Vulcan Materials Company

Good morning. Welcome, everyone, to the Vulcan Materials Company second quarter 2025 earnings call. My name is David, and I will be your conference call coordinator today. Please be reminded that today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay later today on the company's website. All lines have been placed in a listen-only mode. After the company's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. 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.

Mr. Thank you, Operator. With me today are Tom Hill, Chairman and CEO, and Mary Andrews Carlyle, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is accompanied by a press release and a supplemental presentation posted to our website, VulcanMaterials.com. Please be reminded that today's discussion 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 non-GAAP financial measures are defined and reconciled in our earnings release, supplemental presentation, and other SEC filings. During the Q&A, we ask that you limit your participation to one question. This will allow us to accommodate as many as possible during our time we have available. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Mark, and thank all of you for your interest in Volcker Materials Company. I'm very proud of how our talented teams are delivering results that exhibit their commitment to continuous improvement through consistent execution of our strategic disciplines. Most importantly, they are doing so while keeping one another safe. Both our safety and financial performance through the first half of the year has been outstanding, despite a challenging operating environment. Extreme temperatures early in the year and excessive rainfall in the second quarter have all contributed to lower same store today shipments across all product lines. Nonetheless, our adjusted EBITDA has improved 16% margins have expanded 260 basis points, and aggregate cash gross profit per ton has grown 13 percent. Our two-pronged growth strategy to improve earnings through compounding profitability in our organic business and adding strategic assets to our portfolio is clearly working. In a quarter, we generated $660 million of adjusted VDOT. a 9% improvement over the prior year despite lower aggregate shipments. Rainfall in the southeast notched 10-year records in many key Vulcan states, namely Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and the Carolinas, disrupting both our aggregates and asphalt businesses in these markets. Aggregate shipments were impacted by an estimate 2 to 3 million tons in our most profitable markets. our reported cash gross product per ton expanded an impressive 9%. Our teams executed particularly well on our VolcanWeb operating disciplines to navigate the challenging operating environment, drive plant efficiencies, and tightly control operating costs. Rate-adjusted unit cash cost of sales increased only 1.5% while remaining lower on a year-to-date basis. Price improvements were geographically widespread, and freight-adjusted average selling prices improved 5%. On a mix-adjusted basis, average selling prices improved 8%. The difference was the anticipated impact of recent acquisitions and unfavorable geographic mix due to weather-impacted shipments in our attractive southeast markets. Consistent pricing discipline coupled with operating execution are yielding attractive unit profitability growth. as we move into the back half of the year. Let me share a few other thoughts about the second half. Residential construction activity, which accounts for about 20% of our shipments, remains weak with persistent affordability challenges across most of the U.S. markets. Starts and permits for single-family housing continue to accelerate. However, multifamily starts are showing signs of improvement with over half of our markets having turned positive on a turning three-month basis. This improvement should begin to help offset the weakness in single-family activity. In private, non-residential construction, higher rates for longer and macro uncertainty have been weighing on construction activity. But we are beginning to see several signs of recovery. With growth in data center activity and moderating declines in warehouse and other private non-residential categories, treading three-month starts have turned positive. This is an encouraging sign that private non-residential demand will soon begin to grow. Data centers remain a bright spot. We are currently serving a number of data center projects and actively discussing green-lit projects totaling over $35 billion. We're beginning to hear discussions of supporting power generation projects in areas with a heavy exposure to data centers. Nearly 80 percent of data center activity in the planning stage is within 30 miles of a Vulcan operation. On the public side, during 12 months, highway contractor wars in Vulcan markets have accelerated meaningfully. They were modestly down a year ago and were up over 20 percent at the end of June. IIJ funding, is continuing to benefit both highways and other public infrastructure activity. And we still have over 60% of the dollars yet to be spent. Importantly, the improvements we're beginning to see in both private and public demand environment are translating into accelerating bookings and growing backlogs to support volume growth in the back half of this year and into 2026. Therefore, we continue to expect to deliver between $2.35 and $2.55 billion of adjusted EBITDA. Now, I'll turn the call over to Mary Andrews for some additional commentary on our results and revised outlook. Mary Andrews?