Superior Plus Corp.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Superior Plus's first quarter 2024 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Adam Kernick, Director of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Lateef. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Superior Plus' conference call and webcast to review our 2024 first quarter results. On the call today are Alan McDonald, President and CEO, Greer Coulter, Executive Vice President and CFO, Curtis Philippon, Executive Vice President, Superior Plus, and President Sertaris. For this morning's call, Alan and Greer 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 for further details. Dollar amounts discussed on today's call are expressed in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. I'll now turn the call over to Alan for his remarks.

Well, thank you, Adam. Good morning, everyone. It's been an important week for Superior Plus. We held our annual general meeting this week and had the opportunity to update our shareholders on the progress we've made over the past year and our strategy for growth and further transformation of the business. This week marks my first anniversary as CEO, but more importantly, it's also been a year since Superior Plus put a stake in the ground and committed to becoming a multi-energy solutions company focused on generating sustainable organic growth. Since that shift in focus, we've made tremendous progress. Through the year, we had all the challenges one would expect from such a transformation, including unseasonal weather, closing the $1 billion Sataris acquisition, retooling our leadership team, evaluating our strategy, and building the operating capability to make it all possible. For me, the most exciting part of the journey has been the renewed sense of optimism we have for our business. Sataris has been an incredible investment. Of this, there is no doubt. Sataris has a proven business model, with consistent returns on capital above 20%, significant market share with 40% of the MSUs in North America, an expanded reach into new geographies and verticals, and a demonstrated ability to grow by double digits year over year. Soteris is also propelling Superior Plus into a new age. It's the leading on-road energy provider for renewable natural gas, with over 10% of our fleet now dedicated to RNG distribution. Soteris also remains a key enabler of critical hydrogen research as companies across North America test new applications for hydrogen-fueled applications. And that's just the beginning. Perhaps our biggest source of optimism and enthusiasm is within our traditional propane business unit. With a renewed energy for revolution, not evolution, our propane teams have been working hard, exploring opportunities for growth, challenging ourselves to create a new operating model for the next era of propane distribution. We've come to believe strongly that our propane assets are among the best in the business. We see significant opportunities as we shift away from our M&A roots and set our sights towards operations excellence, challenging our teams with aggressive growth and productivity targets. Over the course of 2024, we will be building new capabilities that enable us to acquire customers organically, lower customer churn, and reduce the cost of delivery, all with lower capital investments than we've seen in prior years. Now while this journey takes time and is never really finished, we're excited and engaged in growing the Superior Propane business. These strategies are the foundation to our leadership's commitment to organic growth and creating shareholder value by operating our business with innovation passion, and pride. It enables our commitment to conserving capital and reducing Superior Plus's leverage ratio to investment grade. In Q1, we saw many reasons to be optimistic. We posted a 15% increase in EBITDA versus last year, testament to the strength of our business, even in light of some significant headwinds thanks to an unseasonably warm winter. Soteris grew 9% in Q1 and successfully expanded its fleet, adding 24 MSUs and ending the quarter with 753 MSUs as we continue to expand and build out our network beyond the well site. The propane segment was led by the U.S. division posting a 1% increase in EBITDA versus last year and impressive results all things considered. And I remain very encouraged about the potential for this business to continue to grow and increase its share of the market. Well that of course will take time Q1 was encouraging. In Canada, the business was significantly more challenged with weather and its impact on our largely industrial business. We, of course, must factor in the disposition of the Northern Ontario operations last fall, a requirement to closing the Soteras transaction. But despite successfully growing our customer base, these additions were not sufficient to offset declines in several large industrial customers' consumption through the winter months. Now, in any seasonal or weather-related business, orders with this type of adversity happen from time to time. And it's our mission to not let this setback distract us from our objectives to drive customer growth, retention, and operating productivity. This is exemplified in the progress we made in Q1 with initiatives to reduce costs through workforce adjustment, cooperative go-to-market sales initiatives with Sataris, and improvements on the effectiveness of our pricing strategies. So with that, let me turn things over to Greer to walk through the Q1 results in detail.