Suburban Propane Partners, L.P.

Good day and welcome to the Suburban Propane Partners LP second quarter results conference call. All participants will be in a 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 touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. This conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. As amended relating to the partnership's future business expectations and predictions and financial conditions and results of operations, these forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties. The partnership has listed some of the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in such forward-looking statements, which are referred to as cautionary statements, and its earnings press release, which can be viewed on the company's website, all subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the partnership or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by such cautionary statements. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Davin D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Treasurer. Please go ahead, sir.

Davin D' Thank you, Chuck, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning for our fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings conference call. Joining me this morning are Mike Stavala, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Coogland, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer, and Steve Boyd, our Chief Operating Officer. This morning we will review our second quarter financial results along with the current outlook for our business. As usual, once we've concluded our prepared remarks, we will open the session to questions. Our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 26, 2020, and Form 10-Q for the period ended March 27, 2021, which will be filed by the end of business today, both contain additional disclosures regarding forward-looking statements and risk factors. Copies may be obtained by contacting the Partnership or the SEC. CERN non-GAAP measures will be discussed on this call. We have provided a description of those measures, as well as a discussion of why we believe this information to be useful in our Form 8K, which was furnished to the SEC this morning. Form 8K will be available through a link in the investor relations section of our website, suburbanpropane.com. At this point, I will turn the call over to Mike Stavala for some opening remarks.

Mike? Thanks, Davin, and good morning. Thank you all for joining us today. We are extremely pleased to report strong results for our fiscal 2021 second quarter, with adjusted EBITDA of $172 million coming in more than $41 million, or 32%, ahead of the prior year. In fact, this was our strongest second quarter performance since 2015. And importantly, there were several factors that contributed to the significant improvement in earnings. First, weather was a real positive contributor. Our service territories were hit with some of the most sustained and widespread cold weather throughout much of the second quarter than we've experienced since 2015, which provided a surge in heat-related demand. Second, demand in our commercial industrial customer segments has started to normalize back toward pre-pandemic levels as COVID-19 related business restrictions started to ease and economic activity has picked up. Third, our operating personnel have continued to execute on our customer-based growth and retention initiatives, which resulted in organic customer-based growth and therefore incremental new customer activity. As a result, propane volumes increased more than 16 percent compared to the prior year second quarter. Our operating personnel were well prepared to meet the challenges of the spike in demand while continuing to adhere to COVID-19 related safety protocols, maintaining the highest level of safety standards, and delivering outstanding service to our customers when they needed us most. In addition to the increased demand, earnings for the quarter were favorably impacted by excellent margin management, despite a dramatic rise in the wholesale price of propane during the quarter. And with our recent investments in new technologies driving incremental operating efficiencies, Coupled with lower insurance claims activity and excellent management of potential bad debts, we reported lower operating expenses in spite of the significant increase in business activities. So the improvements were across the board to deliver these outstanding results for the quarter. And with the strong earnings, we utilized excess cash flows to reduce total debt by nearly $70 million during the quarter. bringing our total leverage metric below four times, ending March 2021 at 3.95. Our distribution coverage, based on trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA of 290 million and pro forma for the current annualized distribution rate of $1.20 per common unit, was around 2.75 times. In a moment, I'll come back for some closing remarks, including our current outlook for the remainder of fiscal 2021. But at this point, I'll turn it over to Mike Coogland take you through the details of our performance for the quarter.