World Kinect Corporation

Thank you for standing by and welcome to World Connect Corporation's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, to remove yourself from the queue, I would now like to hand the call over to Braulio Medrano. Senior Director of FP&A and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to World Connect's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call, which will be presented alongside our live slide presentation. Today's presentation is also available via webcast on our Investor Relations website. I'm Braulio Medrano, Senior Director of FP&A and Investor Relations. With me on the call today is Ira Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Mike Tejada, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and John Rao, President. And now, I'd like to review our Safe Harbor Statement. Certain statements made today, including comments about our expectations regarding future plans and performance, are forward-looking statements that are subject to a range of uncertainties and risks that could cause actual results to materially differ. Factors that could cause results to materially differ can be found in our most recent Form 10-K, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We assume no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information. This presentation also includes our non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our press release and can be found on our website. We will begin with several minutes of prepared remarks, which will then be followed by a question and answer period. At this time, I would like to introduce our Chief Executive Officer, Ira Burns.

Thank you, Braulio, and good afternoon, everyone. As I begin my first earnings call as CEO, I'd like to say how honored I am to step into this role at a defining moment for our company. We entered 2026 with a strong foundation in place and clear opportunities ahead. I'm truly energized and excited by the opportunity to lead the company into its next chapter, one grounded in accountability, aligned leadership, and a commitment to consistent execution and long-term value creation. As we previewed last quarter, we welcomed Mike Tejada to the role of Chief Financial Officer shortly before my appointment to CEO. I am joined today by Mike, whose deep expertise in financial management and operational transformation has already proven instrumental as we sharpen our portfolio, enhance efficiency, and create additional value for our shareholders. I'm also joined by John Rao, recently appointed president and the commercial leader of our aviation, marine, and land segments. John is an experienced leader with a deep understanding of our business. His focus on operational excellence and disciplined commercial execution continues to strengthen our platform and better positions WorldConnect to deliver sustainable growth. And over the past several weeks, I've had the opportunity to engage deeply with our leaders and many of our employees across the company. Those conversations have been energizing and have reinforced the shared commitment to simplicity, clarity, and increased transparency. Our team understands the changes we're making. They believe in where we're headed, and they are excited about contributing to the next chapter of World Connect. That level of alignment and engagement gives me tremendous confidence in our ability to execute and deliver on our commitments. Beyond our internal audience, I've also met with external stakeholders to pressure test our thinking and better understand where we can optimize our business and drive additional value for our shareholders. While these discussions are ongoing, they have already reinforced that a unified performance mindset, a disciplined approach to capital allocation, and most importantly, a sharpened focus on portfolio management are critical to driving strong results. As a result, we've been deliberately reshaping WorldConnect, simplifying our business model, concentrating our portfolio on businesses that deliver more attractive and predictable returns, allocating capital with a clear ROI mindset, and strengthening our financial discipline to create a clearer path to sustainable success in a dynamic and evolving industry. These actions are building a more resilient future ready company that serves customers with excellence and is positioned to deliver sustainable value for our shareholders. With the renewed focus on our core business and meaningful momentum underway, we are confident that 2026 will mark the start of a new era for World Connect. With this clarity, the fourth quarter marked several pivotal milestones in our transformation and portfolio repositioning. In aviation, We successfully closed the acquisition of Universal Weather and Aviation's Trip Support Services business, expanding our capabilities in flight support and strengthening our role in global aviation services. This business fits squarely within our core strengths and complements our global fuel distribution network. Integration is underway following our proven M&A playbook in aviation, focused on operational excellence and disciplined execution. I just returned from Europe where I witnessed firsthand the enthusiasm for the opportunities we see to expand our on-airport footprint, which we believe will unlock further growth potential in this region. In land, we have taken action to meaningfully reshape the portfolio and narrow our focus to better align with our long-term return objectives. I will share related details with you in a moment. Meanwhile, as we look ahead, our land business will focus on our North American operations, anchored around higher margin and more rateable card lock and retail activities, as well as natural gas. When combined, these businesses create the foundation on which we will continue to build and enable us to successfully drive longer-term land-based growth. To put this in context, for many years, our role in the C-Store fuel distribution space has been focused on supplying fuel to site operators under long-term agreements, many of which are locked in for as long as 15 years, driving solid rateable profitability. While opportunities for growth here remain, we now see meaningful room for additional growth through a new pathway in which we own or lease the site and manage the fuel operations ourselves, while partnering with an independent operator who runs the convenience store. This approach increases our margin, reduces upfront capital incentives and credit risk, and opens a much larger growth opportunity in the C-Store fuel distribution space. In turn, we expect to drive synergies over time as we leverage this new model that more closely aligns our card lock and retail business activities. Ultimately, we expect the targeted changes we are making and the broader strategic shift across our land segment to enhance returns and significantly improve profitability in 2026, while also providing increased transparency regarding the business's long-term growth potential. Summarizing the actions we have taken to reshape the land portfolio. In Europe, we made the decision to exit our power, energy management, and related sustainability service businesses. Steps that now shift our focus almost entirely to North America and our core businesses that have proven to deliver more consistent profitability and returns. In North America, as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our portfolio and further sharpen our strategic focus, we have also recently entered into an agreement to sell our tank wagon delivery and lubricants businesses to Diesel Direct, a national mobile fueling business based in Stoughton, Massachusetts. We expect to close this transaction during the second quarter of 26. In terms of the transportation model for our remaining core land business in the U.S., we have also made the decision to fully outsource our transportation requirements to drive additional operating efficiencies. We expect this transition to also reduce capital requirements going forward, ultimately allowing us to redeploy resources towards higher value opportunities. It's also very important to recognize that as a result of the strategic changes we've made, We plan to redeploy associated capital into core areas of our business that deliver stronger and more consistent returns. Mike will share additional details on the proceeds from the exits, as well as related one-time charges. Overall, we are making meaningful progress in optimizing our portfolio. The actions we've taken have simplified our business, reduced complexity, and positioned our land segment for more consistent and predictable performance. Our strategy is now very clear. Build a more focused and efficient company that delivers stronger longer-term returns as we continue strengthening our core businesses through 2026 and beyond. Let me now quickly turn to a summary of our fourth quarter results. Overall, our performance fell short of where we expected it to be for a couple of reasons. While aviation results were up year over year, benefiting from the universal acquisition, Margins in our core fuels business were impacted by a somewhat more competitive market environment during the quarter. In addition, weaker land performance was driven principally by underperformance in the lower return lines of business we are in the process of exiting as part of our broader portfolio repositioning. The good news is that our core business and land, card lock, retail, and natural gas, performed generally as expected during the fourth quarter. Mike will provide additional details during his prepared remarks. While our fourth quarter and full year 25 results fell a bit short of expectations, the strategic actions we are taking, particularly within our land business, represent a meaningful operational transformation and an inflection point for our business. It is important to note that a portfolio transformation like this doesn't happen overnight. While much of our attention in 2025 is focused on our strategic repositioning, the majority of the work is now largely behind us. Our 2026 outlook reflects our strong conviction that the structural changes in place reduce competing priorities, thereby simplifying the business, enabling greater focus on growth in our core businesses, and positioning us for more consistent performance as we move through the year. With that, I'll now pass the call over to Mike for his first inaugural review of our financial results. Mike?