Centuri Holdings, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Century's second quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jason Wilcock, Century's Chief Legal and Administrative Officer and Corporate Secretary. Please, you may begin.

Thank you, John, and hello, everyone. We appreciate you joining our call. This morning we issued and posted to Century Holdings' website our second quarter 2025 earnings release. The slides accompanying today's call are also available on Century Holdings' website. Please note that on today's call, we will address certain factors that may impact this year's earnings and provide some longer-term guidance. Some of the information that will be discussed today contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are as of today's date and based on management's assumptions on what the future holds that are subject to several risks and uncertainties, including uncertainty surrounding the impacts of future economic conditions and regulatory approvals. A cautionary note, as well as a note regarding non-GAAP measures, is included on slides two and 16 of this presentation, today's press release, and our filings Securities and Exchange Commission, which we encourage you to review. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made today. We caution against placing undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements. Today's call is also being webcast live and will be available for replay in the investor relations section of our website shortly after the completion of this call. Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Gregory Eisenstart, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Jason, and good day to all of you. We thank you for attending our second quarter 2025 earnings call. First of all, I'd like to sincerely thank our hardworking employees across the U.S. and Canada who deliver the highest service quality to our customers in a safe and productive manner. Without them, we wouldn't be here today. We're pleased with our performance in the second quarter, which delivered higher profitability year over year across all of our four business segments. On a consolidated basis, gross profit was 12% higher than last year this time and nearly 20% improved year to date. We drove strong revenue growth across our union and non-union electric operations and also within our Canadian gas sector. segments. US Gas also performed well and continues to make good progress in margin improvement initiatives and delivering predictable performance. Our sales and business development strategic initiative, underpinned by a data-driven approach and a robust project pipeline, along with our shift towards an organizational-wide growth mindset, drove another strong quarter in commercial performance. This is evidenced by 1.8 billion in new awards in the quarter, which materially tops our Q1 record performance of 1.2 billion in new orders. With 3 billion in total bookings through the first half of the year, we've already achieved a book-to-bill through H1 of 2.3 times and are on track to exceed our targeted book-to-bill ratio of 1.1 times for the full year 2025. Further, our strong bookings performance, our backlog, and near-term opportunities give us confidence to increase our full-year revenue guidance. I'll expand on its success in Q2 shortly, but first. Equally, if not more compelling than our current bookings are the strong end markets that we serve. As a result of our shift to get closer to our customers and better understand their needs, we've been able to increase the near-term addressable market of differentiated opportunities to which we will pursue. These opportunities span all core end markets, including gas, electric, and distributed power, including data centers. Since the first quarter of this year, we've added over 2 billion of new differentiated opportunities into the pipeline, which now stands at almost 14 billion. Our sales strategy is twofold. Improve alignment of our focus, resources, and capability, in capturing a larger share of the wallet from our existing customer relationships, and delivering our core services into new differentiated opportunities. The latter includes migrating our resource delivery to mitigate seasonality in our business, particularly on the U.S. gas side. Central to executing this strategy is our one-century approach, which has fundamentally transformed how we engage with our customers in the broader market. The sensory approach requires the entire organization to engage with our customers to not only safely deliver quality services, but to identify how we can increase the scope of what we do to deliver future customer needs. In addition, we have identified approximately 20 customers that we currently underserve and which affords us over $200 billion of opportunity over the next five years. we've created specific plans to engage more closely with these customers, aligning building capability and resource delivery to ensure we meet their needs and successfully maximize this opportunity. Over the last 90 days, I've been able to engage with almost all of these 20 customers, discuss their plans and challenges, and share how Century will align our business to ensure we meet their needs. So drilling further into our commercial success in the second quarter, As outlined in February, we began 2025 targeting over $3 billion in bookings, comprised of $1.8 billion from MSA renewals and over $1.2 billion from expanded scope, new MSAs, and strategic bid projects. Through the first half, we are effectively already there on that target. I'm proud that over one-third of our new awards are additive work above our existing MSAs, which will underpin our future growth. Of the total bookings in the quarter, nearly $1.2 billion represents MSA renewals, primarily from a few hundred-million-dollar agreements that long-standing gas utility customers in the Northeast and Midwest, including one relationship that spans over 40 years. In one of these cases, the award came sooner in the year than we had previously anticipated. A key focus of ours in the renewal process has been ensuring that we generate adequate returns so as to support the achievement of our historical norm of 7% plus gross margin in our gas business. We've also secured nearly $250 million from incremental MSA work, primarily comprised of adding new service territories through these gas-focused MSA renewals. Lastly, we won a $375 million in strategic project awards in Q2, heavily concentrated in our union electric business in the Northeast. These awards are comprised of core electrical work, including utility transmission projects with both 345 kV how voltage line and 115 kV line projects won during the period, as well as work in adjacent and emerging markets such as water infrastructure, distributed power, and of course, data centers. Notable wins in this category included our second water infrastructure project win this year and two awards related to R&G infrastructure. You'll recall that we secured an award related to data center electrical infrastructure in Q1 and have over 20 data center projects currently in our pipeline that we are pursuing. We anticipate the second half of 2025 to be focused on client engagement, positioning, and tendering for 2026. and we anticipate bookings to moderate during the remainder of 2025, with the exception of some MSA renewals and planned project awards. I reiterate, we anticipate that we will exceed our full-year book-to-bill target of 1.1. It's also worth noting that we are already positioning and tendering for 2026 opportunities, yet more evidence of the impact of our forward-thinking sales initiative and growth-orientated mindsets. Now a few words on another important factor of our strategy, capital efficiency. We remain focused on improving the efficiency of the fleet, an area where we can see meaningful opportunity to drive balance sheet strength and confident that we can make significant strides. As announced in July, we hired a senior vice president of fleet and procurement with almost 30, sorry, with almost three decades of experience in the energy and construction sectors to drive our enterprise-wide fleet and resourcing strategy. Coming to us from one of North America's largest utility and infrastructure contractors, where he managed 17,000 fleet assets globally, he will also focus on maximizing equipment utilization and improving capital efficiency across our $1 billion of fleet portfolio. Further, as part of our strategic initiative to optimize our asset management approach, I'm pleased to report that we've made meaningful progress in establishing a more balanced equipment financing model. This hybrid approach to asset financing provides us greater flexibility in managing our fleet of service vehicles and equipment whilst maintaining our ability to efficiently deploy resources across all of our extensive operations. Now to an overview of our business trends for the second quarter. In our US gas segment, and as expected, our revenue was stable year-over-year, and we focused on executing our substantial backlog of awarded work to begin demonstrating year-over-year growth in the second half of 2025. The strength of our recent MSA renewals and improved commercial terms is providing better profitability. We've seen improvement in gross margins year-over-year, supported by better resource utilisation, and work is ongoing as we continue to performance manage and identify further opportunities to drive further margin enhancement. We remain confident that our focus on operational excellence, combined with our stronger commercial terms, will create sustainable margin improvement in the months and quarters ahead. Our Canadian gas operations delivered exceptional results with strong revenue growth and margin expansion. demonstrating the effectiveness of our operating model within that market. Turning to our electric business, we're seeing excellent momentum across both segments. Our union electrical operations delivered robust growth and profitability in core business activities, particularly in industrial-focused markets where we play a role in executing on complex infrastructure projects. In our non-union electric segment, we've sustained the positive trajectory that began last year, with significant revenue growth driven by increased MSA volumes and crew deployment. To further elaborate on these trends, let me now turn over to Greg for more specific details on the financial results.