Capital Markets Day Transcript - KOP 2026-09-17

Speaker 9

Good morning, everyone. I'm Quinn McGuire. I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations for Coppers, and welcome to today's 2026 Coppers Investor Day. We appreciate that you're joining us, and we look forward to sharing our story today. We've posted materials to the Investor Relations page of our website at www.coppers.com that will be referenced in today's discussion. This event is being broadcast live on our website, and a recording will be available for replay for one year. Before we begin, I'd like to note that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. Certain comments made today may be characterized as forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, including risks described in the cautionary statement included in our presentation and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking statements included in the company's comments, you should not regard the inclusion of such information as a representation that our objectives, plans, and projected results will be achieved. The company's actual results, performance, or achievements may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during today's discussion. References may also be made to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The company's presentation, which is available on our website, contains reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. And I'll now turn the discussion over to Leroy, our CEO of Coppers.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Okay, fantastic. Thank you, Quinn. Appreciate that. I want to start off by welcoming everybody that's in the room here today, as well as those who have decided to join us virtually, to Copper's 2026 Investor Day. Now, for those I haven't met, I'm Leroy Ball, CEO and Board Chair of Copper's, and I recently enjoyed my 16-year anniversary with Copper's, having joined the company in September of 2010 as first as Chief Financial Officer before stepping into the role of CEO in January of 2015. As we gather here today in mid-September at the start of a new college and professional football season, I'm reminded that a few things that capture the power of hope quite like the beginning of a new season. Every team starts with a clean slate and a renewed belief in what might be possible. Yes, dare I say it, even Cleveland Browns. I hope we don't have any Browns fans in the audience here today, but there's hope that the lessons learned from past setbacks have made us wiser and stronger, and hope that the countless hours of preparation, sacrifice, and hard work will pay dividends when moment of truth arrives, and hope that this could be the season when all that effort, discipline, and perseverance finally come together to achieve something extraordinary. And that's what makes the start of a new season so exciting, right? Now as I step back and I think about how the hope and excitement of a new season correlates to coppers, I can't help but think that the same sense of possibility applies to us. We've learned from our challenges, we've strengthened our capabilities, and we've continued to invest in the future. And like every team taking the field this fall, we have every reason to believe that the work that we put in can translate into something special in the season ahead. And today you'll hear from several members of our leadership team who will share important updates on our company, the progress we've made during what I would characterize as our preseason here in 2026, and our plans to achieve higher levels of performance in 2027 and 2028. We've laid the foundation, we've put in the preparation, and now we're focused on converting that preparation into sustained execution that translates into superior results as we enter this next phase of our strategy. Now, before we look ahead, however, I'd like to begin with a brief overview of coppers for those who may be newer to our story. You know, coppers has evolved significantly over time. In 2014, we began transforming from a legacy carbon materials company and railroad company into a wood preservation technology leader through a series of strategic acquisitions. These include what are now the cornerstone of our growth strategy, performance chemicals, or what we refer to in shorthand as our PC business, and utility and industrial products, or UIP. Meanwhile, our two legacy businesses, Railroad Products and Services, also known as RPS and Carbon Materials and Chemicals, or CM&C, have been asked to step back in prominence to play a different role in our go-forward strategy, but they still remain an important part of our value creation story you'll be hearing multiple references to these names and acronyms throughout this morning today our 1800 team members around the world provide wood preservation technologies carbon compounds and services that support critical infrastructure and guided by safety and sustainability we help enable the movement of goods the delivery of power and connectivity and the creation of outdoor living spaces our products often operate behind the scenes but their impact is everywhere. They help produce the aluminum that goes into the cars we drive and the airplanes that we fly on. They protect the cross ties that keep rail networks moving the goods that power our economy. They preserve the utility poles that deliver electricity and support the communications infrastructure connecting us to the digital world. And they protect the wood used in the decks, fences, docks, and outdoor spaces that enhance everyday day life. Simply put, coppers helped build and preserve the infrastructure that keeps the world moving, connected, and growing. And with that perspective in mind, let's get things underway with a look at today's agenda on slide two. Now, I'm going to kick things off today with an overview of the company, which will include a summary of the portfolio transformation that has occurred during my time at the company, as well as an update on Catalyst, the enterprise-wide transformation of our operating model that we launched in 2025. And of course, I will get into rationale behind our 2028 strategic plan next stephanie possibly our chief legal and strategy officer will discuss in greater depth how we are executing our strategy which is designed to enhance value creation for our shareholders she'll then follow that up by moderating a discussion with our business leaders on the various initiatives that they're overseeing and their impact eric brenner our chief financial officer and treasurer will then outline the financial framework supporting our strategy including our path to 15 or higher adjusted the EBITDA margins, and $300 million of cumulative free cash flow through 2028. Then I'll return to wrap up and open the floor up for Q&A. All right, Quinn has already gone over the safe harbor statement, but I do want to say that everything here today leads back to a single unifying theme. We believe that coppers is well positioned to accelerate performance, expand profitability, increase cash flow, and deliver meaningful value for shareholders for years to come. And here's how. Slide four captures the investment thesis for coppers in a single page. We've reshaped the portfolio, we've completed much of the heavy investment, and we've installed a more disciplined operating model. We're now positioned to convert that work into stronger margins, greater cash generation, and higher shareholder returns. Now, most recently, we launched Catalyst, our enterprise-wide operating model transformation. Catalyst is fundamentally changing how the weed drive performance improvement across the organization by bringing greater structure, discipline, accountability, and transparency to how we identify, prioritize, resource, execute, and measure improvement initiatives. And as a result, we've already seen a meaningful step change in cash flow generation, reaching levels well beyond anything previously achieved in our history. At the same time, we've sharpened our capital allocation approach, directing discretionary investments toward the most attractive areas of our portfolio, particularly PC and UIP, while returning substantial capital to shareholders through dividends, share repurchases, and debt reduction. Now, taken together, these actions are creating a stronger, more resilient, and more focused coppers, and they're also establishing the foundation for what we believe will be the next phase of value creation, one that's characterized by stronger profitability, higher cash generation, disciplined capital deployment, and increased returns to our shareholder base. If we move to slide five, I'm going to show you what I mean. To start, coppers begins from a position of strength as a market leader in critical end markets. The diversity in our end markets is a strength that's often undervalued as our business risk is spread across several distinct end markets. It's this diversification that helps moderate the effects of downturns or disruptions in any one particular end market. The vertical integration of our chemical and wood treatment business is another aspect of our model that is often misunderstood. As others in the treating industry have dealt with quality issues, we've been able to bring our direct chemical expertise to the table to assure customers that we have experts in-house to address their concerns. And I believe it has directly led to coppers being the preferred supplier at several major customers. And with most major investments behind us, we're primed for a breakout with a little market tailwind. But even if markets remain subdued, we have a model that can still generate cash at a rate that is top tier with our cash flow yield comfortably in double digits at our current share price. Moving forward, each business uniquely contributes to copper's value creation strategy. With RPS growth being limited as a pure repair and replacement business, it's all about optimizing our cost to serve by maximizing the utilization of our asset base in order to maintain our leading market share and generate cash to deploy to PC, UIP, and to shareholders. For CM&C, the end goal of driving maximum cash flow is the same as RPS, but we'll get there by better managing the inherent risk and volatility in the business that has experienced large swings in raw material costs over time and higher operating and capital costs for safety, environmental, and plant reliability. PC and UIP are positioned as our higher growth, higher margin, less capital-intensive businesses where we look to continue investing to earn greater market share that results in higher sales and increased profitability in cash. As PC and UIP grow to make up a greater proportion of our top line, our consolidated margins and free cash flow will expand in turn. Now, if we drill down another layer on slide six, you can see more details on the four businesses across three segments, all of which will serve critical end markets or support essential infrastructure. And together, they provide a balanced platform for managing risk, strengthening our market position and our treating business, and supporting a more diversified earnings base that smooths out the peaks and valleys of the economic cycle. As an example, our performance chemicals business is the recognized market leader in developing treatment solutions for the wood preservation industry, holding 139 patents, including the patent for Micropro, the current industry standard for residential lumber treatment. And clearly the cornerstone of our portfolio, PC is a global business that generates attractive high teens margins, and it's a business that we intend to build around. Our utility and industrial products business does the bulk of its business in the U.S., but also is the leading utility pole supplier in Australia. With an attractive margin profile, our smallest geographic presence, and macro demand drivers that make this the largest growth opportunity in our portfolio, UIP is being targeted as a prime option for growth. Our railroad products and services business is a major supplier of cross ties to all six Class I railroads, as well as commercial rail customers. And while this will never be our highest margin business, I believe we can continue to optimize it by applying our catalyst principles, generate adequate returns, and use the cash to fuel growth in PC and UIP. And finally, our carbon materials and chemicals business serves most major aluminum producers in North America, Europe, and Australia, while also operating as a key supplier of creosote to the North American rail crosstie industry. And with a structurally declining coke industry in developed countries, we've reached a point where our industry needs to think hard about how we work together to remain viable for our customer base that relies so dearly upon the key products that we supply, such as creosote and carbon pitch. We are the number one or number two player in most of our markets, which are heavily concentrated. And we maintain that position by delivering superior quality, service, and safe operations. And the journey to our current portfolio can be explained in three phases, as the next slide will show. slide 7 highlights more than a decade of deliberate actions that have transformed coppers into the wood preservation technology leader of today 2014 to 2020 served as the portfolio transformation phase we began the shift away from carbon products to focus on wood preservation first by acquiring osmos which is now our performance chemicals business and also cox industries which is our utility and industrial products business and during this period, we closed or sold eight of 11 CM&C facilities. We exited production in China and continued to prune the other parts of our underperforming portfolio by selling or shutting down five additional operating sites. Now, the year before this transformation began, CM&C made up over 60 percent of our top line and over 50 percent of our adjusted EBITDA. And by the end of 2020, that has been flipped with PC and UIP making up over 50 percent of adjusted EBITDA and CM&C just over 20 percent. Now this happened by adding leverage which had been as high as 5.1 times on a pro forma basis but by the end of 2020 had been reduced to three and a half times. Now 2021 to 2025 was our expand and optimize phase and it was during this phase that we made heavy capital investments across all four businesses that have brought us to where we are today. We expanded service to higher value carbon product markets by investing in enhanced carbon products line in CM&C Denmark, while exiting the lower-value thallic anhydride business at our Stickney, Illinois We bought a crosstie procurement business, enabling us to increase profitability at our Canadian plant, and built a new crosstie treating facility at North Little Rock, allowing us to close our Denver treating plant and consolidate production. We invested in our Leesville, Louisiana utility pole peeling and drying facility to better serve the southwest market. Then we acquired the brown wood-preserving utility pole business, which gave us greater access to the larger Midwest market, and most recently acquired the Green Hill Reload, a Doug Fir procurement business, which expanded UIP's product portfolio. Now, key investments in our micronized copper production and the addition of DCOI to our industrial preservative portfolio helped PC reach new heights in profitability before taking a step back in 2025 with the loss of some market share. Now, we were on a path to reach our 2025 target of $300 million in adjusted EBITDA, but a combination of that PC market loss, the Russia and Ukraine conflict, tariffs, and a generally softer demand environment in PC and UIP prevented us ultimately from reaching that goal. It did not, however, stop us from doing what we do best, which is finding other ways to attack the challenges, and thus Catalyst was born. So as we move to the next phase of our strategy, from 2026 forward, we plan to accelerate cash generation through Catalyst by capturing the full benefits of significant investments made during our expand and optimize phase and that's what makes our investment story attractive since the major capital projects are complete we can focus on further optimizing the portfolio and harvesting cash to reduce leverage and share count as we look patiently for opportunities to grow in pc and uip we exceeded our initial 2025 catalyst target of 40 million dollars in benefits by generating 46 million in total in that year And in 2026, we're already delivering meaningful benefits and working capital improvements. And through two quarters, PC and UIP make up now two-thirds of our year-to-date adjusted EBITDA and just under half of our sales. And we expect those numbers to climb in the coming years. With a track record of actively managing our portfolio, Catalyst now provides the foundation for our next phase of profit optimization and cash generation. It's a really good story. If we turn to slide 8, we'll get deeper into that story. We can see how Catalyst is reshaping how we operate, make decisions, and deliver results. By identifying, evaluating, and implementing ideas from across the organization, we are strengthening our competitive position and increasing scalability. The early successes give us more confidence in this framework. And as I stand in front of you today, we're reaffirming our commitment to generate 90 million of benefits to annual adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2028 through a combination of commercial growth and cost savings, which when added to the 46 million of benefits captured in 2025, would bring total catalyst benefits from 2025 through 2028 to $136 million. Now, beyond 2028, we'll continue incorporating catalyst into our annual planning process to drive execution and improve performance. Now, Catalyst is not a one-and-done cost reduction exercise, as can be seen on slide 9. It's how we do business across our operations, and it's delivering meaningful returns. We've identified initiatives expected to generate $90 million in recurring annual adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2028 across several key areas. In the category of commercial excellence, we are targeting to generate $40 to $53 million of benefits by improving our right to win through a combination of rededicating ourselves to key customers, pricing actions, doting out our network to open up new regional markets, and adding technology to improve our sales team's effectiveness. The category of network rationalization, which is set to generate 15 to 22 million of benefits, always seems to get the most attention because it's the easiest to understand and monitor. We can see when production is stopped at one location, and we can just as easily tell when it's ramping up at another. We have been operating the plant consolidation playbook for a long time with our announcements this year that we'll be ceasing operations at Stickney, Florence, and Vance, just the latest in a long line of adjusting to changes in market conditions. Now, the remaining categories of manufacturing, procurement, and other cost savings are estimated to generate another $20 to $30 million of annualized benefits. And the important point is that these, again, are recurring benefits measured against a consistent 2025 baseline. And they're helping to offset today's headwinds, which have been massive. To date, they've enabled us to combat the challenges of a stalled housing market, a pullback in crosstie replacements, an unpredictable tariff environment, inflationary costs, and a carbon products market upended by two wars while also still generating historic cash flow. The value of these initiatives should become visible as markets improve and the benefits flow through on top of a healthier earnings base. So now I want to take the opportunity on slide 10 to dig a little deeper into an important Catalyst case study that epitomizes our mindset as we approached Catalyst, and that's that everything was fair game for evaluation. And with that in mind, we conducted a thorough review of our organization design, which was an exercise that had never been conducted before at Coppers, to my knowledge. And while the hard dollar benefit opportunity is important, I'm actually most excited by the doors that our redesigned organization opens for us to capture even greater value in the years to come. We designed the organization around five guiding principles. One, centralize where scale matters. Two, streamline and simplify before adding resources. Three, push down, out, or automate transactional work. four invest where or five invest where capabilities create value and align for execution let me provide a couple of examples here so a shining example of where we look to centralize where scale and standardization matter is in the financial planning and analysis or FP&A function our former structure at FP&A roles in some businesses but not all and where we had them they reported into our business unit heads now this made FP&A reporting extremely difficult to standardized, so we were getting varying quality of information from each area, and we had no consistent view of performance below the headline metrics that we could point to across the enterprise. We've now addressed this with FP&A resources in each business that roll up to a corporate FP&A leader who can ensure that our one coppers model is applied consistently across the enterprise and vastly improving the value of our reporting and analysis. Before the change, we had handful of analysts that operated mostly independently, providing analysis that they thought important in a format of their choice. We now have a team of professionals that provide critical strategic decision support, acting as a true partner to our business leaders while adding the value of efficiency, quality, governance, and scalability that comes with a centralized function. Another example is where we are strengthening our capability or risk judgment and value matter. As we benchmarked our spend across functions, we confirmed what we had long suspected, which is we've continually underinvested in our IT resources over time, and as a result, we're leaving value on the table. In addition to investing in a new ERP platform that we're in the process of implementing, we've added roles to bridge the divide between the businesses and IT. Now, this will enable us to derive the most out of our enhanced systems while also adding AI and data enablement capabilities to help us harness the vast possibilities that exist to work smarter, faster, safer, while also spending less to do it as we increase our levels of productivity. And the last example I'll leave you with is related to designing the organization for execution, not theoretical performance, and it's reflected in the change and responsibilities of the members of my team. Effective September 1st, Stephanie Apostolou assumed the role of Chief Legal and Strategy Officer, adding oversight of Catalyst and our Transformation Office to her responsibilities, with the rationale of creating a stronger link between strategy and the execution elements connected to Catalyst. At the same time, Jim Sullivan, who is overseeing Catalyst as our chief transformation officer, has now shifted his focus to the restructuring and transformation of CMC. Christian Nielsen continues to lead CMC globally and manage day-to-day operations, but Jim is overseeing the Stickney closure, the disposition of the remaining assets at Stickney, and the evaluation of options to further reduce our risk and exposure in CM&C markets. There's no one else in our organization who has that depth of experience, and the fact that I specifically asked Jim to take on these responsibilities demonstrates our commitment to designing the organization for execution. Finishing this off, our CFO, Eric Brenner, has now added oversight of procurement and logistics to his responsibilities, which will bring a greater focus to process standardization and analytics. This will help to ensure that we're capturing the full value available across our supply chain and working capital while continuing to deliver value to our customers. Going through the org design was an intense six-month process that's put us in a much better position to succeed. Responsibilities have been clarified. Key capabilities have been added where lacking. Roles have been better aligned to create value, and an expectation of accountability for performance is now clearly understood throughout the company. So now I want to shift gears and begin to give you a closer look at how each of our main businesses plan to maximize their operations to serve customers, generate results, and contribute to a higher level of performance. So on slide 11, I'm going to start with a video that features Doug Fenwick, our president of Performance Chemicals, who will discuss the customer relationships, technical expertise, and market leadership that drive growth in his business.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

Performance Chemicals is a world-leading formulator of wood preservation chemicals for the infrastructure, commercial, and residential businesses. Hi, I'm Doug Fenwick. I am president of Copper's Performance Chemicals. If you took a piece of lumber from a local lumber yard or from a piece that you found in your garage and you stuck it in the ground, it would fail within three to five years, depending on where you were in the country. by pressure-treating in our different preservatives for the different uses that prevents fungal decay, termite attack, even fire attack. And it starts right from the beginning with our Hubble, Michigan facility and up in the UP or Upper Peninsula. The Upper Peninsula facility produces BCC, basic copper carbonate. We're taking millions of pounds of scrap copper from all over North America, bringing it into that facility, processing it, and then circulating that material into our two manufacturing plants in Rock Hill, South Carolina and Millington, Tennessee. So our MCA residential flagship product for residential, we've been in commercialization of that for over two decades now. Its patent is coming to an end in 2029. We don't anticipate patenting causing any massive issues, but we do have new technology coming in right behind it, and that's micronized copper pentalfluthin. There's potential for us to launch that on a small scale next year, and in a bigger scale the year after that. We have a lot of interest in it from our customers, mainly because the penfluthin is a very robust cobiacide, and because it is so robust, it allows us to use less copper. And in a very volatile copper market, that's of great interest to our customers and their retail partners. So from the time that we have an idea in R&D, either from Dr. June or one of his research scientists or one of our field people come up with an idea and they bring it to R&D. From the time that they talk about that to the time it actually gets to market is 10 years. Performance Chemicals recently had a C-level executive say to us, which was very thoughtful, that he no longer views us as a supplier. He views us as a true partner. We continue to look for growth opportunities. We continue to develop very good relationships with our customers continue to provide extraordinary engineering services that help our customers continue to run their facilities at top efficiencies. The new technology coming forward, the opportunity of fire retardants, and the continued growth on the commercial side are all real opportunities for us going forward.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Now, slide 12 shows that Performance Chemicals reported $544 million of revenue in 2025 and an 18.9% adjusted EBITDA margin. And as Doug stated, Performance Chemicals provides copper-based wood preservatives and fire-retardant technologies, including MicroPro, MicroShades, DCOI, CCA, and FlamePro for residential, industrial, and infrastructure and markets. Residential demand is driven primarily by repair and remodeling spending, which is driven by existing home sales and, to a lesser extent, new home construction. Obviously, the interest rate environment and consumer confidence have a lot to do with what is going on in this business and those markers haven't been in a great spot in quite some time. But the industrial drivers are healthier, as evidenced by what we're seeing in our utility business, and they're expected to remain that way over the next several years. Bottom line is if you've ever enjoyed a summer afternoon on a backyard deck, chances are you are walking across wood that's protected by PC treatment solutions. Our technical expertise, engineering support, and regulatory knowledge differentiate coppers and help drive growth, customer satisfaction, and profitability. Now, continuing to slide 13, next up is a video featuring Jason Bach, our Vice President of Utility and Industrial Products, who will discuss the growth opportunities and competitive advantages driving this business.

Jason Bach, Other

We sell poles to help our customers supply power to the communities and ensure that the power continues to stay on, light stay on. My name's Jason Bach. I'm the vice president of the Utility and Industrial Products Group at Coppers. Well it all starts in the woods. We have foresters that go into the woods, mark the trees that would be suitable for a utility pole. We peel them, dry them, and they go through the framing process and then we take the poles, load them into a pressure-treating cylinder and treat it in our cylinders and then sell it to the customers. We're vertically integrated with them and it's a great relationship that we have with them makes it better. We have a steady supply of chemicals. We're able to get what we need when we want it. We have surety of supply and it works out well for both of us. We made a strategic decision to get into the Doug Fir business and there's a number of reasons for that. Doug Fir itself is a huge market in the United States. It's a good portion of the wood utility pole business. So the transmission projects that do use wood poles are going to mostly be Douglas fir. So some contracts specify both Douglas fir and southern yellow pine and historically we've only been able to bid on a southern yellow pine portion and now we're able to bid on both the Douglas fir and the southern yellow pine portion which a lot of utilities want. Utility poles in the United States are very old. Utility companies are investing in grid hardening. They're using bigger poles. They're trying to replace the older poles that are coming of age. You have a grid hardening aspect too, to the demand story over the next four to five years. And we expect the market to grow. So big numbers, pushing the industry, lots of tailwinds supporting the business and helping us grow the business. So we feel very confident going into the years ahead that our business will continue to grow.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Now, as outlined on slide 14, our UIP business generated $305 million of revenue in 2025, which was an increase of 5.2% year over year. UIP supplies pressure-treated transmission and distribution poles to electric and telecommunications utilities. And our integrated supply chain, with preservatives produced internally by PC and SiemenC, give UIP customers the added benefit of surety of supply. And it also provides us a friendly conduit to others in the industry, which in many cases provides an inside edge when it comes to considering consolidation opportunities. As a leading utility pole supplier in the U.S. and the largest utility pole supplier in Australia, UIP is the one business where we hold less than 30% market share in our largest market, so we have an opportunity to grow through targeted expansion in geographies that we know well through our other businesses. In terms of pure market demand, grid modernization and AI-related power needs have created a multi-year growth opportunity, which we believe we can participate in, while also growing our footprint and capabilities to serve other parts of the U.S. And while the pace of data center development may vary, the underlying demand for grid expansion remains a compelling growth opportunity that isn't going away anytime soon.

Speaker 4

So next up on slide 15 is Travis Gross, our Vice President of Railroad Products and Services, and he's going to talk about the customer relationships, competitive strengths, and strategic actions that drive this business forward we have to be agile we've got to be ready to shift with market with our customers needs whatever they may be we need to be able to react and i take pride in our team and our ability to do that my name is travis gross i'm the vice president of railroad products and services we primarily we manufacture treated railroad ties the railroad ties come in either by truck or by rail we run it through our ties order that's where we inspect the ties. We grade them. They're then sorted. We incise those ties. We end plate them, which prevents them from splitting. We take them from there. We stack them, and we call it German stacking. We put them up for air dry. They'll dry from 6 to 12 months, depending on the climate and the humidity. From there, we take them down from the stacks. We put them into our cylinders, where we pressure treat them with creosote petroleum solution. We then take it from there, and we bring it out, We package it for shipment, either by rail car or by truck. We can control from the chemical all the way through the treating process. We've got complete control over that. We're looking at the available market that's out there, and we're saying, how can we get the biggest piece of that? But we need to be strategic in the share that we're going after because we have to protect our margin floor. To this point, we've right-sized for the Class 1 demand, but we still have excess capacity. So now we're looking at the commercial markets and we're saying, how can we be more aggressive in the commercial market? What business do we want to target? Because, again, it's all about that volume and throughput through our facilities. And that keeps our unit costs down and allows us to be more competitive. We're focused on attacking our costs so we can be price competitive in the market. And I think we've done a really great job of that. So we're reaching customers that we've not reached before. We're having greater success than we've ever had before. And as a result, you know, we're not only maintaining our market share, but we're growing. We're here for the long haul. We've right-sized our network to the point now where we'll continue to show improvement and profitability. I think we'll be on the forefront of advancements in technology as we move into the future. We're working with our customers and our suppliers on a daily basis, trying to figure out what's next. And we are the leader today, but we want to continue to be the leader into the future. And I think we've got a very, very bright future.

Leroy Ball, CEO

So going to slide 16, we see that RPS represents our largest top-line business at $622 million of revenue in 2025. And our product portfolio includes treated and untreated railroad cross-ties, rail joint bars, and cross-tie recovery services, which serve several aspects of our customers' needs. Demand is driven by railroad maintenance of way spending, which is recurring and replacement-based, rather than tied to new construction, plus ongoing transit investment. Our customers include Class 1 short-line and commercial railroads, as well as transit systems. Class 1 railroads purchase approximately 70% of all crossties produced in the U.S. and Canada, and coppers remains the largest supplier of crossties to the Class 1 railroads in North America, supplying all six. Key strengths include a strong quality system backstopped by captive wood preservative expertise, security of supply through internally sourced creosote, and logistics advantages created by plants located on the rail lines of our customers. It may not be the most glamorous business, but it certainly remains one of the most essential for the transportation of goods and people. So let's move to slide 17 for a video from Christian Nielsen, our Senior Vice President of Global Carbon Materials and Chemicals, who will speak to our plans for repositioning CM&C to streamline the footprint, de-risk the business, and reduce volatility.

Christian A. Nielsen, Other

We are much more efficient than we have been in the past, for sure. There's a lot of focus on energy uses, there's a lot of focus on emissions from the plants. I'm Christian Nielsen and I'm senior rice president in carbon material and chemicals. So we get a lot of different quality of coal time than we put to our distillation plant where we separate it by boiling point. So we have some light products, which are around 20% of our production, which are naphthalene solvent. Then we have a middle section, which are the carbon black and the creosote oil. And at the end, we have the heaviest fraction, which are distilled on the vacuum, which are the pits. and the pits is going into aluminium production as anodes or into like steel production for cathodes. ECP pits in the future will be hopefully used as a coating material for graphite or for the base material for carbon fibers. We do not have the necessary feedstock in North America to keep Stigney running efficiently. The Nubohr plant is also located directly at the sea, which means that we can produce the product in Europe and we can ship it all over to the North American market. We will be able to supply 100% of the aggressive that RPS is needed out of Nubohr. I have no doubt about that. Carbon material and chemicals is set in a really good spot because we have the right location, we have the logistic setup to supply to our customer, and we have a very efficient workforce, and we have a very efficient plant. We have a really good position in the future.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Now on slide 18, Siemens C reported $409 million of revenue in 2025 and an 11.2% adjusted EBITDA margin. Seaman seed distills coal tar into creosote, carbon pitch, and specialty chemicals. And demand is driven by a diverse set of end markets, including railroad infrastructure, aluminum production, steel manufacturing, and construction activity. We serve customers across North America, Europe, and Australia through a flexible supply network. And now, earlier this year, we announced the pending closure of our Stickney facility, and we're shifting production to our Neuborg Denmark facility, which will continue to supply products to our North American customers. Key strengths include our position as a leading supplier of creosote, multiple sourcing options, and vertically integrated operations. Through the actions that we're taking to streamline the business, we expect to significantly reduce production costs and improve cash generation. Even a legacy business like Siem & See is finding new ways to operate more effectively, providing part of the foundational cash to spur growth across the wider company. now our business connects to and operates from our sustainability strategy as seen on slide 19 and this strategy is built upon three foundational pillars people planet and performance and zero harm remains the cornerstone of our culture placing the welfare of our people the environment and the communities where we operate as our top priority this continued focus on the health and safety of our people led to an all-time best safety best safety rate in 2025 and we may be a little behind so far in 2026 in terms of leading activities and serious incidents but even with fewer hours worked year over year we're holding steady on our total recordable injury rate which is a major achievement. Now this is a never-ending push for us as we constantly strive to get to our goal of zero. Additional training and renewed effort to drive environmental improvements are central to zero harm in 2026. Our proprietary environmental metric called TEIR which stands for total environmental incident rate measures a combination of airborne and surface exceedances this coppers developed tool was fully implemented in 2026 to better understand our environmental performance and assess where we can improve and while we're relatively mature on using data to drive safety decisions and improvements teir is our first step to reaching a similar level of maturity and performance on the environmental side our 2025 sustainability report issued in June details our 2030 sustainability strategy, and we are proud of the progress and recognition that COPERS has achieved to date. We intentionally focused on areas that could support sustainability imperatives while providing real business value. We believe we successfully threaded that needle to focus our strategy on the highest impact goals for 2030. Now, everything I've discussed so far leads to a fundamental question. How do these actions translate into higher earnings and stronger cash flow. As shown on slide 20, this bridge illustrates the path from our 2025 adjusted EBITDA to our directional earnings potential in 2028. And most importantly, we are not waiting for markets to recover. While market conditions will eventually improve, our plan does not depend on that outcome. Through commercial execution, cost actions, portfolio optimization, and catalyst-driven initiatives, we are taking action today that strengthen coppers and support our 2028 objectives. Now, the earnings gap created by the contraction of the PC business is precisely what our 2028 strategic plan is designed to address. Through a combination of commercial execution, market share recovery, product line rationalization, and catalyst-driven self-help initiatives, we believe we can restore that earnings power and create meaningful value for shareholders. And a key The key message I want you to take away is this, the majority of the earnings improvement reflected in our 2028 outlook is expected to come from actions within our control. Market recovery and pricing represent additional upside, but not the foundation of the plan. We spent a lot of time today discussing how we're improving the quality of our business, expanding margins, strengthening operating performance, but ultimately values created when those improvements translate into cash generation. After all, EBITDA is important, but cash is what provides flexibility. Cash is what allows us to reduce debt, return capital to shareholders, and invest in the highest return opportunities. And as shown on slide 21, our plan to generate stronger cash flow begins with streamlining our operations and enhancing our business mix. We're containing SG&A expenses, optimizing capital expenditures, reducing working capital requirements, and maximizing cash generation from our CM&C and RPS businesses to be redeployed. With a clearer path to stronger cash generation, our focus shifts from creating cash to deploying it in a disciplined manner. And specifically, we intend to accelerate the leveraging through excess free cash flow, return capital to shareholders through dividends and opportunistic share repurchases, particularly while we believe our shares remain undervalued as they are today, and pursue adjacent growth opportunities by expanding PC and UIP into new markets and geographies where we see attractive risk-adjusted returns. And what I particularly like about this framework is that it's self-reinforcing. By improving our structure and business mix, we generate more cash. That cash then strengthens the balance sheet, supports shareholder returns, and funds attractive growth opportunities. Those investments, in turn, further improve the quality and earnings power of the portfolio. Now, the initiatives I've reviewed are designed to produce measurable results, and here's what success looks like in 2028, as outlined on slide 22. Adjusted EBITDA margins at 15% or higher, which reflects the benefits of our self-help initiatives and a stronger business mix. Three-year EPS CAGR of 10% or higher, which delivers sustained earnings growth for shareholders. Net leverage at or below 2.5 times, which demonstrate continued balance sheet improvement. Free cash flow averaging $100 million annually or approximately $300 million over the 26th through 28th time period, providing the flexibility to invest in growth, reduce debt, and return capital to shareholders. And PC and our RUPS business is targeted to represent 85% or more of the sales, reflecting our intentional shift towards higher margin, more durable businesses. And taken together, these outcomes would represent a fundamentally stronger coppers, a company with higher margins, stronger cash generation, greater financial flexibility, and a portfolio position to create sustainable long-term value. So how do we get there? And the path forward is clear, as we can see on slide 23. We are advancing a disciplined set of priorities designed to strengthen the business, improve performance, increase that financial flexibility, and drive long-term value creation. And we're confident in our ability to deliver. The strategy is clear, the priorities are defined, and our team is aligned. And that brings me back to where I started today. Every new season begins with optimism, but championships aren't won on optimism alone. They're won through preparation, discipline, execution, and a relentless focus on the fundamentals. And over the past several years, we've strengthened our team, we've improved our capabilities, and we've built a playbook designed to create long-term value. The preseason work is almost behind us, and now it's time to take the field. The opportunity in front of us is significant. The strategy is clear. The groundwork has been laid. The Coppers team is ready. And as we enter the next phase of our journey, we believe our best season is still ahead of us. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Stephanie Apostolou, our Chief Legal and Strategy Officer.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thank you, Leroy. Good morning, everyone. I'm Stephanie Apostolou, Copper's Chief Legal and Strategy Officer. I've been with the company now for 15-plus years, and my key responsibilities include legal, strategic planning, the Catalyst Transformation Office, risk management, engineering, sustainability, and the zero-harm functions. Today, as seen on slide 24, I'll be taking you through Copper's strategy for focused value creation. It's a cohesive story explaining how we plan to create durable value across the portfolio with a targeted strategy for each of our segments. After that, I'm going to moderate a panel discussion where you can hear directly from our business leaders about the macro factors impacting each of their businesses, the opportunities we see ahead, and how we're using Catalyst to drive execution towards our 2028 goals. Now, the strategies summarized here on slide 25 are well underway and have begun to propel us towards those 2028 goals that Leroy just outlined. Our Catalyst Transformation Program is the engine driving consistent execution across each segment and function in our business. And each segment has a targeted strategy. In Performance Chemicals, we're focusing on growth via new products and geographies. In UIP, we're looking for share gains and geographic expansion. RPS is maximizing cash flow through operational excellence, and CM&C is taking major actions to reduce risk, volatility, and cash requirements. These are four distinct plays under a single unified operating discipline, all driven by Catalyst and aimed squarely at value creation. Now, before we go into our panel, I want to take a high-level look at each business unit, starting here with PC, where we see several exciting opportunities. First, PC is actively working on go-to-market plans for a number of new products. They have a next-generation residential wood preservative in the final stage of development, and it offers improved performance and reduced copper dependency. PC is also developing fire-resistant infrastructure and building materials to meet rising demand driven by the increased prevalence of wildfires and new building code requirements out west. We're also looking to expand PC into new growth markets, And the first example of this is our brand-new Brazil CCA manufacturing facility, which is targeted to be complete in Q1, 2027. We're also exploring adjacent chemistries and end markets that leverage PC's technical expertise in areas such as copper, biocides, and other wood products. Another differentiator for PC is its history of commercial excellence that provides for close customer relationships, which I'll explain more here as we get to slide 27. So how does Coppers and PC win? This shows how we turn these opportunities into a competitive advantage at PC. Our dedicated technical support and enhanced R&D capabilities deepen our partnerships by helping our customers solve product challenges and develop more cost-effective solutions. PC is not simply providing a preservative to their customers. They work with their customers on formulations, performance, and process efficiency, and that deepens those core relationships and opens new opportunities. So as we're heading into these 2027 contract renewals at PC, we believe this track record of innovation and partnership also provides an opening to retain share with existing customers and then selectively pursue further share gains. These are just a few examples of growth built on innovation, geographic expansion, and commercial excellence at PC, and you're going to hear more details about this shortly in our panel discussion. Now I want to move on to UIP here on slide 28. You see here that the U.S. woodpool market is projected to grow from about $2.2 billion in 22 and 23 to roughly $2.9 billion by 2028, which is a 4.3% annual growth rate. We believe that copper stands in the number two position in the U.S. wood pole market with room to grow. Our primary opportunities for gaining share are concentrated mainly in the Midwest and Southwest markets in the U.S. And as you're going to hear in our discussion, we have deliberately built and bought new assets over the past several years that have established a network that allows UIP to effectively serve these markets. A growing market plus a fragmented customer base gives us a broad runway for share gain in UIP. We have the infrastructure in place to expand UIP's reach, and we're working hard to generate the sales needed to make our path into these new regions. Now, RFPS and CM&C are going to play a key role in generating cash flow over the next several years, as we see here on slide 29. RFPS now features an improved, streamlined portfolio after the sale of our KRS Railroad Services Group and the shift in our KRR business to a recovery-only model, both in 2025. In our core cross-tie business, we're pursuing a strategy of reset and optimize as contracts with certain Class 1 customers come up for renewal or are open for renegotiation. And in addition, network optimizations are underway to increase utilization at our existing facilities, as evidenced by the idling of our Florence plant, which we announced earlier this year. in cmnc we're moving to reduce risk through footprint consolidation with phallic anhydride production being discontinued in 2025 and now north now all north american supply shifting to our newborg denmark facility as we proceed with the closure of our stickney illinois plant which we announced earlier this year we continue to expect the stickney shutdown to generate the following benefits. $15 to $20 million in annual adjusted EBITDA, $1 to $1.20 of annual adjusted EPS, $8 to $15 million in lower CAPEX, roughly 50% lower CM&C production costs versus 2024, and we've already seen record first half 2023 cash flow. Essentially, we're maximizing efficiency and reducing risk in RPS and CM&C to provide the foundational cash to allow us to invest in more aggressive growth opportunities in PC and UIP. So with that strategic framework established, I want to turn to our panel discussion featuring our four business leaders. I'm going to ask you all to please bear with us briefly as we bring them up and get this place set for our discussion. All right. So please let me introduce you to today's panelists. I'm going to start on my far left. We have Jason Bach, our Vice President of Utility and Industrial Products. Here immediately to my left, we have Doug Fenwick, President of PC. Over here on my right is Travis Gross, Vice President of RPS. And on my far right is Jim Sullivan, President of Copperzinc. Thank you all for joining this morning. I want to start with the same question for each of you. And that is, if an investor looked at your business three years ago, when we had our last investor day, and compared it to today, what would be the biggest change they would see? Jason, let's start with you.

Jason Bach, Other

Sure. Three years ago, investors would have seen UIP as a solid operating business with a focus on the northeast and southeast markets in the U.S., which, by the way, are two of the most competitive regions in North America. Today, you would see a very different UIP than you would have three years ago. Coppers has invested heavily in UIP and its assets and its people in preparation for the demand growth we're expecting in the years to come.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jason. Doug, let's turn to you for that question.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

Three years ago, I think PC would have been viewed as a very high-performing division of Coppers, very strong market positions. The shares we experienced in 2025 are both challenging and, quite frankly, humbling for us. We ultimately made us a better, stronger, and more customer-focused company. Going forward, we're approaching the 27 contract negotiations with some real discipline and a commitment to deepening our partnerships. I believe we're positioned to be a long-term contributor to Copper's overall.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Great. Thanks, Doug. Travis, let's go to you next for that one.

Travis Gross, Other

Yeah, I'd say three years ago, honestly, I think the investment community probably looked at RPS as an underperformer. And I'm excited to say we've made a lot of meaningful changes in our operations. We're way more focused on customer economics, better project execution, improved network optimization. I think that discipline, along with the investments that we've made, put us in a much stronger position moving forward.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Travis.

Jim Sullivan, COO

Okay, now Jim for CMC. yeah sure three years ago investor would have seen cmc coming off one of its best years ever actually was his best year since 2018 but what was happening is we were facing some rapidly changing market dynamics and those dynamics came in the form of a reduced availability of our critical raw material under constant demand which meant the costs went up so you've already heard of some of the actions that we've taken, we've already shut down the phallic anhydride plant and our Stickney, Illinois facility, and we've announced the closure of the entire plant effective at the end of this month, and that will help offset some of these headwinds.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jim. I want to pivot now to get each of your takes on some of the larger macroeconomic impacts hitting your business. So, Doug, let's start with you. Tell us a bit about the markets where you play, how you see those evolving, and how PC is positioned.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

As Leroy mentioned in his presentation, we're a global player. We perform in almost every market around the globe. The current largest market for us is North America, and it's been relatively flat. We've been able to offset that by some share recapture in 26 and some new customer wins. We've been very proud of that. 27 is going to be challenging. We've got some sustained copper inflation, raw material volatility, diesel pricing, etc. We've been talking to our customers since the spring. We historically started talking to them in September, October, and we've already managed to put together a few contracts, so we're satisfied with that, but still have some work ahead of us going forward. We're very well positioned, though, as far as our competition goes with our vertical copper integration, pricing discipline, and our technical capabilities. That all supports our profitability and cash flow initiatives. Industrial growth also, as Leroy mentioned, has helped offset the flat residential market. Pole demand's been strong. Outside of our main competitor, we've been able to wrap up almost every pole manufacturer across the country, as well as our introduction of DCOI. Our new industrial preservatives have been very profitable for the division.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Okay, great. Thank you, Doug. I want to turn now to Jason. Jason, we've been clear that UIP is a business we want to grow moving forward. So why are you confident that the utility pole market can support attractive growth for an extended period of time?

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, great question, Stephanie. First, I'd like to say, like, the demand drivers are durable. And I'll start with aging infrastructure. The average useful life of a wood utility pole is approximately 50 years, you know, plus or minus. And there's a large group of poles right now in the U.S. that are either at the 50-year mark or have passed that need to be replaced simply because of their age. So, you know, that's a good tailwind for our business. And then you have grid hardening, which is essentially the replacement of small poles with larger, stronger poles. And this is being done in response to the increased storm activity that we've all experienced across the country. You know, so another good tailwind to our business. And then finally is load growth. And this is, I think, the most important contributor to what we expect to see as a growing business in the years ahead. Over the last 20 years, load growth in the U.S. has been essentially flat, and now we're starting to see it increase, and it's expected to increase 2% to 3% per year up to 2030 and probably beyond. The main driver for this is what we're all reading in the news with AI and the build-out of data centers, but you also have other contributors to power consumption like increased manufacturing, crypto, electrification of vehicles. Again, all tailwinds for the business that we're excited about.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jason. I want to dig in a little deeper on that point. You mentioned data center demand. And how is that phenomenon impacting UIP specifically? Do you think it's real or is it overstated and hype?

Jason Bach, Other

No, AI demand is real. It's not hype. And it's changing the infrastructure needs across the economy. Over the last 14 years, utilities have increased their spend on CapEx every year. Last year in 2025, that investment was somewhere north of $200 billion. So again, lots of investment. It's increasing, and we expect that trend to continue. Some prognosticators project $1.3 to $1.5 trillion of CapEx investment from utilities through 2030. It's a big number. And that's not a one-for-one translation into poll demand, but it signals the major scale and duration of the investment cycle that our customers are entering.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

So is UIP seeing growth from that increased utility investment yet?

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, I mean, we're experiencing growth. We see strong demand right now. We have a very healthy backlog of orders. And, you know, like I said, utilities are preparing for the AI-driven load growth that, again, we're all expecting in the years to come. There's also another important factor that helps drive CapEx investment with utilities, and that's the rate increase approval by public utility commissions. So a utility cannot increase rates to its customers, you know, many of us, without getting approval from these commissions. and so the trend we're seeing is that these public utility commissions are starting to approve rate increases and that ultimately leads to more capex investment from the utility because they're able to generate more revenue so again another positive another positive tailwind that we're seeing in our business we have one southeast customer who recently announced a hundred billion dollar investment plan to build out infrastructure out to 2032. And that happened following an approval of a rate increase from a public utility commission. So again, the industry pattern is rate approvals from these commissions lead to higher capex plans for the public utilities.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

And one last question for Jason on this point. So how much of the opportunity do you think is underlying market growth versus copper's taking share? And why should our investors believe that UIP can successfully take share from established competitors?

Jason Bach, Other

Right, another good question. Well, first of all, the utility pole market is expected to grow 3% annually through 2030, which will result in UIP growing its revenue in the mid-single digits. As far as taking market share. UIP has operated in and continues to operate in the Southeast region of the United States, which is by far the most competitive region in the country. And we've done it successfully. So we can take our assets and our knowledge and our experience that we've had in the Southeast and use that to grow our business into the Midwest, into the Southwest and the Western States, which we've been doing and will continue to do now, especially with the growing demand. On top of that, we have multiple treating, peeling, and drying facilities located in the heart of the Southern Yellow Pine woodbasket. And we have a strong logistics and procurement system as well. So we've invested in all parts of the business in preparation for the expected demand. And we expect to continue to see growth from both the increase in volume and taking market share as we move into these new regions.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jason. That was a lot of great information. Thanks. So, Travis, I want to turn to RPS now. So how should investors distinguish between the current environment you're seeing in the cross-tie market and the long-term health of that market?

Travis Gross, Other

Yeah, we're currently seeing softer cross-tie demand, but, you know, in my 19 years, I've seen plenty of those purchasing cycles. So I would separate the timing of purchases from the underlying replacement need. You know, our customers may slow down those tie purchases temporarily, but at the end of the day, they have to replace that tie. The tie's going to age, the track's going to wear. So ultimately, that maintenance has to happen for them to keep the network safe. So lowered purchasing today may represent deferred maintenance, and typically what we see with deferred maintenance is higher demand in the future. So we're not attempting to predict the future. We're focused on what we can control. What we can control is our costs, our inventory management, and cash generation.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

So what are you and your team doing operationally, Travis, to prepare for that potential uptick in demand in the future?

Travis Gross, Other

Yes, operationally, we're focused on staying flexible and disciplined. We're aligning our production in inventory with our current demand. We're reducing our working capital. We're managing our costs through actions like Idling Florence, but we're keeping the network ready. Our investments, like North Little Rock, that provides flexibility and capacity for our network. Catalyst provides a structure for that continuous improvement. And so when we see that deferred maintenance create higher demand for our products in the future, we want to be ready to respond and convert that volume into cash.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Travis. So, Jim, let's talk about CM&C. You've got a number of external factors that continue to impact CM&C performance. How's copper dealing with these variables?

Jim Sullivan, COO

Yeah, so let's talk about the external factors first, none of which we can control. So there's three big ones, right? So the first one is the war in Europe, so the Ukraine-Russia war. What that did was took out a significant amount of raw material from that market. And the demand for that raw material never changed, so the costs have gone up. So that's been difficult. And then the other issue that we have on the external factors is a continual shift in steelmaking production and technology. from basic oxygen furnace technology to brew steel which produces coal tar to electric arc furnace technology which just melts scrap steel and there is no coal tar produced so the availability of raw material in Europe and North America have gone down as a result of that and once again that demand has stayed the same so the costs have gone up and the final external factor is the conflict in the Middle East so as everybody knows the conflict in the Middle East has rapidly escalated fuel costs, oil costs. And why that's an issue for coppers is that some of our raw material in certain regions is indexed directly to oil costs. So as the oil cost goes up, our raw material goes up. And normally that will self-sort, but it has happened so fast that we have not been able to pass on those costs in the way of pricing to our customers as of yet. Now, to answer your question about what we're doing about it, so we've approached our customers and said look you know you know the past practice of having long-term pricing contracts is just it's just got to end the world's changing way too fast we have to compress the timeline from when we can reset pricing now we are getting some making some ground on that but we will have a chance to reset those contracts when they're when it's time for them to renew and the final thing that we're doing is we are accelerating or expediting the closure of our Stickney Illinois facility. So we moved that up a number of months, and we're set to be ceased distillation operations at the end of this month.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jim. Doug, I want to go back to you. I want to hear a little bit more from you about how innovation deepens customer relationships and creates additional avenues for growth at PC? Sure, Stephanie.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

Any of you that toured our facility yesterday can see our commitment to innovation. The investment that Copper's made in that R&D center over the last couple of years is significant, and it's gone over very well with our customer base. Our customers really see us as Leroy and Stephanie both said they see us as a partner and not really as a supplier, and that goes a long way in collaboration, working with them on formulation, performance, process, the efficiencies, et cetera. That opens up adjacent markets, new projects that we talked about yesterday, that was in particular one customer that brought us a project that Dr. June's group's been working on for about a year now. That provides not only an adjacent marketplace for us, but additional market share growth with that particular customer. We've got a very strong runway right now in additives, fire retardants, formulations, and industrial applications.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

You also mentioned in your video, Doug, the forthcoming patent expiration for MicroPro, which is PC's flagship residential product. How is PC preparing for that?

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

We're prepared. And again, talked about this in our lab tour yesterday. That was one of the questions that came up. MicroPro's been around for around 20 years now. We've enjoyed some tremendous market growth with that. It is the known standard in North America. And while the patent expiration may create some new entrants, I believe capital, engineering, expertise, as well as regulatory barriers are going to create some real issues for anybody wanting to get into what's already an oversupplied market. In addition to that, as we talked about yesterday, we have our next patented product, MicroPro XP, coming in right behind it. We did introduce it to customers this year. There's tremendous interest in the product, mainly because of the reduced copper retentions in it. But our customers, as I explained yesterday, are battling with price increases this year. And they just thought it was going to be too much in order to do both a price increase and a new product introduction. But we're excited about that product line for down the road. And it's going to give us a strong hold on the market to continue.

Jim Sullivan, COO

Thank you, Doug.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Travis, let's go back to you in RPS. Yes. So I know your team continues to find ways to improve performance and drive operational excellence. Can you tell us a little bit about how Catalyst has changed the way you operate?

Travis Gross, Other

Yeah, I mean, Catalyst has really changed the way that we look at our business every single day. We approach Catalyst's process with a simple mindset, find small, fix small, keep building on it. So we know those big improvements don't just come from one big move. We see practical improvements show up in our business every day, really across the business. So we know that one improvement may not move the needle, but those repeated small improvements across the network really tend to add up. And that catalyst process allows us to share those good ideas across the company. So it kind of become more of a common operating language for us and a way for us to continue to improve. Do you have any examples of where a rail catalyst idea created value somewhere else in coppers yeah i think a good example comes from our roanoke virginia plant so that facility was dealing with premature pump failures and so instead of the team just saying well that's a that's the cost of doing business they asked a question they said well how do we identify that these pumps have problems before they fail so we installed what we call aftermarket pump monitors those pump monitors provide us with real time and historical performance data and it lets us know when something just doesn't look right you know that obviously helps us catch issues a little bit earlier but helps us reduce the replacement cost as well improve that operational reliability so I think that's kind of a practical example of a fine small fix small but you know that idea was generated within RPS but we can we have the ability now through our catalyst process to share that throughout the company and we've seen some of the benefits maybe like in Doug's business as well yeah that was an interesting one that engineering best practice really helped us at our Millington, Tennessee facility.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

We were having similar issues at our grinding and pump issues, and that best practice from Roanoke helped us install similar technology and eliminated some failures that we were having ahead of time as well.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks. Maybe move on now to Jim, where you've got some major projects going on and changes. Jim, pending the closure of Stickney, what benefits do you expect to realize?

Jim Sullivan, COO

Yeah, so we touched on it a little bit, but the benefit from, you know, eliminating the Stigney facility and servicing out of New Borg is we're going to reduce operating costs. I think you had it up on your slide, 50% reduction in operating costs since 2024, so that's going to help. But the other thing that sort of we didn't mention is that it's also going to improve the efficiency of our New Borg facility, and the New Borg facility is already an incredibly efficient operation. So the net result of this move is that we're going to improve profitability for CMC.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Jim, what more can you tell us about CMC overall moving forward?

Jim Sullivan, COO

Yeah, so in the short term, we're focused on a safe closure of Stickney. Then they'll continue down the path of optimization, perhaps better said, continuous improvement. So the operators at CMC are actually excellent. They're very good at removing cost, increasing efficiency. They're just facing some really tough market dynamics. So we're confident that we're going to be able to continue to improve. And then the other thing, you know, we think there's going to be some strategic options. We're going to evaluate those. We'll evaluate those as it relates to, is it going to help us serve our valuable customers better? Is it going to help improve our CMC business or perhaps coppers in general? You know, the goal is improved in profitability and reduced exposure to volatility.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Jim. Jason, let's go back to you. You spoke earlier about the underlying dynamics of the pool market and copper's ability to win. We also talked about the additional investments that copper's has made in UIP. Can you tell us a little bit about how those additional investments have benefited UIP's competitive position?

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, sure, Stephanie. You know, as was mentioned in Leroy's presentation, we acquired Greenhill in 2025, which procures Doug fir poles. Doug fir is an important addition to our portfolio. Doug fir represents a significant percentage of overall wood utility pole sales every year. And with that acquisition now, we can generate revenue and profit from this market. In 2024, Coppers acquired Brownwood. Brownwood includes a large treating facility in northern Alabama and peeling and drying assets in Mississippi. An important acquisition for us, Brownwood is strategically located and supports our expansion plans and provides access to UIP to key future growth markets for our business. And then Copper's built a greenfield site in Leesville, Louisiana, where we peel and dry poles, send them to another coppers location to be treated with creosote, and then sell into the southwest market. A relatively new market for our business, one that we're growing in and plan to continue to grow in in the future.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

And what's the overall outlook for that UIP expansion making an impact on our earnings, Jason?

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, right. So we've deliberately built capabilities ahead of this growth opportunity that I've been talking about here through the presentation. And we're going to fill the network with profitable volume, finish integrating the acquired assets, and, you know, use Catalyst to take costs out of the system. You know, that'll help improve margins. And, you know, we're using Catalyst now to do that. We'll continue to do so moving forward. So our ongoing expansion effort into new markets will ultimately result in more revenue and profit for coppers.

Operator

Thanks, Jason.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Let's go back to Doug now. Doug, we talk about PC being one of our primary areas for growth. Can you tell us what PC is focused on for 2027 and how you see the growth path?

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

Again, outside of the significant price increase that we're going to be passing on next year, we're really focused on profitable volume growth. We're not just looking for units. We're looking for profitable volume growth going forward. We're rebuilding market share through new customer wins as well as international growth. We think that there's some really nice underlying markets out there that we can build some significant market share going forward. We recently, just in this year, there was a bit of a surprise to us. We were able to displace one of our main competitors at a large box store retailer. I mentioned that yesterday during our tour. We were pleased with that. We see continued opportunities in that. But we're also working forward with our customers. We're trying to find customers that really value our reliability, our technical support, engineering, and long-term partnerships.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Thanks, Doug. We also talk about wanting to invest in and around PC to leverage that business as a platform for growth in new markets, adjacent markets, and geographies. So tell us a little bit about which adjacent markets and geographies you find most attractive and why.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

We're looking at multiple bolt-ons right now. Most of them are outside of the United States where we think, again, there's underlying demand and can support growth in our category. Number one we're looking at are two opportunities in South America, one in Asia. Our brand new CCA facility in Brazil, I believe that's been public news for a long time, is finally scheduled to be complete by the end of this year, early Q1 next year, just pending on some weather in final permitting a lot of our analysts and investors probably don't know but brazil is actually our number two profit center it's uh it's a very strong growing marketplace for for pc and we put a lot of money effort into that facility over the last several years it's going to be a very quick return on investment we currently toll blend there right now facility north of sao paulo and one south of sao paulo they've both been good partners with us but any place where we can manufacturer, do core manufacturing ourselves versus total blending is always more profitable for the division. So we're looking forward to that. Our PCR and D center again that we toured yesterday has exhibited to our customers that we are the only wood preservation company globally that's reinvesting in our industry right now. And we're continuing to review new technologies, obviously copper-based solutions, which is our core, but we're also looking at biocides, material protection and wood enhancement.

Speaker 8

Thanks, Doug.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

Okay, to finish up our panel today, I'd like to ask each of you to give me one sentence summarizing the single thing that you want investors to remember about your business after today. So, Jason, let's start with you.

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, sure. I mean, the work and investment that's already been done for UIP puts us in a great position to grow our revenue and increase profits over the coming years.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

For PC, profitable growth. I'll repeat that again, not just growth, not just volume. We're looking for profitable growth, and we're doing that through customer relationships, very strong engineering team, and R&D breakthrough solutions.

Speaker 9

Travis?

Travis Gross, Other

Yeah, I'd like this group to remember that RPS is a resilient cash generator. We continue to improve through Catalyst, and we're ready to react as demand for our products changes.

Jim Sullivan, COO

Jim? Yeah, for CMC, it's a deliberate transition towards a less volatile, less capital-intense business model that will improve earnings.

Stephanie L. Apostolou, Other

All right. Thank you all for your information and insights. That concludes the panel discussion for today. I'm going to ask you all to bear with us again as we pause briefly to reset the stage and let these gentlemen exit. Okay, great. So to wrap things up for this portion of today's program, as you just heard from our business leaders, each segment has a key role in our next era of focused value creation, as you can see here on slide 31. Simply put, operational efficiencies and risk reduction in RPS and CM&C drive cash generation. Growth in PC and UIP drives earnings, and Catalyst is the engine that powers execution across the whole portfolio. Taken together, these initiatives position coppers to deliver higher profitability and long-term shareholder returns. Thank you all for your time this morning. Next up is our Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Eric Brenner.

Eric D. Brenner, CFO

Good morning, everybody. You've heard about the quality of our market positions, the distinct role each business plays in our strategy, and the way Catalyst is changing Coppers. My role is to translate that strategy into financial opportunity. I will address where we are today, including the headwinds impacting current performance, but the focus is where we're going and what we believe Coppers is capable of by 2028. Having joined Coppers approximately three months ago, I'm bringing an outside perspective shaped by prior transformation experience. Based on what I've seen in this business, I am confident that we have a clear pathway to our 2028 objectives. Let me start on slide 33 with a clear statement on how we view the path ahead. We plan to reach our 2028 goals by managing those items in our control. This company has a proud history of making bold moves to reshape its portfolio and aggressively reduce cost. The company-wide transformation will further strengthen execution of this strategy in ways our panel addressed today. I was attracted to coppers because of the company's willingness to embrace change, and I was excited to arrive in the middle of a transformation as I recently led one before. And personally, as we go through this transformation, I've seen firsthand the benefits it brings to our people, our processes, and the financial returns that continue for years. We are well on our way to overperforming in the areas that everyone in this room can agree truly matter. And that's working capital efficiency, cash generation, and the willingness to quickly address emerging risks in our industry. improvement actions are truly in flight across the entire company creating a credible path to stronger margins and cash flow they also help offset our current market headwinds that you heard from our panel in my first three months i've seen firsthand how the catalyst approach is improving our decision making speeding up our execution and driving urgent reactions to the problems that develop. The planned closure of Stickney is one of the best examples, with the team accelerating the closure timeline by three months since the announcement just in May, which will move up planned cost reductions to combat the lower margin environment in CMC. Before moving on to the formal presentation, I wanted to share five key messages for today. First, Catalyst is our enhanced operating model. Second, we expect a structurally stronger cash flow profile as our earnings improve and the recent growth-focused capital cycle moderates. Third, our capital allocation is set around clear priorities and return thresholds. Fourth, greater flexibility will allow us to explore adjacent growth, including M&A into attractive products and markets, but we will be selective and highly disciplined. And fifth, we remain laser focused on returning capital to our shareholders. Let's look at Copper's growth strategy with some context of historical financial performance, as shown here on slide 34. This history demonstrates both the resilience of the portfolio and the meaningful top and bottom line growth, with significant expansion in our performance chemicals segment. The financial trends also show that our current earnings do not represent the full potential of the business. Our trailing 12-month June 26 results capture real short-term pressure. And at the same time, I want to highlight how our trailing 12-month and year-to-date record cash flow performance shows the potential is real. The current results are the starting point, not the destination. Today, the focus is the earnings and free cash flow potential that we are building towards for 2028. The segment history becomes more useful when we connect it to the role each business plays going forward, starting with the next slide. Looking at our business portfolio on slide 35, we'll start with the RUPS segment. The turnaround in this business, as highlighted by Travis in the panel, propelled this segment to annual EBITDA record in 2025. While 2026 levels are expected to fall short of those record levels, we view this as a short-term setback and see multiple pathways to grow EBITDA in this segment. First, as you heard from Jason, the utility pull part of the segment can drive both top and bottom line expansion with durable market demand and meaningful operating leverage with incremental volumes. We built procurement and production capabilities before the full opportunity is visible in our EBITDA. The next phase for the RUP segment and the utility pull part of this segment is conversion. Fill the network with profitable volume, further optimize the assets to lower cost, increase utilization, and turn share gains into earnings that grow faster than revenue. We then look at the rail business. Rail is a resilient cash generator, as shared by Travis, nimble enough to react to demand changes, which is improving further through the Catalyst program. Rail demand is projected to be softer here in 26, reflecting the delayed timing of purchases by our key customers, but that does not represent a disappearance of the physical replacement need. We are aligning our production and inventory today with our current demand. We're taking costs out while keeping the network ready for future growth. This business has been further impacted here in 26 by lower pricing, as we deliberately provided near-term price concessions to a number of strategic accounts to secure incremental volume for future growth. Looking to CMC, this segment is continuing its transition to a less capital-intensive model to lower cost and improve earnings. Closing Stickney and optimizing our supply chain are designed to preserve customer value and margin while reducing fixed cost and operating exposure going forward. As you can see from the drop in EBITDA between 2025 and 26, CMC is working through weaker margins, pricing pressure, and the mismatch in timing of sharply higher material costs associated with the Middle East conflict and flat pricing for the short term, which has limited our ability to pass through the higher raw material costs. In the near term, we are also absorbing stick knee closure costs and transition incremental costs that have also weighed on margins. Our North American sales today have included a higher proportion of non-core sales as we work to monetize inventory out of the U.S. In addition, we have and will incur additional logistics costs in the short term to maintain reliable supply to our critical North American customers during this period of transition. To put a number to the margin challenges we see in the RUPS and CMC segments, I estimate a $45 million unfavorable annual impact EBITDA, With approximately $10 million of that related to the lower pricing in the RUP segment, another $25 million related to the weaker CMC margins, and $10 million related to higher costs due to tariffs and higher freight and logistics costs across all of our businesses. Looking at performance chemicals, our most profitable segment, we see significant opportunities to expand it further. The team has reestablished commercial discipline following the 25 share disruptions. It's winning volume in a flat residential environment and pursuing expansion in a number of international growth markets, as highlighted by Doug. This is high-quality growth, not volume for volume's sake. It is also a strategic effort to improve the balance of the performance chemicals portfolio and reduce customer concentration. Our trailing 12-month growth highlights our progress against these goals, and we're driven to grow this part of the business beyond the high EBITDA watermark of $143 million set in 2024. Across all of these businesses, we are not assuming these market conditions will reverse quickly. The environment may remain uncertain and dynamic. Our confidence in 28 comes from what we can control, not predicting the timing of a market recovery. Catalyst benefits, stronger commercial execution, and closure of high-cost facilities can drive meaningful earnings and cash flow improvement, even if the markets do not improve. if there's one common thread today's discussion it is our catalyst transformation and it remains the most significant source of our confidence in our 2028 financial framework it is delivering hard-fought offsets to near-term headwinds and providing a new way of working that makes the gain sustainable for the long term as seen on slide 36 the quick win phase of catalyst produced 46 million of benefits in 2025 from urgent reactions to the margin hit. These gains were led by cost reduction actions, with SG&A down 15% between 2025 and 2024 levels, with headcount down nearly 22% from the peak in 2024. The second quarter launch of the catalyst in 2025 moved us from the urgent reaction phase toward a repeatable platform for cash generation, capital efficiency, and operating execution. As the pipeline matured, the target of benefits increased from $40 million to $75 million. And today, our target now sits at $90 million of incremental recurring annual adjusted EBITDA benefits as measured against our 25 baseline volumes, cost, and margins. This is fundamentally a self-help plan built to drive improvement without relying on the external environment. We have always pursued self-help opportunities, but Catalyst brought a new performance infrastructure that drives these efforts with greater consistency, speed, and accountability. I've seen firsthand how the new interfaces have sped up decision-making by making clear ownership and success criteria. It has also brought our four business teams together to share best practice, leverage centralization, and technology to improve customer service while lowering cost. We've already delivered $33 million of benefits here in 2026, offsetting market headwinds, and have high confidence of sustaining these gains and delivering an additional $57 million of benefits by the end of 2028. We have multiple levers across our business and across our commercial, production, and procurement work streams. No single initiative drives the plan. The result will be stronger earnings and a business position for double-digit EPS growth. Two recent wins show why Catalyst is an operating system, not a collection of cost-reduction projects, as shown on the next slide. slide 37 captures our first case study here that i'd like to highlight in the rail business we process millions of pieces of timber to create rail ties that withstand decades of weather exposure and heavy rail traffic no two trees no two pieces of timber are the same yet we find ways to consistently deliver high quality rail ties to our customers one of our major costs is downgrading or scrapping untreated timber that do not meet our strict quality standards. Through Catalyst, a cross-functional team set out to upgrade our inspection procedures to reduce waste and lower cost. This team built new performance dashboards, training, and data analytics. The new data and common grading standards improve visibility to income and quality, supplier performance, and root causes of downgrades. With that data, work plans were established and quickly executed for each major type of loss, and the result is improved yield, lower material cost, and better consistency for our customers. Our next example is on slide 38. In indirect procurement, we replaced fragmented purchasing practices that varied across our various businesses and locations with analytics, centralized governance, and a repeatable bidding process. The result is lower operating cost, a consolidated vendor base, and a scalable platform for further improvements. Through this initiative, we were able to consolidate nearly $50 million of spend across our businesses. And by doing so, we were able to lower the cost of diesel. We were able to install MRO inventory at a number of locations that improves working capital. And we standardized safety equipment that supported our sustainability goals while also lowering cost. Both of these case studies show how the team started looking for nickels and found silver dollars along the way. Small operational improvements create meaningful value when they are repeated across the enterprise. These are just two examples of nearly 500 Catalyst initiatives currently underway. Looking at Catalyst from a financial perspective on slide 39, we see our bridge to our potential 2028 EBITDA margin. Our in-flight improvement initiatives support 280 basis points of margin expansion by 2028, and that is our path to EBITDA margin greater than 15% and greater than 10% annual EPS growth. As I mentioned previously, the current market headwinds in RUPS and CMC are driving lower margins today, but we expect those to moderate in the future. In particular, we expect a modest recovery, primarily in the CMC and RUP segments from our current 26 levels. In addition, our improvement initiatives have partially offset these impacts in the short term and will benefit us in all market conditions. Our situation reminds me of walking up a down escalator. We have a clear goal to get to the top and are exerting effort to keep pace and moving ahead of that downward momentum. But as we fight and get to the top, you will see us pick up speed, and we can really make progress against our goals when we hit that flat top. Driving in our favor to support these goals include our underway closure of Stickney with a near-term benefit to our cost. We have other plant and network optimizations in flight that are being completed this year. We also have supply chain and procurement targets underway, like the case study that I shared. And as you heard about from our panel, we're also focused on securing commercial gains to grow the top line. And our commercial plan includes leverage from identified share opportunities, as well as our robust installed capacity in the key markets that we serve. Improving earnings is only one part of the objective. Slide 40 shows that structural improvements in cash flow provide greater financial flexibility and support meaningful shareholder returns. Our 2026 free cash flow run rate is above target, led by improving working capital efficiency in 26. In addition, in prior years, we've de-risked our pension plans, reducing that cash obligation. We also see our cash model improving as the growth investment cycle has been substantially completed. Future capital requirements are lower, and the 26 through 28 cash taxes are expected to remain significantly below our book tax rate of 28%. In the near term, our cash flow will be restricted by our in-flight closure activities. activities. Restructuring and asset closure costs are expected to have a cash impact of approximately $80 million over the next three-year period. I know this is a very large cost, but this is a very high-return project that improves utilization, safety, and cost while lowering our capital requirements going forward. Structural drivers such as improved earnings, lower capex, and better conversion create a pathway to average annual cash flow of greater than $100 million, with further upside as our catalyst benefits are realized and the stickney asset remediation costs subside. With a stronger cash flow profile taking shape, let me turn to how do we intend to deploy the cash. As this audience knows, greater cash generation creates opportunity only when paired with discipline. Our first priority will remain safe and reliable operations. As seen on slide 41, future capital spending is expected to be in the range of two to three percent of revenue going forward, down from an average of nearly five percent in the period of 2021 to 2025. This is a reduction in lower growth capital following the significant investments in that period, as well as lower maintenance capex as a result of our in-flight network optimization efforts. In particular, the closure of Stickney alone removes $8 to $15 million per year of required maintenance capex. After maintaining our assets, we will balance the deployment of discretionary cash between shareholder returns, deleveraging, and selective growth. We are targeting approximately 50% of future free cash flow for shareholders, subject to our revolving credit facility terms and business needs. The mix will flex with leverage, valuation, and the environment. Every dollar must compete for the best risk-adjusted return. We've returned over $187 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. As shown on slide 42, the dividend has grown 10% annually for four consecutive years, and repurchases remain a meaningful tool for per share value creation. A stronger free cash flow profile should allow us to substantially return cash going forward. We will remain valuation sensitive, balance returns with leverage reduction, and preserve capacity for investments that can create long-term value. Increased cash is not intended to accumulate without purpose. It will be deployed against a clear hierarchy with accountability for returns. Slide 43 illustrates that improved cash flow has enabled debt repayment while we've also returned capital to shareholders. We remain committed to a leverage target of two to three times. We may temporarily exceed this leverage range for the right acquisition, but only when the strategic logic is compelling, routines meet our thresholds, and there's a clear path back to our target leverage. The balance sheet target is about financial flexibility and the freedom to act as opportunities appear. The debt-financed Brownwood acquisition pushed up debt and leverage ratios, but it brought a strategic asset enabling our rough segment growth plans with new access to new markets in the utility pool market since the brown wood acquisition we've been working on improvement in leverage through both the expansion of earnings and repaying debt i'd also like to highlight that the at the end of june we had 390 million of liquidity and no significant near-term debt maturities as cash generation and balance sheet flexibility improve we can move be more active in exploring investments in new products and markets as shown on slide 44 our focus includes geographic expansion for our uip and performance chemicals business we will look to expand our portfolio in the performance chemical space and it will evaluate strategic bolt-ons supporting the core business we will be disciplined and measure everything against the criteria laid out on this page. An opportunity must fit our capabilities and culture, strengthen a leadership position, add a product or location value, and offer clear synergies. We will compare any acquisition against organic alternatives. Financially, we target an IRR greater than 12%, EPS accretion in year one or two, and an opportunity that will improve our growth and margin quality going forward. The test for any potential deal is not whether it makes coppers bigger, but it is whether it earns an attractive return and improves the portfolio over the long term. Having gone through our business and our look ahead, I wanted to reaffirm our financial targets for 2028. As captured on slide 45, those goals include adjusted EBITDA margin greater than 15 percent, three-year adjusted EPS compound annual growth of greater than 10 percent, net leverage below two and a half times, free cash flow that averages $100 million per year, and to signal a shift in our portfolio, we are targeting 85 percent of sales from our PC and RUP segments. The drivers behind these goals are clear today. An in-flight transformation, a focused portfolio, recurring replacement demand, favorable infrastructure investment in the markets we serve, as well as a number of growth opportunities ahead. For these goals, we do not require any further M&A or divestitures, and should markets strengthen beyond the modest recovery I highlighted before, that would only provide additional upside for our 28 objectives. As I wrap up, I wanted to end where I began. The current environment contains real headwinds, and we are addressing them quickly and directly. But current conditions do not define the earnings potential of coppers. Our focus on execution is building momentum across the business and strengthening our confidence and our ability to deliver against these 28 objectives. Our algorithm is simple. Self-help expands margins, higher earnings and lower capex increases, cash, cash funds returns, deleveraging, and disciplined growth. And those choices compound for per-share value creation. This is the next chapter of COPRS. Higher earnings, increased cash, enhanced shareholder value. As the newest member of the leadership team, I am energized by the opportunity and confident on our path to our 28 targets. Thank you very much for joining us today, and I would now like to turn today's events back over to Leroy.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Thank you, Eric. We've thrown a lot at you so far this morning, but we are going to open it up for Q&A right now. While they assemble the question roster virtually, I'll ask anybody in the room who has a question, maybe raise your hand when we have someone with a microphone who will come around to have you ask it. So I'll pause and let them prompt for questions online.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. For virtual attendees, to ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Okay, so while they're assembling the questions online, yeah, Michael, you have a question?

Speaker 6

I do. You've mentioned your leverage target that you'd like to get down to two and a half times.

Jason Bach, Other

I believe you're in the nature of three and a half times now.

Speaker 6

So we're seeing interest rates go up, likely to go up further. Do you foresee accelerating debt pay down? If you could just have any comments on that.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Yeah, I mean, so right now, as we talked about, right, we're deploying capital to share repurchases. We have a dividend that's in place. I think we have our capital expenditures pretty much under control with no near-term big, big movers there. So really everything in excess of that has been going to debt pay down. I think we'll continue to evaluate that as time goes on. But we're going to be able to make meaningful progress by still being able to deploy capital to shareholders through those share repurchases as well as paying down debt. I think if it moves in terms of the cash that we're generating more towards debt repayment versus share repurchase, I don't think it's going to be meaningful in the greater context. We are limited through our credit facilities in terms of what we're able to actually deploy towards share repurchases, and it's around $50 million a year. So we have a natural cap that still gives us plenty of room for, you know, substantial debt reduction on an annual basis. So, you know, it could cause us to push a little bit more over there, but I wouldn't say it's anything dramatic from my standpoint at this point. Other questions in the room? Yes, Jim.

Jim Sullivan, COO

Leroy, this might be for Jim or Travis, but I understand the profitability increase at the CMC business by consolidating production to Denmark, but is there any margin implication on the RUPS business with the transportation cost of Creosote back to North America?

Leroy Ball, CEO

Yeah, do you want to come up and talk about that, Jim?

Speaker 8

Thanks, Jim.

Jim Sullivan, COO

So the short answer is no, right? Because the net result of all these changes is improved profitability. We're pulling out costs. We're not going to add costs. There is incremental logistics costs, but that's more than offset by the closure of the sticking facility.

Leroy Ball, CEO

Do we have anything online? Oh, here we have another one in the room.

Speaker 8

Around the geographic expansion you guys highlighted, what was it about those specific markets that made them attractive? and how do you guys evaluate where to expand next?

Leroy Ball, CEO

So I'll let Doug come up and address PC. I'll just say, because I'll respond to the UIP, come on up here, Doug, I'll respond to the UIP one because I think it's pretty simple and straightforward, right? Again, we hold significant market share east of the Mississippi. There's a big market, as you saw up on that slide, west, And we had little presence there just a few years ago. And so we're building a presence. We know we have the capabilities to compete for market share. And so to us, it's an untapped market and one that we know well. So for us, it was a no-brainer. And that's one of the easier decisions. As it relates to Doug's business, and it's more geographic outside of the U.S., I'll let you comment as to sort of what you see as the attraction.

Douglas J. Fenwick, Other

The two markets we've been talking about that I mentioned yesterday as well as today, Brazil is a massively growing marketplace for us. It's a huge agricultural center, very big in beef and cattle production, and lots of export opportunities for that country going forward. It's a massive landmass, lots of unexplored areas that they're building into farming. The government's been very proactive in land grants and building out of ranches, So we see a real opportunity in that agricultural spec going forward. Asia's been a growing marketplace for us. We've played in that market for years. Where it's really catching up to us now is on freight. We used to be able to ship a container there for around $3,000. It's up to around $7,000 in container now. So we're shipping Asian material out of our Millington, Tennessee facility, our Rock Hill facility at great expense by looking at a facility in Asia, which we've been looking at hard for about a year now. we can cut down our logistics costs significantly as well as our raw material importing costs from different countries that we get our raw material costs our raw material supply from other questions in the room or online yeah yeah jim is there um leroy one aspect of catalyst that you're most

Jim Sullivan, COO

excited about that you feel is underappreciated right now by the market by the street oh gosh uh You know, Jim, that's a great question.

Leroy Ball, CEO

It's a tough answer, right, because, you know, we show up, again, in the presentation, significant benefits that we've already realized as well as benefits that we expect to realize going forward. But, you know, when you look at the, you know, the overall results, right, they haven't moved up. In fact, they've come down a little bit, right, because of the significant headwinds that we've been seeing. I think the magic of Catalyst is that there's no silver bullet in that whole process. Yes, you have a big initiative like the Stickney closure that has some significant dollars attached to it, but it really is hundreds and hundreds of projects that range anywhere from, you know, $50,000 on up. Even the org design, right, $3 to $5 million out of $136 million over that time period, you know, it's meaningful because at least it's in the millions, But it would be one of actually the bigger returns. But the magic of Catalyst is it is broad-based and it is just across the entire enterprise. So many of these smaller projects that just stack up, stack up, stack up. And again, what really excites me is the position it puts us in when we just get just a little bit of wind at our backs. And we've been in this role for 12 years, been with the company for 16. And I've seen, you know, I've seen the ups and downs, and there's been times when we've been, it seems like we're walking into a hurricane, and other times when, again, we have a lot of wind at our backs. This is probably the longest prolonged period of time that I've seen where we've just seen general market stagnation. And so, you know, we're doing everything we can, as Eric aptly put it, right, walking up a down escalator. It's the way it feels like. But, man, I mean, the structural improvements that we're making, you know, is just going to put us in a position to really see a step change, you know, when we see just a little bit of stuff, you know, coming back the other way. So, you know, I tell our team and have, you know, and the teams below them, stay focused, stay positive, because things will turn. And when they do, you know, we're going to see a release that is actually going to be quite compelling. So, yes, in the back.

Operator

With what you're doing in the utility pole expansion in the southeast or southwest, right, can you give us an early read on how successful you may be taking some market share? And also, what gives you the confidence that, you know, you can gain that share?

Leroy Ball, CEO

I'll let Jason respond to that.

Jason Bach, Other

Yeah, right. So, you know, it's a new market for UIP that we're expanding to in the southwest. We have been gaining market share since we've entered that market, and we feel confident that that market will continue to grow. A big part of that market is the oil fields. They utilize the creosote poles, and so, you know, that business is doing well. But something else we've noticed in the southwest is that there's a significant demand for DCOI-treated poles. And we've seen growth there with that particular treatment type. So, again, like both creosote-treated poles and DCOI-treated poles are in demand in that region, and we make both, and we feel pretty confident that we're going to grab market share.

Operator

Anything further?

Leroy Ball, CEO

I do want to add an addendum, Michael, to your question earlier again about what would cause us to think about allocating more dollars towards debt repayment versus returning capital to shareholders. The piece that I didn't mention is we believe and continue to believe that the stock is undervalued. We are generating double-digit free cash flow yield, which we expect to be able to do that sustainably at current share prices. So look, as share price moves up and we see that free cash flow yield come back down, maybe down into the higher mid-single digits, you know, that may cause us to think about how much we might allocate there versus debt reduction or something like that. So, you know, we're not in a vacuum, and so there's multiple things at play there, but that would be one of the other things that would cause us to think differently about that. But as it relates to rates and where they kind of, you know, what happened yesterday versus what we see on the horizon, we still think that, you know, our debt load is more than manageable, and there is a clear path towards paying down debt over time that's going to just naturally bring our interest costs down as well. Okay, I think we're probably out of questions at this point. I don't think we have anything online, right? So with that, I thank you all for taking the time. For those, again, who traveled down here to Atlanta, I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to do that. I know travel these days is not easy. For those who chose to join us online, thank you for doing that. We really appreciate your interest in coppers. Again, we are geared up and ready to perform, take the field, as I said earlier. And we believe that the season we have in front of us is going to be a special one. So we look forward to telling you more about it and giving you updates on our progress as we go forward. But thank you for your time and attention today. And have a great rest of your day.

Operator

Thank you, everyone.