Good morning, and welcome to Titanium Transportation Group's Q3 2023 earnings conference call. On today's call, we have Ted Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Fu, Chief Financial Officer, and Marilyn Daniel, Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain statements made on this call today may be forward-looking. In that regard, please refer to the risk factors and cautionary provisions outlined in the press release issued by the company yesterday, as well as the filings made by Titanium on SEDAR. Please note that this call is being recorded today, November 15th, 2023. A replay of this call will be made available until midnight on December 6th, 2023. Details of the replay can be found on Titanium's website under the Investors section. I would now like to turn the call over to Titanium's President and CEO, Ted Daniel. Please go ahead, sir. Good morning. Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us. The third quarter of 2023 marked a continuing turbulent period for the North American economy and our industry. Freight transportation faced substantial headwinds, including the adverse effects of rising interest rates, surging operating costs, persistent high inflation, overcapacity, and global geopolitical conflict. Furthermore, freight volumes weighed down contractual and transactional freight rates. Against this backdrop, I'm pleased that we delivered another profitable quarter, generating CAD 112.7 million in revenue and CAD 13.5 million in consolidated EBITDA, a testament to the company's resilience and financial navigation systems. In addition to these results, during the quarter, Titanium was able to take significant strides towards sustainable growth through the completion of the acquisition of Crane Transport. As mentioned on our previous conference call, the acquisition expands our service offerings to current and new U.S. customers and complements our existing freight brokerage services. With approximately 200 trucks in its fleet, generating roughly $60 million annually in revenue, we expect Crane to be a vital asset as we build a solid foothold for our U.S. expansion. Since closing the acquisition on July 31, 2023, our team has worked diligently on the new brand integration, which includes new authorities and systems. We expect this to last the next few quarters, which will have a negative impact on margins. In the third quarter, on a consolidated basis, we generated revenue of CAD 112.7 million, EBITDA of CAD 13.5 million, and EBITDA margin of 13.6%. We are pleased with these profitable results at a time when many companies find themselves unprepared to manage and in some cases struggling to remain solvent. On a segmented basis, our trucking business continued to perform well. We delivered revenue of CAD 62.4 million, a 13.6% increase, and compared to the third quarter of 2022. The third quarter results were impacted by current economic conditions, with volumes for the quarter down about 9% year-over-year, and freight pricing also down nearly 8%, with a decrease in fuel surcharge being the main contributing factor. EBITDA margins came in at 18.9% and a 4.2% decline from from Q3 2022. This was due to the segment absorbing the majority of integration costs from the acquisition of Crane. In addition, soft economic conditions also put significant pressure on our segment's margins. Although profitability of this segment tightened, we strongly believe that these are natural growing pains as we ready the company for the next stage of growth and remain focused on controlling our operating costs to maintain strong levels of profitability in this segment for the remainder of the year and into 2024. As I mentioned at the start of the call, the current freight environment impacted the logistics segment of our business. Despite these pressures, we performed in line with expectations, generating revenue of CAD 51.5 million and EBITDA of CAD 4.5 million. The pressure on pricing accounted for the entirety of the segment's 13.6% decrease in revenue, as well as offsetting the 6.1% in volume growth achieved by our dedicated team. EBITDA margins for logistics were 9.7% in Q3 2023, compared to 11% in Q3 of 2022. Overall, we are pleased that this segment was able to grow organically through its new locations, despite unfavorable economic conditions. This is consistent with our core strategy of developing sustainable growth platforms across the entire company. Titanium's success is founded on the strength of our people, business processes, and technology. With the acquisition of Crane, as well as our new freight brokerage offices, we remain focused on maintaining sustainable profitability while building towards our future growth. We anticipate continued macroeconomic uncertainty for the remainder of 2023 and ideally positioned to weather these conditions and drive growth when the truck transportation industry cycle turns. During the second half of 2024, we expect the market to improve, with reductions in supply to the freight market, enabling additional organic growth and driving value for shareholders. As a result, we revised our 2023 full year revenue guidance range to CAD 430 million-CAD 450 million and EBITDA margins of 10.5%-12.5%. With that, I'll turn it over to Alex for more detailed discussion of our financial results for the quarter. Alex, take it away. Thanks, Ted. In the third quarter of 2023, on a consolidated basis, Titanium generated revenue of CAD 112.7 million, compared to CAD 113.4 million in Q3 2022. We delivered EBITDA of CAD 13.5 million, compared to CAD 15.5 million in Q3 2022, with EBITDA margin of 13.6%. Diving deeper into segment performances, the truck transportation segment saw revenue of CAD 62.4 million, an increase of CAD 13.6 million, or percent over Q3 2022, and EBITDA of CAD 10.1 million, with an EBITDA margin of 18.9%. As Ted mentioned previously, this segment absorbed a significant portion of integration costs resulting from the acquisition of Crane Transport. We expect this to last the next few quarters. The logistics segment generated revenue of CAD 51.5 million, compared to CAD 59.6 million in the comparative period. EBITDA was CAD 4.4 million, compared to CAD 5.8 million in the comparative period, with an EBITDA margin of 9.7%, compared to 11% in the same quarter in 2022. Titanium's people, processes, and technology provide a solid foundation for our operations and platform for our future growth. Given the strength of our business and our confidence in the earnings outlook, we maintain our dividend, declaring a dividend of CAD 0.02 per common share. Before I turn the call over back to Ted, I would like to highlight that we demonstrated the results of our strong capital allocation strategy by closing the acquisition of Crane without a capital raise. We believe in a strong balance sheet, which will continue to be our focus as we navigate these economic headwinds. I would now like to turn the call over back to Ted. Thanks, Alex. Good job. For the remainder of 2023, we expect that the North American economy will continue to be impacted by below trend demand, elevated inventory levels, and overcapacity in our industry. Despite these challenges, Titanium will remain focused on servicing our customers, investing in our technology and people, efficiently managing our expenses, and driving profitability. With the closing of our recent acquisition, we'll unlock future logistics growth as we remain well positioned to capitalize on customer opportunities when the cycle turns. I would like to add that we are in full swing of integration and conversion of Crane to Titanium's proprietary processes and the new branding of Titanium American Trucking. We are very pleased with the process and excited to welcome staff, drivers, and customers to the new direction and service offerings. Our diverse customer base and product lines provide us with consistency during turbulent times. We're confident that we will continue to capitalize on opportunities and make prudent investments, which will translate into sustainable long-term growth for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator to open the line for questions. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touch tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be polled in the order that they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Our first question comes on the line of David Ocampo of Cormark Securities. Please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Morning. Morning, David. I appreciate the commentary on the revenue contribution from Crane, but I was hoping you guys could also speak to the margin profile. And then on top of that, if you're seeing anything that could make the integration process a little smoother or bumpier, versus your 12-month integration process. Okay, great. Thanks for asking, David. I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually-- Alex is gonna take this one. Okay. So, the margin profile, like we explained, when we originally acquired Crane, their margin profile is not to the same level as Titanium, so we are working to integrate that. One of the questions that may come up is that, you know, we're expecting Titanium's margin to drop on the trucking segment, and it may not drop as much as anticipated. That's because there's only two months of Crane, which is a lower margin profile, a couple points lower than Titanium. We have recognized some cost savings in the quarter, thanks to running our fleet better, and Marilyn will jump into that later. But overall, we're expecting the margin to slip a little bit more because there are transaction costs that's going to come into play in Q4, in Q1 of next year. So that's going to happen. This—in this quarter, we only have about CAD 500,000 of transaction costs. It's still really early in the... Oh, not transaction, sorry, integration costs, because that's still really early in the integration. ... But, as we go on and we incur these costs of next few quarters, we are gonna see some margin compression. But past that, we're expecting our integration efforts and getting onto our Titanium platform, that the margin's gonna turn around for Crane as well. And now I'll pass the puck over to Marilyn to maybe talk about some of the integration. Sure. David, just to clarify, what part of the integration process would you like to have information on? Just sort of where we are so far? Yeah, where you guys are so far, and if, if you're on track for that 12-month target? So yeah, so actually we're well underway. It's been a great team to work with. From a human capital point of view, we've been very fortunate to have a good group to work with. We are deep in the process of rebranding and retooling as we normally do, changing authorities and so on. We expect our go live date to be January first for physical integration, and rebranding of all trucks and drivers, et cetera, on our normal course. From that point, we move to fleet optimization stage, which we expect to take the better part of one to two quarters at least, to kind of work through and optimize our, our, I guess, our synergies between the company and opportunities created. Crane has a new set of customers for us to work with, which is a growth area for us. There's a little overlap, but not a lot in terms of customer base. But product lines, definitely significant overlap, so we have an opportunity to really leverage that. So, the 12-month target of our usual turnaround phase, we are on track for, and we're excited to work with the team out here. That's great. And then maybe for Ted, I, I mean, if I take a look at- Mm-hmm. The truck transportation's margins before you even completed ITS, it was in the mid-teens. And if I look at the post-integration phase, you guys were able to push margins into the low twenties. I understand that part of that is supported by, you know, pretty good market environments, but some of it's probably attributed to some scale. So I was just curious if you're able to get the scaling benefits from Crane, just given that you guys are separated by a border there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've always been a cross-border carrier, so this is nothing new to us. We've always experienced both markets. They are different. You know, if you look at, for example, a local, domestic Southern Ontario market is extremely different in terms of how it operates versus a, you know, call it a short to medium to long-haul environment in and out of the U.S. and throughout the U.S. So we're very experienced with that. We're definitely a high teens target. You know, we also will benefit here from economies of scale. There were only 200 trucks, and our purchasing power as well will provide far more discounts on numerous levels. Our cost of operations is also a lot more efficient, and that's kind of counterintuitive if you think about it, because overheads in the Canadian market are actually higher than the U.S. So we've got kind of two double positive whammies that we're gonna be able to actually scale from in this environment. Okay. That's perfect. I'll hand the line over and hop back in the queue. Yeah. Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Lee of Canaccord. Please go ahead. Hey, morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe we'll get started with a housekeeping one on margin guidance. Am I just correct to assume that, you know, that's not management definition, EBITDA margin in, in the context of it includes fuel costs and fuel revenue? It does. Okay, that's helpful. Yeah. And then maybe just a follow-up on David's question. I mean, can you help me quantify the impact of the integration costs in the quarter, you know, maybe as a percentage point or, or dollars? And then, you know, do you feel like Q3 margins in trucking are kind of a bit of a floor on that business, or if there could be more pressure coming? I'll-- the second part of the question, I'll let, I'll let kind of Marilyn jump in. So transaction costs, no, sorry, integration costs, like I said, we're still early in the stages. We're well underway, but we haven't incurred a lot of the costs yet. So this quarter, we have about CAD 500,000. We are expecting quite a bit more in the coming quarters. As we move the trucks over, we gotta reta- redetail. There's a lot of physical cost that comes with that, computers and whatnot. But for now, we're CAD 500,000, and a lot of it is, when we evaluate a new business, there are some inefficiencies that goes with the start of the integration. So that's what we're incurring right now, such as elevated borrowing costs from Crane themselves that we could have cut, but right now we have to keep. Some of the other stuff includes insurance and whatnot. So there are pieces that will disappear in a quarter or two that currently we just have no choice but to carry on. Okay. So I think to elaborate on that, when we originally bought Crane, we basically told the market that it's roughly a somewhere around the 13%-14% EBITDA. It is not technologically advanced purchasing power when it comes to things like fuel and insurance and so on. You know what? They don't, they didn't get the critical mass that we've got the ability to do that. In addition, the navigation systems that we're gonna be implementing, that are gonna go live January 1 and onwards, are gonna provide significant, you know, guidance in terms of, you know, both daily, weekly, you know, monthly, et cetera. You know, so from an IT and IS perspective, those are huge tools for us. We're extremely technologically advanced and compared to, I would say, 90-something% of companies that are out there. So, from that perspective, we'll definitely see a significant lift. So yeah, there's maybe a little bit of initial cost in terms of implementing some of these processes and streamlining of everything over the next few months, but, once we get everything on our navigation systems, we believe that this is a tremendous opportunity. It's gonna open up a huge market. The U.S. is almost a $1 trillion market. It is absolutely incredible as to how many thousands of customers you can obtain in the U.S. that have 10, 15, 20 times the amount of revenue that your small to mid-sized Canadian company would have. So, from that perspective, we're actually, you know, we're, we're very excited on that level. We should really see some, you know, some economies of scale, in the probably after Q1 of next year. Oh, okay. But is it safe to say that, you know, on an EBITDA margin basis, kind of Q4 and Q1 will kind of be similar or lower than Q3 was? I would say, given the fact that this year's been pretty soft year, I think that Q4, if we're gonna sort of broach that subject, I'd say Q4 is gonna be, in general, given the circumstances of the market, it's gonna be more of the same. Q4 is generally not a good quarter from a seasonality perspective. It might even be a tiny bit lower, but it's been a soft year. And Q4, of course, you're absorbing, in Canada, in October, you're absorbing Canadian Thanksgiving, in November, you're absorbing American Thanksgiving, and in December, we're absorbing the, the Christmas and New Year holiday season. So generally, Q4 is really not a great quarter for anybody, quite frankly. It kind of has this busy little spurt in the middle just to sort of, you know, help out in the retail environment. But other than that, it's got a lot of challenges. I'd say Q1 as well, is never a great quarter from a seasonality perspective, just because you've got January, February, and there isn't a lot of good retail. You know, things generally are soft. That's from a seasonality perspective. Now, layering on top of that, the cyclicality aspect of what's going on, you know, you've got, I think, in general, regardless of, you know, what's going on, and regardless of strategy that we're implementing, Q4, Q1 are generally not good quarters. But with the technological investments and the strategic investment that we've made with Crane in Georgia, we believe that, you know, we're going to see significant benefits from this acquisition. I'll also add, just from an operational point of view, in terms of, Q1, especially. So once our integration, our physical integration and rebranding is really complete by January first or shortly thereafter, our push really is on the customer expansion. So we've already been meeting with customers that are new opportunities for Titanium, with not just interstate freight, which Crane has been moving historically. Crane did not do any cross-border freight or any Canadian freight prior to Titanium, where many of these customers have those opportunities for us. So we expect the first quarter to be a farming time for us with our customer base, to be able to leverage that. So it's not just, I wouldn't just look at the quarter from a revenue perspective. It's also a seeding ground for us. Okay, that's perfect. And then maybe just lastly, in terms of your Miami location, I know it's a bit early, but I mean, directionally, is that office kind of performing as you'd expect? Jacksonville. It's Jacksonville. Sorry. Not Miami. Sorry, Jackson. I'd like to be in Miami. I wanted Miami, but, you know. No, so you know, it's Jacksonville. Go ahead. But yeah, it's Jacksonville is going really, really well. In fact, we're very excited. We're like 90% done with the leaseholds, and we're starting with the interviewing process, and we are very excited that before the end of the year, it's gonna be basically fully ready to run, you know, both physically and technologically. And we should start seeing growth quite albeit. I just said Q1 is never a great quarter, but that's a great time to go and look for people because everyone else is also slow, so usually. So it's a good time. We're gonna be hiring more and more people starting January and onwards, and we'll definitely see growth. And it is a growing town. It's a growing state. So we're actually really excited. There's actually a Crane customer that's in Jacksonville as well, so we're definitely leveraging those relationships. There's a lot of really great overlaps here. That's great. Sorry about the Miami thing. I think, I just had the holidays on my mind. Yeah. Well, it put a smile to our face, too, so it's all good. Yeah, fair enough. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Matthew. Our next question comes from the line of Gianluca Tucci of Haywood Securities. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning, guys. Morning, Gianluca. If I can start off by asking about your margins. I'm wondering if there's anything in particular that you're doing on the trucking or asset light side on the margin preservation front, in the context of the market environment we're presently in right now? ... So definitely we have a lot of cost control measures. Like we said, right now the market's soft, so we can have to do what we have to do. So there's a lot of cost control measures. We have recognized a lot of savings on our fleet operation costs that by just looking at some of our navigation system, and we found areas where we could improve on, and we could temporarily improve on at least to drive that margin or to maintain that margin on Titanium proper. We know that Crane is going to be a little soft, different in terms of the margin profile. So there's a lot of that. Some of the savings that we recognize is completely, it's a little out of control. Fuel pricing, we have mentioned a couple of times that FSC has come down, and that's one of the main reasons why our revenue is down. But the good side of that is that fuel is also down. So there's part savings on that end as well. True. Yeah. So we do have savings on stuff that we can control and stuff that we can't control that drives the margin where it is. We are happy to have that margin, but one of the big things is that Crane's only two months in, so we don't- Right ... have a full quarter margin profile with Crane in there. And as we incur more integration costs, that's going, that's gonna drive down the percentage as well. And then, but logistics front, I'll pass it off to Ted to talk about how we're able to maintain our- Yeah, I mean, yeah, we've got, you know, also some variable costs in the mix. In particular, you know, you've got all sorts of cost structures that can scale up and scale down. Even, I mean, I just wanna add one thing. For example, we've got a very new fleet. Let's just for a sec go back to trucking. Mm-hmm. A lot of the fleet's been refreshed. We don't have... Our average age of our truck is like 1.6 years now. I mean, 99% plus of our trucks are under warranty at this point in time. So we also have a very high cost control right now in R&M. So that's a really big one. So we do have a lot of areas where, you know, we've got costs that scale up or scale down relative to the market. Our technology gives us a lot of navigation, and because the tech is very, very dialed into, you know, minute-by-minute transactions, and it gives us a lot of navigation, we're able to make decisions very quickly. Our margin profile is based on a lot of technological navigation. I mean, think of it as our, as our, you know, daily minute-by-minute navigation, our GPS navigation- Right ... of where we're going. Like, you know, GPS in your car, GPS in your plane. It's very, you know, it's very robust from that perspective. So I think that gives us a lot of, call it a lot of power, you know, from, you know, sort of from a profitability perspective, you know, and giving us the ability to weather the storm on a profitable basis, given the circumstances. I think it's really, it's more exciting than anything else in the sense that I know that as soon as the cycle turns, and it is in the process of shrinking right now. I mean, if you look at the stats of your net new authorities, you know, on a monthly basis, the report that comes out, you know, and we all- we all look at the, you know, whether it's FreightWaves or FTR or any of the publications. You know, we look at net new, and it's of course, every month now you've got negative, negative net new, so the market is shrinking. Good. At a certain point, it's gonna hit an inflection. As soon as it hits that inflection, and you know what? Our systems are just gonna kick into overdrive, and it's gonna be a complete reversal of what's going on. As soon as that happens, you know what? I mean, people aren't gonna see it coming. Right. Yeah, no, I totally hear you, and I concur. It's great to hear that the integration plans with Crane are on track and according to plan. I think Marilyn touched on this, but can you speak to the early new revenue opportunities you're seeing by having hard assets in the U.S. now? Are you at a point to be able to quantify a pipeline of new business or opportunities at this point? Certainly, as we've said from the beginning, you know, having assets on the ground in the U.S. is definitely a market opener for us, just as it was for us many years ago when we started with our logistics business and then added assets to the mix. That is certainly an opportunity. In these times that are, unfortunately less robust, having assets on the ground is definitely a key conversation piece with customers. So it is definitely an opportunity for us, and we do see it as a significant growth opportunity for us, both on the brokerage side, with opportunity coming from it and on the asset side. Okay. I appreciate that context. Like with all the capacity that's coming offline, particularly in the U.S., have you been able to capture some of that market share at this point, or is it still too early to say? It's still very early. We're just focusing now on their existing customer base, which is good. Yeah ... and just leveraging information we have in that. We're just, we're just putting in our, our tools, so that's part of it. Once we have complete visibility of all operations, like with most smaller companies, there's a lot of offline paper processes that we need to automate, and we're going through that right now. That's why I always kind of look at it as there's two stages. First is sort of your integration, then it's your optimization. Once we get to the optimization stage, which will be in Q1 for sure, that will be where we really start to see a benefit. ... Thanks, Marilyn. For Alex, lastly, can you update us on your CapEx plans for the next 12 months? Yep. So, very excited to share that our fleet, our truck side at least, is completely done with. You can see it from our MD&A as well. We're not buying—we, we don't plan on buying any trucks in the next year. So, and trailers, we have caught up entirely, and going forward will just be maintenance. So you see that there's 170 committed so far, and that's probably gonna be the number for next year. Our fleet is pretty new, and that also reflects on the cost control because the R&M is, like Ted said, significantly lower. So, we'll maintain the fleet that we have now and just replace trailers on a needed basis. And that's it. So that's CAD 14 million next year, or in the next 12 months, and as needed, we'll probably do another CAD 14 million the year after. Maybe, maybe we'll go up to 200 trailers, maybe 250 trailers, so it won't be too significant. That's great clarity. Yeah. We're pretty happy and relieved that, you know, we're pretty much done the majority of our CapEx replacement cycle. Just to touch on Crane, so far, we haven't found anything that would require significant replacement. Their trucks are pretty new and in pretty good condition as well. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Keep up the good work. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Thanks, Gianluca. Our next question comes from the line of Benoit Poirier of Desjardins. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning, everyone. Morning. Morning, Benoit. Hey, just to come back on the opening remarks about the market that is poised to improve in the second half, and also your comment on logistics. I was wondering about when would you expect logistics revenue growth to turn positive, especially as you expect the market to rebound at one point? Okay. Yeah, I love this question. So because I'm trying to navigate on a macro basis here to some degree, right? But yeah. So interestingly enough, I mean, there's really two components I think to or three components really if you think about it, to revenue in a broker, to some. For the most part. I mean, you could have other smaller ones, but one is fuel, which if fuel is somewhat of a flow-through, particularly in the brokerage market. It's an ingredient that if fuel goes up, fuel surcharges go up, or it's whatever you need to give the subcontractor in terms of either a rate plus fuel or an all-in rate. It really all comes down to wash. So you're, you're basically, you know, providing a margin with fuel, which we can't control. But that's really controlled by the fuel market. So putting that aside, the two other components is essentially the market, which is a matter of really supply and demand. So, and those really two ingredients, last year, you saw—Well, let's just go back to 2022, which was still a really great year. There was a lot of profit, but really from a seasonal perspective, Q1 is not a great quarter. It's a challenging quarter for most carriers, and especially most small trucking companies, of which, according to the ATA, 97% of which are 10 trucks or less. So that, that's a significant part of the hyper-fragmented market. So last winter, people survived a lot easier than I believe they're going to survive this winter. So I believe that there will be, based on supply and demand and an accelerated shrinkage of capacity, that by the late spring, early summer, we are going to see a impactful shrinkage of capacity in the market. And that's why I believe the second half is going to be far more robust than it currently is from a pricing perspective. Yeah. Okay, perfect. And obviously, we are tracking the net revocation authorities, but probably bankruptcy needs to step in also at one point to remove some supply, right, Ted? Yeah. Yeah, I look at that as well a lot, so it definitely gives me an indication of where we are in the market. Okay. Just with respect to, in terms of, change, mix, spot versus contractual rate, is there any big change in the mix, for truck transportation and logistics, given the change in market environment? Not really. We like to be in the contractual market when it comes to trucks and trailers. The reason being is because they are assets. You know, I, I like to use the colloquialism that they are similar to real estate on wheels, so we like a certain, you know, steady as she goes, predictable, we like to have our trucks moving. Yeah, certainly there is a little bit of, and we understand that, you know, there is a little bit of pricing pressure in the trucking environment, and you do have a little bit of spot market in there just because it, it does... It's not a perfect science in terms of even the contractual environment and just, you know, filling in a few of the small gaps, your spot market, you know, head hauls or your back hauls and stuff like that. So certainly there's been a little bit of downward pressure there. So that's, you know, that's challenging. And as the market tightens, even those little fillers are going to get more expensive, so that's gonna add more revenue to already your existing fleet. And because it's very, very new. You know, I mean, our balance sheet is never going to forget the purchase price of the truck. So the truck is there no matter what, whether the rates are down, whether the rates are up. So as rates improve, I believe in the second half of 2024, you're going to see, I think some real significant improvements. In terms of logistics, our logistics environment is more flexible. It definitely has more of a majority spot market environment. We help solve more of the immediate problems that our customers run into, where they've got fluctuations in demand or production lines or what have you, and, you know, that's how we solve problems on a fluctuating basis. So you want to be more in the spot market there, right? So that you can, you can adjust in terms of more of the immediate needs of your customers. Okay, perfect. Keep it up. Thanks for the time. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Hoeh of ATA. Please go ahead. Good morning. Good morning, Mike. Morning, Mike. Good morning. I wanted to ask just, first of all, on the macro outlook, you, you talked about, an anticipated improvement in the second half of 2024. I guess I just, and apologies if I missed some of the call, if you've already addressed this, but, I wanted to just ask, is that, is that sort of based on the various industry sources and, and a consensus among those? Or is that your, your own internal visibility? Or how do you, how do you kinda, substantiate a second-half improvement versus maybe something earlier or even something later? I don't believe earlier, but that could be my little bit of, I guess, you know- Conservatism. Conservatism. Yeah, exactly. I I was going to say, you know, cautious. I don't even know if there's any optimism in that, cautiously optimistic, but, I definitely don't think- I think that anything, yeah, first half of 2024, even though Q2 is generally a good quarter, I don't think first half is going to be fantastic. I think it's just going to be too, you know, it's, it's too, too close, and I'm just seeing way too much capacity still out there. But I, I mean, it's a combination, right? I think to answer your question more specifically, where are we getting our opinions from, I guess, or where are we formulating our opinions from? Definitely some of the industry sources that are out there do have a... Obviously, we read them, and we pay attention to them, but then some of our indexes within our own system. So what our customers are telling us, what our trends are telling us, what our data is telling us, seems to indicate that that is what we are looking to. As mentioned earlier on the call with Benoit, we're tracking things like carriers leaving the space, carriers leaving the space, large and small, revocations of authorities, et cetera. That's all on the rise. So those are all granular indexes, truck rejection rates, new orders of trucks, et cetera. We put them all together. It helps us formulate our opinion as to when we feel the market is turning. That's where we're getting our perspectives from. Okay. Okay, so then let's just drill down. You know, I was happy to hear about a similar level in 2025. So let's just assume EBITDA. You know, I think your expectation for the year now is at a midpoint of around CAD 50 million. Let's just say 2024 was flat, or you get improvements from Crane integration, etc., but maybe the industry remains weak. Let's say EBITDA is flat at CAD 50 million, but with only CAD 50 million CapEx in the next two years, you'll be generating, I mean, call it CAD 30 million of free cash flow a year for the next two years, all else equal? Yeah. So yes, if we look at it from that metric, yes. We've had this conversation before, Mike. Can't you give us a little bit of a surprise win here? Like, I mean, you can take all the fun out of it. So yes, by free cash flow measure, we will be very much positive, and it is, it is a positive story, don't get me wrong. But, one of the figures that we look at internally is actually sustainable CapEx. The reason why is because, yes, we're now into a low in our replacement cycle because we've replaced most of our equipment, but we're going to get back into it again in a couple of years, which is going to be heightened spending, and all of a sudden, the free cash flow disappears. So- Well, but not to the same extent. Yeah. Right? Because the extreme, sorry to interrupt, just the extreme was that we were delayed by 1.5-2 years on trucks due to COVID. Yeah, but there is that. Whenever we went into a cycle, it will be that amount. So- Right. Uh, yeah. Yeah, no, I was just going to say, COVID kind of messed everything up, for sure, and now- For sure. You're in a low period, and then you'll go into a higher period. So for our benefit... have you guys ever sort of come up with where you think your sort of average annual CapEx number is? Yes, we do. We do. We have that number. So our net of our disposal, our normalized CapEx is about CAD 40 million. Normalized is 40. Okay. Yeah. But as I said, I mean, the next two years are going to be, you know, exceptional. And I mean, you know, CAD 30, 30 million is, is 30% of your market cap. So, so that said, your priority remains growth, growth in logistics, growth in, you know, sensible acquisitions... Would you, as a secondary consideration, would you have a preference between buybacks or dividends? So right now, our focus is debt, is reducing our debt. We don't have too much, but we do—we have burned through a lot of our cash flow from with the Crane acquisition. It's a good thing we didn't have to do a raise for it, but it did burn through a lot of our cash flow. So we are trying to repay the debt and draw it down. After that, then it goes back into our- Yeah. capital strategy of buying back, raising dividends. It depends on the market at the time. Yep. So if we generate on a no change basis with 0 growth, 0 impact for logistics, let's say CAD 50 million in cash, we're gonna pay off the check that we just wrote for Crane. But I think that as time goes on, strategically, we'll have to decide whether or not we want to increase the dividends or we want to do share buyback. And I think that's gonna depend, to some degree, on growth opportunity at that point in time. So if we wanna go and buy another Crane, let's say, to hit our growth targets over the next three to five years, open up more logistics offices, expand the number of terminals that we've got across the U.S., then we'll have to make those, capital allocation decisions from that perspective. You guys, have you ever expressed a target leverage ratio or a range you're comfortable with? Yes. So we are comfortable with a debt to EBITDA of debt to EBITDA about 3.5 and a debt to equity about anywhere from 3-3.5. But that has to be the right acquisition for us. We, we don't wanna get to that three range if it's... Well, right now, in that, we're in that three range because Crane is the right acquisition for us. But we generally, if we do buy, we would like to keep it under 3, but again, with the right acquisition, we'll go, we'll go above that. Go above that, to as high as 3.5, if I heard that correctly? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but that's got to be strategic in the sense that, as we said, we were, we were in the low ones on our debt before Crane. We bought Crane, that put us in, you know, call it that high twos, almost three range, depending on how you want to calculate it. We understand that that's a number that, you know, we don't like to be at that level, but we understand that we needed to be at that level in order to buy Crane. And it was purposeful because we know what this is gonna do for our company. So kind of getting back to the question that you asked strategically, where do we wanna go from here? We know what this is gonna do for us. So assuming we don't grow, assuming Crane really has no impact, assuming we don't have a margin improvement program, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Assuming we don't open up three more offices in the U.S., in brokerage over the next 18 months, like, our goal is to hit 10 by the end of 2025. So, you know, we, you know, we, we definitely expect this to have an exponential impact from a positive perspective. So we would like to generate the cash flow that you're kind of looking at, I guess, on a worst case scenario, faster. That's our goal. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, not to put words in your mouth, but just to summarize, I mean, it sounds like number one, delever and accrete, you know, take down debt, accrete value to the equity. And then once that's at a level where you're sort of more comfortable, that's been reduced, then consider the next growth opportunity or capital return to shareholders, depending on what the situation is at that time. Actually, I would say number one is probably organic growth for us, which is not that expensive. Right. Then we'll go into debt repayment, and then we will look for opportunities. That's more of our- Sure. They're all kind of close seconds. For sure. Very good. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That's everything for me. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Mike. There are no further questions at this time, so I'll hand the call back to Ted Daniel. Please proceed. Okay. Thank you, operator. Regardless of challenge, the confidence that Titanium's team of hardworking people will undoubtedly rise to the occasion. We appreciate your interest in our company. I look forward to providing an update on our progress and all of our priorities discussed today when we report our Q4 results. If there are any further questions, please feel free to call us. Thank you for joining us on our call today. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.