North American Construction Group Ltd

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the North American Construction Group's earnings call for the first quarter ending March 31, 2020. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, there will be an opportunity for analysts, shareholders, and bondholders to ask questions. The media may monitor this call-in listen-only. They are free to quote any member of management, but they are asked not to quote remarks from any other participant without participant's permission. The company wishes to confirm that today's comments contain forward-looking information that actual results could differ materially from a conclusion, forecast, or projection contained in that forward-looking information. Certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing conclusions or in making forecasts or projections that are reflected in this forward-looking information. Additional information about these material factors is contained in the company's most recent management discussion and analysis, which is available on CDAR and EDGAR, as well as the company's website at nacg.ca. I will now turn the conference over to Martin Farren, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, and a very good morning to everyone. Following on from three years of solid growth in 2017 to 2019, we entered 2020 full of optimism and enthusiasm. We were looking forward to another successful year based on plenty of work in hand and a strong backlog for the medium term. We expended our growth capital in January on new assets to support a key customer of the curl mine on firm contractual terms. We pressed on with our front-end loaded sustainable capital plan for the year and decided to call a convertible venture which had been deeply in the money for many months. Then, around March 15th, the gravity of the COVID-19 virus outbreak, combined with an oil price war, began to weigh heavily on our business. It would be easy to consign our Q1 performance to the record books with a who cares, that was then and this is now attitude, However, I will look back on it as a quarter went far in all cylinders. My amazing team of employees put up numbers that I always will be immensely proud of. In fact, if not for the deteriorating business conditions towards the end of the quarter, we would likely have put up an adjusted EBITDA number in the mid-60s, an adjusted EPS of close to $1. I will now hand the call over to Joseph Lambert, our President and Chief Operating Officer, to take us through the safety and other operational highlights shown on slides two to four. Jason Veenstra, our CFO, will then cover financial highlights from slides five to eight before I talk about our outlook using slide nine. Over to you, Joe.

Thanks, Martin. Looking at slide two, Our unwavering commitment to safety continued through Q1 and into the onset of the virus, where we further demonstrate that even with increasing workforce hours and winter conditions, we can maintain our industry-leading safety results. Starting March and continuing into Q2, our business has naturally felt the impact of this pandemic and is demonstrating our commitment to the health of our employees physically, emotionally, and financially. Physical health is protective of our policies and procedures, ensuring workplace hygiene and accommodating physical distancing and work from home. Emotional health is being bolstered through strong support from both our internal human resources team and external assistance programs. And finally, financially, through doing everything in our control to minimize layoffs during this pandemic. If there is anything positive to draw from this experience, is the heightened awareness and commitment to continuously improving employee health. Moving on to slide three with our business update, we have quite the contrast of a Q1 demonstration of what we can achieve in a stable market and normal weather pattern to that of an unanticipated, unusual Q2 opportunity to show our business resilience and ability to adjust quickly to the most volatile markets. In boxing terms, We certainly prefer to show our ring prowess and punching power like we did during the majority Q1 to that of demonstrating our ability to take a punch here in Q2. But in an inherently cyclical commodity business, both skills are required for sustainable business success. Moving on from the bottom of slide three and into slide four, you'll see what we believe to be characteristics of a strong corporate culture and that our core strategy remains intact and we have adjusted the priority on the objectives to match current business climate. We expect our customer first mentality, safe low cost provider reputation and client alliance relationships put us as a front runner in working with our long term oil sands clients to reduce costs, improve efficiency and weather this low oil price environment. The need for lower cost and improved efficiency only further reinforces the value of both our internal and external maintenance services. Our new component rebuild facility got up and running in Q1, and we will be ramping up through Q2 to provide low cost, high quality components, initially supporting our internal needs, and growing into next year with capacity for additional external revenue. Machine health is only second to employee health in our overall business success, and the value of these maintenance services only increases during economic downturns. Our oil sands fleet utilizations will obviously drop from our high Q1 levels and we're aggressively marketing, bidding, and pursuing work in other resource and geographic areas using our own business development and also through our NUNA group of companies. The virus impacts have not deferred our expected Q2 startup schedule for assuming operational management of a Texas lignite mine. I look forward to telling you all about our successful transition on our next quarterly call. To close out my brief comments, I'd like to take this opportunity to personally thank all of our employees, clients, shareholders, and other stakeholders that continue to support and show confidence in our business. We will again prove the naysayers wrong and demonstrate we can take a one-two punch of COVID and oil price and recover stronger than ever. The consistency of challenging events in the 12 plus years I've been a North American is an understood reality in the mining and construction industries. but our persistence and resilience have given us the abs of steel to absorb the impact for these such occasions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jason for details on our financial health.