North American Construction Group Ltd. (NYSE:NOA) Q1 2022 Results Conference Call April 28, 2022 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Joe Lambert - President and CEO

Jason Veenstra - EVP and CFO

Conference Call Participants

Tim Monachello - ATB Capital Markets

Bryan Fast - Raymond James

Maxim Sytchev - National Bank Financial

Yuri Lynk - Canaccord Genuity

Richard Dearnley - Longport Partners

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the North American Construction Group Earnings Call for the First Quarter ended March 31, 2022. [Operator Instructions]

The company wishes to confirm that today’s comments contain forward-looking information and the actual result could differ materially from the conclusion, forecast or projection contained in forward-looking information.

Certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing conclusions or in making forecasts or projections that are reflected in the forward-looking information. Additional information about those material factors is contained in the company’s most recent management’s discussion and analysis, which is available on SEDAR and EDGAR as well as on the company’s website at nacg.ca.

I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Joe Lambert, President and CEO.

Joe Lambert

Thanks, Raine. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. I’m going to start with our Q1 2022 operational performance before handing it over to Jason for the financial overview. And then I will conclude with the operational priorities and outlook for 2022 before taking your questions.

First off, I want to state upfront that you’re going to hear about what I call booming market issues, in which during these times of high demand and high commodity prices, we face skilled labor shortages and inflationary pressures. I can ensure you we are not complaining and we fully understand that booming market issues are much more desirable than the alternative.

Secondly, and as an overall theme for today, our outlook remains unchanged as we believe our long-term contracts, transparent client relationships and long-standing experience, together with our well-maintained fleet, will serve us well in managing through these inflationary times.

With that, I’ll get into the deck starting off on Slide 4, where we have had a slight uptick in our total recordable rate, but remain close to our industry-leading target frequency of 0.5. And we’ll be focusing our efforts on further developing our green hand new hire training programs, reducing hand and lifting incidents and prevention of high potential injury events.

On Slide 5, we show the diversification of our business across commodities and customers, 4 investment-grade companies, mining bitumen-rich sand, which we have been working for continuously since their inception, including 2 that we have working relationships dating back to the ‘70s.