Dexterra Group Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Dextera Group's first quarter 2025 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in a 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 one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing the star key followed by zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Denise Achanu, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, Chuck, and good morning. My name is Denise Achanu, Chief Financial Officer of Dextera Group, Inc. With me today on the call are Mark Becker, our CEO, and our Board Chair, Bill McFarland, who will provide some brief introductory comments. After a brief presentation, we will take questions with the call ending by 9.15 Eastern Time. We will be commenting on our Q1 2025 results with the assumption that you have read the Q1 earnings press release, MD&A, and financial statements. The slide presentation, which supports today's comments, is posted on our website, and we encourage participants to access the slides and follow along with our presentation. Before we begin, I would like to make some comments about forward-looking information. In yesterday's news release and on slide two of the presentation that we have posted on our website, you will find cautionary notes in that regard. I will not cover the content of the cautionary notes in any detail. However, we do claim their protection for any forward-looking information that we might disclose on this conference call today. I will now turn it over to Bill McFaughan for his introductory comments.

Good morning. Thank you, Denise, and thank you to everyone for joining the call. Q1 2025 saw continued strong execution of Dexterra's business plan. Management also spent time meeting with investors in Q1 to communicate our story, and the feedback was very positive. We have a more focused and streamlined business, a very strong balance sheet, and strong free cash flow. A resilient business, which is important in light of tariff uncertainty and other global economic risks. which gives us future flexibility to take advantage of market opportunities. It was also good to see our share price continue to react positively with an increase from December 31, 2024 of 10% despite lots of market volatility. With that overview, I would like to now pass it over to Mark Becker for some detailed comments on the Q1 2025 results, and we are also hoping you will be able to attend our AGM later this morning. where we'll be presenting more information on our strategy.

Mark, over to you. Thanks very much, Bill, and a good morning to everyone. Always pleased to report another good quarter in Q1, another strong quarter for Dexterra, with robust activity levels, strong margins all across the business, including over $25 million in adjusted EBITDA, which shows a 28% increase over Q1 in 2024. Our results in the quarter were driven primarily by high occupancy at new camps that were mobilized in the second quarter of last year and a full quarter contribution of CMI management, which is our IFM services acquisition in the U.S. that we closed in February of last year. Cold weather early in the quarter this year resulted in slightly lower demand for access matter that partially offset these positive increases. Our strong operating performance allowed us to achieve our target return on equity at 15% in Q1. Also in the quarter, we returned $13 million to our shareholders through our dividend of about $5 million and share buybacks of about $8 million. As Bill noted, our continued positive performance as well as these shareholder returns has been positively reflected in our share price in Q1, despite what we've seen as a lot of recent market turbulence. All of this is consistent with our business strategy and focus on building a sustainable business for the long term while delivering strong returns to shareholders and all stakeholders. So turning to slide six and speaking in more detail on the business segment, starting with support services. For Q1 2025, revenues from support services were $199 million, which is an increase of 7% over Q1 of 2024. And the jeopardy, but not for the quarter, was $19 million, which is 24% higher than Q1 of 2024. The increase in revenue and profitability is attributable to higher occupancy. Attempts mobilized in Q2 of last year that I mentioned, and a full quarter contribution from CMI, as well as the continued strength of facilities management at margins above 6%. These increases were offset by lower project activity compared to the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA margins in Q1 of 9.5% compared to 8.2% in Q1 of last year, and was a result of business mix with higher cap occupancy in Q1 of this year contributing to this improvement. The Q1 margins were consistent with Q4 of 2024 of 8.8%, and over the long term, we expect margins in this business to continue to exceed 8% as the ISM business grows. Compared to Q4 of 2024, support services revenue decreased by 4% as certain facility management project activity that we had in Q4 was completed. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 4% in Q1 over Q4 of last year as a result of the business mix with higher occupancy at camps offsetting lower facilities management product activity. Our pipeline of VCL's opportunities remains strong in all areas of support services, including integrated facilities management, opportunities on both sides of the border. Additionally, we remain active on identification and evaluation of IFM acquisition targets. Moving on to asset-based services on slide 7, revenue from this business segment for QLINE of 2025 was $41 million, which was similar to Q4 of last year and compared to $46 million for the same period, Q1 of 2024. This increase in Q1 revenue compared to last year is primarily a result of lower access matting activity due to cold regional temperatures early in the quarter, as I previously mentioned. Matting utilization has returned to more typical levels in Q2 of about 90% as we've transitioned now into spring breakouts. Our access value business is focused on the Monte Duvenay region, which is an active area in liquid-rich natural gas production supporting the West Coast LNG. Camp equipment utilization also remains strong in Q1 at over 90%, and our indications point to that continuing through the balance of the year. Q1 2025 adjusted EBITDA of $13 million and margin of 33% was similar to Q4 of 2024, and higher compared to $10 million and about 22% respectively for Q1 of 2024. This increase is primarily the result of the margin differential between higher camp asset utilization in Q1 compared to project mobilization-related work in Q1 of 2024. Looking forward, we expect to jack the EBITDA margins in 2025, and this is meant to be in the middle of the range of 30% to 40%, as our mix of business is likely to have less project activity in 2025. With that, I'll now turn it back over to Denise.

Thank you, Mark. I'll speak about our financial position and the capital markets on slide 9. Free cash flow for Q1 2025 of just over $1 million was impacted by the delayed collection of the $20 million customer receivable that is being funded by the Canadian federal government, which we expect to collect in May. This will have a positive impact on free cash flow in Q2. On a normalized basis, annual cash taxes are approximately $15 million, and our 2025 tax liability will not be payable until early 2026. Adjusted EBITDA conversion to free cash flow is expected to continue to be above 50% going forward, with Q3 and Q4 experiencing the highest conversions to free cash flow as a result of the seasonality of the support services business. Management at Working Capital remains a key focus area for us, and we believe that absent the delayed receivable, they are at optimal levels. Net debt at March 31st, 2025, of just around $82 million, was less than one time during 12 months of the debt, and will be lower in Q2 following receipt of the delayed receivable payment. We are managing our balance sheet prudently and have significant unused debt capacity and flexibility under our credit facility for share buybacks and acquisition opportunities. We're currently renegotiating our credit facility agreement and expect to receive more favorable terms, which will support our growth strategy. In Q1, we repurchased just under 1 million common shares for total consideration of about 8 million under the terms of the NCIB. The Board has also approved the extension of our NCIB program subject to TSX approval. This will allow us to repurchase up to an additional 3 million shares over the next 12 months. We plan to remain opportunistic with share linebacks in 2025, and we believe our shares are still significantly undervalued. Finally, Dexterity declared a dividend for Q2 2025 of $0.085 per share for shareholders of record at June 30, 2025. And I'll turn it back to Mark for closing comments.

Great, thanks very much, Denise. Turning now to our outlook and plans forward, T1 has definitely been a positive momentum build for the start of the year this year. The impact of trade tariffs is something that we have been closely monitoring and working to proactively mitigate the potential impacts. As a service-based company, Dexter is largely naturally insulated from the direct impacts of trade tariffs. As our labor and a large majority of our supply commodities are domestically sourced. For food, chemicals, other commodities that we've historically been sourced cross-border, we've been active over the last few months addressing our supply chain sourcing, domestic alternatives, among other mitigation strategies. In sum, we expect that we can substantially mitigate the direct impact of trade tariffs on the direct impact to the big startup business on the assumption that North American economy does not experience a significant recession or significant broad inflationary pressure. We continue to monitor economic and industry indicators very closely, as well as staying closely connected to our clients. At this time, we're not seeing indications of changes to industry activity levels or client plans for the balance of 2025. We have a strong pipeline of new sales opportunities in all areas of our business. We have seen some delays in contract awards that has moderated the pace of new sales growth so far this year. We expect these delays may continue until business uncertainty subsides. Our focus is to manage what we can control, and we'll continue to invest in our sales and expand our sales pipelines and marketing approaches, as well as continuing to deliver value and operational excellence for our clients. In spite of the near-term market uncertainties, we are excited and confident about our path forward. Our strategic focus remains the delivery of strong profitability, consistent and predictable results, and a return on equity for shareholders of 15% or greater. The key to achieving this return on equity will be through continuing to deliver profitable organic growth and identifying creative acquisitions that provide integrated facility management capability, technology, and scale for the long-term growth of the business. Our capital allocation priorities remain intact, each of which is an important pillar in our long-term strategy. This includes maintaining our current dividend level, supporting sustaining and selective high-return capital investments, staying opportunistic in share buybacks under the NCIB, and identifying accretive acquisitions that are consistent with our strategy of building a larger capital-light support services business for the long term, while continuing to support our market-leading asset-based services business. This concludes our prepared remarks, and I will turn the call back to Chuck for the Q&A portion of our call.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. In the interest of fairness, you are asked to limit yourself to two questions and then rejoin the queue if you have additional questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing any keys. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. And the first question will come from Chris Murray with ATB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks, folks. Good morning. Mark, you know, very strong performance in the support services industry. group despite what, you know, would be, you know, maybe kind of a cold quarter, things like that. And in the MD&A, you also talked about keeping that EBITDA margin above 8% on a go-forward basis. Can you just talk about the sustainability of that margin at this particular point, if there's anything in the quarter that maybe skewed it higher than normal? You know, because above 8 when you're 150 basis points above it, you know, just feels like there's a pretty big gap there. So, So just maybe some color on how you're thinking about that on a go-forward basis as we get used to the new segmentation. Yeah, thanks for the question, Chris.

And, you know, I think we've seen, you know, as you said, margins and support services were pretty strong in Q1. And a lot of that, as we talked about, really related to, you know, high-cap occupancy that we had in Q1. We had some large contracts mobilized in Q2 of last year. Those were all fully on stream in Q1. So that tends to contribute to, you know, kind of stronger margins as we saw in Q1. I think, you know, as we've talked about, you know, mix of business definitely ties in. And I think, you know, what we could probably see for the balance of the year is probably, you know, it's a good start to the year on that front. And I think what we're probably seeing is some continued strength, perhaps short-term in the 9% range, plus or minus, if we can say it that way. And then, you know, vitally important, I guess, Chris, as you say, as we get used to the resegmented model, you know, long-term we're still seeing 8% plus, and we want to kind of stick to that as we add more kind of IFM business to our current mix of business that offsets sort of the asset-based business. But I think short-term kind of 9% plus or minus is probably not a bad target.

Okay. And then the other question I had, and you sort of talked to it a little bit, is, a lot of the business leaders we've been talking to, there's a lot of uncertainty out there, almost record levels, and certainly it seems to be changing day by day. Can you talk a little bit about what you're hearing from some of your customers in terms of their expectations and how they're thinking about the world? And can you also maybe walk us through sort of lessons learned and what might be different this time if we do get into a into a recessionary scenario or a higher inflation scenario and what to expect, the levers that you can pull in order to kind of maintain margins as we go through something like that. Yeah, for sure. And it'll be active for us.

As I mentioned in my remarks, we're staying very close to our clients, obviously industry indicators, but staying very close to our clients. I think what we're seeing is a product of our diversity and our diversification within the business. You know, if you look at where we've been the last few years in terms of, you know, not call it natural resources, you know, energy, but now expanding into mining almost on the same significant basis as energy, infrastructure, power infrastructure projects, other infrastructure projects that we're doing, that does help us. And, you know, everybody is talking about kind of uncertainty as we go along here, but, again, we're just not seeing where – where we're seeing negativity around the plans, or maybe not negativity, say it this way, a change around detailed plans or specific plans for the balance of the year. Things like being in the money, and as we talked about, that does have an LNG focus. connected to develop their feeding energy on the West Coast, the West Coast LPG projects that we're working on out there. Mining is still staying very, very strong in the natural resources space, and we do see infrastructure projects, you know, continuing on. So we don't really see, you know, kind of detailed change of plans. And then, of course, on the field management side, we do still see a lot of stability, and that's kind of the nature of our business, you know, being a lot more tied to assets and, you know, maintaining assets and supporting assets, so that tends to be a bit more stable even in the face of uncertainties. Your question around inflation lessons learned, you know, I think I've mentioned this on other calls as well, You know, I guess coming out of the post-pandemic hyperinflation, you know, we did learn a lot of things about how to manage, you know, when you run into high inflationary environments. And as I think I've mentioned other times, you know, certainly our contracts, I would say, are in good shape related to terms and conditions, as much as we can possibly build in around, you know, CPI adjustments, other terms around pricing adjustments that we try to build into our contracts. a majority of which have those kinds of terms. And, you know, I would say probably since the last time we went through hyperinflation, we've reinforced that. And then I just think, you know, our ability and even most of our clients are long-term clients and going through the conversations. Unfortunately, we're used to having it because we only had it two or three years ago. But, you know, that kind of protocol. So I would say our team... You know, we feel really ready for that, and, you know, we would probably take advantage of some of those lessons learned that I talked about, contract terms, and just being able to manage adjustments with our clients. All right. Thanks. That's helpful. I'll leave it there.

The next question will come from Frederick Bossian with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and good results, guys. Thank you very much, Fred. Just to weigh on that earlier theme, can you remind us how big your camp business is today and how much of that is exposed to mining versus oil and gas versus infrastructure versus others? Just curious how big of a business that is now today. Thank you.

Sure. Good morning, Frederick. In terms of revenue, it's about $500 million in terms of revenue from the camps business, just speaking specifically to the support services aspect of it. And in terms of kind of mining, mining is about, I would say, about a tenth of it, a tenth to 20% of it. And then oil and gas is about more in the range of 20% of our support services, of that $500 million. And then the balance there is infrastructure, as Mark mentioned, as well, power lines, et cetera.

And just recognizing that you don't really provide backlog information, how much visibility do you have on that business? Yeah, just for us, are we talking about six months, 12 months? Is it two years? I'm sure it's a mix of everything, but, yeah, if you could provide a bit more color on that, that would be great. Thanks.

Yeah, for sure. And I think you kind of said it right. It's a mix of everything. And the way that we're managing things these days, you know, like we are kind of fairly diversified across segments of business and lines of business as well. So we kind of manage our pipelines. We have focus teams in different areas of the business, including a focus team, pursuit team around IFM. You know, I would say rather than kind of quote numbers across those different approaches, Frederick, I would say, If you kind of look at our pipelines, which does kind of go up and go down, I would say generally across all our businesses, our pipeline of opportunities is very strong. Our hit rates are achieving where we'd like to be around hit rates of 30% plus. So I think if you do the math around kind of the size of our pipeline, you know, our hit rates and equaling kind of what we would expect in terms of organic growth, across the businesses, you know, that the math kind of hangs together in terms of being able to deliver our organic growth rates that we expect.

All right, thanks. I have one more, but I'll let others go first. Thank you.

The next question will come from Zachary Evershed with National Bank Financial. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone.

Congrats on the quarter. Great. Thanks so much, Zach. Could you walk us through the mentioned enterprise IT strategy investments and what areas of improvement is being targeted there, and then maybe bridge that to how it's impacting corporate costs, which have been rising for the last 24 months?

Morning, Zach. So just, you know, obviously we're a support services business, so people are a significant portion of our costs, and it's important we're able to manage them efficiently, our labor costs efficiently. And so we have been looking at what we call our workforce management system, also HCM, so human capital management system. Right now we're in the process of scoping something out. So it's early days in terms of talk and cost, but really this is an investment that is important for us to make in order to scale the business. From an enterprise perspective, you know, there's another piece of our technology strategies around client-facing technology and customer-facing technology that we're making investments in. Again, just in terms of being able to deliver better customer service, data insights for customers, and so forth. That's really key in us being able to offer operational excellence to our clients as well. So hopefully that gives a little bit more color in terms of our costs.

The other thing I would add to that is, you know, this is a topic definitely for Denise and I. We work on it quite a bit. We've got actually within the last year we've hired a new technology leader that's working across the business on the things that, that Denise talked about. I think I would say, and we'll keep the market well informed about this as we kind of go forward, I would say we're being, you know, we're going to be very prudent about this. I think we're very clear on our priorities around technology and where we're going to see the biggest bang for our buck. and then looking at those investments, the size of those investments, affordability within the overall size of our corporate costs. That's a big topic, and we want to take a fairly prudent and controlled approach on our technology investments. But suffice it to say, expect to see more news on that and expect to see us talking about that more in the near future for sure.

And just in terms of thinking about, you know, costs for the balance of 2025 right now, it would kind of be in the range that you're seeing for Q1, you know, as a percentage of revenue.

Good call there. Thank you. For my second question, given what you're seeing in the fall in oil prices, any concerns around falling demand for any of your remote support services?

Yeah, definitely good questions, Zach, and I kind of alluded to this on one of Chris's questions. If you look at where we play, again, I talked about Mondi Gas, you know, we work with the big players that are producers in the Mondi, you know, Northwest Alberta, Northeast BC, you know, that are providing ramp-up volumes for LNG Canada, which is ramping, start-ups are ramping this year. You know, they're still planning on, you know, and we... Again, with all due to uncertainty, we talk to them quite frequently. No plans that we're seeing for the balance of this year, so we're seeing strength in that area. The LPG projects, even the LNG projects, Cedar LNG, et cetera, we're still connected into those, and they're still moving forward on the West Coast. And even in the well-signed space, you know, those are large contracts for us. And, you know, well-signed, you know, big mega-capital investments, and if you look at previous kind of energy cycles, you tend to see, you know, our lodges really support the operating plants and the operating people related to those sites. you tend to see them continue to operate and kind of on a generating cash flow basis for themselves. No matter where the price is, you might see them delay a little bit in terms of activities that they tend to continue to produce because they are kind of wanting to generate cash flow no matter what the real price is. So, I mean, that would be the context I would give. I think we're happy where we are and where we're playing specifically because there are some some good specific ties to what we're seeing in terms of activity levels, but we're going to kind of continue to really monitor closely on how that plays out. Thank you very much.

I'll turn it over. Again, if you have a question, please press star, then 1. And as there are no further questions, this concludes the question and answer session as well as today's conference call. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you for your participation and have a pleasant day.