Interfor Corporation

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Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Inter4 Quarterly Analyst Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Ian Fillinger. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Q321 analyst call. I hope you and your family are safe, healthy, and doing well during this pandemic. With me today, you have Barb Bender, our Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, along with Rick Plaza Bon, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our agenda today will start off with myself providing a recap of our financial results, our strategic focus, and our improvement efforts. I'll then pass the call to Rick, who will cover off financial matters, and then we'll pass the call to Barb, who will cover off the markets. Turning to our financial results, our Q3 adjusted EBITDA was $94 million. By executing on our strategic plan, we are generating industry-leading margins and returns on capital. And I encourage you to look through the investor deck that's posted on our website to take note of these metrics. Turning to our strategic focus, we continue to focus on achieving greater returns on capital through our unrelenting focus on operational excellence and capital deployment. We continued on our CapEx improvement plans in every region, spending $44 million in the quarter and on track for $170 million by the end of the year. We continue to work hard on our capital allocation discipline to ensure the best returns for our shareholders, and we're continuing to see strong performances from our internal projects and our recent acquisition. I'm also very pleased to report that our southern team made solid progress on the restart plan for our De Quincey mill in Louisiana. We anticipate running the mill on a one shift basis in approximately three months and a two shift basis in Q4 next year. Our improvement efforts were again balanced across the company as we made progress in all regions. Our operating teams achieved higher production volumes, primarily driven by our acquisitions in the south and the Pacific Northwest region. We continue to apply our very disciplined approach to working capital by ensuring we don't build excess volume in the supply chain and we're lean and mean as possible. Finally, earlier this week on November 2nd, the BC government announced the proposed deferral of harvesting within 2.6 billion hectares of BC forest. The proposal deferral, if implemented, has been identified as temporary and is subject to First Nations engagement, which is currently ongoing. We will require additional and more specific information to understand the potential impacts. However, as most of you know, our operations on the BC coast and the BC interior account for 4% and 19% of our total lumber capacity. And our BC operations are very well capitalized are very highly competitive within their operating regions. Lastly, we continue to have significant financial flexibility to consider a number of further capital deployment options that Rick will cover off. In closing, we are focused on maintaining the health, safety, and well-being of our employees. We continue to drive cost reductions, and we're matching our production rates to our order files. That concludes my opening remarks, and I'll now hand the call over to Rick.