role they play throughout the productive life of the well. Whether we are enhancing production through our broad artificial lift portfolio, capturing high-value hydrocarbons through our Vapor Recovery solutions, or providing the Surface Equipment that enables more efficient production of oil and natural gas, our objective is the same: helping customers optimize production with the right solution for each well, every time. As operators continue to prioritize production optimization to drive their performance, we believe our differentiated platform is well positioned to support our customers throughout the lifecycle of the well. Looking ahead, we see opportunities to further leverage our platform and deliver even greater value to our customers.
Valiant is an excellent example of this strategy in action. The acquisition of Valiant's ESP capability broadened our production optimization platform while enhancing our ability to better serve customers across the life of the well. By leveraging the operational data generated through platforms like Optimus, Valiant's ESP monitoring and optimization software, we are better positioned to identify customer opportunities earlier and deliver more integrated solutions. We believe this data-driven, collaborative approach is applicable across our platform and will continue to strengthen customer relationships, identify new commercial opportunities, and enhance the value we deliver. In summary, the second quarter demonstrated our ability to deliver profitable growth, generate meaningful free cash flow, and continue executing on our long-term strategy. With that, I'll turn it over to Jon.
Thanks, Joe Bob. Turning to our financials, second quarter performance was within our original guidance range, driven by growth in our high-margin rental businesses and a full quarter of contribution from Valiant. Total revenue increased 13% sequentially to $236 million, primarily driven by growth within Production Solutions. Adjusted EBITDA increased approximately $8 million from the first quarter to approximately $94 million. While higher operating and maintenance expenses within Production Solutions created modest margin pressure during the quarter, we continue to deliver approximately 40% adjusted EBITDA margins, highlighting the strength of our operating model and customer demand for our technologies. In our Production Solutions segment, second quarter revenue increased 22% sequentially to $171 million, while adjusted segment EBITDA increased approximately 16% to $71 million. The increase was primarily driven by Downhole Components, including the contribution from Valiant, which is performing ahead of our expectations.
Integration activities for Valiant are substantially complete, and our focus has shifted towards capturing incremental commercial opportunities across the combined platform as we continue to invest in the business. Turning to margins, adjusted segment EBITDA margin decreased 229 basis points quarter-over-quarter, reflecting a revenue mix shift towards Downhole Components following the inclusion of Valiant, as well as higher operating and maintenance expenses within the segment, including increased lubricant and fuel expenses. We expect these cost pressures to continue into the third quarter and have reflected them in our third quarter guidance. We are actively focused on mitigating these cost pressures through disciplined cost management, improving the efficiency of our rental fleet maintenance program, optimizing overtime, and reducing fuel and lubricant costs where possible. In our Natural Gas Technology segment, second quarter revenue and adjusted segment EBITDA each decreased 6% sequentially to approximately $65 million and $28 million, respectively.
The decline was primarily driven by lower Vapor Recovery system sales, which more than offset continued growth in our Vapor Recovery rental business. Turning to corporate costs, second quarter corporate expenses decreased to $5 million from approximately $5.6 million in the prior quarter, primarily due to lower professional fees. Overall, second quarter adjusted EBITDA came in at $93.9 million, underscoring the durability of our operating model and building on the momentum we outlined last quarter. In the second quarter, we generated approximately $50 million of free cash flow while investing $45 million of capital, primarily to expand our Surface Equipment and Vapor Recovery rental fleets and support the continued growth of Valiant. Our annualized adjusted return on capital employed for the quarter was approximately 18%. Capital investment was elevated during the quarter with the inclusion of Valiant and continued expansion of our rental fleet, but our full-year capital outlook remains unchanged and continues to support meaningful free cash flow generation.
Our vertically integrated manufacturing model and six-month lead time on equipment provide flexibility to respond efficiently to customer demand while focusing our capital on high-return opportunities. Turning to our balance sheet, liquidity, and capital allocation, we continue to strengthen our financial position during the second quarter and into the third quarter, increasing available liquidity while reducing leverage further below 1x. As of August 7, we had approximately $274 million of borrowings outstanding under our credit facility with a borrowing base of $722 million. We had approximately $446 million of available capacity. Our conservative balance sheet and consistent cash flow generation provide the flexibility to invest organically, pursue strategic acquisition opportunities that strengthen the business, and consistently return capital to shareholders through dividends and opportunistic share repurchases.
Subsequent to the quarter, our board approved a $0.14-per-share one-time special dividend to Class A shareholders only. This is in addition to our quarterly discretionary dividend of $0.09 declared on July 30. As a result of our ownership structure, we've accumulated cash on our balance sheet and are returning this cash to our shareholders. We do not anticipate similar special dividends in the future. In summary, we delivered another strong quarter, strong free cash flow, disciplined investment and high-return growth, and a stronger balance sheet that provides strategic flexibility. We're well positioned for the opportunities ahead. Back to you, Joe Bob.
Thanks, Jon. Let me close by sharing our perspective on the current market environment, Flowco's positioning, and our outlook for the quarter. We believe we continue to benefit from our North American positioning, where reliable domestic energy production is playing an increasingly important role in meeting global energy demand. We continue to see an uptick in activity across portions of our customer base, which we expect will increasingly accrue to Flowco's benefit over time. With U.S. production expected to remain near record levels, operators must continue working to offset natural decline across a large and growing base of producing wells. This requires an increasing focus on production optimization, operating efficiency and recovery, providing consistent demand for our solutions. Against this backdrop, we anticipate third quarter adjusted EBITDA of $92 million to $98 million. We will continue to drive incremental efficiencies across our full organization and further integrate our platform.
Increasingly, that means putting our operational data and deep industry expertise to work, not just to identify cross-sell opportunities and the right solutions for each customer, but to run our broader rental fleet more efficiently through condition-based maintenance powered by AI and machine learning. We also remain disciplined in evaluating strategic opportunities that complement our existing technologies, broaden our platform, and enhance the value that we deliver customers. Together, we believe this positions us to deepen customer relationships and drive profitability over time. We believe Flowco is the leading pure-play production optimization platform positioned to benefit from our customers' non-discretionary spending patterns in what has become an increasingly industrialized production base in North America. We believe our margins, returns on capital, consistency of our free cash flow generation, and capital-efficient growth are differentiated within our industry segment.
As we continue to execute quarter after quarter, we believe these qualities will increasingly become evident, leading to long-term value creation for our shareholders. And with that, I'll turn it back to the operator for Q&A.
Questions and answers
Our first question is from Arun Jayaram with JPMorgan.
I was wondering, Joe Bob, if you could elaborate a little bit more on what you're seeing with the Valiant acquisition. You appear to be ahead of plan. I know when you guys got Valiant, they had about 30 to 35 customers. This compares to Flowco, I think you have over 300 customers. And then you'd highlighted expectations to deliver around $52 million of EBITDA at, kind of, 40% margins. Can you maybe give us an updated view on what you think Valiant can deliver and opportunities to further scale this part of your business?
Yes, absolutely, Arun, and thanks for the question. As we said in our prepared remarks, we are very pleased with how well the Valiant integration has gone and how well the culture that the Valiant team built has integrated into the Flowco culture. As it relates to customers, you've just highlighted exactly what we are doing, which is expanding the Valiant customer base through deliberate, intentional conversations with customers that we have a deep history with on the Flowco side, where Valiant might or might not have done work with in the past. But using that platform and the integrated approach to business development to expand that customer base. Not quite ready to give you specifics on how much ahead of plan we are, but the guidance that we provided looks eminently achievable, and we will report back once we have a little more visibility through the end of the year on what our expectations are for Valiant on a full-year basis. Rest assured, things are going well and we hope to have more specificity for you potentially next quarter.
Great. My follow-up, Joe Bob, just digesting the guide that you gave, call it $92 million to $98 million for 3Q, which would be up slightly from 2Q on a sequential basis. Could you or Jon just provide a little bit more segment-level detail on your expectations for 3Q, including thoughts on what would frame maybe the upper end of the guide versus the lower end, but maybe just a little bit more segment-level detail would be appreciated.
Yes, Jon can certainly dive into some specifics there. At a high level, our capital deployment across really all segments is unchanged. You'll see some quarter-by-quarter variation here and there given the natural ups and downs of delivery times, but there's no change in our expectation on a full-year basis for capital deployment. That high level will inform the guide and the range of outcomes. I will also remind you that our Downhole Components business, which now includes Valiant, is more variable on a quarter-by-quarter basis than our rental businesses. So the width of the range reflects that variability. We had a couple of months during Q2 that were behind expectations and a month that was ahead of expectations for Downhole Components. I expect that variability will continue, but I also expect slightly better-than-expected results as compared to history because of the inclusion of Valiant in the Downhole Components segment. Jon, did I say all that right?
Yes. Directionally, we expect Surface Equipment to be relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. We expect a little bit of an uptick in Natural Gas Technology driven by an increase in business at NGS, which is our packaging business that we use internally and externally.
Our next question is from Derek Podhaizer with Piper Sandler.
I just want to stick on the Valiant conversation. I appreciate we're not giving out too many details yet, but have you seen any immediate wins now that you had a few months with the company on the Flowco platform, as far as cross-selling opportunities? Obviously, you have the starting artificial lift solutions in HPGL and ESP, but then as you move towards conventional gas lift into plunger lift, have you had conversations around those or have seen any immediate wins when it comes to cross-selling opportunities?
Derek, we have. It's off to a great start. A couple of examples. Within legacy Flowco, we have what we refer to as our cap and spooling business. This is the actual service where an operator will unbundle the installation of an ESP: they will choose a vendor to buy the ESP, and they'll choose a different vendor to run the cable and the capillary string downhole to optimize the performance of the ESP. Valiant historically had gone to market in two ways, on a limited basis themselves, but to a larger degree externally. Flowco, before the acquisition of Valiant, was one of the larger players in the Permian Basin on that specific product line, even though we did not offer an ESP product prior to our acquisition of Valiant. The low-hanging fruit is starting to come our way: on every Valiant installation, we are increasingly relying on our own internal capability to install the cap string and the ESP cable.
That's an immediate uplift. More broadly, on the customer-by-customer intentionality that I described earlier, yes, we're starting to see good results. Going to hold off on specifics around customers, but some household names are starting to engage with us on a more holistic approach to the early days, first form of artificial lift installation. That's been very promising. We're also starting to see interesting signs internationally from our Valiant acquisition. The team there has deep experience in international markets, many of which are large ESP markets, and they dovetail nicely with some of Flowco's organic efforts. Our ambition is to talk more openly and specifically about some international wins in the coming quarters. Still a bit early, but the Valiant acquisition and integration follow a playbook for Flowco: we've proven to ourselves that we can identify and integrate acquisitions that make sense. Keep an eye on that for us in the coming quarters. We hope to add more as our business progresses.
Great. Very helpful and encouraging commentary there, Joe Bob. My follow-up: I wanted to go back to some of the cost inflationary pressures you felt during the quarter. It sounds like these will remain somewhat consistent maybe through the rest of the year. Specifically on the lube oil side, I know your compression peers are also navigating these pressures as well. Can you help us understand how you expect or potentially lock in or de-risk some of these longer-term swings for lube oil? What can you do with your supply chain as we think about how much of an overhang this could be for the business over the next 6 to 18 months?
We procure a lot of lube oil for our fleet of compressors—over 5,000 units in our fleet. We have choice among suppliers, but we also try to manage that supply chain by locking in prices periodically. The suppliers of that commodity are tied directly to crack spreads. Everything you're seeing in the refining space with crack spreads being really high is directly impacting the pricing of that product for us. We have very limited potential ways to pass that through because contracts don't contemplate our ability to share that risk with customers. So we have to get creative and we're actively trying to manage that. The contract we are currently living under, the most substantial one, is priced 90 days in advance. I think for Q3, the cake is baked. Jon, is that right?
No, I don't think so on the lube oil side. I do want to highlight that operations and maintenance has been a part of the cost increase as well, probably a bigger part than lube oil. That's something where I don't expect a short-term improvement, but over the medium term, that's something where we can make progress. We have real expertise in operating fleets across the segments, and over the next six months we expect to show some improvement from initiatives in maintenance efficiency and labor optimization.
Our next question is from Phillip Jungwirth with BMO Capital Markets.
Free cash flow is really strong in the quarter, and you've been above 50% EBITDA conversion for the last five quarters now, I think. I know this can bounce around a bit, but how are you viewing medium-term free cash conversion for the business? And maybe go into a little bit more detail on the thought process behind the special dividend in the quarter, although I know you said you don't expect that to continue in the future.
Free cash flow and return on capital are our North Stars at Flowco. We talk daily with the folks running each business on every lever they can pull to impact those two key metrics. We are laser-focused on generating not just high EBITDA margins or revenue growth, but real free cash flow and cash-on-cash returns. Every quarter compounded over time should yield increased equity value. Those are our guiding metrics and we'll continue to emphasize them. We're pleased with the conversion this quarter and hope to continue that story in the back half of the year.
Just to address the special dividend: we are an Up-C structure, and historically we've paid tax distributions at the individual tax rates of about 40%, while Flowco pays taxes at 22%. When distributions are made, it's done pro rata, so everybody gets the same amount per share, per unit. That resulted in accumulation of cash on the balance sheet. The board decided to return that to shareholders with a one-time special dividend. Going forward, we have the option to pay tax distributions at the corporate tax rate, and that's the plan. That's why we don't expect another one-time special dividend in the future.
Got it. Appreciate that. Then on the production optimization platform with Valiant added, could you expand on the technology integration point and specifically what you're doing here? Separately, we've heard a lot from E&Ps talking about utilizing AI to manage artificial lift systems. Are there ways in which Flowco is able to implement this technology in its own products and services? I know you referenced this earlier as far as condition-based maintenance.
Valiant developed an in-house technology that captures real-time operating data from ESPs, and that data is monitored remotely. Today, humans monitor the data and predict when wells will require a change—an adjustment to operating parameters or an intervention. That presents the potential for AI to provide predictive analytics on when wells will go down, and to help with autonomous intervention with customer permission. It's early in the U.S. onshore where we operate; customers are on their own AI journeys and have varying degrees of comfort with eliminating human oversight for thousands of wells. It will be fits and starts. We are making progress and see opportunities to use ESP remote monitoring and intervention to help customers as wells transition between lift types—from ESP to gas lift to plunger lift. The same technology platform can help monitor the well and provide predictive analytics on when a lift change is needed. We have interesting case studies where we're seeing success. Stay tuned for our version of this progress.
Our next question is from Keith Beckmann with Pickering Energy Partners.
I wanted to get a sense around VRU sales ticking down a little bit over the last quarter. What upcoming catalysts could drive growth in that business? I think pipeline takeaway capacity increasing is potentially one of them, but anything shorter term or longer term around potential growth in Natural Gas Technologies?
The VRU growth story is intact. VRUs are often specified as standard equipment on well pads, particularly in the Permian Basin, before a pad is constructed and turned on. We're seeing continued adoption in the Permian. Pipeline takeaway capacity has been a concern for some customers about the timing of VRU installations, but that is starting to be alleviated with more takeaway capacity. The in-basin power theme is also a tailwind: capturing molecules for in-basin generation reduces the need to transport them. Any quarter-to-quarter slowdown in VRU sales is consistent with lumpiness; we remain confident in our ability to deploy more VRUs either by selling them to customers who want to own them or building them and putting them in our rental fleet.
That's really helpful. My second question is twofold. First, you provide a six-month look ahead for CapEx—do you have a good feel for operators' plans into early next year and what that could mean for growth early next year? Second, we've seen many private operators start to ramp; Flowco is often seen with a blue-chip customer base—are you seeing adoption of your technologies among smaller private operators?
On the second point first: yes, we work with a wide range of operators, including small private family-backed and private equity-backed businesses. While our top customers are larger blue-chip operators by the law of large numbers, smaller operators are still an important part of our customer base. Regarding longer-dated growth expectations: rig counts have increased, and each rig creates new wellbores that will need production optimization over many years. Whether wells are being completed and kept as DUCs or turned on, every well needs production solutions for its productive life. We view the current uptick in drilling activity as fueling future growth for Flowco. It's hard to put a number on 2027 at this point, but we're feeling good about the early signs of growth as customers lean into activity.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Joe Bob for closing remarks.
Thank you all for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you in 90 days. Appreciate it. Have a good summer.
Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect at this time and thank you for your participation.