WillScot Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ:WSC) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 30, 2024 5:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Nick Girardi - Vice President, FP&A
Brad Soultz - Chief Executive Officer
Tim Boswell - President & Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Scott Schneeberger - Oppenheimer
Steven Ramsey - TRG
Andrew Wittmann - Baird
Faiza Alwy - Deutsche Bank
Angel Castillo - Morgan Stanley
Ronan Kennedy - Barclays
Philip Ng - Jefferies
Operator
Welcome to the Third Quarter 2024 WillScot Earnings Conference Call. My name is Sherry, and I'll be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the call over to Nick Girardi, Vice President, FP&A. Nick, you may begin.
Nick Girardi
Good evening, and welcome to WillScot third quarter 2024 earnings call. Participants on today's call include Brad Soultz, Chief Executive Officer; and Tim Boswell, President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's presentation material may be found on the Investor Relations section of the WillScot website.
Slide 2 contains our safe harbor statements. We will be making forward-looking statements during the presentation and our Q&A session. Our business and operations are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. As a result, our actual results may differ materially from today's comments. For a more complete description of the factors that could cause actual results to differ and other possible risks, please refer to the safe harbor statements in our presentation and our filings with the SEC.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Brad Soultz.
Brad Soultz
Thanks, Nick. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Brad Soultz, Chief Executive Officer of WillScot.
As highlighted on Slide 16, our team executed well in Q3 despite a market environment that continues to be worse than we anticipated. On the positive side of the ledger, adjusted EBITDA margins were at record levels at 44.4% and adjusted free cash flow and return on invested capital were also near record levels. And we've continued to advance several key enterprise-wide initiatives that position us well for 2025 and beyond.
On the negative side, non-residential construction start square footage was up 14% year-over-year in the quarter and are now tracking 15% below 2019 levels. Consistent with that contraction, we saw delays in a lot of the encouraging order activity in our pipeline in Q2, which both impacted the quarter and makes us more cautious towards the end of the year.