Atlas Critical Minerals Corporation

David well on his road to recovery. So on today's call, I'll provide an overview of the business and give us an operational update. And then Walter will continue with discussion of our financial results and outlook before we open up the call for questions. So starting on slide four, it gives me great pleasure to speak with you today, not just about another solid quarter of financial and operating results for Atlas, but also to highlight the incredible opportunities we see for growth as we look forward to 2022 and 2023. This is backed by expanding market demand, stimulus funding, our tech-enabled capabilities, and our major project and program pipeline. Before I touch on these aspects of our bright future, I'd like to highlight the strength and resilience of our business that delivered solid results in the third quarter despite a number of challenges. This performance is really due to a focused execution by our entire Atlas team, and I'm thankful for that. We deliver over 15% year-over-year revenue growth, driving an increase in adjusted EBITDA to approximately $20 million. Common to our industry, the economy-wide labor pressures impacted our margins in the short term, as cost recovery programs in the form of pricing increases lagged slightly. market shifts in the transportation business led to volume decreases and some larger projects in the quarter, in comparison to the acceleration of activity in the prior year quarter when traffic patterns were at an all-time low due to COVID. We had a very strong quarter when in work, as our backlog again rose to a new record level of 757 million, fueled by new major project infrastructure and environmental related contract awards. This was an incredible feat during our third quarter, which is typically our highest revenue burn quarter. We were successful in converting into backlog nearly half of the roughly $150 million of new awards that were pending contract execution, but not yet in backlog at the end of the second quarter. And due to our results in winning new business, across markets and through the cross-selling, we now have an additional $175 million of awarded but not yet signed contracts. This demonstrates trust placed in us by our clients and the technical expertise of our professional services. Our company is purpose-built to ensure quality, longevity, and sustainability in our nation's public and private investments in our both natural and built environments. Now detailing from slide five, we expect markets and service areas to benefit from strong secular tailwinds unlike any other time that I've seen in my career. As the nation continues to recover from the pandemic, we're seeing a steady ramp in client demand as we move into 2022. This includes the renewal of infrastructure assets that are overdue for improvement, replacement, and connectivity to ensure safety and reliability, along with the renewed focus on sustaining and improving our environment. Of course, recent building and bridge collapse tragedies remind us of the importance that quality assurance and asset monitoring plays in keeping us safe, which is driving growing demand for higher safety, regulatory, and code compliance. We continue to see growth in outsourcing by state DOTs, cities and municipalities, and the private sector for both project and quality assurance services. This urgency to address overdue upgrades to our nation's infrastructure has only been heightened by the rise of climate impacts and the threats to public health and security. Growth of environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, has increased awareness on enhancing the quality of life for communities and sustainability of our planet. Clients are also looking for public and security improvements for the well-being and safety of community infrastructure and workplaces. With increasing climate and pandemic-related tragedies occurring, Atlas has responded with critical monitoring of air quality for fires in the West, assessments of possible viral exposure pathways for infection, and healthy building studies in hurricane-flooded areas. The commonality of all these focal points is resilience. In the broadest definition, it's about strengthening our infrastructure, our environment, our communities, and economies to survive extraordinary challenges. At Atlas, we've built a company that's uniquely positioned to address those challenges. Take a closer look at the next slide, please. And as you can see on slide six, the Atlas platform is directly aligned with the critical ESG focus areas of our clients. Our technical experts created innovative solutions that I will discuss a bit later on slide nine are at the forefront of addressing our clients' diverse needs, whether it's connecting smart cities, protecting our ecosystems, upgrading to healthy buildings, or other technical services required for today's rapidly evolving standards. Starting with the focus on mobility across modes of transportation and technology, all four of our service areas are engaged to capitalize on macro trends. The same holds true for risk, quality, and safety. Our ability to successfully win work in all these service areas through cross-selling and to consistently advance our acquisition integration strategy is contributing to our growth and record backlog. We continue to execute on our discipline M&A strategy, targeting companies that bring rich cross-selling opportunities to the Atlas platform and are well-positioned to capitalize on the infrastructure and environmental market tailwinds. Our pipeline is very healthy and composed of proprietary opportunities that are both technical experts and fit this mold. These targets are typically firms that have seen the rapid growth and success at Atlas over a short period of time and are excited to be part of the future success of this company. And this lends itself to deleveraging transaction structures that the principals are eager to take Atlas stock and have a vested interest in the future growth of Atlas. Several of the targets in our pipeline are in advanced stages of due diligence, and as a result, we're well positioned to expedite our strategic growth initiatives, reap revenue synergies through cross-selling, and accelerate the deleveraging of our balance sheet. Beyond these prevalent market tailwinds, the enactment of the $1.2 trillion U.S. infrastructure bill, flown on slide seven, will represent a milestone moment for the nation and for Atlas. As I said earlier, and even more so with this federal bill, this renewed focus and investment in infrastructure and environment may be the best I've seen in my career. In tandem with the upward trend of outsourcing critical technical and proprietary professional services that Atlas provides, this bill is an extremely positive catalyst for our business in the upcoming years. The spending bill is directly focused in the markets and services provided by Atlas, with transportation being the biggest, followed by water and utilities. Medical services typically represent about 6% to 8% of the spending on infrastructure and environmental projects, so this represents large incremental opportunities for our services. We look forward to working with our diversified portfolio of public and private sector clients to drive value-added services in the focus areas of the bill as new programs and spending comes online late in 2022 and beyond. Just as important as the absolute funding levels, this federal investment tailwind prioritizes the need for performance improvement and lifecycle extension of critical assets stressed by climate, health, and economic impacts. That's exactly what we do here at Atlas, and our momentum in winning larger projects continues to increase. Moving on to slide eight, we have some significant-sized projects planned for kickoff by the end of the year and into the first quarter of 2022. Consistent with this, I'm excited to profile our recent $15 million I-35 project win, which is a part of a major project for the Texas Department of Transportation. we will provide design quality assurance services for the $1.5 billion I-35 Northeast Expansion Design Build project as a partner to the Alamo NEX Construction JV team. This section of I-35 is a major gateway into the San Antonio area. It's one of the most congested roads in Texas. The proposed improvements will include elevated highway lanes, additional connector bridges, construction of general purpose lanes, revisions to ramps, improving interchanges, and other enhancements such as drainage utilities and signs. And this is expected to have a significant improvement in safety and mobility, reduce congestion, and accommodate the future traffic demands from the growth of the third most populous city of Texas. Under this phase of the contract, Atlas will provide design review of infrastructure assets to assure compliance with the design bill contract and TxDOT codes and specifications. We are thrilled to be part of this major project and anticipate being part of the construction phase as well. Our longstanding relationship with TxDOT demonstrates the trust in our expertise to deliver this major infrastructure project that will play a pivotal role in the growth of the area. And as I mentioned earlier, we bring both technical expertise and innovative solutions to our clients. On slide nine, I'll provide a couple examples of how our technology applications and innovative solutions strengthen our service offerings and help us deliver results for our clients. Our client for a University of Washington project was faced with the costly challenge of addressing contaminated assets during a stadium renovation. Our team's in-depth understanding of materials reactivity allowed us to sustainably reuse materials while complying with the environmental cleanup and code requirements. A proprietary Atlas-designed leachability and geotetical testing modeling program enabled the reuse of 60,000 cubic yards of concrete debris into the newly renovated stadium while reducing construction disposal waste and enhancing protection of nearby wetlands and groundwater qualities. As another example, I'm very proud of our team's work with the City of San Diego's critical water infrastructure. Access to this certain stretch of coastline was heavily constrained, so we used extensive geotechnical technologies, including vibrating wire piezometers and vibration monitoring equipment to develop an early warning system to coastal bluff erosion as a major threat to this critical water asset. technical experts continually use proven technologies from varying applications to develop unique solutions from GIS integration for monitoring and modeling wildfire impacts on high-speed rail the geophysics searching for deep aquifers in the West extremely proud of our diverse technical capabilities now let me address our record backlog and third quarter key wins as I said earlier Third quarter backlog increased $757 million with a number of major project wins across services and geographies. We saw particular strength in new awards as our state and municipal agency markets are getting back to a more normal course of business regarding contract procurement and lending opportunities. As you can see on slide 10, the strength of our diversity of our service offering plays well to the increased demand for our infrastructure and environmental capabilities, which in turn drives backlog growth and visibility into future revenues.

So with that, I'll turn the call back over to Walter. Thanks, Joe, and please turn to slide 11.

Now for the details of the quarter. Gross revenue of $138.7 million was up 15.1% compared to the prior year quarter, driven by strong execution across all service offerings, and contributions that were both organic and from recent acquisitions. Our environmental solution services saw the biggest gains this quarter, along with engineering and design services, as we continue to see commercial markets accelerate and larger projects and programs enter the portfolio. Net revenue of $112.5 million was 15% higher than the prior year period and represented approximately 81% of gross revenues, consistent with our strategy to cross-sell and self-perform more work to improve margins. We realized improved utilization rates even as we grew our workforce during the quarter. Like many businesses, we are managing through the great resignation, but our marquee awards tend to attract highly qualified professionals, and we have been successfully increasing our workforce this year. Adjusted EBITDA of $19.8 million was 4.1% higher than the third quarter of 2020 and represented 17.6% of net revenue compared to 19.4% in the prior year quarter. Revenue growth supported our EBITDA growth, while project mix and some labor cost inflation had a temporary impact on margins. For the third quarter, we produced adjusted net income of 4.6 million and adjusted EPS of 14 cents versus 18 cents in the prior year quarter, with some differential in EPS related to the conversion of Class B to Class A shares over the past year.