Stella-Jones Inc.

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Stella Jones' third quarter of 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in lesson-only mode. Following the presentation, we will hold a question and answer session. To queue up for questions by phone, please press star 1 and a moderator will contact you. If anyone experiences difficulties hearing the conference call, please press star 0 for operator assistance at any time. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded on Wednesday, November 5, 2025. I will now turn it over to David Callison, Vice President, Investor Relations of Stella Jones. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ina, and good morning, everyone. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release reporting our results for the third quarter of 2025. Along with our MD&A, it can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.stella-jones.com, as well as on CDAR+. As a reminder, all figures expressed on today's call are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. Please note that our comments made on today's call may contain forward-looking information, and this information, by its nature, is subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the views expressed today. For further information on these risks and uncertainties, please consult the company's relevant filings on CDAR+. The documents are also available in the investor relations section of Stella Jones website at www.stella-jones.com. Additionally, during this call, the company may refer to non-GAAP measures. which have no standardized meaning under GAAP and are not likely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. For more information, please refer to the company's latest MD&A available on Stella Jones website and on CDAR+. Lastly, we have prepared a corresponding presentation, which we encourage you to follow along with during this call. I'll now hand the call over to Eric Vachon, President and Chief Executive Officer of Stella Jones, for a strategic business update, followed by Silvana Trapolini, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Stella Jones, who will provide a more detailed financial overview of the quarter. Eric, over to you.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. First, as some of you who are joining us virtually may have noticed, Stella Jones recently unveiled a new brand platform. This includes not only a refreshed look and feel, but also an update brand positioning to make Stella Jones the backbone of solid infrastructures for stronger communities across the continent. We are thrilled with this new brand platform, which aligns seamlessly with our focus on building a strong, agile business and on being a partner of choice to our infrastructure customers. Our results reported today reflect another successful quarter supported by the continued strong execution across our businesses. Our Q3 results benefited from the organic sales growth of our pressure treated wood businesses, as well as the contribution of our steel structure division, formerly known as Lockwell. Particularly noteworthy is the continued improvement in volume momentum for utility poles. we remain encouraged that this positive trend will continue and be sustained going forward. Although railway tie sales did not increase as anticipated, the company generated more EBITDA and maintained strong EBITDA margins and cash flows. This allowed us to reduce our leverage to 2.2 times and further enhance our financial flexibility to support ongoing strategic initiatives. The integration of our steel structures product category into our business, and operational investments into the production capacities are well underway, having committed the majority of the planned $15 million capital. We remain on track to complete the expansion by mid-2026, with production ramping up in the second half of the year. We remain well positioned, as quoting is very active for long-term contracts to fill the expanded capacity for major North American transmission projects. Consistent with our focus on creating long-term shareholder value, we were pleased to announce the closing of the Brooks acquisition, which further expands our product offering as we leverage our extensive sales and distribution network to better support the needs of our utility customers. This acquisition provides us with a presence in the wood distribution cross arm and transmission framing component markets, aligning with our vision to make Stella Jones a partner of choice to our infrastructure customers. We look forward to welcoming into our team the group at the Brooks facility as we continue to focus on enhancing growth through acquisitions as a cornerstone of our value creation strategy. I'm pleased to share that we published our latest ESG report in September, highlighting meaningful progress in our sustainability journey across the organization. Notably, we obtained limited assurance of our scope one and scope two greenhouse gas emissions, an important milestone in our commitment to transparency and accountability. We also advanced on our GHG reduction roadmap, launching several impactful projects aimed at lowering emissions throughout our network, such as the integration of heat recovery vents or real-time energy monitoring at select facilities. I want to thank our team for their dedication and hard work in driving these initiatives forward and helping us build a more sustainable future. I will now turn to a performance overview of our main product categories, starting with utility poles. As you are aware, a large part of our business is contractual. and our strong network and focus on quality have helped us secure additional contracts, which we are now starting to benefit from. Our volume growth this quarter is coming from these new contracts, while we continue to see softness in the spot market. Given the additional industry supply, the slower demand has continued to impact spot pricing, which have remained below levels realized in 2024. For the full year, our utility pole sales growth outlook is expected to be in the low single digit range versus 2024. The pipeline of opportunities for volume growth in the utility pole business remains strong and continues to be key for Stella Jones. While the pace of investments will continue to be influenced by our customers capital deployment strategies, we have positioned the business well. to benefit from meaningful investments required by utilities to replace aging infrastructures and increasing grid resiliency. For railway ties, volumes in the third quarter continue to be impacted by a class one customer treating their railway ties internally, as well as a lower than expected increase in commercial volumes. While commercial orders have been helping close the gap in volumes, delays in certain project starts are pushing deliveries into next year. As a result, we now expect a larger volume shortfall to act as a headwind for the remainder of the year, and we are now forecasting a mid-single digit year-over-year decline in railway ties. Despite the lower volumes, our teams have worked diligently to improve margins and profitability. Once we reset this year with the lower external purchase from our Class 1 customer, we continue to expect our railway-type business to achieve a low single-digit sales growth. We remain confident that we can leverage our upcoming Class 1 contract renewals and our customer relationships to develop potential solutions addressing the evolving needs, allowing us to capture a larger share of the industry's volume. The residential lumber business performance was solid with similar quarterly volumes as last year and better pricing in response to higher cost of inventory. In the fourth quarter, we will be focused on building inventory and working to support customers as we see good momentum going into 2026. We continue to anticipate sales in this product category to trend in the 600 to 650 million target range over the long term. As we entered the last quarter of 2025, we are maintaining our financial objective for the year and remain confident in the long-term sales growth trajectory of our infrastructure product categories. The disciplined execution of our strategy will serve us well as our team remains engaged and dedicated to delivering strong customer and shareholder value. With that, I will ask Silvana to provide a more detailed overview of our third quarter financial results.