Acacia Research (ACTG) reported their fourth quarter and full 2025 results in March. It was a solid year and there has been a lot of improvement from where they were in my first article on them almost two years ago. I did another article here on them with a back of the envelope sum of parts valuation. If you want to get familiar with the company, I suggest you check out those previous articles.

ACTG has had relative strength this year and is up 33% year to date, and up 49% over the past year. The Benchmark oil and gas segment to me is one of the best things currently going for them with the rising oil and natural gas prices. Benchmark grew revenue a cool 30% for full year ‘25 vs ‘24 on record production. Several non-operating Benchmark projects came online in Q4. The work on the Benchmark Cherokee project is starting to pay off as it is coming online.

The company’s market cap is $482 mil with the stock at $5.00. Cash and equivalents are $3.52 a share. The stock is trading at a 16 PE TTM and 8x FCF.

For full 2025,

• Total revenue grew 133% year over year (YoY)

• Adjusted net income of $29.2 million or $0.30 diluted EPS.

• Free cash flow for the year was $59 mil or $0.61 cents per share.

Below is the revenue breakdown by segment

Energy Moving Along

In December 2025, Benchmark spud its first Cherokee well which is expected to be completed and producing in Q1 of this year. Benchmark has benefited from much higher natural gas prices in 2025. Natural gas sales are up 98% for 2025 YoY. I wrote about in the past how I saw that being a very possible catalyst for the segment.

Their average price for oil in 2025 was $63 a barrel. With crude oil over $100 now Benchmark is poised for some serious sales growth over coming quarters.

Q4 Conference Call Highlights

CEO MJ McNulty talked about how much value has been created since they took over. They said, “We've extracted $187 million from our valuable IP portfolio, have monetized most of our legacy assets, and have kept parent expenses relatively flat even as the organization has scaled.”

When the CEO took over at the end of 2022 the company had $350 mil in cash and they now currently still have $340 mil in cash. The strides the business has made is pretty impressive.

Considering the recent Deflecto purchase and all the businesses growing free cash flow, they go on to say they “used a combination of approximately $10 million of cash and $92 million of non-recourse subsidiary-level debt to add approximately $36 million of durable operated segment EBITDA, which now has nicely eclipsed our parent costs.”

In the call they talk about green shoots in Deflecto’s Class 8 orders in trucking. They are seeing year-over-year improvement over the last three months, with December through February up 23%, 25%, and 156% respectively, after 11 straight months of year-over-year declines.

Improvement on tariffs are poised to help Deflecto earnings. Tariffs from products imported from China have moved from a 20% tariff to a 10% tariff, and products imported from Canada have moved from a 25% tariff to a 10% tariff.

CEO MJ said Wifi-6 which is the majority of their IP patent portfolio hasn’t been impacted by AI. I don’t see that happening either as AI is being integrated into wireless networks.

There wasn’t any talk on analyst coverage as there was in a previous call. I have only been able to find one analyst on the company right now. It remains undercovered.

There was a question about a share buyback or potential buyback. There wasn’t a definitive answer on yes or no.

Final Thoughts

The stock is still cheap despite all the progress they have been making. I especially see it cheap after the rise in oil and natural gas recently.

Full Disclosure: I’m long ACTG shares