RB Global, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Victor, and I'll be your conference operator today at this time. I would like to welcome everyone to the Ritchie Brothers Auctioneer Second Quarter Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during the time, simply press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Thank you. Now, I will turn the call over to Mr. Samir Rathod, Vice President of Investor Relations and Market Intelligence, to open the conference call. Mr. Rathod, you may begin your conference.

Hello and good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss our second quarter 2021 results. Joining me today are Anne Fandesi, our Chief Executive Officer, Sharon Driscoll, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as other members of the management team who will be available for the Q&A portion of this call. The following discussion will include forward-looking statements. Comments that are not a statement of fact, including projections of future earnings, revenue, gross transaction value, and other items are considered forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual and operating results to differ significantly from our forward-looking statements or details in our SEC and Canadian securities filing available on our investor relations website, investor.richiegross.com. We encourage you to review our earnings release and Form 10-Q, which are available on our website, as well as Edgar and Cedar. On this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. For the identification of non-GAAP financial measures, the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and the reconciliation between the two, see our earnings release in Form 10-Q. Presentation slides accompany our commentary today. These slides can be viewed through the live or recorded webcast or downloaded from our website. All figures discussed on today's calls are U.S. dollars, unless otherwise indicated. I will now turn the call over to Anne Fantuzzi.

Thank you, Samir, and good morning to everyone joining our call today. First, I would like to start the call by thanking our team members on their continued vigilance. The COVID-19 variants have been challenging for so many regions across the world, and as we traverse the pandemic, we continue to look for ways to support our communities. Our top priority is the health and safety of our customers and team members, and continuing to follow the best practices and updating our protocols based on regional or local recommendations. Our omnichannel platform continued to deliver strong outcomes for our customers, with bids per lot sold increasing 9% and used equipment pricing remaining robust. This translated to solid financial results for shareholders, with total service revenue increasing 8%. We believe this is a critical measure of performance and growth trajectory to which we have committed. As a strong signal of our continued confidence, we are increasing our quarterly dividend approximately 14% to 25 cents. You don't need me to tell you that this is an unprecedented environment as we have noted in the past few quarters. We are seeing a tight supply environment caused by low inventory levels and continued supply chain issues hampering OEM's production levels. While a tight market is not good from a supply perspective, we are seeing very positive signs from new customers entering our ecosystem. And while the equipment availability will certainly open back up, we believe these new customers will remain, having experienced Ritchie Brothers for the first time. That said, we see the current dynamic of tight equipment as a point in time event, and we continue to move forward and control our own destiny. For us, this starts and stops with serving our customers. We always remember that our omnichannel platform exists for the benefit of our customers, both sellers and buyers. Throughout the pandemic, sellers have needed us to take care, custody, and control of their equipment in the physical world, while driving transactions for buyers in the virtual world. We are now hearing from our customers once again that they crave a return to some type of normalcy. a face-to-face interaction with our sales teams, our operations teams, as well as each other. To that end, we are pleased to announce that we are welcoming customers back to our yards for auction day and night before social activities at select larger events. This is very important to our customers and these events will bring back the opportunity for them to interact with the Ritchie Brothers team. To be clear, our yards have been open the entire duration of the pandemic and have been busier than ever with inspections, drop-offs, pickups, etc. Some activities, like ramping, will be a thing of the past as we have learned how to better showcase our equipment digitally and allow buyers same-day pickup, which ramping largely precluded. As always, we will continue to listen and learn and continue to evolve our business based on our customers' needs and technology-enabled innovations. One way we are controlling our destiny is through our accelerated growth pillar. We have been closely analyzing our satellite yard pilots internationally, and we have been impressed across the board with how they are doing. We started to scale the learnings in the quarter by launching six locations in the US under the satellite yard strategy with more to come in the next few quarters. Moving to IMS, we are building an industry-leading inventory management system that will help our customers make decisions and allow us to simplify our workflow by making it more digital, automated, and scalable. Our evolution to a marketplace is a journey which begins with activating organizations in the IMS, much like a gateway. Future phases will include monitoring and driving assets per organization, then services provided and monetized per each of those assets, all resulting in a final KPI of revenue growth. You see here our current thinking of future KPIs we will release around IMS, while 2021 will focus on organizational activations. These metrics over time will ultimately allow you to go from the organizations to total assets to total transactions to revenue generated by multiplying them together. We launched our business IMS product late last year, and in the second quarter, the number of organizations that activated on our platform increased 34% from Q1 to Q2. While this implies a very large annual growth trajectory, we are still learning from our customers and are excited about the journey we are on, both with our customers and our partners. After Sharon discusses our financials, I will talk about how we are executing against our strategic pillars and outlook, and then we will move to Q&A.