Mark Stauffer
Analyst · Stephens Inc. Your line is open
Thank you, Shane. And thanks for joining us this morning. I'd like to first thank our 2,500 coworkers for all their hard work, dedication and commitment to our Company. It’s through our combined efforts we strive every day to safely meet our customers’ needs, while working towards our strategic objectives. I'm pleased with our start to 2018. During the first quarter, we had solid execution with continued strong market drivers. While weather patterns impacted production in our Concrete segment, our Marine segment experienced solid execution. Additionally, we continue to see strong end market drivers across our business, and we continue to expect 2018 will see improvements over 2017. As we go forward, we will continue to execute on our strategy of seeking to be the premier specialty construction company focused on providing solutions to our customers across the infrastructure, industrial and building sectors, while building our market share and enhancing our operations in these areas. We will continue to look for opportunities in these areas through both greenfield and M&A efforts. As we previously discussed, we made several changes within our Marine segment during 2017 to solidify and improve our operational results, while continuing to provide high-quality services to our customers. As we saw the in fourth quarter of 2017 and the first quarter of 2018, these changes are helping to produce improved operational performance and leading to solid bottom line improvement. We have been and continue to be committed to our Marine segment and providing quality services to meet our customers’ unique needs. Within our Concrete segment, we will continue to focus on expanding our services and market share in our Central Texas Dallas-Fort Worth market, while focusing on maintaining market share in Houston. We believe there continues to be solid demand drivers for Concrete segment, and expect to see continued long-term expansion and growth opportunities. Finally, I’m pleased with our efforts today in the industrial. While leveraging our skill set and customer base, we are expanding our addressable market to provide high-quality services to meet more of our customers’ needs. We are pleased with progress in this sector and expect to see further opportunities throughout 2018. As we’ve stated before, we will continue to work to deploy new capital to high return high free cash flow businesses with a focus on increasing our return on invested capital. We expect to continue to see solid demand drivers across the infrastructure, industrial and building sectors. Additionally, with the favorable macro economic conditions we see, we believe conditions exist for improved bid pricing. And we remain hopeful that markets will recognize the prevailing positive conditions and adjust accordingly. The infrastructure sector, which consists of our Marine segment, continues to provide both public and private opportunities to maintain and expand facilities on U.S. waterways. Throughout our operating areas, market fundamentals remain positive and we are seeing pockets of margin expansion. Private sector bid opportunities continue from downstream energy customers as they expand their waterside facilities associated with refining and storage. In addition, recreational demand continues from private and public customers with bid opportunities related to cruise lines remaining promising, as we track projects related to new destinations or refurbishment of existing destinations in the grid. Finally, we continue to see demand from port authorities, which are generating opportunities as they execute their expansion plans to handle larger vessels and increase traffic flow. The underlying fundamentals of our Marine business remain sound with solid demand drivers, bid opportunities and a good backlog. We will continue to provide to be a leading and premier marine construction company. Turning to the building sector, which consists of our Concrete segment. We continue to have solid long-term demand drivers as well. The markets we currently serve continue to retain their positions as leading centers for population growth and business expansion. Population growth throughout our markets continues to drive new distribution centers, offers expansion, reseller and grocery facilities, multifamily housing units, educational facilities and medical facilities. In Houston, we continue to experience a competitive environment, but we are focused on providing high quality services and maintaining market share. We are also focused on expanding our market share and service offerings in the Dallas-Fort Worth market in the Central Texas market, both of which we expect to continue to provide long-term opportunity. In all markets, we will continue our pursuit of structural projects in addition to live commercial work. In the industrial sector, we are continuing our greenfield expansion by combining talent and resources from the Marine and Concrete segments to continue to pursue and execute foundation work inside the industrial environment and other land-based environments. We are beginning to execute work in this sector and are pursuing additional opportunities to build backlog. The massive long-term petrochemical driven opportunities along the Gulf Coast provide significant potential to expand our addressable project opportunity. In closing, we had a strong first quarter and a nice start to our year as we continue to focus our efforts on solid execution of work to produce solid bottom-line results. The combination of strong fundamentals, improving efficiencies in our business and opportunities for targeted acquisitions, we believe we are extremely well-positioned to take advantage of improved economic conditions and increased infrastructure spending. We are also focused on maintaining and enhancing the improvements we've made in Marine segment, seeking profitable growth opportunities in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Central Texas markets in our Concrete segments and continuing to expand our addressable market by pursuing bid opportunities in the industrial sector. We remain focused on delivering high quality projects to our customers with continued expansion of our services across our operating segments and areas. We are excited about the future as we continue to execute our strategic plan and believe we have solid fundamentals for future success. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Chris to review the financial results in more detail. Chris?