Concrete Pumping Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Concrete Pumping Holdings financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended October 31, 2020. Joining us today are Concrete Pumping Holdings CEO, Bruce Young, CFO, Ian Humphries, and the company's external director of investor relations, Cody Slott. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Slott to read the company's safe harbor statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Cody, please go ahead.

Thanks, Shamali. I'd like to remind everyone that in the course of this call, to give you a better understanding of our operations, we will be making certain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. For information concerning these risks and uncertainties, see Concrete Pumping Holding Inc.' 's publicly available filings with the SEC. The company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. On today's call, we will also discuss adjusted EBITDA, net debt, and free cash flows, which are non-GAAP financial measures. Adjusted EBITDA adjusts reported EBITDA for certain items. We believe the presentation of this non-GAAP financial measure is useful because it provides investors and industry analysts the same information that we use internally for purposes of assessing our core operating performance. Net debt reflects all principal amounts outstanding under debt agreements less cash. Cash is subtracted from the gap measure because it could be used to reduce the company's debt obligations. We believe this non-gap measure provides useful information to management and investors in order to monitor the company's leverage and evaluate the company's consolidated balance sheet. Free cash flow is defined as adjusted EBITDA less net capex and cash paid for interest. This measure is not a substitute for cash flow from operations and does not represent the residual cash flow available for discretionary expenditures since certain non-discretionary expenditures such as debt servicing payments are not deducted from the measure. CPH believes this non-GAAP measure provides useful information to management and investors in order to monitor and evaluate the cash flow yield of the business. For reconciliation of historical adjusted EBITDA and net debt to their most directly comparable gap financial measure, please refer to the press release issued today or the investor presentation posted on the company's website. However, the company has not reconciled the forward-looking adjusted EBITDA guidance range and free cash flow range discussed to the most directly comparable forward-looking gap measures because this cannot be done without unreasonable effort due to the lack of predictability regarding the various reconciling items such as provision for income taxes and depreciation and amortization. I'd like to remind everyone this call will be available for replay later this evening. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in today's press release, as well as on the company's website. Additionally, we have posted an updated investor presentation to the company's website. Now I'd like to turn the call over to the CEO of Concrete Pumping Holdings, Bruce Young. Bruce?

Thank you, Cody, and good afternoon, everyone. Our performance throughout the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2020 has been a testament to our continued operational resiliency and solid financial foundation. The hard work of our team has allowed us to maintain the quality and efficiency of our operations as we navigated and continue to navigate the lingering COVID-19 headwinds across our markets. Our team members have swiftly adapted to evolving health protocols throughout the regions in which we operate. We are deeply grateful for their flexibility and resourcefulness, and we continue to prioritize their safety as we monitor further changes in health guidelines. Despite the pandemic, we maintained our position of financial strength in the fourth quarter. We continue to benefit from our highly variable cost structure and maintained year-over-year adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. In addition, we generated double-digit revenue growth in our concrete waste management services business, sustained the strong momentum that we have delivered throughout the year. For our full year, revenue increased approximately 8% to $304.3 million when compared to fiscal 2019, demonstrating the resiliency of our business model throughout the challenging market backdrop. Gross margin was up 80 basis points to 45.1%, and adjusted EBITDA increased 12% to $107.3 million. Further, as Ian will highlight shortly, we made significant progress strengthening our balance sheet. Net debt has been reduced by $42 million since we ended fiscal 2019, and we have reached our 2020 targeted year-end leverage ratio of 3.5 times. In fact, we have executed on all the key priorities we established and made to respond to the pandemic. Along with meeting our pre-COVID 2020 leverage target, we invested approximately $36 million into our fleet of equipment. We have kept our workers safe, maintained strong operations, demonstrated our businesses' agility and resilience, which today's results support, and controlled costs due to our roughly 70% variable cost operating model. Our ability to execute on our year-long strategic objectives during this difficult period proves that our robust foundation will not only see us through these challenging times, but also sustain our long-term growth throughout fiscal 2021 and beyond. Turning back to the quarter, our fourth quarter revenue performance reflects COVID-19 driven softness in the UK, as well as in several US markets. To dive into this a bit further, starting with our UK business, we continue to experience COVID-19 related softness within this market as we have since the onset of the pandemic. While the curtailment of our business operations is not as severe as it was during April and May, the market's pace of recovery remains slow, particularly across infrastructure work and new project starts. We continue to monitor changes in lockdown status across the UK region, particularly closely given the recent reinstated restrictions put in place last month. We expect any easing of these restrictions will be based on the ongoing monitoring of new COVID cases and the success of the vaccine rollout. The UK construction sector has been considered essential work, and therefore we expect that the majority of job sites will remain open where it is safe to do so. In addition, the multi-year HS2 project continues to represent a strong opportunity for our business, and we continue our bidding activity for contracts on this job. Moving now to our U.S. concrete pumping business, we experienced modest organic growth within many of our U.S. markets that were more than offset by COVID-19 headwinds and other regional markets. These headwinds took the shape of modest project delays and work interruptions. On the other hand, we have continued to see growing demand within our U.S. residential market, and we believe that this strength will carry through into fiscal 2021. The strong demand and utilization trends of our Ecopan business also continues. The 11% revenue growth in the fourth quarter reflects the operational improvements and increased penetration that we have achieved throughout the year, as well as continued positive reception to the geographic expansion of our Ecopan roll-off service. As I mentioned last quarter, our roll-off service is intended to handle larger volume pickups than what our standard Ecopan service can accommodate as it comes with larger containers that can be moved around job sites with roll-off or hook-lift trucks. Having this service available allows us to enhance the value of our concrete pumping service with an expanded waste removal offering. In summary, we are entering fiscal 2021 from a position of both financial and operational strength. Our roughly 70% variable cost structure, diversified geographic and segment revenue exposure, and strengthened balance sheet make us well-positioned to address evolving macroeconomic and industry conditions over the coming months, as well as seek creative investment opportunities that support the long-term growth of our company. Now I'd like to hand the call over to Ian so he can provide a detailed overview on our fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results. although in return to provide some color on our market expectations that we enter fiscal year 2021. Ian?