Vulcan Materials Company

and welcome to Vulcan Materials Company's fourth quarter earnings and I will be your conference call coordinator today. During the Q&A, your participation to one question. This will allow everyone who wishes the opportunity to participate. Now I will turn the call over to your host, Mr. Mark Warren, Vice President of Investor Relations for Vulcan Materials. Mr. Warren, you may begin.

Good morning. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter. And with me today are Tom Hill, Chairman and CEO, and Suzanne Wood, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is a supplemental presentation posted to our website, bulkmaterials.com. A recording of this call will be available for replay later today at our website. session may include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks, along with other legal disclaimers, are described in detail in the company's earnings release and in other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measure are defined and reconciled in our earnings release, our supplemental presentation, and other SEC. As the operator indicated, please limit your Q&A participation to one question. This will help maximize participation during our time together. With that, I will now turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Mark, and thanks to everyone for joining the call today. We appreciate your interest in Volcker Materials Company. We hope you and your families are and will continue to be safe and healthy. 2020 represented another year of strong earnings growth for Vulcan, despite the many challenges associated with the pandemic. Our results showed flexibility and resilience. But most of all, 2020 demonstrated as they faced uncertainty and had to make adjustments both in their professional and their personal lives. Teams stayed focused on operating safely, servicing our customers, and making progress on our four strategic disciplines. A job well done. In a few minutes, Suzanne will share some fourth quarter highlights with you to summarize our full year 2020 and discuss broad themes and where we are headed. Full year financial results were strong. Total company adjusted EBITDA increased 4% to $1.324 billion. And EBITDA margin expanded by 150 basis points. Cash generation continued to be strong with operating cash flows increasing by 9% to $1.1 billion. And finally, one of our principal measure capital improved by 40% . These results were particularly noteworthy, considering decline by 3% as compared to 2019. And effective cost control were key drivers of this performance. Agri's pricing improved by just over 3% on both the reported and mixed adjusted basis. Importantly, these pricing gains were widespread across our footprint. Our total cost of sales per ton increased by 2%, while our unit cash cost of sales, which is more controllable, this led to a 5.5% gain per ton. at $7.11 toward our longer-term goal of $9 per ton. This improvement in unit profitability was supported by our four strategic disciplines, commercial excellence, operations excellence, logistics innovation, and strategic sourcing. We also experienced improvements in each of our non-aggregate business segments collectively. Gross profit improved 12% across these three segments. Unit profitability increased in both asphalt and concrete. Asphalt gross profit increased $12 million, or 19% over the prior year, even though volumes declined 7%. This improvement in profitability resulted from stable sales prices and lower liquid asphalt costs. Concrete unit profitability increased 8%. Average selling prices increased by 2%, and volume declined by 5%, primarily as a result of the cement shortages in California. Profitability in each of our business segments and our improving overall EBITDA margin is 1. We are well positioned to take advantage of market opportunities in our geographic footprint. The demand environment is also improving, particularly in residential construction and highway construction. Let's take each market segment in turn. Residential continues to show strength, especially in single family. The market fundamentals of low interest rates and reduced the growth will continue. This represents a clear opportunity for us as both permits and starts are going faster in vault and serve markets. Highway lettings and awards return to growth in the fourth quarter. State DOT budgets have stabilized, with most of our states showing budgets flat to up from 2020. The caution in this market segment is that it will require time to turn awards into shipments given the mid-year 2020 Lowland Awards due to the pandemic. While timing of shipments is a variable, we will see improvement in highway shipments throughout 2021. As we said in the third quarter, the near-term outlook for the non-residential construction sector provides the least forward visibility. Dodge construction starts are still down year over year, but certainly indicators are beginning to improve, perhaps signaling that potential improvement is just around the corner. Weakness lingers in the office space and hospitality related sectors, but there is growth in the heavier non-residential categories like distribution facilities and data centers. In fact, warehouses are now the largest non-residential category as measured by square feet and represent approximately one-third of construction awards. These projects are typically more aggregate-intensive And 90% of the near-term growth in this sector will occur in vol-conserved states, according to Dodge. The administration and Congress are committed to an infrastructure-led economic recovery and have indicated that they will focus on an infrastructure bill next, after the COVID-19 relief package. Clearly, our leading market positions will mean broad participation in infrastructure-related spending. We believe demand for aggregates will continue to improve as we progress through 2021. That being said, the timing of shipments to highway projects and non-residential construction projects remains a variable. We considered these factors as we thought about our 2021 prospects and guidance. That said, we expect our adjusted EBITDA to be between $1.34 billion and $1.44 billion. We anticipate 2021 aggregate shipments could fall in a range of a 2% decline to a 2% increase as compared to 2020. Regardless of volume swings, we will improve our full year unit profitability in aggregates. We expect aggregates freight adjusted average selling prices to increase by 2% to 4% in 2021. And gross profit in our non-aggregate segments is forecast to improve by mid-single to mid-high single digits. To sum it up, 2021 will turn out to be a year of solid earnings growth. Now, I'll turn it over to Suzanne for further comments. Suzanne?