Badger Infrastructure Solutions Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Badger Infrastructure Solutions 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, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Trevor Carson. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our first quarter 2023 earnings call. On the call this morning are Badger's President and CEO, Rob Blackadar, Rob Dawson, Badger's Chief Financial Officer, and Pramod Bhatia, Vice President of Finance. Badger's 2023 first quarter earnings release, MD&A, and financial statements were released after market closed yesterday and are available on the investor section of our website as well as CDAR. We are required to note that some of the statements made today may contain forward-looking information. In fact, all statements made today which are not statements of historical fact are considered to be forward-looking statements. We make these forward-looking statements based on certain assumptions that we consider to be reasonable. Forward-looking statements are always subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on them, as actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. For more information about material assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that may be relevant to such forward-looking statements, please refer to Badger's 2022 MD&A along with the 2022 AIF. I will now turn the call over to Rob Blackadar.

Thanks, Trevor. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. As always, we would like to start the call with a health and safety update. We have built a strong safety culture here at Badger and are pleased with the progress we make each year. Safety is about building a culture of shared responsibility that pushes our people to proactively identify and mitigate daily safety risk. As mentioned in our ESG report, which was published in March, we track our behavior-based observations as a key metric in monitoring our company's performance and is a component for our short-term incentive program. The emphasis we place on safety and integrity every day means that we challenge ourselves to meet and exceed employee, customer, and stakeholder expectations. Now onto the results. We are pleased with our first quarter performance. We achieved record first quarter revenue, 25% higher than Q1 of 2022. We started the year with strong utilization and operational performance across the business. We saw some regions exhibit utilization in line with our typically busier spring and summer months, while other regions experienced headwinds due to wet weather. Overall, we are building positive momentum leading into the upcoming construction season. We also made meaningful improvements in our year-over-year EBITDA margins. which increased 80% compared to Q1 of 2022. This can be attributed to the execution of our commercial strategy of focusing on pricing and asset utilization, which helped to raise the shoulders in our historically softest quarter. We are also encouraged by the trends in our asset utilization. Revenue per truck per month, or RPT, was just over $38,000. up 21% from Q1 of 2022. This was achieved while also adding net 60 units to our fleet over the last year. This increase is largely driven by improved utilization resulting from our investment in our sales and marketing resources. The team's goal remains to deliver more consistent volumes over the course of the full year. We manufactured 58 non-destructive excavation units including one prototype air vac in the quarter versus 16 units in Q1 of 2022. We are confident in our 2023 guidance to build between 200 to 230 units and retire between 80 to 100 units. As we mentioned on our Q4 earnings call, we are implementing a proactive refurbishment program that we expect will enable that will enable us to extend the useful life of some of our assets. We may choose to selectively replace critical components, namely the engine, transmission, transfer case, or blower, to extend the life of a well-maintained chassis. We have begun identifying select units to begin this refurbishing program and will continue to review the fleet for opportunities over the balance of the year. These costs will be capitalized. We believe these incremental investments will yield positive contributions to our return on invested capital as we continue to optimize our capital investments. Before turning the call over, I would like to welcome Rob Dawson, our new CFO, to the team. We are excited to have Rob on board, and Badger is already benefiting from his knowledge and experience. He's only been with us for a month. but the first few weeks have reinforced our view that he is the right person to help Badger achieve our stated financial objectives. With that, I will turn the call over to Rob Dawson to discuss our financial results.