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 first quarter ending January 31st, 2022. Joining us today are Concrete Pumping Holdings CEO Bruce Young, CFO Ian Humphreys, and the company's external director of investor relations, Cody Slaw. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Slaw 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, Maria. 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 regarding our business and outlook. 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 Holdings Inc.' 's annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly report on Form 10-Q, and other 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 reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, net debt, and free cash flow, which we believe provide useful information for investors. We provide further information about these non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the comparable GAAP measures in our press release issued today or the investor presentation posted on the company's website. 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 on 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 first quarter in 2022 is off to a strong start with over 21% revenue growth in all segments of the business as we continue to gain market share and benefit from recent accretive acquisitions. On the first day of the quarter, we successfully completed the acquisition of Pioneer Concrete Pumping, adding Pioneer to our portfolio positions as well to benefit from favorable market conditions and accelerated construction activity in Texas and Georgia, two of our strongest growth areas in Q1. Additionally, it also provides a complementary growth platform for our Ecopan service expansion. This acquisition, along with the other assets we acquired late last year, have integrated seamlessly into our business. We have been able to capture expected margin improvements at this point of the integration as we identify and secure various cost synergies. With our experience in acquiring over 60 different companies in our industry, We are the clear leader in terms of M&A and will continue to pursue opportunistic deals that will be accretive to our earnings and have teams that align with our core values of people, safety, and reliability. Now turning to our individual reporting segments, our US pumping business increased 21% for the first quarter, driven by contribution from recent acquisitions and our continued market share gains in residential and infrastructure projects. We continue to experience high demand in residential, especially single-family homes. We expect residential to remain a bright spot for our company into 2022, even as interest rates rise due to strong demand and limited supply of housing. For infrastructure, we experience sustained activity from increased state funding in public project investments such as bridges, schools, wastewater treatment plants, and hospitals. We will continue to work to win projects at the state and local level and we are encouraged by the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While we do not assume any meaningful benefit from the Infrastructure Act in our 2022 fiscal year, we are well positioned for 2023 and beyond. In our commercial business, we experienced a modest improvement during the first quarter, particularly with additional light commercial projects emerging around new residential construction. Additionally, we experienced more demand for our higher margin specialty equipment. While we continue to experience pockets of softness across the country tied to the dynamic commercial construction environment created by COVID, the trends we are experiencing experienced in the first quarter are encouraging. In our UK segment, revenue increased 23% compared to the prior year quarter due to organic volume growth from the country's continued strong recovery from the impacts of COVID-19. Our team continues to secure energy road and rail projects in addition to the work we previously announced with the concrete intensive high-speed rail project HS2, which is expected to last beyond 2030. In Ecopan, our concrete waste management business, revenue increased 24% for the quarter due to an improved sales approach and our team's ability to execute more in-person selling. As a reminder, we enhanced our Ecopan sales team in 2021 to strengthen our position for long-term growth. Going forward, we continue to expect to maintain Ecopan's double-digit revenue growth. Shifting to the cost side of our business, continued inflationary pressures were the only major headwind we experienced in the quarter, particularly in diesel fuel. The rapid and material price escalation made it challenging to fully offset our rates in the first quarter, and our team has done an excellent job to ensure we are well-positioned to offset the inflationary headwinds in 2022. As we close our first quarter, we are in a strong position to continue executing on our strategic growth priorities for the rest of 2022, whether it's organic or through opportunistic M&A. Now I would like to hand the call over to Ian so he can provide a detailed overview on our first quarter 2022 financial results. I will then return to provide some concluding remarks. Ian?