Everybody, my name's Daryl Swetlishoff. I run the research group at Raymond James, very, very pleased to have Stella-Jones today presenting. You know, our research coverage has evolved. We've moved away from a lot of the commodity wood producers, we've moved into upstream into these distributors, specialty distributors, manufacturers. Stella-Jones fits right into that category. We made it our analyst top pick for the year, I have to thank Eric for making us look smart so far. It's been the best-performing stock in our coverage universe. It's had a really good run. As our research coverage has evolved, Stella-Jones is also evolving. I find this very interesting. They have a very stable core business, but the growth that they're making in the infrastructure play is nothing short of very exciting. I've asked Eric to give a bit of an overview. The story will probably be new to some of you, and then we'll do a bit of a fireside chat to dig into some of these questions. Eric? Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, ev eryone, and thank you for sticking around. I know it's the last day, so I appreciate you taking the time to spend the next half hour with us. As Daryl mentioned, I'm Eric Vachon, President and CEO at Stella-Jones, and I've been in this position for the last six years. 15 minutes, about 10 or 15 minutes to give you an overview of our company, then we can do the deep dive into some more details, if there's some questions, we'd be happy to answer those. I will spare you the cautionary statement, but for the record, it was there. At a glance, you know, our business, we are a infrastructure-focused business servicing the utility and rail industry. We operate 46 facilities across North America, Canada, and the U.S. As I said, we service the major electrical utilities in both countries and the railroad industry, so all Class 1 and short lines and public transits. The nature of our business is mostly driven by maintenance. We do benefit from projects, expansions in infrastructures and grids, but definitely I would say a good 90% of what we do is supporting grid hardening, you know, rail safety, rail strength, and that is driving a consistent revenue for our business. Over the last three years, our sales have grown at a 4% CAGR, and our EPS has grown at a 13% CAGR. Through that period of the last three years, we have increased or improved our EBITDA margins by 300 basis points, up to 18%, and we've been holding that 18% level, if you want, for the last, the last three years, and very, very proud of our team. Our business generates a healthy cash flow annually, and we've also in the last three years been able to return CAD 500 million back to our shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. We've been increasing our dividends for the last 22 years. This year will be actually the 22nd year, and also very proud of that track record. Obviously having a strong cash-generating business, you know, we have an opportunity to deploy capital, and as we are thinking about our future growth, we have initiated a growth into expanding our presence to our customers. Our utility poles business has now become a utility products division where we now offer steel products, steel transmission towers, as well as crossarms, and looking to expand that over time. We have great customer relationships. Most of our customers are under contract for long-term from a long-term basis. On average, three to five years, on the utility product space, some of them extend up to 10+ years. Very much a strong belief in Stella-Jones' ability to service our customers, provide quality products, but also the ability to handle very large maintenance programs across North America. Finally, on this slide, our market cap is, you know, roughly about CAD 5 billion, and our sales for trailing last 12 months is around CAD 3.5 billion. Maybe just a comment, maybe I should have made initially, the numbers you see on these slides are in Canadian dollars, unless they're otherwise stated. There's a few U.S. dollar statements here or there, but just make sure we're clear on that aspect. If we take a closer look at our products, so we're definitely infrastructure-focused. If I go back three years ago, that infrastructure we had, which we consider our utility products, our railway ties, and our industrial products, you know, represented somewhere along the line of 69% of our sales. Today, it's roughly 80% of our sales, with the remaining being the residential lumber and the logs and lumber piece, and I will touch on that. If you want, I'll actually go through those product categories for you briefly to give you a better insight of what we do. Half of our sales at Stella-Jones are under the utility products division. We're a leading supplier of utility wood products, utility poles, that being for distribution and transmission purposes. 80% of our wood poles are for distribution purposes, the other 20% are used for transmission lines and projects, but they would be, I would qualify them as, you know, the smaller-sized transmission as 90% of that transmission market is actually steel products. The products we offer, as I said earlier, is for maintenance purposes. It's for, you know, Grid Hardening, ensuring the resiliency of the network. You know, if you pay attention to what North American utilities, you know, explain, you know, as far as their capital all-allocation, Grid Hardening is a very big concern for our customers. Ensuring stable supply of electricity to their end customers. You know, obviously it's all about their credibility and the service that they're actually offering to the communities. 75% of our sales are under long-term contracts, so it covers the majority of our sales obviously. The 25% is what we'll call the spot market business. Obviously the long-term agreements is where we focus our energy. We have been expanding that over the years, and we've actually been seeing contract terms increase in length and time. Definitely the 20% of our contracts are 10+ years. We see a lot of our customers do so because they want security of supply, assurance of, you know, proper timing and proper quantities of their maintenance programs because they have a lot of work to do, and they want to work with a reliable supplier. The 25% is what we'll call the spot market. It's, you know, bidding and quoting for different projects, and that we'll use to adjust our capacity usage. Definitely our first prime focus for using capacity is to service contract customers, but then obviously, you know, we'll use that spot market to fill up our capacity to the desired level. It's not to say that, you know, in that spot market, they're not recurring customers. A lot of them are. They're, you know, co-companies or contractors or utilities that don't want long-term contracts and simply just don't want to work and bid every year to make sure they're getting, I guess. They're leveraging the market. You know, it works actually very well for us. The railway tie piece is a versus wood treated railway ties. 90% of the North American infrastructure is built on wood ties. I would say, you know, 90% of our sales are for maintenance purposes. When a railroad maintains the track, they're changing out a given tie because It's not because the wood is rotting, it's actually because the wood is breaking down. It's no longer playing that role of a shock absorber between the steel rail and the rock ballast. When you switch out a tie, a wood tie, you will have, or our customers will have to put in another wood tie. Because of the distance between the ties, because of the Rock Ballast and the structure, the fastening systems that is holding down the rail, if you take out a wood, you put a new wood. Our customers actually have equipment. They lift the tracks, take out a wood tie, put in a new wood tie. That also gives us a bit of an assurance that, you know, unless it's a new track being built, you know, composites, concrete or steel don't have a play in this space. Annually, the industry maintains 18 million-20 million ties. I would say we're probably 35%-40% of that market, along with a main competitor of ours, who is Koppers Industries. It's really much a duopoly. We have the capacity to at least supply 50% of the market if we needed to, so we definitely have some bandwidth or sorry or some depth in our network to be able to support, you know, more activities from the railroads or new projects of the like. 65% of our sales are made to Class 1 customers. You would know the CSX, BNSF, UPs of the world, but there's five Class 1s. The other 35% would be, again, what we will call the spot market, but in this case, it's defined by the short line railroads, very much recurring customers, and public transits. Then there's obviously industrial projects and so on. I would say for industrial projects, since those are typically new installs, there we will see competition from the steel and the composite products. Moving on to the third category, which is industrial products. That's really complementary to railway ties and utility poles. In the industrial product category, you know, we will manufacture bridge timbers for the railroad. We will manage road crossings, manufacture road crossings, I mean. We also supplied the marine industry with piling. Oh, construction piling as well actually. That is nothing else than a pole that is not meeting our customer specification that can definitely be put in the ground to support structures. Our residential lumber product category is a bit different. The commonality, it is wood treating. It's, you know, pressure-treated wood for decking and fencing applications. It's definitely a Canadian play where, you know, we have one big box customer as a main customer. We service them, you know, across the country from our facilities. The key aspects that we deliver there is obviously we have our plants are used as distribution centers. We have, you know, dedicated sales force for merchandising the product in those stores, as well as, you know, we do direct-to-home delivery, so we actually pick and pack orders for certain size projects and use a third party to deliver direct to the end consumer. That's a service we offer where our main customer says, "You guys can do it better than us. More accurate on picking and packing, more accurate on, you know, less breakage, and so on and so forth. I'm just being mindful of time. We've built a very strong team at Stella-Jones, and everybody's much aligned on our strategy and how we want to move forward. One of the metrics we do track and management is compensated by is ROCE or ROCE, depending how you want to pronounce it. Our team is compensated through that metrics, and we do believe that we're aligned with, you know, with our shareholders. You can see that, you know, we've been holding, you know, I would say a healthy ROCE for an industrial co-type company. As I said earlier, we generate very healthy cash flows. Over the last three years, we've generated over CAD 600 million of free cash flow for our organization. From our EBITDA target, let's say we've been shooting for that, well, the range of 17.5%-18.5%. We're holding at least 18% for the last three years. The free cash flow conversion is approximately 50% of what would be our target. Our free cash flow profile really underpins our capital allocation strategy. Obviously top of mind is to keep our company assets in, you know, in good health, make sure that we provide a safe environment for our employees. Obviously there's always opportunities for growth CapEx. We announced last week that, you know, we would be building greenfield facility in the U.S., so that would be an example of a growth CapEx where we're investing to expand our presence in North America. Obviously M&A is always top of mind. We're a company that has grown over the years through M&A. We've consolidated the wood pole industry, the wood railway tie industry, and now as we're thinking expanding into the steel industry or the steel segment, obviously deploying capital to those initiatives is top of mind. What we always keep focused on is how do we create value for our shareholders, and ultimately, depending on the timing of M&A, we're definitely mindful of returning capital to our shareholders. Obviously, there's dividend, there's our share buyback program that we will use, you know, in a fashion that we, you know, we maintain our target leverage of 2-2.5, maintain our Investment Grade credit rating, but at the same time, we're very mindful of, you know, we're not afraid of being in that range and doing some share buybacks to return capital to our shareholders. Our strategic approach to M&A, you know, we look at what makes you know... We've changed our vision as a company. We have traditionally identified ourselves as, you know, we wanted to be a leading pressure wood treating company in North America, and I do believe we've achieved that. We have revisited our vision as a company and wanting to be a supplier of infrastructure products for the electrical and rail industry. As such, we are now, you know, with our, I would say our Lattice steel acquisition last November, you know, increased our addressable market. The steel transmission market, you know, has a annual addressable market of, I would say, around CAD 5 billion annually, Canadian dollar sales. You know, the acquisition we made last May, once we've done our upgrades and capacity would represent probably CAD 100 million in sales. There's definitely an opportunity for us to grow in that space and get a greater market share and then, you know, leverage that to be able to service our customers. The idea is to being able to offer the suite of products to our customers, and if there's a missing link there at this point, it would be tubular transmission, which is another type of transmission structure that we manufacture a very small quantity, but we're not specialized in that. I will say yet an M&A would be definitely a great opportunity to do it. Financial metrics are key. What is accretive, you know, to our EBITDA margin? How do we improve our returns on capital employed? You know, I'm not looking to average down our business. I'm looking to grow it and make it, you know, more profitable and therefore, you know, create some value for our shareholders. Last November, we held an investor day. In December of 2025, we finished a three-year cycle on guidance, and we reshoot a new guidance. We're looking to increase sales on a CAGR for the next three years to 4%-5% annually. That would bring us to CAD 4 billion by the end of 2028. The EBITDA target is sitting between 17.5% and 18.5%, and we've been successfully doing that for the last three years. Understanding that spot market that I referred to earlier can play tricks sometimes as where pricing pressures and dynamics can actually pull you slightly down. We're fighting the fight to make sure we stay above 18%, but it's not to say we couldn't finish a year at, you know, 17.8%, 17.9%. Ultimately, the new metrics that we inserted here is EPS. We do plan on increasing our earnings per share at a 10% CAGR over the next three years. We will achieve that in several ways. We will grow our business. Obviously, the top line grows at a good EBITDA margin. We will increase our profitability. M&A is definitely a way for us to accelerate that. Last but not least, I spoke about the share buybacks, which, you know, in the last three years actually have been very a big contributor to our EPS growth, which if, you know, I mentioned in my opening comments, it's around the 13% mark. you know, Stand Tall, Reach Wide is our motto internally at Stella-Jones. We will stand tall. We will, you know, represent our products, service our customers with quality and quantity 'cause that's what they need, and timeliness of delivery. It's a key focus for what we do. We're focused on infrastructure. We have strategic locations across North America. If you don't have treating facilities, we actually have distribution yards, 35 of them. We have the logistics in North America to support our customers in every corner, in every region. As a reminder, and as I expressed, we have a very strong cash flow generation. I do believe we're very well structured for continued growth. With that, I'm slightly over my 15 minutes, but I will now turn it back to Daryl. We're gonna forgive you, Eric, for that. I've prepared a few questions. If anyone in the audience has a question, just please raise your hand. Maybe I'll kick it off. I found your comments around the contracted part of your business interesting. Could you dig into that a little bit by segment, like with respect to railway or industrial? Like, how do those vary with respect to your exposure to both contract and spot volume? Thank you for that. Well, I did mention, so our utility products, you know, 75% of those sales are under long-term contracts. Contract features have pass-throughs for the, you know, cost of material, the cost of the wood preservatives, even cost of the steel. There's an index. There's a pass-through there that preserves margin. Obviously there are inflationary indexes that support the cost of living, maybe, our labor force annual increases, cost of energy, and so on, and so forth. Very well protected with those contracts and actually very preserving the margin, which is very good for us. On the railroad side, a typical contract, so obviously they're with Class 1s, and before I move on, actually, so we do have exclusivity. When I have a long-term agreement with an American Electric Power or a PG&E, we get exclusivity on 100% of their wood pole requirements. Contrary to the rail business where our contracts will share the annual maintenance of our customers with Koppers Industries. You know, if I give you an example, the CSX annually on average maintains or requires 3 million ties. My contract says that I get 50% of the annual maintenance, so I know I will sell them 1.5 million ties in the next year, and I will sell it from them from most likely two given facilities that are online with the CSX. The CSX bring in the rail cars at the plants, we load them up, and the ties go, and to be honest, I don't even know where they're going. There are similar features in the contract. There's a pass-through for the cost of the wood as well as the preservatives and indexes for inflationary costs. The slight difference there, it's a dollar for dollar pass-through. In order to maintain the same margin, if I have to increase my sales price, then my percentage drops. I maintain my same. It's not ideal, right? As we're renegotiating contracts this year, we have four contracts that we renegotiate. This is one thing we're gonna bring forward to our customers is, you know, we work for a return, and obviously our shareholders need a return, and we need to adjust for that. We've been smart in, you know, navigating those dynamics over time. There's always ways to make sure you hold your margin, but it's not always as easy. I would say Class 1 customers are tough cookies. You know, we could spend a 30-minute meeting negotiating a CAD 0.25 increase on a tie. That's what we do and. Those are the nature of those contracts. Okay. Thanks for that. The Analyst Day was really well attended. We learned a lot there. You put up the targets that you've suggested, that your stretch goals are there. What would be the key building blocks to get there by segment, you know, utility, rail, residential? You know, on a base scenario, you know, we believe our utility pole business will grow at a mid-single digit. We're saying that the railway tie business will grow at a low single digit because obviously we're fighting for the same... There's no growth in market share. There's 18 million ties to maintain, and we're always fighting for market share with our competitors. There's a bit of pricing there and maybe a bit of market share steal. The residential lumber piece is bookended in our guidance. We expect sales to be between CAD 660 million, CAD 650 million. The growth is not necessarily there. Obviously, a few things off of this base scenario can happen. Obviously, there's the growth, which we, you know, accretive to our EPS piece. We're definitely focused on expanding our presence in, you know, I would say steel for one, but it's not to say that we could not address other types of materials, such as composites for railway ties or composites for poles. Definitely M&A will help us contribute. Ultimately, if there's a lag in M&A, which the pipeline seems pretty healthy to me right now, if there would be a lag, obviously, you know, we'll be mindful to ensure to execute on our NCIB, which would probably get us to the 10%, you know, EPS CAGR. Awesome. Thank you for that. Turning to the steel lattice, the greenfield expansion that you announced, the 20,000 tons target by the end of 2027, what demand signals and customer discussions are really underwriting this investment? We acquired Locweld back in May of 2025. You know, they were producing annually 10,000 tons of steel, you know, and supplying U.S. and Canadian customers. The mix changes. Last year, they sold 75% of their production into the U.S., and in 2026, it'll be about 50%. One thing that we did see because of, you know, our CapEx, the CapEx plans of all our customers in North America, we understand there are significant investments in transmission and in discussion with our customers, so we decided to double that capacity. We're moving it to 20,000 tons. Well, the project will be completed midyear this year. We've already sold out the whole capacity for 2026, and we've sold the 20,000 tons for 2027. We also have one utility that has given us a contract for the next 10 years of a given tonnage per year, which will consume about 25% of that 20,000 tons we'll have. We're actually having very meaningful discussions with a lot of customers asking us to, you know, plan some capacity for them and, you know, they're very much interested, especially our U.S. utilities. They were very much interested a few weeks ago anyhow, as would we ever consider building a facility in the U.S. We have six U.S. utilities that have offered us expressions of interest for us to do so, now we're giving it a first shot at, you know, this new 20,000 capacity, that 20,000 ton capacity that we're building. Because we're selling out, because customers are planning 10 years ahead of time, we're talking about projects to 2028 now right up to 2035. It takes about 10 years to build a transmission line. We're positioning ourselves very well, being as well, you know, one of the few lattice manufacturers in North America. Today as we speak, there are no lattice manufacturers in the U.S. We will be building a greenfield starting this year, and we will be the first U.S. lattice manufacturer. Obviously a great advantage, well, for us for e-enabling our customers to buy American, but also, avoiding some tariff costs for our customers because currently the competition comes from Turkey as well as India. All the products that are currently imported into the U.S. have a 50% tariff that our customers are paying. Definitely a huge advantage. I'm confident that, you know, if we speak in a couple of weeks, I'll be telling you like, "Yeah, yeah. We're, we have takers for that capacity. What sort of payback are we looking at with that investment and what would be the biggest execution risk? It sounds like it's not selling the volume, but what would be the, as you move into a bit of a new business for you? We have built greenfield facilities in the past on our railway ties side and utility side. We understand that's always a challenge. We've de-risked the project in the sense that we're actually mirroring our Canadian facility. Same suppliers, same layout that we're actually implementing now. We're just going to take our old PO and just say, "Can you do this again for us. Please deliver here in the U.S." We're still negotiating that final spot where we want to go. We have two sites identified. We don't want to disclose it because we're negotiating. I want to keep some leverage in those negotiations. We are looking at a location which would have a building already in place, which obviously de-risks. Really if I have a building in place, I got 14 months to get the equipment, and then the other challenge would be the labor, right? We need to hire employees, and we've made sure to select two geographical areas in the Southeast U.S. that have a good pool of potential employees that understand steel work, understand welding, because obviously that's a skill that is required. Shifting gears a bit, the Brooks acquisition now closed. What early integration lessons are you seeing, and where do you expect to see the most value creation? The integration lesson, actually started with Locweld, because now, you know, we have several products with several sales team, and what we're trying to avoid is one customer seeing three Stella-Jones reps in one week and going like, "What are these guys doing?" As we have rebranded our logo last year, we wanna make sure we have a strong brand with our customers and have actually restructured our sales force to make sure that we have customer relationship agents that, you know, make sure that we deliver on the purchase orders, that we follow up on their internal needs. We have our specialists in all three product categories to make sure we have a unified message going into our customers. The Brooks acquisition presents a lot of exciting potential. We have... You know, Stella-Jones works with over 1,000 utilities in North America. We are in a position to introduce Brooks to customers that are not buying crossarms from them or actually not even buying wood crossarms. We are actually looking to convert a couple of utilities that are using fiberglass back to wood because we can demonstrate that wood is a more resilient product. It actually performs better in a fire event. Definitely we plan on increasing the customer exposure. Then there's the Canadian piece. Brooks did not sell in Canada, and we do have interest. Obviously, we supply all the utilities in Canada. We've consolidated that market. There's not a lot of competition left. Obviously we talk to all the utilities and they're very much interested. I do believe that, you know, by the end of the year, we would include in our contracts, hopefully one or two utilities that would source their crossarms from us. Some good upside on a deal that was actually done at a very reasonable multiple, I would say. How does Brooks shape, your next acquisition? How does that inform on your next acquisition? You know, when I think about the two last ones, you know, it's been a while that we've been, you know, educating the market of what we can do next 'cause we've consolidated, you know, wood poles and wood railway ties. We've been mindful discussing with our customers, we're not doing this blindly hoping that they will open-armed, you know, welcome us. It is thought through. Our customers are suggesting a whole bunch of other things. Some of them are less interesting than others. I think those two acquisitions first show that our ability and our confidence in doing so and executing on them. I will grant you that they're not, you know, billion-dollar acquisitions, you know, baby step before you run. Now I have a team internal at Stella-Jones that understands steel. I have a team internal at Stella-Jones on the Brooks side that understands, yes, the crossarms piece, but also all the pole fixtures that come with it. Obviously now it opens a whole other universe on the Brooks side of what else can I supply to my customers that helps them, you know, execute and realize their projects. The idea really is to be that supplier that makes my customers' lives easier. We have a large team of employees internally, you know, we call them inside sales, but their job is to talk to our customers every day. Where's your project? Are you on time? Are you behind? How do we adjust to deliver the products that you need? You'd be surprised how often we get a call from a customer telling us, "Okay, don't ship. We don't have transformers. We're gonna delay this till next month. Stella-Jones invoice us, but please hold on to the inventory. That tells me that there's a supplier out there that's in the supply chain that's having challenges, it's not supporting those projects properly. Trust me, there's thousands of projects across North America, utilities, and all that our customers want is a supplier that can execute. I do believe that's really ingrained in the DNA at Stella-Jones. Perfect. Sean, you have a question? Eric, you talked about the long-term contracts and kind of protect pricing margin, how you protect that volume. That client delaying the take-or-pay. Yeah. It's a good question. No. There's no take or pay, there's no volume guarantee. If I look at the railroad business, every year 18 million to 20 million ties get maintained. The CSX, their largest program has ever been like 3.1 million ties and the lowest program has been 2.8 million. There's a bit of volatility, but it's marginal. On the utility side, what we see, they're maintenance programs. If anything, every year at worst, a utility buys the same volume every year to change out the poles. What we're seeing is most customers are increasing year-over-year slightly their cadence. I know we're running out of time, but, you know, I'll give you an example in Quebec, but it's true for AEP and PG&E. Quebec has 2 million poles in service. We've been supplying Hydro-Québec, you know, for the last 30 years. They used to buy 20,000 poles a year. That means that that pole should last 100 years. Well, it's not. In order to be able to reduce that average age, they keep increasing the cadence. They went from 20,000 to 27,000 poles, and they're telling us they want to go to 33,000-34,000 poles. The only thing stopping them from doing it today is that they need more crews to be able to change out and install the poles. You're right that they could call tomorrow and says, "Okay, we're done. We're cutting costs. We're not gonna..." That is a risk that we bear. However, not maintaining, you know, has other issues like poles failing, ice storms breaking poles, and, you know, power outages is not a good thing. Our customers get evaluated by rating agencies on the level of service they give. You can Google this, Google this on the internet, every year the number of power outages in terms of minutes increases across North America. That's not good for our customers. It's, it's not sunken in concrete that we can, you know, get that volume every year, but I'm highly confident, and I've been with the company 19 years, never seen... There's ebbs and flows, don't get me wrong, that does happen, but we're in it for the long term, right? The capital deployment of our customers is, you know, out there for the next 10, 20 years, and we're right in the middle of it servicing them. I'm not really concerned about demand for our business. Well, I see we've gone over time. you know, there's a few more questions. We'll be downstairs in the breakout room. just like to thank Eric, Silvana, and David and Stella-Jones for presenting today. Thank you. Appreciate it.