The Shyft Group, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the SHIFT Group's fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call and webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode until the question and answer session of the conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce Randy Wilson, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury of the SHIFT Group. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. I'm joined by John Dunn, President and Chief Executive Officer, and John Duyard, Chief Financial Officer. Their prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. Before we begin, please turn to slide two of the presentation for our Safe Harbor Statement. Today's conference call contains forward-looking statements which are subject to risks that could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied. Primary risks that management believes could materially affect our results are identified in our Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. We'll be discussing non-GAAP information and performance measures, which we believe are useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. Reconciliations for these non-GAAP measures can be found in the conference call materials posted on our website. We'll start with opening comments from our CEO, John Dunn, before turning the call over to John Duyard for a review of 2023 performance, as well as our 2024 outlook. We'll then open the line for Q&A. Please turn to slide three, and John Dunn will begin today's prepared remarks.

Thank you, Randy, and good morning to everyone. As I noted on our call back in October, I'm excited to be leading this fantastic company. Over the last 50 years, Shift has grown to a national leader in many specialty vehicle markets while consistently demonstrating the ability to innovate, partner with customers, and maintain financial stability. In past roles, I've delivered ambitious growth by focusing on building solid teams and driving commercial and operational excellence. I spent my career in the automotive sector with experience launching vehicles for General Motors and having senior leadership roles for tier one auto suppliers. One of which grew annual sales from 50 million to $1.5 billion in North America. I look forward to building on Shift's great legacy and leveraging my experience to deliver a higher level of performance. Having just completed my first full year at Shift, including the last four months as CEO, I continue to be impressed by the industry-leading products and the team's capabilities. Together with the leadership team, we have defined an operating framework which will serve as the foundation to drive sustainable financial growth and deliver value for our shareholders going forward. Our approach includes a relentless focus on building high performing teams to foster collaboration and drive results, delivering operational excellence, improving efficiency in all aspects of the business while bringing innovative and high quality products to our customers. And keeping customers at the center of everything we do, from sales to design to delivery, we are here to enable our customers' success. Shift's recent performance has been impacted by end market demand softness, and we are acting with urgency to return the business to historical profitability. As we transition to slide four, I will talk Walk you through the actions we have taken over the past four months, which reflect this operating framework. It all starts with a team and our immediate focus was on team alignment to drive operational rigor and financial growth. We top graded key roles, including production and sales leadership to improve immediate performance and build bench strength. We promoted Jacob Farmer into our FES president role. He previously led our SV business. Jacob is a proven leader and we are confident that he will continue to drive the necessary improvements already underway in FES and utilize his experience within SV to strengthen coordination across the company. We look for better ways to enable our businesses to ensure that they had the appropriate tools and support needed to be successful. We have simplified our internal reporting rhythms and identified opportunities to push down functional support into the businesses where it is needed most. An example of this is in our marketing function, which now reports directly into our segments. Transitioning to operational excellence, we understand the importance of product quality and process efficiency, as well as Salesforce effectiveness, and overall customer satisfaction. We are focused on improvements in all of these areas. In December, for the first time, we pulled together our sales team from across the company. We held product training and identified cross-selling opportunities. Coming out of the sales summit, we adjusted our sales compensation structure to incentivize business with new customers and to establish targets for our sales team to sell all shift brands. We have a portfolio of industry leading products and need to make sure we are selling them broadly to the market. By taking a more comprehensive approach, we will expand our reach and diversify our customer base. Operationally, we've identified opportunities including deeper cross-company synergies in procurement and ways to optimize our footprint. I look forward to updating you on the output of these initiatives on our upcoming calls. Another area of focus, given its strategic importance to SHIFT and our customers, has been the Blue Arc EV program. I've spent time with the team. validating the overall market opportunity, reviewing the project plan in depth, and assessing our manufacturing capability. I'm impressed by the quality of the product, the robustness of the design, and what the team has been able to accomplish. I had direct conversations with our key customers who communicated their excitement for our Blue Ark vehicle and its role in their fleet strategy. After assessing progress and interest, We prioritize the class three to four walk-in van as the most efficient path to getting Blue Arc to market. While we discussed other class sizes and vocations historically, we have refined our focus in 2024, which will drive lower spending versus 2023. Let's turn to slide five, and I'll give you more detail around the status of our Blue Arc program. Our team continues to make solid progress on overall vehicle development, including the battery performance. We previously discussed battery quality issues impacting our ability to go into production. We worked with our supplier Proterra to solve the issues until the recent purchase of Proterra by Volvo. Currently, we are exploring a new commercial agreement with Volvo. In parallel, we accelerated the battery integration in our Class 3 to 4 vehicle with battery supplier Our Next Energy. We recently completed performance testing and are pleased to confirm the vehicle range is over 200 miles. These results meet customer requirements and are consistent with our prior vehicle testing. From a vehicle standpoint, we have finalized the design and the first production intent units have been manufactured in our Charlotte, Michigan facility. With the revised program timeline, we expect final testing in the coming months to complete and start production in late 2024. In conclusion, our team has built an outstanding vehicle. While there is more work to do, I am confident this will be a growth driver for SHIFT. We will provide additional detail around Blue Arc as John Douillard discusses our outlook later in the presentation. With that, I'll turn it over to him to discuss our financial results.