Russel Metals Inc. (RUS) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our 2025 second quarter results for Russell Metals. Today's call will be hosted by Mr. Marty Jurowski, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. John Reed, President and Chief Executive Officer of Russell Metals. Today's presentation will be followed by a question and answer period. At that time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Now, let's turn the meeting over to Mr. Marty Dreyfus. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. I'll be providing an overview of the Q2 2025 results, and if you want to follow along, I'll be using the slides that are on our website. They can be found in the investor relations section, and it's located in the conference call submenu. If you go to page three, you can read our cautionary statement on forward-looking information. So let me start with page 5 to provide a little bit of a perspective on the quarter. In Q2, we generated a sequential improvement in most Q metrics, and we looked at the past two quarters, Q1 and Q2, both individually and together. We had a very solid improvement. We had an improvement between Q4 into Q1 and even more impactful improvement between Q1 and Q2, as we took advantage of some interesting market opportunities. It was nice to see the sequential pickup between Q1 and Q2 in absolute terms, but it also reflected a relative outperformance versus our publicly traded U.S. comparables. Specifically, we generated near-record shipments. Revenue was up 3% versus Q1. EBITDA was up 26% versus Q1. Earnings per share was up 43% versus Q1. And cash from operating activities was up 29% versus Q1. If you look at the middle row on that diagram on that page, discretionary cap at the left box, we are activ...