Operator
Good morning, and welcome to the third quarter 2026 Perimeter Group earnings conference call. With us today are Haitham Khouri, Chief Executive Officer, Kyle Sable, Chief Financial Officer, and Seth Barker, Head of Investor Relations.
At the conclusion of today's call, there will be a question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press *1 on your telephone keypad.
If you would like to withdraw your question, please press *2 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference call is being recorded, and your participation implies consent to our recording of this call.
If you do not agree with these terms, please disconnect at this time. Thank you.
I would now like to turn the call over to Head of Investor Relations, Seth Barker. Please go ahead.
Seth Barker
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Perimeter Group's third quarter 2026 earnings call.
Speaking on today's call are Haitham Khouri, Chief Executive Officer, and Kyle Sable, Chief Financial Officer. We want to remind anyone who may be listening to a replay of this call that all statements made are as of today, November 5th, 2026, and these statements have not been nor will they be updated subsequent to today's call.
Today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements made today are based on management's current expectations, assumptions, and beliefs about our business and the environment in which we operate, and our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied on today's call.
Please review our SEC filings, particularly any risk factors included in our filings, for a more complete discussion of factors that could impact our results, expectations, or assumptions. The company would also like to advise you that during the call, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, LTM adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow.
The reconciliation of and other information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, both of which will be available on our website at ir.perimetergroup.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Haitham Khouri, Chief Executive Officer.
Haitham Khouri
Thank you, Seth. Good morning, everyone.
I'd like to begin with our new name. As we announced last month, Perimeter Solutions formally became Perimeter Group yesterday, the same day we moved our headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Our shares continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the same ticker, PRM. The new name reflects what Perimeter has become: a group of six market-leading businesses across our two reporting segments.
In fire safety, our businesses are Perimeter Solutions, our fire retardant business which keeps its name; Solberg Fire, our fire suppressants business; and Monaco Enterprises, our life safety and incident management systems business. In specialty products, our businesses are PDI, our P2S5-based lubricant additives business; MNT, our medical manufacturing equipment business; and IMS, our proprietary aftermarket electronics business.
Our new name also reflects how we run the company. As companies grow, many centralize decision-making in pursuit of scale.
We have chosen a different path. Each of our six businesses operates under its own brand and is led by its own president and management team, all responsible and accountable for its results.
Our aim is for each business to have the focus, speed, and agility of an independent company, with the capital and support of a larger group behind it. Decisions about how to serve customers are made inside each business by the teams who know those customers best.
Our corporate team is small by design. Its role is to support our businesses, not to run them; to develop their leaders, help them solve problems when they arise, and allocate capital, both to our existing businesses and to acquisitions.
We work hard to avoid bureaucracy. We keep layers of management to a minimum, and we have no group-level heads of sales, engineering, or operations imposing a single approach on different businesses.
That keeps each business agile and close to its customers. The autonomy we afford our businesses comes with a small number of foundational and non-negotiable standards that apply to every business in our group.
Each business consistently and rigorously applies our operational value drivers. Each leadership team is held to the common set of attributes we expect of every Perimeter leader.
Each business is focused on delivering for its customers and driving returns for our shareholders. We believe this model leads to faster and better decisions for customers and better outcomes for shareholders.
This is why we have chosen not to combine businesses simply to reduce costs on paper. In fact, we've done the opposite.
A few years ago, we separated our retardant and suppressants businesses, which had previously been managed as a single, centralized organization. The two businesses sell to different customers with different needs, and those customers are better served by separate, dedicated teams.
Our suppressants business shows what this approach can achieve. Since becoming a stand-alone business with its own leadership team, Solberg has made the two—has made the most, excuse me, of the two biggest opportunities in its recent history.
The first is the global transition to fluorine-free firefighting foam. FAA-regulated airports and other customers that historically relied on fluorinated foams are now replacing them with fluorine-free alternatives.
For these customers, the change is far more than a product swap. The new foam must perform in high-consequence situations and work with each customer's equipment.
Because our suppressants team works directly with these customers, they understood early what the transition would take. With the authority and the resources to act, they invested in fluorine-free products designed for these applications and in the technical and service support each conversion calls for.
As a result, Solberg Fire has gone from a challenger in fluorinated foams to a global leader in fluorine-free foams. The second came from the Defense Logistics Agency.
Not long ago, Solberg did almost no foam business with the DLA. The Solberg team listened closely to the agency's needs and made a series of decisions to earn its business, investing in products developed specifically for the agency's requirements, expanding our Green Bay, Wisconsin facilities' add capacity and redundancy, and building a vendor-managed inventory service around how the agency operates.
That work led to the 5-year contract we announced earlier this year, with a maximum value of $500 million. In both cases, the team closest to the customer saw the need first and had the authority to act and the capital of the group behind them.
In a centralized organization, those decisions would have been made further from the customer and more slowly, if at all. Accountability works best when leaders share in the results.
We tie our business leaders' compensation to performance, they do well when our shareholders do well. Autonomy, accountability, and alignment: together, these three principles define how we run the company, and they are what the Perimeter Group name is meant to reflect.
While our name has changed, our approach remains consistent. Our goal is to fulfill our critical mission by providing our customers with high-quality products and exceptional service, while delivering our investors private equity-like returns with the liquidity of the public market.
Our strategy is built on three pillars. First, we own exceptional businesses.
These are niche market leaders that play critical roles in solving complex customer problems, qualities that support high returns on invested capital and durable earnings power. Second, we rigorously apply our three operational value drivers to the businesses we own.
We drive profitable new business, achieve continual productivity improvements, and provide increasing value to customers, which we share in through value-based pricing. Third, we operate our businesses in a highly decentralized manner, granting our business unit managers full operating autonomy paired with the accountability to deliver results, with a tightly aligned incentive structure for our managers to think and act like owners.
We believe that these three pillars will optimize our durable, long-term free cash flow. We then seek to maximize long-term per-share equity value through a clear focus on the allocation of our capital, as well as the management of our capital structure.
Turning now to our third quarter results. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $223.5 million, up 20% year-over-year, and year-to-date adjusted EBITDA was $370.3 million, up 25%.
Fire safety delivered a strong quarter, with adjusted EBITDA up 14%. This was the first full season under our 5-year federal retardant contract, which boosted service levels and reliability while lowering costs for our customer.
During the most active weeks of the season, our crews staffed and supplied airtanker bases across the country. We also invested significantly on our customers' behalf.
We converted additional federal bases to our full-service model, in which we staff, equip, and maintain each base, and we invested our own capital into airbase upgrades so that airtankers can be reloaded even more quickly and reliably. In specialty products, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled year-over-year.
Our two more recent acquisitions in specialty products, MNT and IMS, share the qualities we look for in businesses: proprietary products, large installed bases, and recurring aftermarket demand. These qualities continue to prove themselves at both businesses, and we are confident that both will be strong contributors to our results.
I'd like to spend a moment on PDI, our third specialty products business. PDI is a strong business with one weakness, which we are now fixing, even at a near-term cost.
PDI's customers consistently tell us that they value its product quality, its logistics, and its customer service. As in all of our businesses, the PDI team listens closely to customer needs and meets them, whether that means adapting to changes in their logistics or partnering with them on safety and reliability.
The PDI team routinely goes beyond supplying product, whether repairing customers' equipment, arranging emergency shipments ahead of severe weather, or providing on-site technical support hand-in-hand with customers' engineering and operations teams. PDI's one weakness has been reliability.
Our US supply has not been as consistent as our customers require. We are taking the necessary steps and making the necessary capital investments to permanently fix this.
We are willingly accepting lower near-term results at PDI, because when short-term results and the right long-term decision point in different directions, we will always choose the long-term. Moving to our next slide and touching on Monaco Enterprises.
Our first months of owning Monaco, which joined us at the end of July, have confirmed the qualities that attracted us to the business. Monaco's systems protect people and mission-critical assets on more than 200 US military installations globally, and nearly all Monaco sales come from supporting its large installed base through spare parts, repairs, expansions, upgrades, and service.
Our acquisition framework is designed to find businesses like Monaco, and we continue to evaluate other opportunities with similar qualities. With that, I will turn the call over to Kyle to review our financial results and capital allocation.
Kyle Sable
Thank you, Haitham. Reviewing Perimeter Group's third quarter results, net sales increased 24% to $389.9 million, while adjusted EBITDA rose 20% to $223.5 million.
In the quarter, we reported net income of $304.5 million, or $1.74 per diluted share. That compares to a net loss of $90.7 million, or 62 cents loss per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2025.
Adjusted net income was $144.3 million versus $125.5 million, translating to adjusted diluted earnings per share of 85 cents versus 82 cents in the prior-year quarter. Year-to-date, net sales rose 32% to $728.7 million, while adjusted EBITDA increased 25% to $370.3 million.
Year-to-date net income was $195.8 million, or $1.14 per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $66.1 million, or 45 cents loss per diluted share, in the prior-year period. Adjusted net income increased to $212.9 million from $186.8 million last year, while adjusted diluted earnings per share was $1.27, compared to $1.24 in the prior-year period.
Consolidated results reflect the ongoing execution of our operational value drivers, continued secular tailwinds, and our acquisition strategy. Our two reporting segments are unchanged under the Perimeter Group name.
Turning to the first of those segments, fire safety. Revenue for the quarter rose 14% to $312.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA also rose 14% to $201.6 million, from $177.2 million in the prior-year period.
Year-to-date, fire safety revenue rose 13% to $487.1 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose 13% to $299.1 million, from $265 million. Fire safety results include Monaco Enterprises from July 30th.
On our second quarter call, we said that our second quarter fire safety margins reflected two temporary factors: the first year pricing step-down under our federal retardant contract, and the pause in foam deliveries to the Defense Logistics Agency. We also said we expected margins to be more in line with their historical averages in the second half.
In the third quarter, foam deliveries to the DLA resumed, and fire safety's adjusted EBITDA margin is 64.5%, essentially flat year-over-year, even with the federal step-down in effect throughout the quarter. Several factors contributed to the strength of the quarter.
Our international retardant business delivered a strong quarter, led by Europe and Australia. Our North America retardant business grew, and our suppressants business had a strong quarter, with stronger foam sales outside North America and DLA deliveries underway.
Year-to-date, North America fire season has been toward the high end of the range we would consider normal. The season progressed at a more severe pace than normal for July and August, but September was very mild.
Canada remained below normal throughout the quarter. We've also continued to reduce our sensitivity to fire activity.
As we've renewed contracts, we have shifted sales toward fixed service fees and away from revenue tied to volume. Full-service bases, Haitham described, give us steady, recurring service revenue.
These steps make our earnings more stable from one season to the next. Over the longer term, the drivers we have described remain in place: rising fire activity, and growing aerial firefighting fleets as customers invest in new aircraft and airbase infrastructure.
Turning to specialty products. Revenue for the quarter rose 84% to $77.3 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose to $21.9 million from $9.1 million in the prior-year period.
Year-to-date, revenue rose 103% to $241.7 million, and adjusted EBITDA rose to $71.2 million from $30.8 million. As Haitham noted, our focus at PDI is on supplying our customers reliably.
To that end, we've expanded production at our own facilities, while bringing in new alternate supply sources. These sources, at least in the near term, come at higher average cost.
We are willing to bear these costs to reach a durably reliable supply position. Our goal is for PDI's supply reliability to match the high standard we already deliver to our customers in product quality, logistics expertise, and service.
Elsewhere in the segment, MNT continues to invest behind its innovation pipeline to accelerate new product launches, while serving its large installed base with consumables, spare parts, and services. Finally, IMS, which keeps customers' equipment in service with proprietary replacement electronics, we continue to integrate the acquired product lines and to evaluate additional product lines that fit our strategy.
Looking forward, we will willingly accept a period of depressed adjusted EBITDA from PDI while we keep our customers supplied through the transition to reliable, long-term sources. Despite these expenses, we expect specialty products' fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA to be only modestly below its average quarterly results so far this year, owing to strong segment performance outside PDI.
Specialty products is comprised of three different businesses, but our approach is the same in each: stay close to the customers, invest to serve them better, and apply our operational value drivers. That approach is not specific to any one business, which positions us to replicate it with confidence as we expand the group.
Turning to our long-term cash flow assumptions, which are unchanged. Starting with interest, our framework contemplates annual cash interest expense of approximately $75 million.
Against that, we paid $20.4 million of cash interest this quarter. Tax-deductible depreciation and amortization is expected to be $60 to $65 million annually.
This quarter, that came to $11 million. We expect our cash tax rate to be approximately 20% or better over time.
We paid $4.3 million of cash taxes this quarter, below the $15.4 million we paid a year ago. Our annual capital expenditures are expected to remain at $30 to $40 million.
In 2026, we expect to be at the high end of that range as we accelerate investments across our business in support of our customers' missions. We invested $12.7 million in the third quarter, which brings our spending so far this year to $31.2 million.
Our long-term expectation for working capital is unchanged, at approximately 10 to 15% of revenue growth over time. In 2026, we expect to invest more than that.
An important driver is inventory we hold for our federal customers. In July and August, the most active part of the season, we kept producing so that we would have enough retardant on hand if severe activity continued into the fall.
Instead, activity slowed sharply in mid-September, which left us with extra inventory that we expect to work through by the second quarter of next year. Our ability to build and hold large inventories through sharp swings in activity is a critical part of the value we provide our federal customer.
We've also invested in inventory at PDI to improve the reliability of supply, and at Solberg to support DLA deliveries. The third quarter is seasonally our strongest quarter for cash generation, and this year was no different, with $150.4 million of free cash flow in the quarter.
Turning to capital allocation. Year-to-date, we have deployed approximately $830 million of capital, including approximately $682 million to acquire MNT, approximately $117 million to acquire Monaco, and $31 million of capital expenditures in our existing businesses.
Our first capital allocation priority remains reinvesting in our businesses on behalf of their customers. This year, that includes new retardant bases and airbase infrastructure, including the airbase we're building in Texas; the expansion of our Green Bay, Wisconsin facility, which is well underway; and additional staffing to serve the DLA; dependable sources of supply for PDI's customers; and investments in Monaco's service capacity and innovation.
Each of these investments is underwritten to our return standards, driving future EBITDA growth. Once the reinvestment needs of our businesses are met, our primary focus remains M&A.
Our acquisition framework remains consistent. We target businesses that provide a small but essential component within a broader solution to critical customer needs, operate in niche markets with sustainably differentiated solutions, and exhibit characteristics such as recurring revenue, high returns on capital, and opportunities for reinvestment in add-on acquisitions.
We remain active in evaluating a robust pipeline of opportunities, and the cash our businesses generate each year gives us the capacity to act when the right opportunity arises. Our capital structure remains long-dated and fixed-rate, consisting of $675 million of 5% notes due 2029 and $550 million of 6.25% notes due 2034, and a blended coupon of 5.6%.
During the quarter, we fully repaid the revolver borrowings we used to fund the Monaco acquisition, and our $200 million revolving credit facility was undrawn at quarter-end. At quarter-end, net debt was approximately 2.7 times LTM adjusted EBITDA, down from 3.1 times at the end of the second quarter.
That reduction came in a single quarter, even as we funded the Monaco acquisition, and shows how quickly our cash generation rebuilds our capacity to invest. We remain below our target leverage level.
We ended the quarter with approximately $116 million of cash, and total liquidity of approximately $316 million, compared with the more than $150 million we described following the Monaco acquisition. We ended the quarter with approximately 153.7 million basic shares outstanding.
Our third quarter reflected strong execution in fire safety, where we completed our first season under the federal retardant contract and began foam deliveries to the DLA under its new contract. We continued reinvestment across our six businesses, from new airbase infrastructure and the expansion of our Green Bay facility, to more dependable supply for PDI's customers.
With our leverage down to 2.7 times and approximately $316 million of liquidity, we have ample capacity to keep investing. We remain focused on applying our operational value drivers across the group, boosting investments to better serve our customers, and allocating capital to compound long-term per-share value.
With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.
Operator
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, press *1 on your keypad.
To leave the queue at any time, press *2. Once again, that is *1 to ask a question.
We'll take our first question from Josh Spector with UBS. Your line is open.
Gaurav Sharma
Hi, good morning, this is Gaurav Sharma sitting in for Josh today. I guess if we look at the $24 million increase in fire safety, how should we think about the contribution from higher retardant volumes versus, say, suppressants and then Monaco?
I'm just trying to get a sense of what drove the improvement there.
Kyle Sable
Gaurav, thanks for the question, it's Kyle. We had a pretty strong quarter across all of our product lines in fire safety this year, and it actually spread quite well geographically as well.
As we look at that and you'll see the details when the Q hits later today, we had strength across every one of those product lines and across most of our geographies. It really was a quarter where the fire safety business was operating on full cylinders across the full spread of the entire business.
Gaurav Sharma
Got it, thanks. Could you talk about the MNT integration and how that's progressing, and if you can give me a sense of the EBITDA run rate is today relative to at acquisition?
Haitham Khouri
Hey, morning Gaurav, it's Haitham. Integration is going very well, pleased with the business, pleased with the team.
As far as the breakdown, as we report very consistently at a segment level. We don't go below that.
That said, if you look at my comments and Kyle's comments on the call around minimal PDI EBITDA contribution in Q4, yet specialty products Q4 EBITDA only modestly below what we've done in the first three quarters, I think there's a pretty clear and powerful inference you can make from that as to performance of businesses in the specialty products segment outside of PDI.
Gaurav Sharma
Thank you, I'll turn it over.
Operator
We'll take our next question from Will Gildea with CJS Securities. Your line is open.
Will Gildea
Hey, thanks for taking our questions this morning. Just on PDI, can you expand on some of the investments you're making to enhance long-term results, and what is the timeline for results of PDI to normalize?
Haitham Khouri
Hey there Will, it's Haitham. For normalized, we can look back a couple years when that segment was only PDI.
That's the best data point out there. We think it's possible that we do even better than that long-term with a supply source we control, and therefore, we're quite optimistic about the future of that business and profitability levels we can get to.
As far as the near-term, our entire operating model at Perimeter is predicated on very consistently delivering and delivering with tremendous quality for our customers. We understand that PDI has fallen short of that standard, and we're not at all happy about it.
We've been clear that we are going to take the decisive and necessary steps to fix that and get PDI delivery consistently for our customers, just like all of our other businesses do. There's a path where we could have solved this within the contractual framework with our existing supplier.
That clearly has not happened. We have been preparing for and are prepared to fix this outside of our contractual framework.
We're not quite ready to provide all the details on that, although hold tight, we certainly will when it's done and dusted. This transition requires a temporary period of elevated expenses while we keep our customers supplied as we make this transition.
Again, we've prepared for this, we feel good about this, and we are willingly living with higher near-term costs to keep customers supplied to get to the other side of this. Because as both me and Kyle said on the call, we will always make the short-term tradeoff to A, take care of our customers, B, drive better long-term profitability, and that's exactly what we're doing at PDI.
Will Gildea
Thank you for the color. Just can you give us a broad update on Monaco?
Has anything surprised you since you closed, either good or bad?
Haitham Khouri
I would say no surprises, Will, although directionally very much good. We've spent a lot of time up in Spokane with the team since close.
The business is what we believed it was, frankly, if not even higher quality. We've really, really enjoyed our interactions with the leadership team there, just a very capable, humble group, and it's really been a privilege to interact with them so far, and we feel excellent about Monaco.
Will Gildea
I'll leave it there, thanks.
Operator
will take our next question from Tomo Sano with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Good morning, this is Ethan Ahn for Tomo.
Haitham Khouri
Morning Ethan.
Just to go a little bit more into with PDI on the investments: were those within the quarter, or are those looking for more Q4 and on a run rate going forward? Then on the expanded production and alternative supply sources, is this bringing it more in-house?
Kyle Sable
Ethan, it's Kyle, thanks for the question. Absolutely, we are making those investments both within the quarter and prospectively, and it's a path that we are very committed to.
As Haitham Haitham alluded to, this is a really high-quality business. We really like this business.
We think we're differentiated here. We think it has a great ability to drive long-term value, with just one piece that's missing.
We're going to spend the money, and we have already started spending it, and we've been spending it, frankly, for a number of quarters now in preparation for this, to make sure that we're going to get that full value out of it overall, and ultimately. The key thing for us, Ethan, at the end of this is we need to have reliable supply.
We need to have substantially more control over the reliability of that supply than we have historically. Yes, we are going to have some expanded production at our existing facilities, as we mentioned, but we have some other sources that we're bringing online in very near order that will complement that.
Thank you for the additional color. Then just kind of go back on MNT as well, with the additional investments that you're making kind of in innovation and running the playbook, it's been really around 10 months, just under 10 months since you acquired MNT.
How would you view it now versus maybe 10 months ago?
Haitham Khouri
Not a whole lot different, Ethan. Again, similar to the comment I made on Monaco, the business is largely what we expected and hoped it would be, primarily with a very large installed base of critically important, long-lived machines, into which there's a very, very high-quality aftermarket revenue stream that is driving really significant profitability.
We expected to and have reinvigorated new product development with the goal of increasing the growth rate and the size of that installed base, in order to increase the size and profitability of the addressable aftermarket stream, and the team's executing, and we feel good.
Thank you, I'll hop back in the queue.
Operator
Once more for your questions, that is *1 on your telephone keypad. We'll move next to Dan Kutz with Morgan Stanley.
Your line is open.
Dan Kutz
Hey, thanks, good morning.
Haitham Khouri
Morning.
Dan Kutz
I wanted to ask, I guess, between the federal retardant contract and the Cal Fire contract that you guys have announced over the last year, that covers the majority of I guess Lower 48 acres burned and retardant demand, but there's some other kind of big markets out there, and you flagged you're building a base in Texas, and that Texas has been investing in more wildfire fighting assets. You have Oregon's had a historically severe wildfire season.
The question is around how do you think about similar contracts, or are there contracts in place with the state wildfire fighting agencies in those markets or any other big markets in the US? How do you think about contracting, and what's your relationship like with I guess those last couple big customers in the United States that you guys haven't necessarily press released a new agreement with like the federal contract and Cal Fire?
Haitham Khouri
Dan, it's Haitham, I'll take it. We've seen a very clear and very positive trend over the past several years where various states decide to take aerial firefighting and wildland firefighting increasingly into their own hands.
They'll still very much rely on the federal agencies for firefighting resources, but they have been supplementing and enhancing their federal partnerships with their own by building out their own robust programs, be that airbases, be that airtankers, be that retardant contracting, etc. We are an absolutely critical and fulcrum part of every one of those processes, and have nicely bulked up, and we'll continue to nicely bulk up our individual state contracts, again, as more and more states supplement the support they get from their federal partners with their own programs.
Dan Kutz
Got it, that's helpful. Then maybe on the third quarter for retardants, I know that when you're kind of in really severe periods of wildfire activity, assets get spread pretty thinly, and I know the third quarter of this year was among the most severe on record, but I bet if you isolate just July and August, that might be record high kind of wildfire activity and acres burned in the Lower 48.
Can you just talk about how kind of bottlenecks that are either up or downstream of Perimeter might have factored in to the quarter? You've flagged maybe back in 2024, in July of 2024, that Perimeter is almost never the bottleneck for wildfire fighting, and I know that you guys have been investing more in streamlining your operations, the full-service airbase in infrastructure model.
Were there any periods in this quarter where you guys were running into bottlenecks? Just broadly asking about how the quarter's kind of historically severe wildfire activity and how any bottlenecks in the firefighting efforts might have come into play in July and August?
Thanks.
Kyle Sable
Hey, Dan, it's Kyle. Thanks for the question.
I think you highlighted a couple key points in here I want to just reiterate. That this was a very different wildfire season in July and August than it was in September.
Let's talk about the first two months first. You have it exactly right, is that within these periods and months where there is elevated wildfire activity, the bottlenecks are a couple of things.
There's do you have wildfire activity in the right geographies, which there was. Do you have timing where it's in a peak season where we're ready to staff, and there was.
Then really, during those periods, what we look at is air capacity. The biggest bottleneck, and this is always the case, as you alluded, it's not us, and, frankly, never will be.
The biggest bottleneck will be air capacity. This is why we spend so much time working with our partners in the airtanker community to help educate stakeholders, the government, and the firefighting agencies about the importance of airtanker capacity, and making sure we're stabilizing and expanding that fleet over time.
There are just times, at these peak wildfire moments, where there's not enough airtankers to deliver the product we need. That's July and August.
For September, as we've highlighted, it was a pretty steep decline. This was a very steep decline going from August into September, and there you shift back to looking at, okay, now it is just the number of fires, and there were substantially fewer fires in September, and so really the bottleneck shifted from being air capacity to just how many fires there were out there that needed to be fought with airtankers.
Dan Kutz
That all makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot.
I'll turn it back.
Operator
Thank you. That concludes our question-and-answer period.
I would now like to turn the call back over to Haitham Khouri for closing remarks.
Haitham Khouri
Thank you, Chloe. Great job hosting our call today.
Thank you to the analysts for your attention, excellent questions, and as always, thank you to our shareholders for the tremendous support. Speak again early next year.
Operator
Thank you. That concludes today's third quarter 2026 Perimeter Group earnings conference call.
You may now disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.