Parkland Corporation

Good morning. My name is Jenny and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Parkland third quarter analyst conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the 2. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Valerie Roberts, Director, Investor Relations for Parkland. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. With me today on the call are Bob Espy, President and CEO, Marcel Tunison, Chief Financial Officer, and Donna Sanker, President, Parkland USA. This call is webcast, and I encourage listeners to follow along with the supporting slides. We will go through our prepared remarks and then open it up for questions from the investment community. Please limit yourself to one question and a follow-up if necessary, and if you have other questions, re-enter the queue. We would ask analysts to follow up directly with the investor relations team afterwards for any detailed modeling questions. During our call today, we may make forward-looking statements related to expected future performance. These statements are based on current views and assumptions and are subject to uncertainties which are difficult to predict. These uncertainties include, but are not limited to, expected operating results and industry conditions, among other factors. Risk factors applicable to our business are set out in our annual information form and management's discussion and analysis. We will also be discussing non-GAAP and other financial measures, which do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS. These measures are identified and defined in Parkland's continuous disclosure documents, which are available on our website or on CDAR. Please refer to these documents as they identify factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements. Dollar amounts discussed in today's call are expressed in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you Val, and good morning everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. I want to start off by thanking the Parkland team for another excellent quarter, delivering record results well ahead of plan. These include Record adjusted EBITDA, both in the quarter and year to date. Record earnings and earnings per share. And record refinery utilization and co-processing volumes. Collectively, they demonstrate the quality of the business we have created. Our ability to drive shareholder value. We are doing exactly what we said we would do. Advancing our strategy, serving our customers, and executing consistently on organic growth and synergies. Each part of our business has contributed to our record performance. This gives me unwavering confidence that we will continue to deliver the ambitious targets we set for ourselves. With that, let's move to slide three. We are building tremendous operational momentum by executing on the strategy we outlined at our 2021 Investor Day. This included doubling our business by growing adjusted EBITDA from $1 to $2 billion by 2025. One of the highlights of my role is visiting our frontline customer-facing teams. Without exception, they are focused on safely servicing our customers and on growing our businesses. I continue to be impressed by the team's ability to drive organic growth, capture synergies, and deliver the cost efficiencies. Their accomplishments have enabled us to increased 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance while at the same time lowering capital expenditures. We believe we will exceed our revised adjusted EBITDA guidance this year. We have also accelerated our $2 billion ambition by a full year from 2025 to 2024. For some time, we have been laying the foundation to deliver $2 billion of adjusted EBITDA in 2024. The outstanding work of our team gave us confidence to share this target with our shareholders. Lastly, we have over-delivered on our 2023 deleveraging commitment, three months ahead of schedule. Our leverage is now within our target range, and we will continue to drive this lower. Let's turn to slide four. You'll recall that we entered the year with three priorities. First, to capture synergies and cost efficiencies. Second, to drive organic growth. And third, to optimize our portfolio by divesting non-core assets. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to outline examples of what we achieved last quarter. We continue to make progress on our synergy capture and efficiencies. A great example is the terminals we acquired from BOPAC. As you know, we have a strong retail and commercial market presence in eastern Canada, where we acquired these terminals. These assets provide us with significant optionality to source and receive local supply. as well as import supply. This flexibility positions us to secure the lowest cost product, which we can reliably provide to our retail and commercial customers. We see the impact of owning these terminals and others like them in our margins. Shifting to the middle column, where you see a picture of our recently opened standalone site in Montreal. This is a great example of bringing together our brands and marketing programs to continue to deliver strong and consistent organic growth. This site unites our on-the-run brand, M&M Frozen Food Offer, and is home to the launch of our Bites on the Run by M&M Fresh Food Offer. We are eager to see how this new food offer performs in our pilot sites, and I'm excited to see how sales evolve. Lastly, let me touch on divestment. In the last column, we will recycle proceeds from this and other non-core assets we are selling into accretive organic growth opportunities. I'll remind you of our broader target to generate up to $500 million of disposition proceeds by the end of 2025. These sales will not compromise our adjusted EBITDA growth targets. With that, I'll pass to Marcel and move to slide five.