Lakeland Industries CEO says expects to ‘grow faster’ than markets served

Lakeland Industries (LAKE) issued a letter to shareholders from Jim Jenkins, CEO, which read in part, ” Lakeland Fire + Safety’s fiscal year 2025, which ended January 31st, was a transformative year in many ways, underscored by multiple successful acquisitions to build a head-to-toe portfolio of brands in fire protection, new management, and an improved capital position to fund our long-term initiatives. To that end, we most recently closed an oversubscribed $46.0 million public equity offering, which brought in an impressive pool of new and existing shareholders. This secondary offering strengthened our balance sheet and positioned us to accelerate further growth in the fragmented, higher margin, $2.0 billion fire protection sector in the largest global markets and to repay indebtedness, resulting in an expected cash interest savings of approximately $2.5 million annually. With this strong vote of confidence from investors, we are moving forward into Fiscal Year 2026 by continuing to implement strategies to accelerate growth and margins by renewing our acquisition focus on the fire turnout gear industry and specifically the decontamination and services segment, which offers recurring high margin revenue streams. While we believe we now have the full suite of premier global head-to-toe fire services products, we are also not ruling out other opportunities, including joint ventures or affiliations in fire and the industrial space and opportunistic M&A in the high-margin chemical space within our industrial offerings. We continue to see growth opportunities in the fire and the industrial space, as well as opportunistic M&A in the high-margin chemical space within our industrial offerings, where we can purchase businesses for fair EBITDA multiples and integrate and deliver higher financial returns on our revamped platform. We have demonstrated our success with our last four acquisitions, providing confidence in our roll-up strategy, and we now have ample capital and flexibility to execute this strategy…Looking back over the past year, we have now successfully positioned Lakeland Fire + Safety for the future, bringing together the people, companies, products and capital to accelerate growth opportunities and increase market penetration. As we now look ahead, we are focused on new M&A opportunities to further consolidate the fragmented fire market with the newly raised capital and Lakeland’s accelerating free cash flow to support this acquisition strategy. We are growing top-line revenue in our fire services and industrial verticals, combined with operating and manufacturing efficiencies, to achieve higher margins. All together, we could not be more excited for Fiscal Year 2026 and expect to grow faster than the markets we serve. I look forward to sharing exciting new milestones in the year to come.”