Superior Plus Corp.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Superior Plus 2022 First Quarter Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to Rob Dorian, Vice President of Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Norma. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Superior Plus' conference call and webcast to review our 2022 first quarter results. On the call today from Superior Plus are Luke Desjardins, President and CEO, and Beth Summers, Executive VP and CFO. For this morning's call, Luke and Beth will begin with their prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for questions. Listeners are reminded that some of the comments made today may be forward-looking in nature and are based on Superior's current expectations, estimates, judgments, projections, and risks. Further, some of the information provided refers to non-GAAP measures. Please refer to Superior's continuous disclosure documents available on CDAR and Superior's website yesterday for further details. Dollar amounts discussed on today's call are expressed in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. I'll now turn the call over to Lisa. Well, thank you, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call to discuss our first quarter results.

I'm pleased to say 2022 is off to a solid start with a record first quarter for energy distribution business, adjusted at $250 million, an increase of 18% compared to the prior year quarter, driven by a higher result in the U.S. propane, Canadian propane business, as well as lower corporate costs. Based on our strong first quarter result and expected contribution from the recent announced acquisition of the propane distribution asset of Coal Petroleum, we're increasing our 2022 adjusted bidder guidance from $4.10 to $4.50 to a range of $4.25 to $4.65. We can also see in the Canadian market some improvement of our commercial Canadian business which suffered from the COVID business overall. Making great progress on our superior way forward in our growth initiative through acquisition, continuous improvement, and organic growth, on March 23rd, we closed the acquisition of TAM Propane, which includes the wholesale propane business, Kiva Energy. We're excited about adding this strong operating platform to grow a retail wholesale business in the attractive western U.S. propane market. We announced acquisition of propane distribution assets of Coal Petroleum, $180 million in Virginia, We expect this acquisition to close during the second or third quarter as we look forward to welcoming the team and servicing their close customers. We also closed two small acquisitions in 2022, one in Ohio, one in South Carolina, for a total consideration of $10.6 million. We are on pace to achieve the lower end of our previously stated acquisition target of $200 to $300 million in acquired assets in the 2022 year. We're happy to announce we signed a definitive agreement with Charbon Hydrogen to distribute green hydrogen to commercial industrial customers in Quebec who are very focused on pursuing lower carbon energy distribution opportunities, including renewable propane. We want these opportunities to leverage our existing expertise in safe and cost-efficient distribution of mobile energy solutions. We believe superior propane as a product will play a significant role in the transition to lower carbon in eventual net zero emission future. We have put an energy transition team in place to identify and develop opportunities in this space. We're working on various projects, mainly focused on lower carbon propane source, including DME and hydrogen currently. We look forward to presenting our lower carbon and alternative fuel strategy later this year. We are in a strong financial position from a debt and leverage perspective following a recent common equity insurance where growth proceeds at $288 million. The additional liquidity from equity insurance and our stable cash flow from operation is expected to provide us with the capital to continue our growth through acquisition, investment, and organic growth and continuous improvement initiatives. We have started 2022 in a strong position with good results in the first quarter, having accelerated our acquisition in 2021 and to start 2022. Our focus in 2022 will be integrating and capturing the synergy from the acquired businesses. We still see good pipeline of acquisition opportunity in the States and Canada, so we are definitely and we will be able to continue to acquire quality retail propane assets. We believe at probably lower costs overall right now because of the numbers and the overall market situation and the aging of some of the owners to achieve a superior way forward acquisition target of $1.9 billion from now to 2026. I'll now turn the call over to Beth to discuss the financial results in more detail.