Doman Building Materials Group Ltd.

Greetings. Welcome to Doman Building Materials Group Limited's first quarter 2024 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to Ali Mandaya. Please go ahead, Ali. Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Dolman Building Materials' first quarter 2024 financial results conference call. Joining me this morning are Amar Dolman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and James Coat, Chief Financial Officer of the company. If you have not seen the news release, which was issued yesterday, it is available on the company's website at dolmanbm.com, as well as on CDAR Plus, along with our MD&A and financial statements. I would also like to remind you that a replay of this call will be accessible until midnight on May 24th. Following the presentation of the quarter, pardon me, following the presentation of the first quarter 2024 financial results, we will conduct a Q&A session for analysts only. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to join the queue for questions. Before we begin, we are required to provide the following statements regarding forward-looking information, which is made on behalf of Dolman Building Materials Group Limited and all of its representatives on this call. Remarks and answers to your questions today may contain forward-looking information about future events or the company's future performance. This information is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual events to result to defer material. Any information regarding forward-looking statements is made as of the date of this call and the company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements. Please read the forward-looking statements and risk factors in the MD&A as these outline the material factors which could cause or would cause actual results to differ. The company will not provide guidance regarding future earnings during today's call, and management does not anticipate providing guidance in future quarterly or interim communications with investors. I'll now turn the call over to Omar.

Thanks, Ellie, and thanks, everybody, for joining us on today's call. Since we spoke last during our fourth quarter and year-end 2023 results conference call, We remain focused and excited with the business across all divisions and on both sides of the border. Despite the impact of a slowing construction materials market, our business units continue to show resilience and volumes while delivering very strong gross margin performance. Our financial and operational performance in the first quarter continues to be a testament to our ability to challenging conditions and our team's track record on managing the business through these types of cycles. Throughout the quarter, we remain focused as always on gross margin and optimizing our balance sheet. The strength in our first quarter results came from the combination of the impact of our strategic acquisitions, steady volumes in key markets, and ongoing disciplined inventory management. Further, our ongoing cost management focused on operational efficiencies and successful integration efforts enabled the company to realize strong gross margin and EBITDA margin performance. 2020-2024 is off to a decent start. We are encouraged with the overall level of our activity in our end markets, and we delivered strong performance across all of our key financial metrics, including revenues coming in at just over $600 million, gross margin at 16.7%, just over $100 million, adjusted EBITDA at $45.6 million, net earnings of $14.4 million, and lastly, another quarterly dividend of $14.4 million. cents per share was declared. These results basically are on the back of our continued strength of our business platform in Canada and the US. I am extremely pleased with our financial performance which has resulted in the continued successful unfolding of our overall growth strategy. As always, we remain confident, focused and disciplined on closely managing our costs and servicing the needs of our customers with the highest level of quality and service as we have done in the past. During the quarter, we also completed the acquisition of Southeast Forest products, including two large lumber treating plants in Richmond, Indiana and near Birmingham, Alabama. We are very excited with this acquisition. The plants complement our central U.S. operations and strengthen our footprint by introducing coverage in eight new states, including the strong southeastern U.S. markets and select eastern states. This strategic acquisition exemplifies our strategy of adding scale and volume to to our U.S. operations and pressure treated lumber and specialty wood products. The acquisition is in line with our growth strategy and consistent with our view of value for what we are purchasing and value creation for our shareholders. Our integration efforts are on track and coming together successfully and pretty much we can say we fully integrated the company within 60 days. The lumber markets have been very soft in Q2 as we know and as always we do remain confident in our ability to work through good and challenging markets diligently while serving our customer needs with the highest level of service. We believe the market is starting to bottom out here on lumber, and we'll talk about that in the Q&A, I'm sure. We remain excited about growth profile and the overall prospects of the business. And with that, I would now like to ask Jay Cote, our CFO, to take over and provide a review of the company's first quarter 2024 financial results in greater detail. And then we're going to open the question, sorry, we're going to open the call for questions. Jay, over to you. Thank you, Lamar. Good day, everyone.