Bombardier Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bombardier second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the discussion over to Mr. Francis Richer de la Fleche, Vice President, Investor Relations for Bombardier. Please go ahead, Mr. Richer de la Fleche.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bombardier's earnings call for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2021. I wish to remind you that during the course of this call, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the financial performance of the corporation. There are risks that actual events or results may differ materially from these statements. For additional information on forward-looking statements and underlying assumptions, please refer to the MD&A. I am making this cautionary statement on behalf of each speaker on this call. With me today is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Eric Martel, and our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Bart Demoski, to review our operations and financial results for the second quarter of 2021. I would now like to turn over the discussion to Eric.

Thank you, Francis. Bonjour à tous. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We certainly have a lot to cover today, and we are excited to share our progress. In a few moments, Bart will provide more detail about the improved guidance we issued earlier this morning and talk about our proactive debt management action. But first and foremost, I am proud to share that the second quarter was exceptional on our front. I want to particularly highlight the $91 million in free cash flow the business generated. Besides the fact it's an improvement of more than $840 million year over year, It's a window into the longer-term potential of our business as we continue to drive our strategic plan, grow earnings, and reduce interest costs. So year over year, Q2 can be summarized simply as much better. Better revenue, better profitability, better cash generation, better service revenue, and perhaps most importantly, better aircraft sales. Reaching an inquiry book to bill of 1.8 on units is something we haven't seen in a few years. I've had activity within all our customer segments to achieve this. Demand in North America with traditional customer is strong. We are also very engaged with our fleet customer who are seeing new customer of their own. And finally, we are very active on the specialized aircraft front. I've kept a close eye on rebuilding backlog across our portfolio. It is the foundation to predictable success, just as much as the better cost base we are creating through our work on the global 7500 learning curve and our target for $400 million in recurring saving by 2023. I am very proud of the team's performance, resilience, and engagement in weathering the storm throughout the pandemic. The market now is certainly starting to give us tailwind. I'll speak to this in a few moments because there is room for optimism, but our plan, as we mentioned at investor day, is designed to perform without extra market boosts. We will continue to focus on being predictable and disciplined in our operation. That said, the market landscape has maintained an upward trend we noted when we last spoke. Macroeconomic indicators continue to point to favorable conditions. In certain cases, the trends have evolved into strong rebounds. We have seen a strong rebound in business flying, but border restrictions are still in place between key country pairs that larger aircraft typically connect. There is still room for activity to improve in markets like Asia. All signs point to further potential in business aircraft utilization as we progress through the next few months. At this stage though, It's important we continue to maintain a prudent approach and focus on what we control. We do, however, have increased confidence both in our plan and the market's availability to sustain this momentum. We are confident in our path to deliver approximately 120 aircraft, as well as higher margins than planned this year. This stems from our all-around solid execution in the first half of the year, our greater confidence in market momentum, and most importantly, our ability to accelerate our cost reduction initiative implementation. Before I speak to the rest of our plan, I'd like to circle back to one of the most notable market indicator, which is preowned aircraft availability. It is not outperforming pre-pandemic levels, with most recent reports showing around 4% to 5% of the worldwide fleet for sale, we have reached a two-decade low in availability with very little, if not any, younger vintage aircraft being available. We see this pre-owned trend as an important leading indicator to new aircraft demand. It also helps create a better pricing landscape for new transactions, all while helping asset value retention for existing aircraft owners. We also see the pre-owned segment as an opportunity to further diversify our revenue, as we outlined in our investor day. To that end, we recently launched a certified pre-owned aircraft program, which is a win-win in this market climate. This program sees Bombardier leveraging our service network to seek out and transform available aircraft into a more desirable offering for customers shopping in that sphere. We also continue to expand our service network reach and footprint. During the second quarter, we received the keys to our Singapore service center expansion with construction complete. We're now turning our focus to staffing and operationalizing the center nearly quadruple physical capacity in line with strong demand. Our similar project in the UK, Miami, and Australia also remain on track. Before I pass the floor to Bart, I'd like to quickly touch on progress toward the other opportunities we outlined at Investor Day. We have excellent line of sight on our cost reduction target. The 100 global 7500 aircraft is moving toward the internal completion phase now and we like the progress we're seeing from the team. If anything, we are working the learning curve slightly ahead of plan. On our recurring cost saving plan, as we previously mentioned, we had a small portion of the $400 million left to identify. We've made great progress on that front. We also have begun identifying and actioning further Kaizen projects. But more importantly, this will become the foundation of our continuous improvement lean mindset. With all of this, the team's work is already contributing more than originally planned to our bottom line this year, as you'll see when Bart detail the guidance. And finally, deleveraging. We have spent a lot on this over the past three months. We've responsibly deployed capital towards clearing the three-year runway we set out with only $1 billion left to go toward that objective. We've also seized refinancing opportunities where it makes sense. So let me stop here and turn it over to Bart to provide the details of our exceptional second quarter results, our raised full-year expectation, and what we've accomplished in terms of leveraging our balance sheet. Bart, over to you.