Manitowoc Company, Inc. (The)

Good morning, and welcome to the Manitowoc Company fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. 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 your telephone keypad. 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 Ion Warner, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our earnings call to review the company's fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial performance and business update, as outlined in last evening's press release. Joining me this morning with prepared remarks are Aaron Ravenscroft, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Regan, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we posted our slide presentation to the investor relations section on our website, www.manitowoc.com, which you can use to follow along with our prepared remarks. Please turn to slide two. Before we start, please note our safe harbor statement and the material provided for this call. During today's call, Forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 are made based on the company's current assessment of its markets and of other factors that affect its business. However, actual results could differ materially from any implied or actual projections due to one or more of the factors, among others, described in the company's latest SEC filings. The Manitowoc company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether the result of new information future events or other circumstances. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Aaron.

Thank you, Ayan, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide three. To start, I'd like to express my appreciation to our team for their hard work and never-ending passion for our company and for our customers. With their grit and determination, we delivered solid results in the fourth quarter. 2025 was a hard-fought year. Given the great trade reset in the U.S., the operating environment wasn't exactly as we anticipated. Even so, the Middle East remained strong, and we began to see green shoots in Europe and Asia Pacific. We also continued to make great progress on our Crane's Plus 50 strategy. Our non-new machine sales grew 10% to $690 million, reaching another record. We continued to grow our aftermarket footprint, adding territory coverage in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in the United States, and several key provinces in France. In addition, we opened or upgraded new locations in Nashville, Phoenix, and Baton Rouge in the U.S., Sydney, Australia, and two locations in France. Lastly, we grew our field service technician population to over 500. Equally important to growing our aftermarket presence, new product development is the lifeblood of our company and critical to growing our population of cranes in the field. At the very end of 2024, we launched the MCT-2205, which is the largest topless tower crane that we've ever produced. We sold 19 of these units last year, which was a great result. During 2025, we launched 11 new cranes, including the GRT-550 rough terrain, a 5-axle hybrid all-terrain crane, and the MCR-815, which is the largest luffing tower crane that we've ever sold. In March, we will unveil two more special cranes at ConExpo. We will launch an 80-ton boom truck, which is the largest boom truck that we've ever produced, and we will launch an eight-axle, 700-ton all-terrain crane, which is also the largest all-terrain crane we've ever developed. A big thank you to our engineering teams. It's been a big lift to extend our product portfolio into these higher ranges. Please turn to slide four. Turning our focus to the Manitowoc Way, I'm extremely pleased that we achieved an RIR of 0.94. For the first time in our company's history, we reduced our recordable injury rate below one. We also reduced our first aid incidents by 10% year over year. For some perspective, in 2015, we had 91 recordable injuries. In 2025, we had just 42. Our long-term goal remains zero injuries. Next, I would like to announce our CEO awards for the Manitowoc Way. Although our teams in the factories continued to do an awesome job, I was pleased that our winners came from the front end of our business. I'm happy to announce our MGX branch in Chesapeake was recognized for their new blast hopper concept, which was built by one of our welders. It increased operational efficiency by 70% and improved safety. Second, our sales team in Portugal was recognized for their work that they did on a large military contract in Spain. In addition to selling multiple cranes, the team helped the customer with all of their rigging hardware needs, offering a complete suite of lifting products. Lastly, I want to recognize three outstanding team members who received this year's CEO Award for their exceptional service to our customers. Stephane Dumont, Vitaly Artemyev, and Nick Bird. Congratulations to each of them for their leadership and unwavering commitment to our customer success. Their entrepreneurial spirit inspires all of us to strive for excellence in serving our customers. Please move to slide five. Turning our attention to the market, we generated orders of $803 million during the fourth quarter, up 56% year-over-year. Backlog ended the year at $794 million, up 22% from a year ago. Regionally, the Americas remains pretty complicated. A year ago, U.S. elections fueled customer sentiment. However, that momentum was reversed by the tariff situation, which still remains fluid. Folks want and need new cranes, but they are waiting to the very last minute to place orders. Our fourth quarter orders were highlighted by three large orders in December, which secured build slots for these dealers and customers throughout 2026. Rental rates have remained flat, which is my biggest concern. Regardless of the specific tariff, the cost of new cranes is going up and rental rates need to follow for crane operators to justify the purchase of new cranes or fleet renewals. Overall, dealer inventory is okay. It's not desperately low, nor is it concerningly high. In Europe, we continue to see improvement driven by several new economic programs across the continent. Without a doubt, the tower crane market has improved significantly. New machine orders were up 64% year over year during the fourth quarter. I was with a couple of our key dealers in early January, and their sentiment is a lot better than it was a year ago. Similarly, mobile crane orders in the quarter were up 39% year over year. Customers are beginning to feel better about the outlook on project work throughout the region. In the Middle East, I remain fairly optimistic, but the ride is definitely getting bumpier. In Saudi, while projects are moving forward, cash continues to tighten, which is making folks nervous. In Dubai, the large residential projects, which are skyscrapers by American standards, remain extremely hot. The Stargate data center project, however, in Abu Dhabi is moving slower than I anticipated. The tower crane work on phase one has been completed and surprisingly phase two has not yet started. Meanwhile, the new Dubai airport has already let the first three construction packages and the fourth is under review. So the groundwork is underway and I would expect to see tower crane work sometime this year. The Asia-Pacific market resembles Europe. Momentum and sentiment are improving, and South Korea optimism has grown despite a still weak currency, bolstered primarily by the announcement of large Samsung and SK Hynix semiconductor projects. Australia reflects a similar positive trend. We are waiting for the green light on a major power transmission project, which should provide a meaningful boost in sentiment. With that, I'll pass it on to Brian to walk you through the financials before I close with an update on our strategy.