Murphy USA Inc.

the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Christian Pichel. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning, everybody. Thanks, Jeannie, and thanks everyone for joining us today. With me are Andrew Clyde, Chief Executive Officer, Mindy West, Chief Operating Officer, Gallagher Jeff, Chief Financial Officer, and Donnie Smith, Chief Accounting Officer. After some opening comments from Andrew, Gallagher will provide an overview of the financial results and performance against our 2025 guidance metrics. And then following some closing comments from Andrew, we'll open up the call to Q&A. Please keep in mind that some of the comments made during this call, including the Q&A portion, will be considered forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. As such, no assurances can be given that these events will occur or that the projections will be attained. A variety of factors exist that may cause actual results to differ. For further discussion of risk factors, please see the latest Murphy USA Forms 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, and other recent SEC filings. Murphy USA takes no duty to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. During today's call, we may also provide certain performance measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. We have provided schedules to reconcile these non-GAAP measures with the reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings press release, which can be found on the Investor section of our website. And with that, I'll turn it over to Andrew. Thank you, Christian,

and good morning, everyone. Second quarter results largely reflect the trends previously disclosed in our operations update covering second quarter's performance through May. Fuel prices continue to be range-bound despite remarkable geopolitical events, and we remain in a lower-price, less volatile environment. Together with lighter cigarette promotional activity and lower lottery jackpots, this translated to modest pressure on customer traffic, and you can see that in Q2, same-store fuel volumes were down 3.2 percent, ahead of OPUS volume levels reported that noted weakness in demand. July volumes have rebounded and are currently running at 100 percent of prior year levels with a couple of reporting days left in the month. While these trends reflect an environment on the low side of what we would call normal, there are definitely bright spots that may get obscured in the current environment, which should result in significant performance uplift when conditions normalize. Gallagher will review the 2025 outlook shortly, but it's worth emphasizing a few things that we are excited about. First, while cigarette volumes remain pressured, non-combustible nicotine categories are growing at a rate that fully offsets the decline in cigarette margins, which is remarkable as this category represents only 30 percent of total nicotine margin contribution. With an uptick in July promotional activity on cigarettes around the 4th of July, we believe a more robust second-half cadence will be supportive to stronger nicotine category growth. Moreover, we view FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark Hayes' forceful comments about illicit vapor and synthetic cranium crackdowns earlier this week as very positive.