Welcome to LOGISTEC's 2022 fourth quarter and year-end results call. Today's call is being recorded and will be made available. There have been technical difficulties. Sorry for the delay. I will now turn the conference over to Carl Delisle, Chief Financial Officer of LOGISTEC. Please go ahead, Mr. Delisle. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We hope you are all doing well, and thank you for joining our call today. We will be discussing our Q4 and fiscal 2022 performance, followed by a Q&A session. Joining me today is Madeleine Paquin, our President and CEO. Before I start, please take note that all information provided during this conference call is subject to the forward-looking statements set out on slide two, detailed in LOGISTEC's management's discussion and analysis, and incorporated in full for the purposes of today's call. I'm very pleased today this morning to report on our strong result for both the fourth quarter and the full year. Our team had set very ambitious goals, and thanks to the ingenuity and dedication of our people, we are pleased to report record financial results exceeding our expectations. Before reviewing the full year, let me say just a few words on our fourth quarter results. We recorded a very solid Q4 performance organically. Our net revenue grew by approximately 10% versus Q4 2021. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased by 10%. We have continued to experiment good market condition. Now back to 2022. LOGISTEC delivered great results. We achieved the financial ambitions set out in our 2019-2022 strategic action plan. Thanks to our diversifications, organic growth, and strategic acquisition over the last few years. We continue to build a more resilient platform while expanding our reach, our scope, and our expertise to our customers, as you just saw with our latest acquisition of FMT. Our 2022 financial performance sets again record-breaking results exceeding our expectation on key financial metrics for the year, including the highest organic growth in the net revenues for the last decade, an increase in adjusted EBITDA margin in line with our strategic ambitions. Our consolidated revenue reached CAD 897.6 million for the first time. Our profit reached an all-time high of CAD 53.5 million. We also reach a record total diluted EPS of CAD 4.12. The strong financial results also drove the adjusted EBITDA to CAD 142.1 million, an 18% increase over 2021. We ended 2022 in a position of strength. Our backlog is indicative of the high demand for our services and trust our clients have in us. Particularly notable, Marine Services net revenue grew by almost 21%, an exceptional performance. Our environmental team signed last quarter its largest project ever to rehabilitate the former Rayrock uranium mine in the Northwest Territories. We are in a strong financial position with a sound working capital ratio and debt approaching of CAD 1 billion milestone. Beyond our excellent financial results, I'd like to express how proud I am of our achievements and commitment to sustainability and engagement with our communities. We created two new university scholarships for Rising Stars in the Aboriginal community, and we just launched four more scholarships to recognize innovation in the water sector. I will now turn over the call to Madeleine. Thank you, Carl. Good morning, and thank you for participating in our conference call. To start, I would like to say a few words on our latest and most important acquisition to date, FMT, Federal Marine Terminals. We have been working on this transaction for the last 3 months, but in reality, this has been in the works for decades. This is a very strategic and natural acquisition. The Marine sector has become very competitive in North America, and we realized that putting our teams together was in everyone's interest, including our employees. The transaction now allows LOGISTEC to add 11 terminals to its network, bringing it to 90 terminals in 60 ports. We increased our presence in the Great Lakes and gained access to new locations on the U.S. Gulf Coast and the East Coast. Yes, there are places where we already have a presence, but it actually strengthens our local teams. It gives us opportunities to position ourselves for new cargos that we hope will unlock in the new ports as well. All in all, this is a great move for our team, our customers, and our shareholders. Now reflecting on 2022, our 70th anniversary, I'm extremely proud of our team. We maintained strong momentum throughout the year, continued to strengthen our platform, reinforced our ESG and sustainability commitment, and welcomed some new colleagues. All of this while elevating our game and executing on our strategic ambition. Let's look at our results by businesses now. Marine Services. In 2022 was another fantastic year for our Marine Services segment, which handled record volumes due to strong demand, a capable team in the field, as well as an aggressive sales force. New and growing revenues came from containers, steel, wind energy, and forest product sectors. We surpassed our all-time record with revenues of CAD 565.8 million in 2022, an increase of 32% over 2021. Further, if we add 100% of our revenues from our two joint ventures, Termont and NEAS, this would add another CAD 320 million of revenues under our watch. Now with the addition of FMT, a network of 90 terminals, we reached the billion-dollar mark for our cargo handling activity. Of course, revenues are not what we are ultimately looking for. With more revenues come synergies on both the cost and revenue side, so we can expect margin improvement. I could not be more proud of this achievement, and I am excited for the future. 2022 was definitely a year of transition and transformation for our environmental team. Our Environmental Services segment produced revenue growth of CAD 331.8 million in 2022, up 5.4% from CAD 314.8 million in 2021. Profits before income were lower than last year's due to several factors, including the postponement of some key projects and challenges in sourcing materials for our Niedner facility. Funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in U.S.A., a once in a lifetime, once in a generation investment for our infrastructure, is expected to accelerate bolstering investment in infrastructure, increasingly frequent and extreme climatic events are driving investments in resilient infrastructure to protect against earthquakes, flooding, hurricanes, and storm surges. We can also count on the growing attention to emerging contaminants such as PFAS. I'm very pleased to report that we closed the year with the highest project backlog in our history, and new contracts for our PFAS treatment solutions are being signed, announcing a brand-new era of growth for our environmental team. Overall, we had an incredible year of success and recognition. As I said, I'm extremely optimistic about the future. We are well-positioned with financial strength, smart diversification, a unique business model, a growing and extensive terminal network, as well as some of the most innovative environmental technologies. Both our business segments offer compelling solutions in today's challenges and is the foundation for our continued growth. We are here to help our customers and our community. Thank you. With that, I turn it back to Carl. Thank you, Madeleine. Our 2022 results serve as a clear evidence of the strength and resiliency of our business and the benefits of our strategy. Despite potential challenges in the economy, LOGISTEC is well-positioned to weather a 2023 downturn. We have a very long history of continuous growth for over 70 years. In the last 10 years, the Marine Services segment alone has grown revenue at 14% CAGR year, which is very impressive for a major industry. As Madeleine was stating earlier, LOGISTEC is now recognized as a leader in the cargo handling industry. Our field experts are also now recognized internationally as the best terminal operators. We remain confident that our customers, partners, and communities will present us with more opportunities to support their supply chains. On the environmental front, our communities are facing never-before-seen challenges. From extreme weather events, aging infrastructure, water scarcity, and climate change, our customers are looking for unique solutions for an increasingly complex set of issues. Our team will play an important role in accelerating solution delivery across these environmental issues. We believe that they are in a great position to perform with the strongest order book ever and are ready to welcome new opportunities. In conclusion, we are both very proud of the accomplishment in 2022 delivering an all-time high result ahead of our expectation, including the highest organic growth in net revenue over the last decade and an increase of 14% in adjusted EBITDA margin. I sincerely want to thank our people across our network, my colleagues of the leadership team, and as well as a big thank you to our customer, our partners, and shareholders for their continued support. We feel ready to tackle opportunities that lie ahead in 2023 and beyond. With that, operator, back to you. Thank you. We will now start the dial-in Q&A for anyone who has the option to ask a question. Please dial in the provided number. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. If you would like to withdraw your request, please press star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please. Your first question comes from Colin Stewart with JC Clark. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Colin Stewart, your line is open. Sorry, can everyone hear me? Yes. Thank you. Sorry about that. Thanks for taking the question. Madeleine, Carl, congratulations on the strong quarter and year. I was just hoping you could spend a few minutes talking about how the uncertain economic outlook is impacting, I guess, both the Marine Services and E nvironmental business and how that sort of factors into your general outlook for 2023. Thank you, Colin. Let me give you a little bit of color. The activities continue to actually be quite strong, particularly anything that is linked to the energy sector, GSM and in particular in the kind of Houston and Texas area. What we see slowing down a little bit more is on the container side. In Montreal here, the first two months have been a little slower for everybody, and I think slower for everybody on the continent. Definitely the retail environment has slowed down. There has been in the past a lot of inventory in the marketplace, and that market, that inventory is slowly dwindling down. What it means on the import side is there are less boxes coming in. At the same time, we had a tremendous amount of congestion on that import storage side in the last quarter. We see that dwindling down, and we see, you know, volumes for container traffic in particular, to come down. We are at LOGISTEC, partnered with the largest-growing container company in the world. We have retrieved a new service back at our terminal, starting in January, a service that had gone to our neighbors because we had so much traffic. We have decongested the terminal. We've welcomed this service back, and we do expect new services to be started up by MSC in 2023. We don't actually foresee a drop in containers overall. You know, the steel traffic coming into the Saint Lawrence River and the Seaway is really just starting because the Seaway is just opening up now. The outlook is actually pretty good. You know, if there's gonna be a recession, I really don't think that it's gonna be a big one and, you know, our government even said yesterday, not sure a recession is coming our way in, at least Quebec, Ontario, where we have a lot of our traffic to our customers. In terms of the Environmental business, the year has started off on a real high. We've gotten some really good contracts, particularly on the site remediation on the APG front. We've largely resolved our problems with supply chain with our Niedner facility. We're starting to pick up contracts, which is always at this time of the year where we pick them up for our infrastructure business, our ALTRA Solutions. We, we're quite optimistic that this year will be another good one. I hope that's what you wanted to hear, Colin. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's great to hear. Just one clarification or I guess just other question on the Environmental business. I mean, I know the revenue was stronger, this past year, but perhaps the profitability down a little bit, and you mentioned some of the issues earlier that you faced. Those issues that impacted the margins or profitability on the Environmental side, do you expect those to improve and perhaps see a rebound in margins in the year ahead? Yes, we do. We bid on them with good margins and we've made some operational changes to improve our profitability. We do expect better profitability this year. You gotta take a note. Last year, we had some contracts that were canceled at the last minute, and that had an impact as well on our profitability. Hopefully this year starting off strong, and should allow us to have better profitability. You know, we also share head office service costs and have reallocated those as well, that will help as well for the Environmental segment. Great. Thanks for that. That's all for me. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star followed by the one. There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed. Thank you very much for joining us today. Carl, do you wanna say the last words? Thank you, everyone. If you have any other question, don't hesitate to call me, and I will stay available to answer any questions. Thank you again. Sorry for the small problem with the communication, it's it will be better next time. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.
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