Service Corporation International

Good morning and welcome to the second quarter 2026 FCI 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 SCI management. Please go ahead.

Good morning. This is Trey Bokaj, AVP of Investor Relations and Treasury. Welcome to our second quarter earnings call of 2026. We are going to have some prepared remarks about the quarter from Tom and Eric in just a minute. But before that, I will quickly go over our safe harbor language. Any comments made by our management team that state our plans, beliefs, expectations, or projections for the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in such statements. These risks and uncertainties include But are not limited to those factors identified in our earnings release and in our filings with the SEC that are available on our website. Today, we might also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in the tables at the end of our earnings release and on our website. With that out of the way, I will now turn it over to Tom Ryan, Chairman and CEO. Thanks, Trey, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us.

I'll start with an overview of our quarterly performance, followed by some expectation setting for the back half of 2026, and then a deeper look at our funeral and cemetery results for the quarter. For the second quarter, we generated earnings per share of $0.90, which compared to $0.88 in the prior year. Cemetery revenue and gross profit increased, supported by high single digit growth and Preenid Cemetery Sales Production, and solid growth from cemetery trust fund income. This favorable impact was slightly enhanced by lower general and administrative expense. Funeral revenues grew marginally, but profitability declined somewhat, offsetting the favorable impacts, resulting in a two cent increase in earnings per share from operating income. Below the line, the favorable impact of a lower share count and a slightly lower effective tax rate was offset by the net negative impact from interest expense and other income expense. While the first and second quarter earnings per share growth was muted by lower funeral case volumes and deferrals of cemetery revenue, we have some very positive momentum to carry into the back half of 2026. Comparable pre-need cemetery sales production grew by 8% and comparable pre-need funeral sales production grew by 7% for the quarter, while adjusted cash by operating activities increased by $71 million to $239 million, helping to fund our business capital needs and new growth capital investments while affording us the flexibility to be opportunistic, returning capital through share buybacks and consistently through dividend increases. As we enter the back half of 2026, we believe we are poised to deliver solid revenue growth as well as margin expansion in both the funeral and cemetery segments as compared to the back half of 2025, resulting in double-digit earnings per share growth Now let's take a deeper look into the funeral results for the quarter. Total comparable funeral revenues increased by $5 million, or just about 1% over the prior quarter. Comparable core funeral revenue increased by $7 million, or about 1.5%, primarily due to a healthy 3.3% growth in the core average revenue per service. This core average growth was achieved despite a modest increase of 60 basis points in the core cremation rate. Comparable core funeral volume declined by 1.7%, exceeding our expectations coming out of a challenging first quarter. We saw less meaningful declines in April and May as compared to the first quarter and slight volume growth for the month of June. Non-funeral home revenue increased by over $2 million, primarily due to a 9% increase in the average revenue per service. We expect this impressive growth in the average revenue per service to continue as older pre-need contracts that are maturing out of our backlog have higher cumulative trust earnings and more recent pre-need contracts written will mature with a higher average revenue per service. Non-funeral home pre-need sales revenue decreased by $5 million, primarily due to an operational shift to defer the delivery of urns on pre-need contracts to the time of need. This transition was completed late in 2025, so we are nearing the anniversary date All earned deliveries will occur at the same time of need as non-funeral home revenue. Then this segment line item will primarily report non-funeral home general agency revenue. Funeral gross profit for the quarter declined by approximately $7 million, with the gross profit percentage down 130 basis points to 18.5%. In a high fixed cost business model, revenue growth of less than 2% is always going to present a challenge to gross margins. In addition, gross profit was impacted by higher selling compensation associated with strong insurance-funded pre-need sales production. Selling compensation costs incurred or paid out were relatively consistent as a percentage of sales production dollars versus the prior year. We have shifted to a model that sells more insurance-funded contracts, both for core and SDI direct, and under GAAP, less selling compensation gets deferred versus a trust-funded product, resulting in a higher percentage of selling compensation being recognized against general agency revenues in the current period. Early July was the anniversary of the preponderance of our sales production shift to insurance products. Going forward, recognized selling compensation should stabilize and improve funeral gross margin comparisons in future periods. Pre-need funeral sales production increased by $20 million, or about 6.6%, over the second quarter of 2025, driven by an 8.3% increase in core pre-need sales production. Now shifting to cemetery. Comparable cemetery revenue increased by $23 million, or about 5%, primarily due to higher core revenue complemented by an increase in other revenue. Core revenues increased by $14 million, primarily due to a $15 million increase in total recognized pre-need revenue, of which $5 million resulted from higher property revenue, and 10 million from higher merchandise and service revenue. Merchandise and service revenue also reflects the positive impact from increased trust fund income. Other revenue was higher by $8 million compared to the prior year quarter, primarily from an increase in endowment care trust fund income based on market performance and higher total return distributions. Comparable pre-needs sales production grew an impressive $29.7 million or 8% in the quarter. Core sales contributed $24.4 million supported by continued strong underlying sales velocity growth in the mid-single digits. Large sales accounted for the remaining $5.3 million increase. This performance reflects the strength and effectiveness of our sales strategy and execution, generating high single-digit percentage sales growth in both pre-need funeral and cemetery by focusing on our four pillars, sales counselor headcount, driving lead effectiveness, seminars, and large sales, in the face of fewer leads generated from activities through our locations. Cemetery gross profit in the quarter grew by $7 million, or 4%, with margins relatively flat at approximately 33%. Gross profit was impacted by higher selling compensation reflecting the strong pre-need sales production growth of 8%. A large percentage of our pre-need sales production growth, particularly for cemetery property, was deferred relative to the growth and Preneed recognized revenue. On the selling compensation side, we recognized all of the fixed compensation in the period incurred. And because most of the growth came from core sales with a higher proportion of fixed compensation, the recognized revenues bore a larger burden of the selling compensation this quarter. You want the good news? The deferred revenues that went into the backlog to be recognized over the coming quarters will not only deliver revenue growth but lower associated selling compensation expense and therefore at higher relative margins. Now let's shift to a discussion about our outlook for 2026. The $4.20 midpoint of our annual guidance range for 2026 is confirmed as we narrow the range expected for adjusted earnings per share of $4.10 to $4.30. While the first quarter funeral volumes presented a near-term headwind, we saw the year-over-year rate of decline moderate and expect that to continue in the back half of the year. When combined with strong momentum in pre-need cemetery sales, average revenue per funeral, and continued disciplined expense management, we are confident and our ability to deliver within our stated earnings range. In closing, we remain firmly focused on building long-term value for shareholders, growing revenue, leveraging the strength of our scale and allocating capital with discipline to the highest and best use. As we move into a period of meaningful demographic tailwinds, we are exceptionally well positioned to expand our reach, serve more families and deliver sustained growth over time. In closing, I'd like to recognize and thank our entire SDI team for their ongoing commitment to our customers, our communities and each other. Your dedication continues to be the foundation of our success. With that, I'll turn the call over to Eric.

Thank you, Tom. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being on the call today. Before I begin my prepared remarks, I want to take a moment to do what we always do, which is most important, and that's to thank our more than 25,000 associates across the entire SCI network and across our company for how they handle the families, work with the families in a compassionate way, and continue to have that compassionate care across all the communities that they serve. We're truly proud of the very positive impact that those associates are having in the communities that we serve. So with that being said, I'll start by reviewing our cash flow results this morning and capital investments for the quarter before concluding with an update on our cash guidance for the full year and our overall financial position. So let's start with the second quarter. We generated impressive adjusted operating cash flow, about $239 million. This exceeded our expectations and was an improvement of about $71 million or 42% over the prior year. So let's talk about breaking that down a little bit. Operating income produced cash flow that was about higher by about $7 million. Cash taxes were also lower by $64 million predominantly due to a renewable energy investment credit realized in the quarter. And I'm gonna give you a little bit more detail later in these remarks. Outside of cash taxes, working capital was relatively flat in the quarter as our printing working capital sources were offset really by increased other working capital uses. But stronger cemetery printing cash collections provided about a $36 million source, which is driven by both the 8% higher printing cemetery sales production during the quarter, where again a proportion of this is deferred into the future, as well as some higher collection rates on these printing contracts. These higher receipts that I just mentioned were offset by correspondent, you know, pretty much $37 million use of working capital, which is primarily associated with the timing of an additional payroll funding in the current quarter, which by the way will benefit us in the second half of this year. Finally, cash interest was modestly lower by just about $1 million as lower cash interest associated with our 2032 notes was partially offset by higher interest on our floating rate debt. Let's talk about capital investment during the quarter. We invested $120 million of capital into our existing funeral home and cemetery locations, also business acquisitions, real estate, and new construction of funeral homes and cemeteries. So to break this down, we invested 80 million of maintenance capital back into our current locations, which was slightly higher than the prior year due to the timing of certain projects. Including this maintenance spend, we invested $45 million into new high returning cemetery development projects, 30 million into our current funeral home and cemetery locations, which again improves the overall customer experience and $6 million into our digital strategy and other corporate investments. We also invested $25 million of growth capital during the quarter towards the construction of new funeral homes as well as the purchase of real estate for future new build and expansion opportunities. From an acquisition standpoint, we deployed 15 million towards business acquisitions in the quarter which added funeral and cemetery locations in California, Georgia, and Delaware. As always, we're thrilled about these high quality funeral homes and cemeteries joining our company. And we're more than happy to welcome all the new associates to the SCI family. These acquisitions bring our full year acquisition investment to almost $40 million. And we remain confident in the current acquisition pipeline and our ability to achieve $75 to $125 million of acquisition investment target for the full year of 2026. So moving on to capital distributions to our shareholders, we returned $172 million of capital to shareholders during the quarter through $123 million of share repurchases and just under $50 million of dividends. We repurchased over one and a half million shares during the quarter at an average price of about $76 per share. This brings the number of shares outstanding to just over 136 million at the end of the quarter. Year to date, we have returned over 360 million in capital to shareholders, repurchasing 3.3 million shares and an average price of $78, which totals to $266 million, an additional $96 million of dividends. Subsequent to the end of this quarter, we've continued that momentum by repurchasing another 330,000 shares for about $26 million, which equates to about $78 per share. So let's now shift to the rest of 2026 in terms of cash flows. As we reported in the press release, we are increasing the midpoint of our adjusted operating cash flow guidance for the full year by about $50 million from a previous midpoint of 1.035 billion to now 1.085 billion for the full year. This $50 million increase is driven By better than expected working capital sources, which is primarily the increase in cemetery down payments and installment cash receipts on higher production that we've mentioned today, this morning. Finally, we're also raising maintenance count back slightly by about $10 million from $325 million in total to $335 million. With cemetery development and maintenance targets really both only increasing by about $5 million each. When deducting this $335 million of maintenance CapEx for the full year from the adjusted operating cash flow guidance midpoint that I just mentioned, we calculated our adjusted free cash flow at $750 million for the full year of 2026. This is an impressive 18% increase over last year's $637 million of adjusted full-year free cash flow for 2025. A little bit more detail here as well. There's no change in our cash tax guidance, which is approximately $120 million of cash taxes for the full year. However, I do want to remind everyone, we've talked about this before, that we are not a full cash taxpayer during 2026. With a cash tax rate of about 15 to 16%, which really compares to a more normalized cash tax rate of about 24 to 25% expected sometime in the future. Cash taxes this year are primarily benefited from the utilization of solar tax credits that have been generated through tax equity investments. And while these credits reduce cash tax Payments, and therefore increased cash flow from operations, they are accompanied by about $40 million of cash outflows or investments reflecting in investing activities during this quarter. So assuming we paid cash taxes at the full normalized rate of 24% to 25%, we'd actually pay closer to $190 million of cash taxes for a full normalized run rate which would have also brought our calculated free cash flow to about $680 million, which again is still a very strong 7% increase over the prior year 637 million that I just mentioned to you. And as a sidebar from an effective tax rate perspective for the income statement, we continue to expect our full year 2026 to trend in line with what you've seen in the prior year with about a 25 to 26% effective tax rate. So I also want to provide some brief updates on our liquidity and financial position this morning. We continue to benefit from a favorable and disciplined debt maturity profile. While 137 million of our 7.5% 2027 notes became current this quarter, Our balance sheet provides ample flexibility as we evaluate our refinancing alternatives. We ended the quarter with liquidity of about $1.6 billion, which consists of $260 million of cash on hand and just under $1.4 billion available on our long-term bank credit facility. We also ended the quarter at the midpoint of our long-term leverage target range of 3.5 to 4 times net debt to EBITDA. And that was exactly about 3.77 for the end of the quarter. So as you can see with all of these statistics, our strong balance sheet, our robust liquidity that I just mentioned, our very consistent and predictable cash flow stream really continue to supplement are capital investment programs, which ultimately results in significant flexibility that we have to invest opportunistically for the long-term benefit of SCI, our associates, and our shareholders. So operator, this concludes my remarks and Tom's remarks. And with that, I'm going to turn it back to you, please. And we'll open the call up for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2.

At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from AJ Rice of UBS.

Go ahead, please.

Thanks. Hi, everybody. First question maybe just to ask a little bit about the strategy behind what you're doing with the sales force moving more to fix compensation a little away from commission. What's the thinking there and are you seeing that have results in Is that part of what's going on with the production picking up?

Yeah, AJ, this is Tom. I'm going to answer that specifically, and then I want to let Jay Waring speak to this strategy a little more in depth. The short answer is yes. By giving more fixed compensation, the idea is to attract the best people we can, and therefore most appropriately retain the best people that we can. So giving them a better opportunity to stay in there and really learn the selling techniques. And so it's mostly a retention tool and we do find it effective. But with that, I referenced the four pillars as part of our strategy and I think it's a good question to kind of launch Jay to give you a little more detail into some of the things we're focused on and what we think is driving some of the extraordinary performance. Jay, you wanna?

Yeah, so as Tom mentioned, our sales strategy has four pillars for growth. And the first pillar is increasing the number of pre-sales counselors. So AJ, that gets right to your question. We're trying to expand and enhance the size of our sales force. The second pillar is increasing our lead to sale rate. So the percentage of our leads to end up resulting in a sale. The third pillar is increasing our number of pre-need seminars. So our customers tell us that attending a pre-need seminar is a very low-key, low-pressure way for them to learn about the benefits of pre-planning. And the fourth pillar is increasing our large sales. We've had a lot of success over time with large sales. We believe they're a nice core competency of ours, and we see opportunities to further build on them. Overall, I'd say that Gerry and Brian and our entire team are executing very well. We're seeing strong results and we're very excited about our future growth.

And AJ, just to provide a little color to what Jay said, this lead to sale rate, you think, what does that mean? Well, that's really about being more effective through the sales process. And the other day, Jay and Gerry were in my office showing me we're utilizing AI right now to train our people. And we have the ability to have AI customer interactions that give grades, give feedback, personalized advice. And so they're really leveraging this tool to be very effective. And it's really early days. So we're pretty excited about what we're doing and where we're headed with that.

OK. And just another aspect on the pre-sales, I guess on the funeral side, you made the pivot over to more insurance-related sales from the trust. But I know some, I believe at least some states still require you to do the trust and there may be reasons to do the trust in some instances. Where do you settle out in terms of How much of the sales going forward are going to be insurance-related versus trust? And are we at that point where you're sort of at a steady state going forward?

We are, AJ. As of July, I think, this year, we're kind of at that steady state in the low 90s. I'm talking about SAA Direct, sorry. I would say 70s in the core. And, you know, the difference really being there's certain people that can't get insurance right so we always have to have some form of a trust product and then again jurisdictionally we may prefer a trust product in certain states so yeah I think we're we think 70 is probably the right core number and low 90s on the SCI direct we're really trying to push that but again not everybody's insurable so we need to be flexible enough to to make sure we take care of all our customers okay

And just a final question on, you made the comment that over the course of the second quarter, it sounds like the funeral volumes basically stabilized and even improved a little bit in the last month of the quarter. Any early read on what you're seeing in the third quarter? Is it continuing to be steady to improving?

Yeah, what we're seeing in July, AJ, is pretty much flat, you know, is kind of preliminary. Obviously, we're not done with July. We're right around kind of flat volume versus last year. Obviously, we don't know what the rest of the year holds, but I think we feel pretty good that the percentage that we're at now will continue to shrink as we get to the back half of the year. And so probably be in line or better than the trends we talked about in the first quarter.

Okay. All right. Thanks so much. Thank you, Ajay.

The next question comes from Scott Schneeberger of Oppenheimer. Go ahead, please.

Thanks. Good morning. I'm just going to follow up on some things Jay said. In prepared remarks, you all mentioned, hey, we're doing the four pillars. These are, you know, these are structural and ongoing in the sales technique because with the softer funeral activity, there's less companion sales and lead opportunity. In time, do you anticipate as that comes back that that'll just provide more strong tailwind to what you're able to do in pre-need sales? Thanks.

Yeah, this is Jay. I'd say yes. You know, what you're seeing today is really garnering more customers away from the cemetery, away from the funeral home, primarily through our seminars. and one of our greatest lead sources is serving at-need customers and falling for those customers after their time of need. So to the extent the internment count grows and the funeral volume grows, we'll be in great shape.

Thanks. And then just following on AJ's last question about the funeral volumes, you know, Surprisingly soft in the first quarter, but it looks like it's much more stable on a year-over-year basis here in the second and July, as mentioned. How are you thinking about that going forward? And I'm talking, you know, looking a year out, do you think we're getting back to a normalized level and perhaps working towards a demographic shift of an increase? With that first quarter being anomaly or still being conservative and not certain? Thanks.

I mean, Scott, as you know, we don't know. But I personally feel like we're on the cusp of beginning to see this impact. And the only thing that negates that slightly when I think about, let's say, 2027, because obviously I think will have a good comparison to 26. I feel good about that. And I think we'll begin to see the demographic impacts. The things that I read about are we came out of COVID, we kind of had this spike of excess deaths related to a lot of things, right? I mean, if you look at drug overdoses, if you look at suicides, if you look at auto fatalities, there's so many good trends for society that those are getting better, right? Now, at some point those stabilize, but when I think of 26 to 27, I hope, you know, the suicide rate goes down again, I hope, you know, all these things are gonna happen. So that could be something that, you know, has a minor impact on 2027 as I think about it. But overall, I think the demographics to see that kick into the numbers. And I think that's our expectation. and it's really hard to precisely predict, but that's how we feel about as we look at models and project internally.

Thanks for that. And then just lastly, can we speak to margins for a second? A bunch of moving pieces that have impacted the quarter. You all called it out, but can we roll it together tightly about Putz and Takes on the margin second quarter, how we might see third quarter, not only the payroll, but how some of the activity in production versus sales and in sales compensation is going to impact that. Thank you.

Sure. So kind of level set here, Scott. First is, you know, as we think about how we manage expenses, you know, we have labor efficiency metrics and dashboards. And so Our frontline leaders and team members are out there every day utilizing those to manage as best we can. As an example, if salary expense inflation is three in a tough quarter, and again, this is a global statement, they can manage salary costs down to two. They have the tools. They have the talent. I can't remember what that quote is from. Some movie. and then cemetery side, they have the same type of tools. And then we have a team here in corporate that staff with a lot of leadership from the field that's called the Performance Improvement Committee. And so we take ideas from the field and can disseminate those quickly and manage costs as best we can. Again, it's a high fixed cost business, but on the margin, we can do some things. So as I think about funeral margins going forward and some of the things, you know, the wins that were in our face, obviously volume is a big one. But two things are happening right now that are a couple of things are happening that are going to go away. We talk about our general agency revenues, both on SCI direct and core. And as you think about the transition from one vendor to the next, we've had to create a cancellation reserve. They're bearing the burden right now of probably about 200 basis points of creating a reserve that I'd say will go away sometime shortly and we think will be better. Number two, the selling compensation changes. Here, this would be two things. One is when we transition to more fixed cost, we're getting close to the end of that. and the other piece is the transition to an insurance product. So those two things, for lack of a better term, didn't really impact our cash outlay, but impacted the way we recognize expenses. And again, those kind of go away in the third quarter. So we've been bearing the brunt of this and it's so funeral margins should get a little better. The last one, and again, they're all happening at the same time, we used to deliver urns prior to need We stopped doing that a while back. The last quarter, I believe, is the fourth quarter, is that right? We'll no longer have anything in both periods of delivery of urns, and that hurt us by $5 million. So as I think about margins in 26, the rest of 26, they should get better. 27, they should get better again on the funeral side. On the cemetery side, the things I think about are We told you we're selling a lot more than we're delivering and we're deferring a lot less expense. So those higher margin cemeteries delivery should happen in the back half of the year. And then again, we've got great performance in our trust funds. I hope those continue. I think they will. And the key metrics of that trust fund, just to keep in mind, are, you know, what's the original corpus going in? We always talk about income, but I kind of want to point out something. The business that's in the backlog has a higher base value than it's always going to improve. We see it every quarter. It's higher, better written business. How long has it been in the trust fund so we can get, you know, what's the period of time that it's been at work? And then what are those returns? So it's not only income. it's really just the value of the contract that's coming back and those are the things I think when I think about cemetery that I'll enhance the margins going forward and enhance the margins on funeral and so we're confident we have the tools and the trends are starting to you know shift in our favor.

Thanks guys.

The next question comes from Tyler Barashaw of Truist.

Go ahead, please.

Good morning. This is Tyler Barashaw for Tobii. Impressive pre-need sales production up high single digits. How should we think about that for the balance of the year? What kind of range do you expect?

And you're talking about cemetery, Tyler, I suspect, or both? Yes.

Primarily sanitary.

Yeah. On the cemetery side, for the six months, I think we're up about 8.8%, call it rounded nine. And, you know, when we think about the back half of the year, and I think right now our position would be we're going to be in the mid to, you know, probably the mid to maybe low high single digit percentages is a place that we're kind of modeling and believe. and we think most of that is going to come from core. That's the piece because as you think about the back half of the year from a large sale perspective, last year was pretty good. I think we're in the mid-40s type of by quarter of large sales and that's a comparison that's a good target and I feel good we can match it or slightly beat it but I think we anticipate most of the growth to come from the core sales.

You've also been in touch on funeral as well?

Yeah, funeral, probably the same, you know, mid-single digit type of, you know, percentages as we think about those things. And, you know, again, trending better, I hope, as we think about general agency commission rates and things like that, particularly as we get out into 2027. Thank you.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Joanna Gajuk of Bank of America. Go ahead, please.

Hey, good morning. A couple of questions. First, I guess on this last one, in terms of the numbers, can you quantify the large sales in this quarter in Q2? Because Q1, I guess, was also in the low 40 million.

Yeah, we actually, in the second quarter, approached almost about 50 million. So it was a really good quarter. Obviously, it wasn't dramatically more than last year because last year was a great quarter too. But yeah, Joanna, we're seeing, you know, we're starting to hit numbers closer to 50. And I'd say the breadth of the sales getting better, Jay, you want to touch on that a little bit?

In terms of private mausoleum sales?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we talked about the other day, you know, the over a million segment is kind of a different one. What we're really seeing success in now is the call it the $100,000 sale to the $900,000 sale. You want to touch a little bit about our focus on that?

Yeah, give an accolade to Gerry and Brian and the team who are doing intensive training with our sales force on understanding what all the options are and showing the options to the customers and really let them pick.

So it's really, you know, more contracts and I think that's a very positive thing of Hitting that inventory level that's more affordable for more people, and I think that focus is really paying off.

Okay, that's great. And on the comment you were making that you expect more growth from the core, so what gives you confidence that there's real demand, I guess, for that type of product?

Well, I think it's the trend. We've seen five quarters in a row of trending strong velocity. I think a component of that is the training we're talking about and the focus. Jay keeps talking about the four pillars. We've really got the team all singing from the same song sheet. We're focused on the things that are going to drive that, whether it be the performance predominantly from seminars and getting those types of leads, focusing on the closing rate using those AI tools. And then specifically, we called out before, we've got a real focus on that cremation consumer. So again, remember, we view that opportunity as almost like greenfield opportunity. We had cremation consumers that we weren't talking to about these products. And now we have, you know, the props if you will to you know within our facilities where it's natural in conversation and so we're seeing an uplift in the number of cremation consumers that are buying and that's going to show up in velocity now that's going to push down the average price a little bit but that's okay we'll take it every time because it's a it's a new consumer we weren't going to get or we haven't got historically so that's why I think we feel confident that that trend should continue. Now, how much? You're right. I mean, you end up with a recession, you know, that could impact the number of people that, you know, want to prearrange. But we're confident that absent that, we should continue to, you know, keep the focus on driving velocity.

So, on this cremation customer, any update there? I think on the Q1 call, when I asked about this, he said, You just highlighted it in like 10 markets. So are you, you know, doing it in additional markets and kind of how things are going there on the cremation customer, you know, buying a cemetery?

We have. We rolled it, I think, in early July to a number of other markets. And, you know, we're continuing to monitor the waves and it continues to be incremental. So, you know, I think the first 10 markets are The take-up rate was dramatically better. I think in the second wave, it's better, maybe not the same rates, but it's clear that with the focus and with the materials and the visibility, and some of that, again, is around marketing, sometimes within the facility or digitally, we're seeing a real pickup in the conversation and therefore pickup in our ability to sell. where we've tested. So we're we ultimately I think by early 27 will be everywhere but we're we're rolling out waves and really trying to make sure we're doing it right and in getting the internal buy-in.

Oh that is great. My question on this topic is a follow-up but it was about It seems like, you know, it gets highlighted throughout the call that, you know, clearly that's flowing through the numbers helping, you know, ourselves in both segments. So can you help us quantify? I think you disclosed this number in Q. But can you give us a ballpark number of maybe, you know, in terms of recognized trust fund income in both segments? And also, there was this other line in cemetery that benefited from that as well. So it seems like maybe the returns are tracking higher. So is that correct? And also, what does it mean for the second half of this year? Are you assuming a higher returns coming through because of this or sort of kind of help us understand how this helps to get to your guidance? Thank you.

You bet. So remember, we have about $8 billion or so plus of trust funds, about $2.5 billion in the internal care fund, which is a little bit of a different animal, Johanna, as we've talked about in the past. About 70% of that internal care fund is really a kind of a fixed return that we could take out according to the state laws. The 30% is the old way where it's mostly fixed income investments and that's ordinary income get that distributed to us. And once in a while as portfolio managers make those decisions, whether to create realized gains, those can sometimes or some portion of those get distributed to it, which makes CCF a little bit more lumpy Although this quarter, we saw it a little bit more lumpy to the to the positive by seven or $8 million. As a very general statement, the trust fund income for all three can range anywhere from, you know, let's call it 330 to 360 million ish And again, I don't know what the markets are going to do the back half. That's the best guidance I could give to you. I'd tell you about $125 million of that number that I gave you is related to the ECF. The rest is related to the MST. And not only do you have to have a crystal ball to understand what the returns are going to be, as Tom mentioned earlier, You got to have a crystal ball in terms of how old the contracts are and what the original amount corpus was coming out to. So there's a lot of moving factors, you know, kind of in that guide. But that's generally where it is for a full year of 2026. All right.

But would you say the returns are coming better?

They are. I mean, we've had, yeah, we've disclosed the returns every quarter, as you know. And what's really benefit of this is we've had low double digit to mid team returns on these trust funds for the past three years alone. So you're really starting to see, you know, the value of the diversity of not just having the general agency revenue with the insurance contracts. and all of that cash flow, but you're also seeing the benefit of diversifying over to the trust fund investments as well and having those good markets create nice trust fund income for the company's cash flows as well. So it really is a good, nice mix that we've kind of designed here.

Great, perfect. Thank you so much for the question.

Sure.

The next question comes from Parker Schnur of Raymond James. Go ahead, please.

Hey, good morning. So the pre-need cemetery, you had another great quarter there, fifth straight quarter of positive same store production growth. But the recognition rate was low at 88.8%. I guess what's your expectation for the recognition rate in the back half of the year? And when should we largely expect a lot of this production to flow through the P&L?

So you really have to split it up, Parker, as you and I've talked about before. The recognition rate includes an at-need component, and that's generally 100%. It includes a property component, which over the full 12 months should also be about 12%. But this production growth also includes merchandise and services, just to kind of state the obvious. And when that occurs, that recognition rate occurs a little later. Maybe about half of the services Kerr, the revenue recognition in the same year, maybe about two thirds of the merchandise occurs in the same way. When you put all that together for a full year, that's where you get to about the 95% recognition rate that we report to you. And those are the components of it so everybody understands it. We're not too far off at 88 than we were in the prior year at this exact time. So I don't think we're coming off of our guidance at all. We expect to have higher 90 percentages, if you will, in the back half of this year. That would be very consistent with the back half of last year. So we should end up somewhere around that 95%. It could be higher if the mix of production, which we can't perfectly predict, Higgins, and many more. Thank you.

When we're talking about the merchandise and services, very few of them turn within a year. The real answer is we're selling, for lack of a better term, we're going to sell 100 this year and 65 are going to come out of the backlog. And they generally have nothing to do with one another. And so it's two different streams. And that's what history tells us. But how many come out of the backlog? We don't know. If we sell a lot, to Eric's point, If instead of selling 100, we sell 110, but only 60 come in, that's going to drive down that recognition rate, right? So that's why it's hard to project or predict because there's two components that really have nothing to do with one another. And if we have a good selling year, the recognition rate on merchandise and services is going to look low. That's a good thing, right? So just to clarify, it's... These are typically going to have a life of six to eight to 10 to 12 years when you think about merchandising services.

Right. Yeah, no, that's helpful. That's really helpful. And then just on share repurchase, you increased your authorization in June. I know that's a fluid thing with the stock price and it's certainly it's run over the last couple of months, but what's your general expectation Baked into your guidance for share repurchase for the remainder of the year?

I think it's more of the same of what you normally see. I mean, we have well over $500 million of capacity. I want to remind everybody that we go heavier and go lighter depending on what we believe the intrinsic value is versus the share price. And we've been very disciplined with that. I think we're on a run rate. and many more.

Okay, and if I can just squeeze in one last one, just on fixed cost control. I know in the first quarter you guys talked about managing fixed costs below inflation. Just wanted to check in there and see how that progressed through the second quarter as well.

Yeah, I think, like I said before, if you look at labor costs in the second quarter, we managed them to about 2%. And that was, again, a function of we didn't, you know, our volumes are down a little bit and our field utilizes those dashboards and metrics to manage labor costs, whether it be part-time and the like. And so they do a fabulous job. And so, Parker, what will happen is if what I hope happens is we do more funerals in the third quarter, and then I expect that cost to again rise back up to kind of inflationary levels, closer to three, two and a half. So that's where we are and how we manage it.

Okay, super helpful.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Mark.

The next question comes from Tomo Sano of J.P. Morgan. Go ahead, please.

Hi, good morning, everyone. Good morning, Tomo. Thank you for taking my questions. On a production side, when production outpaces recognized revenue, what KPIs or God-related Do you use to manage the trade-off between near-term margin pressures and future margin expansions? And then when should we expect that backlog to translate into margins, please?

On the funeral side, Tomo, I think there's a seasonality to this business. So what you typically see is in the first two quarters, and it's true again now, is we're selling you know a bit more than we are delivering because we're selling into projects that get built later in the year so a lot of completions of projects can happen in the third and fourth quarter and the other thing that's happening is we're selling in this project it's building that backlog so we'd expect the back half of the year that our pre-need property recognition rates would go a hundred percent or higher because what we're experiencing right now as Eric pointed out is lower rates on those property. We're in the 90s, sometimes the high 80s, and that gets correct itself in the third and fourth quarters. Now, comparably, that happened last year, right? So it doesn't really help you when you think about the comparisons, but sequentially, you expect higher margins to occur in the back half of the year, and we expect that again.

Thank you. and on follow-up digital investments, how are digital investments impacting such as like lead generation, conversion, case mix, collections and could you talk about like some of the evidence that impacts so far, Bruce?

Well, there's a lot in that digital investment. Some has to do with the leads that you just described coming from the websites and making sure that we get it into the sales funnel As quickly as possible. Some has to do with the applications that we've developed in-house that the Salesforce uses, such as the beacon tool, the tablet-based beacon tool that's in certain areas of our company, but not in all areas of our company that we continue to work on. We've separated that application development, and we're trying to like anybody else look for efficiencies through AI now and into the future in terms of that development. But the way I describe it, Tomo, is as we talked about our four pillars that are driving sales, this is one of those pillars in terms of the technology investments to give us the tools to help drive those four pillars. And that's how I kind of describe it. It's generally around you know 20-25 million dollars a year is what that technology investment has been run right that's in our CapEx guidance but that's how I'd describe it.

I know you probably heard we talked about how we're utilizing AI today to do customized training and feedback for our sales counselors and it's still early days but it's just such an incredibly powerful tool to get immediate feedback and be able to role play and it just gets people the confidence and therefore we believe going to improve efficiencies. And again, the beauty of AI is you're taking your best sales techniques and everybody's getting the same training. They haven't tried it out on me yet and that would be the real answer. If I can sell something, then look out.

Thank you, Tom, Eric. Appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to SCI management for any closing remarks.

I want to thank everybody for joining us today. We really appreciate your participation. Have a great rest of the summer. We look forward to seeing you in late October for our third quarter earnings call.

Thanks.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.