Ward Nye
Analyst · Stifel.
No, happy to Stanley. Thank you for the question. I think several things are properly relevant. Number one, are contractors continuing to hire to the extent that they can? Yes. So is that a modest constraint that we see getting better? Sure. Is trucking still in some markets a constraint because of the availability of drivers? Absolutely. I think if you look at the overall public numbers from the railroads as well, it's getting better, but it hasn't been as fluid, I think, as they would have hoped. Here's something else though, that I think is really worth noting, and that is, in a lot of markets, cement is on allocation. So think about what that means as products roll through the process. If ready-mix producers can't get cement later in the week, the fact is they're not going to put down ready-mix concrete, which means they're not going to bring in aggregates. So the fact is that a really tight cement market in some markets can also have a bit of a governor on what overall aggregates growth looks like. So as we're looking at the back half of the year, those are some of the things that we've taken into account as we think about volumes. Now to your point, if we also try to consider what our customers' backlogs look like the customer backlogs are really quite good, and we're pretty heartened by that. What we're seeing right now is, overall in aggregates, the backlogs are about 9% ahead of where they were at prior year levels. So those are pretty heady numbers. What I like in particular is some of the wear on that. So if we look in the East division, which, as you know, is one of our very profitable divisions, that's up about 13% over where it was prior year. But here's one that's really notable, and that is in the Central division, now some of this is impacted by our acquisition of Tiller last year, but Central divisions up about 30%. And then even as we look at West Group, and again, you've heard the numbers on what's happening in the West, particularly in Texas, for example, in cement, that markets is sold out. We're basically seeing backlogs in that market broadly where they were prior year. And even in Southwest ready mix, we're seeing, again, backlog is very consistent, but bidding is remaining very strong. throughout the markets that are so core to us in DFW, Austin and San Antonio. So I hope that's responsive to your question on what we see on volumes and some of the why. But importantly, what we see on customer backlog and in summary, and what gives us that nice confidence as we look out.