ATCO Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the ATCO Limited First Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call and Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. To do need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Colin Jackson, Senior Vice President, Finance, Treasury, and Sustainability. Please go ahead, Mr. Jackson.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We're pleased you could join us for the ATCO's first quarter 2024 conference call. With me today is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Investment Officer, Katie Patrick, and our President of ACCO Structures, Adam Beattie. Before we move into our formal agenda, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the numerous traditional territories and homelands on which our global facilities are located. Today, we are speaking to you from our ACCO Park head office in Calgary, which is located in the Treaty 7 region. This is the ancestral territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, comprised of the Siksika, the Kainai, and the Pagani Nations, the Tsitsinu Nation, and the Stony Lakota Nations, which include the Chukniki, Beerspah, and Good Stony First Nations. The city of Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Districts 5 and 6. We honor and respect diverse histories, language, ceremonies, and culture of the Indigenous peoples who call these areas home. The call today will begin with some opening comments from Katie on recent company developments and financial results, followed by an update from Adam on our global structures business. After these prepared remarks, we will take questions from the investment community. Please note that a replay of the conference call, a short supplementary presentation, and a transcript will be available on our website at ATCO.com and can be found in the investor section under the heading events and presentations. I'd like to remind you all that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that are subject to important risks and uncertainties. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please see the reports filed by ATCO with the Canadian securities regulators. And finally, I'd also like to point out that during this presentation, we may refer to certain non-GAAP or other financial measures, such as total of segment measures, adjusted earnings, adjusted earnings per share, and capital investment. These measures do not have any standardized meaning under IFRS, and as a result, they may not be comparable to similar measures presented in other entities. And now, I'll turn the call over to Katie for her opening remarks.

Thanks, Colin, and good morning, everyone. Thank you all very much for joining us today for our first quarter 2024 conference call. ATCO achieved adjusted earnings of $148 million in the first quarter this year. This is $11 million, or 8% higher than the first quarter last year. This $11 million of growth came primarily from the strong performance of our structures business, and the Alberta utility businesses. Collectively, this more than offset the expected downwards earnings pressure associated with the normalizing inflation profile in Australia, along with a decline in merchant power pricing and weather challenges that impacted Acton Power. I won't go into too much detail on Canadian utilities as we spoke to their performance on this morning's call, but I do want to reiterate that we continue to focus on delivering growth in 2024 and beyond. This year, we have an increase to our allowable ROEs from 8.5 to 9.28% across our Alberta-based utilities. We have strong regulatory prospectivity as our distribution utilities enter their third performance-based regulation cycles. Our gas transmission utility confirmed their two-year rate application, and electric transmission currently has rates set to the end of 2025. Transitioning to our other investments, ACCO Frontec delivered first quarter earnings that declined nominally from 2023 levels, primarily due to the closure of the Trans Mountain Expansion project camps. Now, two may continue to drive a strong quarterly level of earnings contributing $5 million in the quarter. ACCO Structures continued to deliver exceptionally strong results with adjusted earnings of $24 million in the quarter. over 25% higher than the prior year. Structures continues to deliver growth from the expansion of our base business and the optimization of our fleet, with major projects being a supplement to these earnings. To speak to this success of driving repeatable base business earnings and to provide an update on the Structures business overall, I'll now turn the call over to Adam.