Atlas Critical Minerals Corporation

And welcome to the Atlas Technical Consultants fourth quarter and full year 2021 conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator's assistance during the conference, you may press star then zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, David Quinn, Chief Financial Officer of Atlas. Thank you. You may begin, Mr. Quinn.

Thank you for joining us. We hope that you have seen our earnings release issued after the market closed today. Please note that we have also posted an updated investor presentation in support of this call, which can be found in the Investors section of our website at oneatlas.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. Any statements describing our beliefs, goals, plans, strategies, expectations, projections, forecasts, and assumptions are forward-looking statements. Please note that the company's actual results may differ from those anticipated by such forward-looking statements for a variety of reasons, many of which are beyond our control. Please see our recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which identify the principal risks and uncertainties that could affect our business prospects and future results. We assume no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements. In addition, we will be discussing or providing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margins, adjusted net income, and adjusted EPS. Please see our earnings release and filings for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable gap measure. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Joe Boyer.

Thank you, David, and I appreciate everyone joining us today. On today's call, I'll provide an overview of our fourth quarter results and talk about our strategic priorities, including the acquisition of Transmart, which we had announced this afternoon. David will continue with the discussion of our financial results and our 2022 outlook before we open up the call for questions. The fourth quarter was a strong end to an exciting year for Atlas. We delivered robust growth, expanded EBITDA margins, generated strong cash flow, and reduced our debt balance and leverage ratio. We also ended the quarter with record backlog, including the largest award in the company's history, which combined with the growing demand we are seeing in our services across all of our key end markets, positioned us well for 2022 and beyond. In the fourth quarter, we delivered over 15% revenue growth and 34% adjusted EBITDA growth as compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, both to record levels. This led to a full year revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% and nearly 17% respectively. Importantly, Our growth in the quarter and year was driven by a combination of factors, both internally and externally. We continue to see robust in-market demand in all of our key service areas, which we've been able to enhance with our ongoing cross-selling initiatives contributed from recent acquisitions. We have and will continue to implement pricing increases to cover transitory labor cost pressures, Even with these headwinds, I'm proud to say we delivered expanded adjusted EBITDA margins. We expect further improvement in our margins as our business scales and these pricing actions flow. We had a very strong quarter for wind and work and entered 2022 on solid footing. Our fourth quarter backlog again rose to a new record level of $808 million, up 29% compared to the end of 2020. This growth was fueled by new major infrastructure and environmental-related contract awards and included growth in all service lines. Our book-to-bill in the quarter was 1.4 times, an impressive feat as we had a record level of quarterly revenue. One of the large projects that we converted in the quarter and the largest award in Atlas history that I'm proud to have in our portfolio is the New York MTA Penn Station Access Project. This $115 million contract will provide direct Metro North service from the Bronx, Westchester, and Connecticut to Penn Station and Manhattan's West Side, providing connectivity to historically underserved communities. And we are in a JV with WSP on this project. We will provide project management services, including construction management, design oversight, operations management, and commercial management to oversee the design-build team. This project's a great example of revenue synergies obtained through the integration of technical resources and capabilities from acquired companies. Our success in winning these large marquee projects is directly related to adding enhanced value to customers as we utilize the broader, full technical service capabilities of one integrated Atlas. These large professional service-based projects are low-risk, and drive growth in our backlog while providing longer-term visibility and predictability into future revenues and cash flows, in addition to the thousands of smaller projects that we have built the foundation of our business on and account for a significant portion of our work. Another great example of this type of project is the five-year, $5 million environmental services contract we recently announced with ConocoPhillips, to assess and remediate petroleum-impacted soil and groundwater associated with legacy oil field activity. Tonico Phillips is a long-tenured repeat client, and we look forward to continuing to provide them with our growing portfolio of technical services. Beyond our current backlog, we still have nearly $125 million of awards that are pending contract execution. As we look into the remainder of 2022 and beyond, we're as optimistic as I've ever been about the outlook and fundamentals driving our business. Secular trends such as aging of the nation's infrastructure and an increased focus on environmental sustainability, workplace safety among both our public and private clients continue to drive demand for Atlas services. Additionally, we're optimistic that we'll begin to see projects funded by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act begin to materialize in late 2022 with acceleration to 2023. Now, let me discuss our strategic priorities for 2022. First, we'll continue to utilize our broad service offerings and national footprint to capitalize on strong fundamentals in our market and drive organic growth. We've had success in our cross-selling strategy, but a meaningful opportunity remains and we'll continue to work diligently to offer our diverse customer base with the services they need from all across our company. Whether it's connecting smart cities, protecting our environment, making the places we live and work safer and cleaner, or other technical services, Atlas is uniquely positioned to benefit from ongoing investment and new and existing infrastructure for many years to come. Second, we will continue to drive our M&A strategy. Today we announced the acquisition of TransSmart, a technology leader in the intelligent transportation systems as well as connected and autonomous vehicle space, a market that is expected to grow at least 12% annually through 2030. This acquisition fits well within the Atlas portfolio, as the services we provide are critical to improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of existing and new transportation infrastructure. This offers a great example of how we plan to cross-sell throughout our portfolio. Although TransSmart business was predominantly been in the Midwest, we're confident we can leverage the company's technology-driven expertise in other key regional markets where we have a strong presence. such as Georgia, Texas, New York, Florida, and California. Further, we have increased access to Transmart's relationships with transportation customers in the Midwest, where our business has largely focused on environmental remediation. Our M&A pipeline remains active. We're focused on adding companies with differentiated services that add to or enhance our existing service offerings and or geographic footprints. We believe Atlas offers an attractive platform for these companies given our scale and our national footprint and expect to announce additional acquisitions in the near term. Our third strategic priority is to continue to make progress with improving our capital structure. Our strong financial results combined with a strict focus on working capital management led to a record-free cash flow in the fourth quarter. This allowed us to reduce our debt, And we ended the year with a net leverage ratio of nearly a full turn lower than where we were post our recapitalization early in 2021. Going forward, our goal is to reduce net leverage to less than three times through a combination of organic growth, cash generation, and deleveraging M&A. And our fourth priority is our commitment to ESG. This is a priority for us, both as a company and as we help our customers meet their ESG requirements. As a company, we believe we have strong governance practices. We're committed to diversity and inclusion, and tie safety and environmental awareness to all that we do. We're in the process of developing more formal ESG goals, which we plan to provide updates to later in the year. Additionally, I'll reiterate that the services Atlas offers are aligned with many of our customers' ESG goals, and we're committed to providing safe and healthy infrastructure and sustainable and resilient systems through our quality management and environmental assessment and mitigation work. So we believe these priorities and initiatives are the key factors for Atlas to drive value to our shareholders. We'll continue to update on our progress going forward. So with that, I'll turn the call back over to David to provide details on our financial performance and our outlook.