Hello, and welcome to the Astec Industries Q4 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is my pleasure to introduce your host, Steve Anderson, Senior Vice President of Administration and Investor Relations. Mr. Anderson, you may begin. Thank you, and welcome to the Astec Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on today's call are Jaco van der Merwe, Chief Executive Officer, and Becky Weyenberg, Chief Financial Officer. In just a moment, I'll turn the call over to Jaco to provide comments, and then Becky will summarize our financial results. Before we begin, I'll remind you that our discussion this morning may contain forward-looking statements that relate to the future performance of the company, and these statements are intended to qualify for the safe harbor liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Factors that can influence our results are highlighted in today's financial news release, and others are contained in our filings with the SEC. As usual, we ask that you familiarize yourselves wi th those factors. In an effort to provide investors with additional information regarding the company's results, the company refers to various U.S. GAAP, which are generally accepted accounting principles, and non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes provide useful information to investors. These non-GAAP financial measures have no standardized meaning prescribed by U.S. GAAP and therefore are unlikely to be comparable to the calculation of similar measures for other companies. Management of the company does not intend these items to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the related GAAP measures. Management of the company uses both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures to establish internal budgets and targets and to evaluate the company's financial performance against such budgets and targets. You should also note a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is included in our news release and in the appendix of our slide deck. All related earnings materials are posted on our website at www.astecindustries.com, including our presentation, which is under the Investor Relations and Presentation tabs. Now, I will turn the call over to Jaco. Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, thank you for joining us this morning. I would like to begin my comments by saying how humbled and grateful I am to be speaking to you as the CEO of Astec. When I joined the company six years ago, I was drawn by what I saw. A strong company with a history of delivering valued product that had tremendous potential. Now as CEO, I'm even more convinced of these early impressions. Astec has established itself as a market leader in the industries we serve, bringing innovative solutions to the road construction industry for over 50 years. The team here is talented, dedicated, and committed to making the company as strong and resilient as possible. As a leadership team, we remain united around our purpose of Built to Connect. It defines where we are going and what we can become. We have made progress, and I'm proud to be part of the team that has moved us forward. The priorities for Astec in 2023 are shown on slide four. I'll share more detail in a few minutes, the priorities are executing on our Simplify, Focus, and Grow strategy and delivering on our commitments to employees, customers, and shareholders. As CEO, I will continue to champion these priorities for the organization while emphasizing the importance of execution to drive consistent and sustainable financial performance. We have a sound framework and motivated team, and we are working together to create a culture of outperformance to reach our potential. Through our Built to Connect purpose, we are enabling our employees to create a customer-centric culture that provides value, and this will benefit our shareholders. That being said, we still have work to do. Our efforts this year will be primarily spent on our Simplify and Focus pillars. This foundation will better position us to grow profitably through organic investments in the future. At the right time, targeted acquisitions can be pursued and effectively integrated into our operations. This is a great company with an outstanding team and differentiated products, and I'm very grateful for the confidence the board has placed in me to be its next CEO. I look forward to meeting with you over the coming months, and I commit to perform in a way to earn your confidence in the future. On slide five, you can see the end markets we serve through our two complementary segments, ensuring that needed materials are delivered and installed for ongoing infrastructure investments. I recently attended the National Asphalt Pavement Association's annual meeting and was able to connect with many of our customers. I can tell you that they are optimistic, and the interactions were positive as the project pipelines looks very full for 2023 as well into 2024. I will also add that a lot of the work that is planned for this year is not yet being driven by the Infrastructure Bill, as we are still in the early days of those funds flowing into specific projects. Excitement is high, and our customers are anxious to get the solutions we provide. The three pillars of our strategy, Simplify, Focus and Grow, are best summarized on slide six. They align the elements of our performance culture and provide the organization with a common framework to create value and drive returns. Beginning with Simplify. We are optimizing organizational structure by reducing complexity across our organization, starting with the leadership team and extending into select areas. We are focused on consistent execution and driving efficiencies. The current system and process consolidations help enable efficiencies through better reporting and access to data, as well as uncover opportunities for further improvement in our operations. We are also using simplify to help optimize our product portfolio, including which products we make, how we make them, and where we make them. Once we simplify and remove unnecessary complexity, we are better able to focus using the One ASTEC business model to drive excellence in everything we do. Operational excellence is permeating our entire organization, driving a focus on quality and performance into our culture. Performance includes thorough planning and execution. We are further assessing prior strategic actions and are harvesting learnings that will benefit us going forward. Prior strategic actions under review currently include our Drive to 25 initiative, the performance of our Brazil business, our site closures in Mequon and Tacoma, and the integrations of recent acquisitions. We improve as an organization when we drive functional excellence across every part of the company. As we do this, we discover that operational excellence is not only for production teams, but is applicable to all areas, such as commercial teams, where we can elevate the customer experience through after-market excellence. This drives higher customer satisfaction and engagement, as well as growth in our business. Profitable growth will be driven by expanding our parts and service business, our dealer networks, and our international presence. It will also be driven by bringing innovative new products to the markets and by leveraging technology and digital connectivity for our customers. We have great products and a team that is diligently working to develop improvements and enhancements to meet customer needs and deliver solutions to add value. Together, these three pillars of Simplify, Focus and Grow help ensure we have the right priorities to consistently drive profitable and sustainable growth as we bring value to our customers, employees, partners, and shareholders. Moving on to the financial results and the current business environment. We summarize our Q4 key messages on slide seven. I have already mentioned some of these and focus on those comments not yet addressed. Our Q4 results reflect a strong finish to a year that was characterized by challenging and dynamic environments. The global Astec team rose to the challenge by demonstrating our core values, delivering unique solutions, and by providing outstanding customer service to our valued commercial partners. Q4 sales improved 31% compared to last year, and full year sales were up 16%. In addition to the strong effort of our team, we benefited from robust end market demand across both segments. Positive customer sentiment is proving sustainable even in the face of ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, and our record level backlog gives us confidence as we enter 2023. As a market leader in our industry, we develop and deliver technology that enable our customers to be successful. We are taking this same approach internally as we unify existing systems, standardize processes, and integrate solutions with the rollout of our Oracle suite of solutions. Becky will say more about this in a few minutes. Turning to slide eight, I would like to review current business dynamics and how we are responding. As we enter 2023, the demand outlook is much the same as it was during the second half of 2022. Infrastructure projects, which tend to be longer term and less correlated with near-term economic fluctuations, have remained robust, and our customer sentiment has remained positive. This supports our confidence and challenges us to increase output through capacity expansion and operating efficiencies to meet strong demand and convert backlog into delivered product. As funding begins to flow from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, we expect this to provide future revenue growth and visibility. As a reminder, the bill currently runs until September 2026. The health and reliability of the supply chain we rely on has shown improvement over the last year, eliminating some of the challenges we encountered. However, pockets of tight labor conditions are persisting, contributing to supply chain delays. Our procurement and engineering teams have done a good job to identify and qualify second sources when feasible. From a human capital management perspective, we continue to hire and train personnel to increase operation staff and output. At the same time, we are implementing operational excellence initiatives to mitigate future disruptions in our supply chain. Inflationary pressures are stabilizing, but we expect some inflation to persist into 2023. We continue to proactively offset inflation through pricing as needed. We show our historical backlog on slide nine. As you can see, backlog at the end of Q4 is down slightly from the record level we established in the previous quarter. Over the past two years, our backlog has increased 153%, and some moderation is expected. We are making steady progress on our initiatives to convert backlog and expect to see this trend continue as order rates normalize and we increase output. I mentioned earlier how the OneASTEC business model shown on slide 10 has aligned us along a unifying framework and centered us around our customers and markets. It is this alignment on core values that unite us as an organization and keeps us focused on achieving our operational excellence objectives. It guides us in onboarding talent and as we add new employees to meet customer demands. It directs us as we leverage our global footprint to reduce lead times, optimize revenue, and manage costs. It empowers us to better mitigate supply and logistic challenges by building a robust supply chain. This model is a critical component of our success, and I believe it has become an ingrained component of our culture that will enable continued future success. Slide 11 and 12 lay out targeted areas of growth, with our primary focus being the organic growth opportunities shown on slide 11. These initiatives, such as growth in parts and service and dealer expansion, are beginning to gain traction. Organic opportunities offer us the most straightforward and efficient path to profitable growth. We will continue to prioritize these initiatives while we keep our eyes open for selective opportunities to acquire businesses that meet our disciplined, strategic, and financial filters. We are on an ESG journey, as shown on slide 13, that is focused on key areas where we believe we can create the most value. We are still early in our journey, but already we are making progress. Slide 14 show a carbon footprint model where we can employ our materials knowledge, process tools, and telematics to monitor and drive lower emissions. This is an area where I believe we can add even more value, and one that is generating interest from our customers. Staying on the theme of telematics, slide 15 show how we are developing comprehensive digital solutions, including positive contributions from our Grathwohl and MINDS acquisitions. This approach aligns well with our Simplify, Focus and Grow framework as we develop capabilities that improve our operations, elevates the customer experience for our partners, and expands our ability to grow into high-value market opportunities. Finally, bringing these slides together on slide 16, we highlight the ASTEC Digital Suite, beginning with materials in the ground to completed roads and bridges, and then ongoing service. We're providing products and services that differentiate Astec as the industry leader. While I am proud of the progress we have made, I'm even more excited about the path we have in front of us to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. With that, I will now turn the call over to Becky to discuss our detailed financial results. Thank you, Jaco. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin my review of Q4 results on slide 18. Sales were $349.9 million, up 31.2%, with strong growth in both equipment and parts, which increased 45.3% and 11.8% respectively. By region, there was a 32.2% increase in domestic sales and a 27.4% increase in international sales. Strong demand also kept backlog near the record level we established in Q3, coming down slightly as we increased output and order rates are beginning to normalize. Compared with last year, backlog is up 19.7% on a consolidated basis. By segment, Infrastructure Solutions backlog grew 26.2%, while Material Solutions increased 8.9%. Domestic backlog saw the greatest increase, improving 23.3%. International was also up, growing 2.8%. This broad-based increase in backlog across segments and regions is indicative of the robust demand we are seeing in our end markets and the success of our global commercial teams winning business. Adjusted EBITDA increased $22.2 million, expanding Adjusted EBITDA margin 370 basis points to 6.3%. This was primarily due to the net positive impact of volume, pricing and mix that outpaced inflation and higher manufacturing costs due to lingering inefficiencies in the supply chain. We have previously outlined our pricing actions and that we expected pricing to catch up with the rising costs we encountered over the last two years. This quarter, we realized significant pricing, which helped improve profitability and drive margins. We did see an increase in adjusted SG&A, which was up 6% as we invested in headcount, incurred expenses for our transformation program, as well as incremental costs from acquired businesses. We expect margins to further improve as we overcome supply chain challenges and realize additional benefits from our transformation. Adjusted EPS was $0.34, driven by increase in gross profit and maintaining cost controls and OpEx. This excludes costs driven by our transformation program, which will optimize our company for long-term value creation. We also recorded foreign valuation allowances of $5.8 million, primarily associated with our Brazil entity. Our adjusted net effective tax rate for the quarter was 47.6%. For 2023, we expect our normalized net effective tax rate to be in the 23%-24% range. Moving on to slide 19. Infrastructure Solutions sales increased 27.1% to $238.4 million in the quarter, primarily due to strong global demand for our solutions, especially equipment and favorable net volume, pricing and mix. Demand was up for both domestic and international sales, increasing 26.9% and 28.2% respectively. By product, equipment sales were up 42.1% and part sales grew 6.6%. Segment gross profit increased 34.3% to $48.2 million, and gross margin increased 110 basis points to 20.2%, primarily due to the impact of favorable volume, pricing and mix. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded 280 basis points to 9.7%. Turning to slide 20. Our Material Solutions sales increased 39% to $109.8 million, driven by strong global demand for equipment and parts along with favorable volume, pricing and mix. Equipment sales grew 49.4% and parts were up 23.2%. Domestic sales grew 45.7% and international sales increased 24.5%. Segment gross profit increased 35.6% to $21.7 million. Gross margin decreased 50 basis points to 19.8% due primarily to cost inflation and manufacturing inefficiencies this quarter that offset volume, pricing and mix for the segment. Adjusted EBITDA margins for the segment increased 530 basis points. On slide 21, we highlight the key drivers of our year-over-year Adjusted EBITDA bridge. EBITDA improved significantly in the Q4, up 217.1% to $22.2 million, which caused EBITDA margin to expand 370 basis points to 6.3%. The positive contribution from volume, pricing and mix more than offset the impact from inflation. Negative manufacturing efficiencies due to supply chain disruptions are still having a lingering effect. SG&A were slightly higher due to increased commissions, research and development costs, and the addition of personnel associated with our MINDS acquisition. Looking ahead, we continue to expect further benefit from price realization and the implementation of our transformation strategy. On slide 22, we show full year results. Strong demand enabled us to grow sales 16.3% and backlog 19.7%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 8.8% even with the various supply chain and manufacturing efficiency headwinds we encountered this year, which is a testament to the entire team for performing in a challenging environment. Turning to slide 23. We continued to invest in growth, which brought our cash position down to $62.8 million, reflecting an increase in inventory and CapEx to meet demand and improve productivity and capacity. Our balance sheet remains solid. We expect our cash position to grow as we manage working capital and resolve supply chain disruptions. Our liquidity and manageable debt enable us to withstand a variety of economic situations, as well as support investment plans and return cash to shareholders. Should we need to incur higher debt levels in the future, we will strive to operate between 1.5 to 2.5 times net debt to EBITDA. Turning to slide 24. We maintain a disciplined framework to capital deployment, balancing investments in growth with returning cash to shareholders. In 2022, we spent $41 million on CapEx to invest in projects to improve operational efficiencies and advance our long-term strategy. We also spent $18 million for the acquisition of MINDS earlier in the year to build out our digital platform. Our commitment to return cash to shareholders was demonstrated in the Q4 as we repurchased $4 million in shares and increased our quarterly dividend 8.3% to $0.13 per share. Our Oracle transformation, summarized on slide 25, remains on budget and on schedule. This system will be a key enabler of long-term, sustainable improvements in productivity and efficiency. We will begin to see benefits in the second half of this year as the first waves of solutions are utilized. I am proud of the work our team is doing and excited as we draw nearer to delivering this objective. I will now turn it back over to Jaco for his closing comments. Thank you, Becky. Turning to slide 26, I would like to review our key investment highlights. Despite all the changes we saw in 2022, one thing that has remained constant is our customers' desire for our unique solutions. We have built a leadership position by delivering innovative, high quality products and superior customer service. Our markets are experiencing positive long-term demand drivers from secular trends such as population growth and aging infrastructure. We have been successful in winning business opportunities. As the global installed base of Astec products grow, it creates the need for reliable aftermarket parts that tends to be reoccurring and less cyclical. This strong OEM aftermarket combination, coupled with improving operational excellence, improves our financial returns. As a result, we have a strong balance sheet that enable us to strategically invest and grow. Finally, our commitment to the Simplify, Focus and Grow strategic pillars unites our organization and drives improvement in everything we do. We saw improvements in nearly all financial metrics in 2022 and have made progress on achieving our long-term financial targets shown on slide 27. The plans we have in place, including the Oracle implementation, plus our team's actions to live out our core values daily, gives us confidence that these targets are attainable and that 2023 will be a good year for Astec. I'll close by reiterating the sentiment from my opening remarks. I'm humble and grateful to be the CEO of such a wonderful team and organization, and I'm excited about where we are going and what we can accomplish together in 2023 and beyond. With that, operator, we are now ready to open the call for any questions. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star followed by the 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star 1. Your first question is from the line of Mircea Dobre with Baird. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, guys. It's Joe Grabowski in for Mig this morning. Hey, morning, Joe. Good morning. Morning, Joe. Good morning. Good morning. Jaco, you've been in your new role for about 60 days. Obviously you're not new to Astec, but you are new to the CEO role. Any initial observations in addition to your pre-prepared remarks from your new broadened perspective? Yeah, absolutely, Joe, nice to talk to you this morning. You know, the first 60 days, I visited 12 of our U.S. facilities, I met with, you know, a significant number of people on all levels in the organization. You know, one thing that's very clear to me is that we have a lot of good people in our organization. A lot of people that's very focused on delivering results for us. I've also spent, you know, quite a bit of time talking to customers, visiting various industry events, specifically, you know, the National Asphalt Pavement Association. You know, the market is, the market is very positive. Our customers has a lot of work to do, obviously that provides us some confidence for this year. We've also made some structural changes on our executive leadership team. You know, I think the structure will position us very well for a company of our size. What I'm more excited about is that, you know, we're putting the right focus in the right place in the organization. We spend a lot of time communicating with our organization around the change, interacting with employees on multiple occasions. You know, very positive first 60 days, lots of work, a lot of traveling going on. I think we have a strong organization behind us and, you know, even more important, our customers are very positive for this point in time. Got it. Okay, great. Thanks for all that color. I guess my next question would be, you know, it looks like guidance is still suspended. Becky Weyenberg did mention that you expect margins to continue to improve. Any other thoughts or color you could give on 2023 earnings drivers? Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously as part of our Simplify, Focus and Grow, we're gonna continue to drive our operational excellence. I think we have strong teams in place now. As you guys know, you know, the volatility in the supply chain is still there. Our teams are working hard to minimize supply chain disruptions and, you know, as that improves, we should see a positive effect on margins. Steel pricing is a little bit fluctuating, as you guys very well know. You know, we've seen steel pricing moderating a little bit. Recently turning back upwards. The other positive thing is that we have seen some stability with regards to, you know, employee turnover and actually our ability to hire employees. You know, that will help us as well, creating a stable environment and improving efficiencies in manufacturing. We invested significant amount of money last year in CapEx, and, you know, those projects as I walk through our facilities is very visible. Equipment is getting commissioned and the benefits are starting to flow through our operations. We're continuously working on pricing. You know, as you guys seen, we've had a positive effect on pricing this year and we're gonna continue to work on that. Got it. Okay. If I can squeeze in one more last question? You know, your sales in the quarter were the highest since the pandemic by a, by a pretty sizable amount, yet the drag on EBITDA for manufacturing efficiencies, you know, got a little bit worse. Maybe kinda talk about supply chain production and kind of the, I guess, the yin and yang between the fact that the sales were much higher, but the efficiency drag didn't get any better? Yeah, I can take a first stab at that one as well, Joe. You know, obviously, supply chain disruptions are not over yet. We've seen that specifically, you know, more in our mobile equipment side, where there's obviously a large number of parts that goes into equipment. I think it's also important to remember that the Q4, you know, have significant holiday periods in the Q4 with Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays. You know, lastly, we also do our annual physical inventory counts during that period of time, and, you know, that takes some hours out of the shop. I'm positive that you will see that turnaround here in the Q1 again. Got it. Okay. Thank you for taking all my questions. Your next question comes from the line of Stanley Elliott from Stifel. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, everyone. Jaco, welcome to the call. Yeah, good morning, Stanley. Yeah, good morning. Could you talk about maybe what happened on the part sales and the Material Group, a big improvement there? Was that just an improvement on the supply chain or really just kind of some catch-up? Any sort of help there would be great. Yeah, good question there, Stanley. You know, obviously, for me personally, parts is something that I'm very passionate about. You guys will remember with the closures of our Mequon business, that was specifically in the Material Solutions business and created a short-term disruption in the flow of parts. Our teams have been very focused on reducing backlog in that business. Those results are starting to show up. Our teams have also been successful in leveraging our international footprint by getting additional capacity out of our international sites to support that business. You know, as the move plays out and as we get the teams back performing, before, you know, like before we closed the facilities, I think those results will continue to be positive. Perfect. You know, you mentioned international a couple times in the call. You obviously have a nice international background with previous positions. Help us from memory, your legacy asset had some issues on the manufacturing side and on the distribution side in the international, as well as on the margin side. What do you think that you can bring to the table? What do you think that the company is gonna do differently this period so that, you know, the international margins and growth profile can be, you know, not dilutive or accretive even to what you all are doing here in North America? Yeah, good question again, Stanley. You know, my view on international is that that is a significant opportunity for our organization. You know, if you look at our traditional market shares, obviously the U.S. is much stronger for us. And I see the international as the international market as a great opportunity for us. However, you know, we need to be smart about it and make sure that we have the right manufacturing footprints and the right supply chain processes. You know, in our future growth, you know, as we make our plans to grow internationally, finding the right footprint and the right supply chain processes will be important for us. You know, delivering products out of the U.S. is not always the best solution and will not give us the same margin. Leveraging our sites, which we've now started to do already that we have, is really important. You know, when the time is right, we will look for other opportunities. Okay. Stanley, this is Steve. I would add to that under our decentralized structure previously, as Jaco said, exporting to those sites, you know, we weren't structured to fully optimize, you know, getting product to those sites. With OneASTEC, considering those as manufacturing sites, it opens up a lot of opportunities for us. Yeah. One other comment there is, you know, we are investing in specifically, you know, our site in Northern Ireland, in Omagh. You know, that facility will become a very important part for us to service the region there. You know, we're very well aware that if we wanna have good margins and good profitable business, that we have to be local, and we have to be great at manufacturing and logistics in the local markets. That makes great sense. Switching gears to the balance sheet, you know, inventories are up obviously just because of, you know, inflation and other things. Where would you think inventories might finish into next year, end of 23? Maybe the implications for free cash flow. You know, whether you wanna talk about as a percent of EBITDA or net income conversion, anything along those lines would be great. Hi, Stanley, this is Becky. I'll take a stab at that one. Our inventories are up year-over-year, so is our backlog, and we continue to see, you know, good order intake. We're really focused on, do we have the right inventory at the right location for that backlog support? We have pockets where the backlog is larger than others, we're balancing that, but certainly we're challenging the rest of the sites to improve their turns. Across the house, we're challenging everyone to improve their turns. We expect that inventory with the focus we have on it to come down. Just being mindful that it does move in conjunction with backlog. Yeah. Stanley, Steve, I'll jump in as well. That inventory, you know, the largest portion is raw materials, and there's a little bit of WIP that quickly converts to finished goods. Those finished goods are, you know, they go out quickly based on the demand. Primarily raw material build up to support the demand. Perfect. That's it for me. Look forward to seeing you guys in a couple of weeks. Thank you. Thanks, Stanley. Your next question comes from the line of Steve Ferazani from Sidoti. Your line is open. Morning, everyone. I know you don't, you're not guiding for 2023, but a couple of lines maybe you can offer some help if you didn't provide it in the detailed review this morning. CapEx for 2023, how you're thinking about it, and also with the announced, you know, limited restructuring, how you're thinking that can affect SG&A. Yeah. Steve, good morning. You know, our CapEx outlook for this year is in the range of $25 million to $35 million. As you, as you know, we invested heavily last year and, you know, the focus is obviously to extract all the benefits of those CapEx investments. Yes, we did announce the limited restructure and, you know, we see an SG&A run rate of about $56 million to $60 million. Becky can maybe provide a little bit more color on the SG&A run rate. Sure. Steve, with the SG&A run rate, we do think we'll be pretty flat year-over-year on a% of sales basis, we're trying to leverage the sales, we should expect that to stay flat. We're taking some restructure, limited restructuring actions. Not necessarily all SG&A, we are also, you know, acquired MINDS, which is software engineers, that all sits in SG&A. We have an uptick related to that acquisition 'cause of where those people sit. All in all, we expect that it will largely remain flat as it moves with sales. Also as a reminder, CONEXPO this year, Q1 we always see an uptick and not that this is all SG&A either, but just, I'll throw in that we're continuing to roll out our systems, we have some incremental things going on in Q2. We've got a lot of launches going on this year with those products. It'll be a little bit lumpy, but it's still, it'll be pretty flat with last year. Leave it at that. Yeah. you're aware this CONEXPO-CON/AGG. As a percentage of sales, correct. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, Steve. and I know you're aware of this, so are many others, but the CONEXPO shows once every three years. Yeah. Great. two months into the year, can you give any look at how order trends are going? Obviously, this was the Q1 we saw backlog down. I know part of that is the significant sales increase, maybe it was year-end. Can you give any sense on order tracking for the early part of the year? Steve, I can do that. You know, as I mentioned, when we met with a significant amount of our customers at NAPA, you know, everybody was still very optimistic. We don't believe that a lot of the money from the infrastructure bill has flown yet. We trust that that will continuously support our order intake. But just, you know, just for January, we've seen an $8 million uptick again in backlog. Really? Good, good, trend continuing. Great. Great. You know, talked to a lot of companies that are sitting on very significant backlog, and it's provided them the flexibility to be much more aggressive, on the pricing side. Simply because you're sitting on this much backlog, you can be willing to lose lower margin business. How do you think about that equation? Yeah. You know, good question. I think, you know, it's much easier to move pricing on parts and services, you know, as your supply chain moves pricing. On capital equipment, obviously, you have to think a little bit forward and anticipate. So our teams are continuously reviewing pricing. I think, you know, we are in a much better position today than what we were in the past. You know, one thing to consider is, you know, if a customer buys an asphalt plant from us, you know, that customer has a lifespan on that equipment for 30 years. You know, we definitely don't wanna necessarily lose that opportunity as well. We believe that our teams will be able to offset any additional inflationary pressure for pricing. Okay. Makes sense. Thanks, everyone. Your next question is from the line of Larry De Maria with William Blair. Your line is open. Hey, thanks. Good morning. Obviously a big increase in equipment sales. Just try to dig down into a little bit more so. Can you talk about, you know, volume price mix? I don't know, any big deliveries? Trying to understand if, you know, if it's a catch-up in production or if we're pivoting to better throughput at this point. Yeah. I mean, if you... You know, the reduction in backlog is obviously a function of getting additional volume out. I will say that, you know, our teams have done a really good job implementing some significant CapEx projects. We've also over the last year invested significantly in manufacturing engineering capability. Those teams are starting to deliver results by helping us to reduce our manufacturing lead times and cycle times. I'm positive that we will see further improvements in our output versus what we had in prior years. You know, the fact that supply chain is still disruptive in some of our lines makes it a little bit unpredictable. you know, with that getting better, you know, output will continue to improve, over the next couple of quarters. Thanks. Maybe I'm gonna join two questions into one here. You talked about dealer expansion and strategic accounts, and you also mentioned digital connectivity and telematics. Can you maybe just give us a, you know, right setting of where we are in those, you know, multiple journeys? You know, where we've come from, where we are now and, you know, how much more wood there is to chop, you know? Is all the equipment going out connected with telematics now, or is that in the future? Just kinda right level us on those initiatives if you can. I will take it in three steps there. Let's talk about the dealers. I mean, if you look back at Astec's history, we were primarily a direct market player. On the mobile equipment side, you know, the teams have now significantly transitioned to dealers. What's happened last year was the teams have really put good structure in place around how we manage dealers, how do we agree on performance with the dealers. That process in my mind is really going to drive the performance of our dealers. Our teams have also been successful with expanding dealers across the country. You know, we still have a few white spaces in the U.S., but overall, the guys have done a really good job expanding that. I will say really good progress on the dealer side. On the strategic account side, you know, this is something that I'm very passionate about. As we see consolidation in our customer base, we need to be good, you know, dealing with the larger customers. Our teams have now, I think, found their strides on that. There's still a lot of work to do for us. I think we're just gonna see that improve in the future. On the telematics side, I think we are really early there. You know, with the MINDS acquisition, the Grathwohl acquisition of about two years ago, you know, taking and putting all of those things together with the current technology we have, is something that we are working on right now. You know, at CONEXPO, we will actually exhibit some of the new products. There's still significant runway and work to do before we have all the technology on our equipment. Okay. Very good. Thank you very much. There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand the call back to Steve Anderson for closing remarks. All right. Thank you, Brent. While we're talking about it, you know, anyone who's gonna be out in Vegas for CONEXPO, please stop by our booth in Central Hall and see us. We'd love to show you some new things that we have on display there. Thanks for that. You know, we appreciate your participation on this call, and thank you for your interest in Astec. As today's news release indicates, today's conference call has been recorded. A replay of this conference call will be available through 15 March, and an archive webcast will be available for 90 days. The transcript will be available under the investor relations section of the Astec Industries website within the next seven days. All of that information is contained in the news release distributed earlier this morning. This will conclude our call, but I'm happy to connect with you if you have additional questions later. Thank you all. Have a good day. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.