Aimia Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the EMEA Inc. First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in the listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Friday, May 12, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Albert Matusak, Head Investor, relations, and communication. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Brian, and welcome everyone to this morning's call. Today's presentation is available on CDAR and on our website. Before we get underway, I would like to remind everyone to review our forward-looking statements and the cautions and risk factors pertaining to the statement. My name is Albert Matusak, Head of IR and Communications. With me on the call today are speakers Phil Middleman, EMEA's CEO, Michael Lehman, our President, and Steve Leonard, our CFO. Phil will begin with our strategic highlights, followed by Michael, who will cover the performance of our investments, before handing the call over to Steve to take you through the results of the quarter. We will have time for your questions at the end. With that, let me hand it over to Phil.

Thanks, Albert, and good morning to everyone on the phone and webcast today. We are pleased to announce the successful closing of the Bizetto and Tough Ropes transactions, as well as the Bizetto debt financing, two cash-generating businesses with significant value creation potential for our stakeholders. Furthermore, we are very excited by the strength being exhibited by all of our current portfolio holdings. On May 9th, AMIA closed the Bozzetto transaction and the associated debt financing at the subsidiary level. AMIA invested $206.3 million for an equity stake of 94% in Bozzetto, investing alongside the management team, who purchased 6% of the company at the same valuation as AMIA. We look forward to working with this remarkable management team as they continue to grow this business organically and through strategic acquisitions, and it is in advanced discussions with a potential target in the Americas. On March 17th, we closed the Tough Ropes transaction and acquired 100% of the company for $239.2 million. Following this acquisition, the leadership team has actively engaged with customers, suppliers, and employees, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The team is exploring new opportunities for potential strategic partnerships and is actively pursuing an accretive acquisition target in the U.S. Suffrop expects adjusted EBITDA margins to grow above 20% within the next two years based on reasonable assumptions such as operational improvement initiatives as well as the optimization of product mix. Turning to our financial results, we ended the first quarter of 2023 in a strong financial position with over $318 million of investable cash and liquid securities, a diversified portfolio of holdings that we believe are poised to deliver strong results in 2023. In addition, the company has tax losses of approximately $660 million that will help shield a sizable portion of our taxable income and capital gains for years to come. As a reminder, at the end of 2022, AMIA utilized $130 million of capital losses to repatriate a portion of the PLM gains. Turning to our holdings. ClearMedia is seeing a sharp recovery in demand beginning in its second quarter of 2023 as China emerged from its COVID lockdown, and we expect ClearMedia to accelerate the digitization of its panel portfolio. Tradex's enhanced asset-light model is achieving some of the highest gross margins to date. Tradex projects a return to EBITDA profitability by the third quarter of this year. Eric Gosselin, currently the COO, will be named CEO on June 1st as founder Ryan Davidson focused on business development. Cognitive's new CEO, Tim Sullivan, is overseeing the launch of its new AI-powered product, Cognitive Pulse, which has been met with industry-wide praise and excitement. Cognitive continues to undertake a series of initiatives to reduce costs and increase efficiency, which is expected to drive the company towards EBITDA positivity by the end of the year in 2023. In addition, Cognitive is securing additional sources of financing through divestitures of non-core assets. Capital A is experiencing a strong rebound in its airline business, generating its first profitable quarter since the pandemic began amidst soaring demand. With that, let me turn the floor over to Mike to provide you some further color on our investment portfolio. Mike?