L.B. Foster Company

and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2024 L.B. Foster Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Stephanie Schmidt. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to L.B. Foster's first quarter of 2024 earnings call. My name is Stephanie Schmidt, the company's investor relations manager. Our President and CEO, John Castle, and our Chief Financial Officer, Bill Tallman, will be presenting our first quarter operating results, market outlook, and business developments this morning. We'll start the call with John providing his perspective on the company's first quarter performance. Bill will then review the company's first quarter financial results. John will provide perspective on market developments and company outlook in his closing comments. We will then open the session up for questions. Today's slide presentation, along with our earnings release and financial disclosures, were posted on our website this morning and can be accessed on our investor relations page at lbfoster.com. Our comments this morning will follow the slides in the earnings presentation. Some statements we are making are forward-looking and represent our current view of our markets and business today. These forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these statements in light of new information, except as required by securities laws. For more detailed risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements, please see the disclosures in our earnings release and presentation. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to read our disclosures and reconciliation tables provided within today's earnings release and within our accompanying earnings presentation carefully as you consider these metrics. So, with that, let me turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Stephanie. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our first quarter earnings call. Please turn the materials to highlight the quarter on slide number five. which reflect continuing progress and building momentum to our strategic transformation. First quarter organic sales improved at 16.9% over the prior year, but they've certainly strong quarter delivered by our rail segment. In fact, rail segment sales were up 29.4% on organic basis. The approved sales performance coupled with a 90 basis point gross margin improvement ending at 21.1% drove a 32.4% increase and adjusted EBITDA year-over-year. The overall improvement in profitability was driven by rail cycles, which delivered strong profit and improvement in technology services and solutions business, both in North America and the United Kingdom. Infrastructure results were somewhat softer in the quarter, with organic sales basically flat year-over-year, as the precast business was adversely impacted by challenging weather conditions in observed markets. But our market demand remains robust in our infrastructure segment, and we expect results to improve as we continue to move through the construction season. As expected, our net debt increased to $74.9 million during the quarter, reflecting the increased funding to our working capital to support sales growth along with annual bonuses and insurance premiums. It's important to note that our net debt was down $2.5 million versus last year, and the gross leverage ratio of 2.2 times Improved two-tenths year-over-year. As mentioned in the announcement, we sold adjacent property associated with our former joint venture Magnolia, Texas for $3.5 million in net proceeds. The associated gain was excluded from our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. Order rates recovered in the first quarter, increasing 25.5% sequentially and 3% last year on an organic basis. Backlog remains healthy at approximately $222 million, which is down $37.69 versus last year, noting that $12 million has decreased due to strategic investments completed in 2023. The balance of decline is largely due to our rail distribution business, which has improved to pre-COVID order fulfillment lead times, translating to sales growth at a lower order book level. With a strong start to the year in line with our expectations, we reaffirmed our 2024 financial guidance and believe we're on track to achieve our 2025 financial goals established over two years ago. Bill will now cover the detailed financials for Q1, and I'll come back at the end with some closing remarks on our markets and our outlook. Over to you, Bill.