Mullen Group Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Mullen Group Ltd. 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call-In Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in 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 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may reach an operator by pressing star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Murray Mullen, Chair and Senior Executive Officer. Please go ahead, Mr. Mullen.

Well, welcome everyone to Mullen Group's quarterly conference call. This morning we released our second quarter interim report. It's a nice 60-page document full of detailed numbers and analysis. prepared by our team headed up by Carson Urlacher and Nick Woodworth. So this document contains updated information and is available on CDAR Plus and on our website, www.mullen-group.com. So I'll remind everyone this morning that today's presentation and commentary contain forward-looking statements and they're based upon current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainty. As such, actual results may differ materially. Further information identifying the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions can be found in the disclosure documents. With me this morning, I'm joined here in Okotoks by the majority of the senior executive team. Richard Maloney is out traveling this morning, so he's not available, but I have Carson Urlacher, he's our senior financial officer, Joanna Scott, who's our senior corporate officer, and Lee Hellyer, who's our senior commercial officer. For today's call, we'll follow a similar format as the last few conference calls. all in an effort to make sure that this call is as meaningful and productive for everyone as possible. All prepared remarks by Carson and myself can be found in the second quarter interim report, the financial report, and the press release documents which were released earlier this morning. We have nothing further to add so we will head straight to the Q&A session as I suspect that you will have some interesting questions. Now not only was last quarter one of the very best ever for our organization, it appears there are several major projects, all that have a significant logistics component to them. These are actively being contemplated at this time. This votes very well for the economy, and I think it votes very well for our organization. So I see some of you have already joined the queue. But before I hand it back to the operator, let me just summarize and give you a few opening comments. Let's start with the discussion on the state of the Canadian economy. From what the data tells us and what it told us, the demand for freight and related services suggests the economy is doing reasonably well. Not robust by any stretch, but there was just enough economic activity to keep with the markets in balance. and just tight enough that we were able to pass through those dreaded fuel surcharges that our customers just really, they push back, but we were able to pass them through. And you saw that was a pretty big number last quarter. But because these surcharges were so high, it just wasn't feasible to pass through general price increases. Our customers can only tolerate so much at one time. There'll come another day when we can negotiate higher general rates, but that was not last quarter. This will happen if, and I reiterate if, the economy can continue to expand. When it does, we will push through higher rates. Until then, and this is basically what we're doing today, is that we will focus on high-grading the freight we handle, demarketing low-paying freight. This in itself helps drive margin improvement. Moving on to the S&I segment. Results were okay, but they really weren't up last quarter over last year. But this didn't bother me too much because there's a lot of momentum building in terms of major capital projects that will fuel this segment to higher revenues and margins in future years. So all good for now. Enough said. Operator, would you please open the lines?

Certainly. We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Our first question is from Konark Gupta with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.