James Hardie Industries plc

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the James Hardy Q2 FY25 results call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Joe Olesmeyer, VP Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you to everyone for joining today's call. Please note that during the course of prepared remarks and Q&A, management may refer to non-GAAP financial measures and make forward-looking statements. You can refer to several cautionary notes on page two for more information. Also, unless otherwise indicated, our materials and comments refer to figures in U.S. dollars, and any comparisons made are to the corresponding period in the prior fiscal year. Now, please turn to page three, where you'll find the agenda for today's call. I am joined by Aaron Erder, Chief Executive Officer of James Hardy, and Rachel Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer. Aaron will share key messages for the quarter and provide an update on the business before handing it over to Rachel, who will review our financial performance, detail our outlook and guidance, and speak to our cash generation and capital allocation framework. Then Aaron will return to conclude our prepared remarks before we move to Q&A. I am now pleased to hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Aaron Erder.

Thanks, Joe. Before I begin, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all our employees around the world who work to safely deliver the highest quality products, solutions, and services to our customers. In recent months, severe weather events challenged our teams, with Hurricanes Helene and Milton in North America and flooding in Germany. I am pleased to share that our teams kept their families and each other safe. Secondarily, I was inspired by the resilience our team showed in rapidly recovering our operations, and I am proud that they did so with an unwavering commitment to zero harm. Our people and their families work and live in these communities, and our support goes beyond what contributions we've made to the early recovery efforts. Our long-term commitment to these communities is embodied by our vision and mission, and in particular, our purpose, building a better future for all. Now let's begin on slide four. We again delivered on our commitments, and our first half results demonstrate that we are managing decisively as we continue to scale the organization and invest to profitably grow our business. And our teams are executing on our strategy to outperform our end markets. I am incredibly proud of our teams for delivering well over half a billion dollars of adjusted EBITDA in the first half of the year, down just low single digits from our record performance during the same period last year. Our performance is a clear demonstration of the inherent strength of our value proposition and the underlying momentum in our strategy. In the second quarter, we again demonstrated consistency in delivering solid results by achieving each of our three guidance metrics. In North America, we shipped 717 million standard feet of volume and achieved a 29% EBIT margin, both solidly within the ranges we committed to in August. And on a consolidated basis, our bottom line result exceeded our expectations as our teams worked diligently to reinforce James Hardy's robust profitability, leading to $157 million of total adjusted net income. As expected, business conditions remain challenging throughout the quarter and into October. But as affordability conditions improve, we expect demand to meaningfully recover in both new construction and repair and remodel end markets. This gives us even greater conviction in our decisions to prioritize investment throughout this fiscal year. We have focused intently on strengthening our competitive position through the current environment. But as we look ahead, we are now even more focused on ensuring that we are well positioned to provide the highest levels of service to our customers. We will accelerate our outperformance and keep our commitments to all our stakeholders. Please turn to slide five. In North America, we are outperforming our end markets through our superior value proposition and driving leading margins despite raw material headwinds. We are uniquely positioned to address our immense material conversion opportunity. and are aligning our capacity to fully service higher levels of demand in the recovery. We are investing across the value chain, growing our contractor base, and accelerating homeowner demand to capture the repair and remodeling opportunity as affordability pressures moderate and homeowners move from dreaming to planning and ultimately to doing. Our strategies are driving wins with home builders as we deepen our exclusivity arrangements, work to increase trim attachment rates, and highlight how our production network creates a competitive advantage that supports their growth plans. In our Asia-Pacific business, our teams are driving share gains in Australia and New Zealand despite soft market demands. We are encouraged as we have observed modest recovery in core products. We are finding efficiencies in delivering HOSS savings that continue to drive further expansion in our already strong margins. And finally, we are executing on our plan to cease manufacturing and wind down commercial operations in the Philippines, enabling greater focus on markets where we have the right to win. And in Europe, Broadly, our markets remain challenged, and particularly in Germany, an important market for us where we anticipate a more gradual improvement. However, we are well positioned to capitalize on growing momentum in residential new construction throughout the early days of a recovery in the UK. Overall, we are investing to grow sales of high-value products, and early product successes such as Therm25 Flooring give us conviction that this strategy will continue to drive further penetration and wins with our customers. Now, please turn to slide six as I take a moment to review our overall strategy. We are grounded in our unwavering commitment to being homeowner focused, customer and contractor driven. This is a holistic approach by our teams across the entire value chain. Importantly, we are doing it the right way. and not sacrificing on our foundational imperatives. Zero harm and the hearty operating system are our commitments to putting world-class safety at the forefront of all that we do and continually improving how we get work done across the company. In October, we celebrated our second annual Global Zero Harm Month, spotlighting our commitment to prioritizing safety in all we do, Throughout the month, we held localized events across our entire global footprint that featured interactive presentations, keynote speakers, and knowledge sharing that reinforced why we must have safety as the first priority in all aspects of our business. From plant floor operations and R&D lab procedures to healthy daily practices in our corporate offices. To our entire organization, I want to say thank you for raising the bar even further and owning zero harm as our collective responsibility and making it fundamental to our culture. Sustainability is foundational at James Hardy. Each of our employees plays a role in putting sustainability into action. And this cross-functional collaboration is driving progress towards meeting our ambitious commitments. And of course, when it comes to people, I believe we have the best talent in the industry. Day in and day out, I see the drive, talent, commitment, and passion as we work towards our purpose of building a better future for all. Put simply, everything you see on this slide is our blueprint by which together we move James Hardy forward. I remain confident in our team and our strategy. Together, they position us to execute at a high level and drive profitable share gain in all three regions. Please turn to slide seven. At our investor day earlier this year and during our most recent earnings call, I used this flywheel to demonstrate how our strategy builds upon its own momentum to create long-term value. Our prescriptive test and learn marketing programs reinforce James Hardy as the brand of choice across the value chain, and we stand to provide the right products for the right customer at the right time. Our teams work tirelessly to bring ever-increasing value to our business partners, supporting their growth and capturing the full potential of our material conversion opportunity. One home, one neighborhood, one region at a time. At James Hardy, we are the industry leaders in demand creation, exhibiting our proficiency in using traditional media to build consumer awareness, forming collaborations with influencers to further our mindshare with consumers, and leveraging technology partners to simplify the homeowner path to purchase through visualizations. We also demonstrate our best-in-class engagement across the value chain in how we leverage our Contractor Alliance program, a collaborative and scalable approach to growing and empowering our contractor base. This program is comprehensive in providing contractors with qualified homeowner leads, training and tools around installation, opportunities to network and share best practices, and recognition, and rewards that foster loyalty to James Hardy. We have seen great success in this program already, and I am bullish on the boundless potential this program has as a long-term tailwind for our performance in repair and remodel. Now, I would like to hand it over to Rachel to share more details about our second quarter results. Rachel?