AZZ Inc.

Good day and welcome to the AZZ Incorporated quarter four and year end earnings conference call and webcast. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sandy Martin, three-part advisors. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today to review AZZ's financial results for the fiscal 2024 fourth quarter and full year, which ended February 29, 2024. Joining the call today are Tom Ferguson, President and Chief Financial Executive Officer, Philip Schlamm, Chief Financial Officer, and Dave Nark, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Communication, and Investor Relations. After today's prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Please note the live webcast for today's call, which can be found at www.azz.com slash investors dash events. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that our discussion today will include forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. By their nature, forward-looking statements are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Except for actual results, our comments containing forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties, some of which are detailed from time to time in documents filed by ACZ with the Securities and Exchange Commission including the annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year. These statements are not guarantees of future performance. Therefore, undue reliance should not be placed upon them. Actual results could differ materially from these expectations. In addition, today's call will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered Supplement 2, not a substitute for GAAP measures. We refer you to the reconciliation from GAAP to non-GAAP measures in today's earnings press release. I would now like to turn the call over to Tom Ferguson.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Fiscal 2024 was an exciting and successful year for AZZ, including several important operational and financial achievements. We are proud of our team's hard work and exceptional accomplishments for the fiscal year. Today, I will discuss the fourth quarter and full year highlights. Philip will then cover the detailed financial results And Dave will cover industry updates. I will conclude by discussing our current outlook before opening the line for questions. Today, AZZ is a pure play metal coatings company. AZZ leads with North America's number one market position in each of our two business segments, which includes hot dip galvanizing and coil coating solutions. Our large scale strategic footprint serves a broad diversified customer base, including long-term blue chip customers. And the company also brings over 65 years of trusted expertise. We provide sustainable unrivaled coding solutions supported by proprietary customer centric technologies. Last year, Our teams focused on critical operational and financial objectives, and I am pleased to report that both segments performed exceptionally well, particularly in the fourth quarter and the full year. Our fiscal year results that ended February 2024 reflect the culmination of near and longer term strategic initiatives that generated sales growth, margin enhancements, and significant working capital improvements. We're uniquely positioned to serve customers with an expanding competitive moat through extensive technical expertise and solutions-based capabilities, a deep bench of talented leadership, proprietary technologies, and strategically placed facilities across the US and Canada. In fiscal 2024, we significantly reduced the company's debt and took action to strengthen AZZ's balance sheet. Our relentless commitment to operational excellence continues to be the focus of our talented teams, and our strong collaborative culture supports our future growth and success. Turning to our results for the fiscal year, we increased total sales by 16.2% to a record $1.54 billion. Metal coatings full-year sales were $656 million, up 3% versus the prior year. And pre-coat metal sales were $881 million, up 28.4% compared to the prior year. Precodes fiscal 2024 included 52 weeks of sales versus 42 weeks for the prior year. Our full year adjusted EBITDA increased to $334 million, and we generated cash provided by operations of 245 million for the year. We will discuss the uses of cash in a few moments. Finally, adjusted earnings per share grew to $4.53, up almost 35% compared to the previous year's EPS. For the fiscal 2024 fourth quarter, which is usually our weakest due to slower construction activity during the winter months, total sales of $366 million increased by 8.9%, with metal coatings up 3.3% and pre-coat metals up 13.4% entirely from organic expansion. Also for the quarter, we increased adjusted earnings per share by 210% to 93 cents and grew adjusted EBITDA by 29% to $74 million. This led to strong cash flow from operations for the quarter of $64 million. As a result, adjusted EBITDA margins were 28.6% for metal coatings and 17.8% for pre-coat metals within our targeted range for each segment. In short, our continued dedication to delivering best-in-class customer service and quality led to increased sales, improved profitability, and significant cash flow for the fourth quarter of the full year. We also continue to invest in our operational technology platforms in fiscal 2024, as we seek to more deeply integrate our business with our customers. Our metal coating segment has a platform called Digital Galvanizing System, or DGS. So we benefit from our improved productivity and efficiencies, and customers are provided faster and more effective communication and better visibility into their projects from beginning to end. For pre-code metals, customers utilize coil zones. a proprietary platform which provides 24-7 access, 365 days a year, to real-time inventory, scheduling, and other vital information customers utilize to help run their business on a daily basis across Precote's network of 13 facilities. These innovative platforms and passion for excellent service among our teams position AZZ as a highly differentiated metal coatings provider to customers throughout North America. Our strategic transformation over the past two years has been a catalyst for generating significantly higher run rate EBITDA and cash flow. As Philip will discuss more in a moment, we continue to strengthen AZZ's balance sheet and allocate capital prudently last year. We've reduced our debt by $115 million over the last year and repriced our term loan or revolver to lower interest costs. We also deployed significant funds to the Greenfield Aluminum Coil Coating Facility in Washington, Missouri as part of our organic growth plans. This critical project remains on schedule. We're highly focused on creating long-term value through our sustainable solutions. We believe that by continually investing in our people and relentlessly executing our strategy, we will accelerate AZZ's value creation. We plan to continue scaling our business through organic and inorganic growth and leveraging our highly differentiated value proposition to customers as we create long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to Philip.