Exchange Income Corporation (EIF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. I think we'll get started. So please, those of you who haven't yet sat down, make your way, and we will start with the program. Firstly, just good morning, and welcome to everyone. This is, of course, the Annual and Special Meeting of the Shareholders of Exchange Income Corporation. And it's a bit of an occasion because it was 3 years ago that we had our last in-person Annual General Meeting. And it's wonderful to see so many of you come out to be a part of this, shareholders, suppliers, friends of EIC. It really is wonderful to have you here. And it's good for us because we love to have the opportunity to meet and rub shoulders with our shareholders and keep the kind of relationship that we've built over the last 18 years. So my name is Gary Filmon, and as a Director and Chair of the Board of Directors, I will act as Chair of this meeting. And aside from saying thank you sincerely for being here, I'm going to add a little personal involvement in the discussion today because today is my last meeting as Chair of the Board, and it's been an absolute privilege for me to be at the helm of the Board of EIC for all these years as one of the original investors, as one of the original board members. I have been able to be there to watch a phenomenal growth story, a growth story that when Mike, our CEO, Mike Pyle, speaks later, he will add to the story looking to the future because it is a great future ahead, I believe. But I was just thinking actually that maybe the crowd is a little bit bigger because some of you are here just to make sure that I really am leaving. Anyway, today, as I say, a bit symbolic and a bit emotional for me, but not for the reasons of any concern about the future. The future is going to be significantly right and I leave behind a management team that is absolutely wonderful. And as an engineer, I always think of myself as a builder and one of the things that we at EIC have been doing for 18 straight years is building a very significant company right here in Manitoba. We're very proud of that. We're very proud -- and you look around and you see some of the assets that we have, and it's pretty impressive. This is just a small sample, but this is a very large corporation now that has gone in 18 years from 0 to $1.5 billion market cap and growing very dramatically. So it's been a great ride for me, and I am very proud to have been a part of it. And our Board that I leave behind is a very competent board, I think as good as any corporate board in Canada in my judgment. And I will be succeeded by Don Streuber, who most of you know as having been one of the original founding members and also the audit chair for many, many years. So with the leadership that we still have from Mike and his team, with the board that continues to be, as I say, one of the most talented in the country. I am very, very confident that the future is bright and we go from strength to strength with EIC. Now to the meat and potatoes of the meeting. And I will lead us through the formal part of the agenda, and then we'll have a presentation ultimately by our CEO, Mike Pyle, on the company's progress during the past year, and you will have an opportunity to ask questions of Mike at the end of it. For those of you who are attending virtually, instructions on how to ask questions and the voting procedure will appear on your screens. As with any new technology, unexpected glitches may occur, but our service providers for this platform at Lumi are very experienced at running this type of meeting and will help us out if an issue arises. The meeting will now come to order, and I will ask Dianne Spencer to act as secretary of the meeting; and Kristine Calesso of TSX Trust Company to act as scrutineer. Everyone present in person should now be registered with the scrutineer, and all proxies should now have been deposited. If not, please do so now. The secretary has confirmed that the notice calling this meeting of shareholders was filed on SEDAR on March 11, 2022, and the record date for the determination of shareholders entitled to receive notice of and to attend and vote at the meeting was April 6, 2022. The scrutineer has provided the chair with a report and the Chair adopts the scrutineer's report confirming that there are present by proxy a sufficient number of persons holding a sufficient number of shares entitled to vote at the meeting to constitute a quorum. Voting delegates and any other person attending a meeting of shareholders may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting. Should you wish to address the chair on any motion, please raise your hand, and the chair will call upon you or for those attending virtually, please type in your question or comment in the message section and the moderator will read the question aloud. Notice having been mailed as required and a quorum being present, I declare that this meeting is duly constituted for the transaction of business, and the polls are now open for all resolutions. This Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders was called to consider 5 matters with voting required for 4 of them. We will conduct the votes on the matters before us by a poll. On a poll, every shareholder entitled to vote on the matter has 1 vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. The poll will be open for all resolutions at the same time. This will allow you to choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait until conclusion of discussion on each resolution prior to casting your vote. If you have already voted in advance of the meeting by proxy and do not wish to change your vote, you do not need to vote again during the meeting. Finally, I would like to remind you that our answers to your questions and our presentation may contain forward-looking information. By its nature, this information contains forecast assumptions and expectations about future outcomes, which are subject to the risks and uncertainties discussed more fully in our public disclosure filings. We will now go through each of the items on the agenda in turn. The first item of business is to receive and consider Exchange Income Corporation's consolidated financial statements for the period ended December 31, 2021. Together with the auditor's report on these statements. The financial statements and the auditor's report on them were included with the material that was sent out giving notice of this meeting and available on SEDAR and the corporation's website. Hans Anderson of PricewaterhouseCoopers, audit partner for the EIC audit, is in attendance here today. And Hans snows everything. So if there's anything that you need to know, he's got it. Unless there are any questions of management or the auditors, we will take the financial statements and auditor's report as received and considered. The second item of business is to appoint the auditors of Exchange Income Corporation for the ensuing year and to authorize the directors to fix the remuneration of the auditors. Would a voting delegate please make the motion?

Mr. Chair, I move to resolve that PricewaterhouseCoopers be appointed auditors of Exchange Income Corporation to hold office until the next annual meeting or until their successors are duly appointed and the directors be authorized to fix the auditor's remuneration.

Mr. Chair. I second the motion.

Thank you, Richard and Adam. You've heard the motion by Richard Wowryk, seconded by Adam Terwin. Are there any -- is there any discussion on this motion? Thank you. Pam is our auditor, who is monitoring all the people who are participating via Zoom, and so we do not have any questions or discussion. So as there is no discussion, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand. Any contrary, if not, with all the virtual voting delegates please enter your votes in Lumi. Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The third item of business is the election of the Directors of Exchange Income Corporation for the ensuing year. As we did not receive any other nominations in compliance with our advanced notice bylaw, I declare the nominations closed, and I will now entertain a motion to consider an ordinary resolution to elect 10 directors to hold office until the next General Meeting of Shareholders or their earlier removal or resignation. Brad Bennett, Gary Buckley, Polly Craik, Bruce Jack, Duncan Jessiman, Michael Pyle, Grace Schalkwyk, Melissa Sonberg, Donald Streuber and Edward Warkentin have been nominated for election as directors of EIC. Would a voting delegate please make the motion?

Brad Bennett, Gary Buckley, Polly Craik, Bruce Jack, Duncan Jessiman, Michael Pyle, Grace Schalkwyk, Melissa Sonberg, Donald Streuber and Edward Warkentin be elected as directors.

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Okay. You've heard the motion by Richard Wowryk and seconded by Adam Terwin. Is there any discussion on this motion?

Mr. Chair, there is no discussion at this time.

Thank you very much, Pam. As there is no discussion, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand. Any contrary? Would all the virtual voting delegates please enter your votes on Lumi. I declare the motion carried. Approval now. The fourth item of business is to approve unallocated awards under the fourth amended and restated employee share purchase plan of the corporation. A summary of the key features of the fourth amended and restated employee share plan of the corporation was included in the corporation's management information circular dated April 5, 2022, and a copy of the fourth amended and restated employee shareholder purchase plan may be obtained by contacting the corporation at the address set forth at the end of the Management Information Circular or on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Would a voting delegate please make the motion?

Mr. Chair, be it resolved that as an ordinary resolution of the shareholders of Exchange Income Corporation, that all unallocated awards of common shares under the fourth amended and restated employee share purchase plan of the corporation dated May 8, 2019, are hereby authorized and approved. The corporation shall have the ability to continue granting awards of common shares of the corporation under the employee share purchase plan until May 11, 2025, being the date that is 3 years from the date hereof, and any one or more directors or officers of the corporation are hereby authorized for on behalf of the corporation to take or cause to be taken any and all such acts and things and to execute and deliver under the corporate seal of the corporation or otherwise, all such deeds, instruments, notices, consents, acknowledgments, certificates, assurances and other documents including any documents required under applicable laws or regulatory policies, as any such director or officer in his or her sole discretion may determine to be necessary or desirable to give effect to the foregoing resolution, such determination to be conclusively evidenced by the taking of any such action or such directors or officers' execution and delivery of any such document.

Did you all hear that? Or would you like Richard to repeat that?

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

You've heard the motion by Richard Wowryk and seconded by Adam Terwin. Is there any discussion of this motion?

Mr. Chair, there is no discussion at this time.

Thank you, Pam. As there is no discussion, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand. Thank you. Any contrary? Would all the virtual voting delegates please enter your votes in Lumi? I declare the motion carried. The fifth item of business is to approve on an advisory basis, the corporation's approach to executive compensation. As described in the corporation's management information circular dated April 5, 2022, the corporation's compensation policies and procedures are based on the principle of pay for performance. The board believes they align the interest of the corporation's executive team with the long-term interest of the shareholders. Would a voting delegate please make the motion?

Mr. Chair, be it resolved that on an ordinary basis and not to diminish the role and responsibilities of the Board of Directors of Exchange Income Corporation, the shareholders of the corporation accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the management information circular delivered in advance of the Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders of the corporation.

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

That isn't incidentally on an advisory basis. Okay. You've heard the motion by Richard Wowryk, seconded by Adam Terwin. Is there any discussion of this motion?

Mr. Chair, there is no discussion at this time.

As there is no discussion, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All those in favor, please signify by raising your hand. Any contrary? Would the virtual voting delegates please enter your votes in Lumi now? I declare the motion carried. We will now take a short pause to answer any questions that have been submitted and to permit any registered shareholder or proxy holder who has not already done so, to record their votes on Lumi on the motions before the meeting. Having received no questions, I will close the polls in 30 seconds. I declare the polls now closed. I have now received the preliminary scrutineer's report. With respect to the election of directors, I'm advised by the scrutineer that each of the proposed nominees has been duly elected to the Board. With respect to the resolutions to appoint the auditors, approve the unallocated awards under the fourth amended and restated employee shareholder purchase plan of the corporation and to approve on an advisory basis, the corporation's approach to executive compensation, I'm advised by the scrutineer that all these resolutions have been duly carried. The detailed results of this meeting will be announced in a press release and will be included in our voting report to be filed on SEDAR as soon as practical after this meeting. Is there any further business to be conducted at this meeting? If not, I will entertain a motion to terminate this meeting.

I move to terminate the meeting.

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Okay. You've heard the motion by Richard Wowryk seconded by Adam Terwin. Is there any discussion of this motion? If not...

Mr. Chair, there is no discussion at this time.

Thank you, Pam. We will conclude the meeting, therefore, by saying thank you to all of you, as I said earlier, for joining us in the Annual General and Special Meeting today. And I am very pleased at this point to be able to turn the microphone over to Mike Pyle, our CEO. And I think you all probably have been waiting to hear his summary and his expectations and things that make us so optimistic for the future. So thank you very much, everyone.

Gary Filmon, our Corporate Counsel is here, and he said I had to put this slide up so I have, and now I'm moving on. The agenda for today, I'm going to talk a little bit about 2021 and just go through the resilience of our business as we went through the pandemic. We're going to talk about the exciting quarter we just finished. And then most importantly, we're going to talk about looking ahead, and where we see ourselves going, the guidance we have, the exciting acquisitions we completed today, you're going to get a chance to meet the management team from Northern Mat, super exciting group of people. They're going to tell you a little bit about timber mats, and then we'll answer whatever questions you have. It's exciting to be doing this live. There's people on the Internet, but after 2 years of doing this from our boardroom, we're back, and it feels great to be here. Most of you, I recognize the faces and EIC has been who we are for a very long period of time, and we're based on a few key principles, and it's based on serving the communities we look after. It's based on interactions with our customers, with our stakeholders, with our employees, with our shareholders. And we do that through 3 things. From the day we started, we've talked about the importance of dividends. We're going to buy and build companies that generate free cash flow, and we're going to share those profits with our unitholders and our shareholders. Today, we announced our 15th dividend increase. I'm going to let Perimeter drive by. Our 15th dividend increase in our history. We've maintained a dividend growth rate of 5% over the last 20 years. and that is second to none on the TSX. It's something that we're intensely proud of, and it's something that the future we're going to talk about enables us to look forward in being able to extend that track record in the future. It's about discipline. It's about buying the right companies, it's about paying the right price, and it's about financing these businesses in an appropriate manner. And you've seen our leverage. You've seen how we've maintained that through great markets and bad markets. You've seen our actual level of leverage go down through a pandemic, which decimated other aviation companies, and we've been able to work through it because of the decisions we've made and the investments we've made in the past. And then finally, diversification. Diversity is a very popular word these days as it talks about gender equality, racial equality. But it's not something that's new to us. If you go back to our original prospectus back in 2004, when we bought Perimeter, we talked about the importance of diversification at that time. And it has served us so well as we've gone through varying challenges of high fuel prices and low fuel prices, pandemics and economic crisis. Through all of that, the stability of diversity has enabled us to keep our promise to you of a reliable and growing dividend. So in 2021, we were dealing with short-term problems, and our management was focused on that, and that helped us maintain our cash position and pay that dividend. But if we want to continue our success in the future, we had our eyes on the horizon, and you saw that in things like the contracts we've won, where we're now delivering our aircraft to the government in Netherlands to provide their maritime surveillance or the new contract we've gotten with the government of Curacao for their ISR requirements or new charter agreements to fly people into mines in the far north and in Northwestern Ontario. It's growth of geographic coverage with the addition, you can see the beautiful new medevac plan in the back from Carson Air, the company we bought last July. It's about adding capacity and adding aircraft, investing for what we know is coming as the economy rebounds. And it's about strategic acquisitions. We talked a lot last year about how it was difficult for Adam and his team to hit the road and meet new teams and do the diligence we require. When you meet Northern Mat in a few minutes, you're going to get to see how strong that management team is. And to be able to uncover those kind of transactions, we need to travel and see the people. Well, that was virtually impossible in 2020 and 2021. So we turned our focus to businesses that our companies already knew about Carson Air, Ryko, Telcon. There's a bunch of them. But they were brought to us by our subsidiaries and said, these guys will bring a skill set we don't have. And so Adam and his team focused on smaller transactions that set us up for growth as we come out of the pandemic. Some of the things we've talked about, so Carson Air in the medavac space, Macfab adding capacity to our Ben Machine manufacturing company in Ontario. Telcon and Ryko adding underground capabilities to our cell phone tower construction company, WesTower. And finally, CTI, which helped us break into the lucrative training market in the United States, providing services to the U.S. military. All of these things are great fits with our existing business, and were tuck-in acquisitions that we were able to do while we were limited in travel capability. Discipline means sometimes you got to do things that are hard to do when you do them because they're right in the long term. And so during a pandemic, we managed to refinance three debentures that were coming due and raise equity and put ourselves into a balance sheet position going into this year where we had no debt due before 2025. The stability that provides us and lets our Board allow us to invest in things is remarkable. And then you've seen in our press release today that our bankers who treat us remarkably well. There's people in the Canadian market who complain about how the banks treat them. We don't have that experience. We've been treated remarkably well by our syndicate. We had a former debt facility of $1.3 billion. Today, we're proud to tell you that's been increased to $1.75 billion to help us fund and grow and talk about the exciting things I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. But business is more than just dollars and cents. It's investing in the people we work with. And the picture you see on there is from an event we ran with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, where we celebrated the Every Child Matters campaign and the importance of reconciliation with our First Nations partners. I'm really proud to have some of the leadership of the First Nations here with me today, and I'm going to invite them up with me here shortly as part of our presentation. But one of the things that's fundamental to understanding EIC is understanding that we're committed to doing the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's the easy thing. And so you saw with that event with the Bombers last year. We had the teams dressed in Orange jerseys and TSN talking about the importance of the Every Child Matters movement. We brought in over 1,000 people and the work that Pam and our team had to do just for the logistics to have them here, get them in hotels, bring them to the game, and it was a remarkable experience for all involved. And that's led to this year, we announced recently the Tik Mason pilot pathway program. We fly into largely First Nations communities, but we have very few First Nation pilots. Tik won the bill Worley Scholarship program and went to our Moncton Flight College, trained, became a trainer and now flies for us in -- with our big planes, a Perimeter into his home community a St. Teresa point. We needed to figure out how we clone Tik. And Tik explained to us that culturally it's very difficult for young people to leave their communities and go all the way to the Maritimes for a year to become a pilot. And so under the direction of our board and Gary, in particular, we put together a program that we're going to have a pop-up flight school in Thompson that opens very soon. Robin and her team are working on the details with MKO, but we're going to train a dozen First Nations pilots at no cost to them. Obtaining your commercial pilot license would normally be an investment of approximately $100,000. EIC is going to bring the school here. We're going to provide room, board at a daily stipend to assist people from the communities we service, get their license. And our goal and our hope is that we can expand this program in future years to bring in maintenance people into this program and other communities to expand into Nunavut or Calm Air services and have our customers be the one flying our planes. And so it's that investment that is fundamental to -- everyone talks about ESG, and it's a bit frustrating for me because -- that's become a synonym for carbon and reducing your carbon footprint, which is super important. But ESG is about much more than that. It's about sustainability and it's about investing in social programs. And you'll see with what we're doing with the addition of Northern Mat, how committed we are to environmental sustainability. But our investment in the community is something we're exceptionally proud of, and it's stamped in our DNA. So here's the financial snapshot. You can see the track record we had going through 2019, and then we ran into the pandemic that we're all painfully aware of and the challenges it faced. But even in that, we were able to maintain strong EBITDA performance and return to growth last year in 2021. And in fact, have the biggest revenue number we've ever had and the biggest EBITDA number we've ever had. And that's a tribute to the strength of the management teams we have in our subsidiaries. I get to talk about it and people give us credit for what we were able to accomplish, but that wasn't an EIC thing. That was a Perimeter thing, a Calm Air thing, a Keewatin Air thing. You go through our list of companies. it was the management teams and the employees there who took the steps to make us remain profitable and able to maintain our dividend. And so we're intensely proud of that record. Adjusted net earnings the same thing. They fell down, bounced back up. And with what we're going to talk about in a minute as we grow our company, you'll see that growth continue in the future. So how are we doing this year? Well, everyone knows who understands our business that the first quarter is always seasonally our most challenging. The winter road season competes with our airlines and the winter road seemed to last forever. I'm not sure they've even melted yet with the cold weather we've had. But in spite of that, we had the largest revenue in a quarter we've ever had. We had EBITDA, which tapped past last year, which was our biggest first quarter ever. So we're on a path, and we're continuing to grow in spite of the challenges that [ Overton ] threw at us in the first half of the first quarter. Our net earnings again bounced back, continued to grow. And what does that mean for us? This is -- if people remember one chart when they remember EIC, this is the chart you should remember. It goes back to 2004 when we started as an income trust, and we were paying $1.08 per unit to our shareholders. Today, we announced an increase of $0.20 a share or $2.40, our 15th increase. And that is -- to me, if there's an official end to the pandemic, it's us increasing our dividend. We're back on to the track we've been before. Our payout ratio is simply a way of measuring our ability to pay. And you can see how the payout ratio spiked at the beginning of 2020 with the first challenges of the pandemic. And then as we brought things under control, whether you look at it on a free cash flow basis, the red line or an adjusted net earnings basis, you could see how it's declined back to right into historical norms. So looking ahead, I want to take this time to thank Darryl Bergman, who's been our CFO. He's decided he wants to move out to the East Coast. So we're losing him. We thank him for all everything he's done for the company. But we're ecstatic to have Richard, little eye, as he's known, he was our interim CFO. And we will be having a ceremony in our office, taking the eye off his title, but he's been with us for 10 years, and he will step into that CFO role at the end of this month. So we're excited about that. I've talked about the Tik Mason pilot pathway and how important that is. And today, we completed 2 transactions. We purchased Advanced Paramedic, which is part of our plan to expand our medevac coverage. They're a provider of medical professionals in Northern Alberta for ground and air ambulance. It will help us with our geographic expansion. And Northern Mat & Bridge, I'll keep my powder dry on that because we're going to have a presentation about that company in a little bit. I've already talked about our enhanced bank facility. So what do we see going forward? Our airlines are experiencing an increase back to the normal levels of passengers. We fell as low as down to the 40% range at the beginning of the first quarter under Omicron. We've seen that grow to about 3/4 of normal by the end of the quarter. And today, in most of our markets with the possible exception of Northwestern Ontario, we're approaching 90% of normal. So business is returning to where it was. And we're excited about not talking about the pandemic anymore, and we're getting close to the stage where we're going to be able to do that. We've talked about our new aviation contracts, whether it's serving gold mines in Northwestern Ontario, increasing our presence in Nunavut. It's ISR contract in Europe in Curacao. It's investments we've made everywhere. Quest, our high-rise window company has struggled with challenges as projects were postponed during the pandemic, but we're seeing that come to a close. Our order book has grown, and I'm ecstatic to tell you that we've actually entered 2 new markets. We got our first order in Nashville and our first order in Philadelphia. We've built that beautiful new facility in Dallas. And as we expand our geographic coverage, we're going to be able to fill it up with the orders from these new markets. And then we've talked about our acquisitions. So that leads me to the last piece I'm going to talk about here, which is our guidance. When the pandemic came, we withdrew our guidance because we really didn't know exactly how long it was going to last, how much it was going to impact us. And we went through surges and recoveries and fallbacks. We're now at a stage where we're comfortable talking about where we think we're going to be. And we're predicting adjusted EBITDA of north of $400 million for this year, between $410 million and $430 million. And just as a marker, the best we've ever done is $330 million in historical times. So you're talking about an improvement of 25% over our best year ever. And more importantly, as we get the full benefit of Northern Mat and all the other acquisitions we've done, our airlines continue to normalize, plus get stronger. We're talking about EBITDA for 2023 of between $500 million and $530 million. That's 50% higher than our 2019 results pre-pandemic. And we talk a lot about keeping our eyes on the horizon. Well, our ability to announce that today was as a result of the things we've been doing for the last 2 years during Omicron and during all the various variants. So we're ecstatic about that, and that's enabled us to increase our dividend now but it's also allowed us to expect our payout ratios to continue to fall. And payout ratio is continuing to fall means further dividend increases in the future. And so we're back on our business plan, we're back where we want to be, and we're ecstatic about what the future holds. So I'm going to postpone the question and answer until the end, and before we have Northern Mat come up, I have a presentation I'd like to make. If I could ask my First Nations' leaders to come join me up here. Joining us up at the front are the Grand Chief of MKO, Grand Chief Garrison Settee, Chief [indiscernible] former Grand Chief [ Oskin ], who worked with us on a number of our projects for community participation and investing in the community. Gary is retiring. And this is, I don't know, I feel like this is like graduation day. Gary has been our leadership training wheels for 20 years. He has installed the culture in EIC where we do the right thing not because other people will think it's the right thing or not because we should do it. We do the right thing because it's the right thing. And that's ingrained not just at the EIC level, but Gary Bell at Calm Air all the way down to every one of our companies. And that's why I'm so comfortable that even though Gary is taking early retirement just because he's turning 80, I think it's a little early to be stopping. But given that he's chosen to do this, I'm very comfortable with the future because Gary's ingrained core values in EIC about how we're going to govern ourselves. And so whether he's in the chair or just in his office at EIC, I don't think we see anything changing with that. And we struggled as a group, my management team, our board about how do you acknowledge what Gary has given to us, to our stakeholders, to our shareholders and to our customers. And after a while, we came up with this idea. Perimeter needs a new terminal or at least a larger terminal. Through COVID, we've realized that and moved the number of passengers we need, we need to expand the footprint. And I am so excited today to announce that we will be going into construction later this year of the Gary Filmon Indigenous Terminal just right behind us here at Perimeter. And where we want Gary's name to acknowledge the leadership he's provided in having us invest with our customers, invest in reconciliation, invest in our customers. And so I'm going to show a couple of pictures of this, and then I'm going to turn the mic over here to brief comments from the Chief. The expansion is going to be great for our customers. We're going to have much bigger holding rooms for our customers as they're waiting to leave. Weather effects the smaller communities we service more than big airports. So flights get delayed, flights get moved, and so we need to have a comfortable place. We wanted a special place for our elders where they could be -- sit comfortably and wait in peace. And so we've got the special elders lounge. We're going to have an interactive child play area. We're going to have a dedicated space to celebrate First Nations' artwork. We've got improved passenger check-in and pickup because of the space we have to do it and new and greater enhanced security services to help us keep contraband out of the communities we service. This is a really complicated big picture. I'm not going to go in too much detail, but the yellow part you see is the part we have today. So we're running the business out of that part. The expansion is all the blue pieces. So you could see how many more gates effectively we have for our passengers before we leave. Our chicken delight restaurant is going to get bigger and better. And it will be a much more comfortable process for our customers, particularly on days of inclement weather where we have to host them for longer. And finally, here's the view if we walked out the store looking back at Perimeter, the glass front looking into our new facility. We're intensely proud of this. It's an exciting time for us. You'll see the construction begin very shortly. Our new head of the airport authority is here with us. We're excited to help they've given us in moving forward with this project, and it's really the next step in us serving our customers better. With that, Grand Chief, could I ask you to step up?

[Foreign Language] Congratulations Mr. Filmon now on your retirement and also this acknowledgement of this terminal being named after you. Kudos to you and also I really appreciate the initiatives that service our indigenous people and more initiatives I think are coming, and I just want to say thank you for all the investments you've made in our indigenous communities. We just congratulate you and wish you the best in the future.

Thank you for inviting me to this momentous occasion. Thank you former premier. We appreciate the work that you've been doing for our business people through EIC Chief for my nation. I get a lot of calls regarding the transportation especially during COVID time. We had like 10 planes every day, flying people out for -- that were affected by COVID. And our partners really appreciated the Perimeter stepping up, doing a lot of work and transporting our people. Sometimes they take only one patient at a time. But also listening to us, the management for EIC and also announcing this Gary Filmon Indigenous Terminal will be really good for us because we had elders sit outside waiting early in the morning. And now you guys listen to us, and this will be really good for them to be able to have a place to sit down and ask to be in comfort and also our children are waiting sometimes there's delays for weather. And I'm just happy that I've seen this and see what it's going to look like and [indiscernible] for you and so forth. Congratulations on your retirement. And thank you again for all your leadership in the past and so forth and [indiscernible] . Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Filmon. 1988 was a good year. Just when I became Chief, I was in native politics for 24 years. And 1988 was a year Assembly of Manitoba Chief was born and throughout, we had our challenges. And a lot of things happened. You did lots. I was talking to my friend, Chief Monias from Cross Lake. A lot of times, when there's challenges, you tend to make more progress. And you say -- I remember late Chief Louis Stevenson telling me that if you deal with someone that will tell you straight to his place where he stands, at least you know that you'll accomplish something. And you stood what you believed and we stood what we believed, and we did so much during that time. All these things like [indiscernible] is talking about a Jordan principle where your office came to First Nations. If only the history that you brought the First Nations were revealed through hidden books, what you did for us. The honor that you have like given the name of the building, it does say a lot. And I'm proud to be here and I'm honored to be here to that announcement be part of it that Gary Filmon Indigenous Terminal. . 1988 was a good year to start from everything. Number 8 actually means a new beginning. I thank my Grand Chief, Settee for being here and providing -- EIC providing the services. I was sitting with the Chief Monias. I wish our assembly were that fast. Thank you very much, and happy retirement. Thanks.

A big thank you to our First Nations partners for coming to join us for this. I'm almost done. You're going to get to hear a new voice here shortly, but Northern Mat is almost a poster child for an EIC investment. It's got great management team. It's got a unique market niche. They're the leader in the industry they're in. We purchased it at a fair but accretive price that's going to work for our shareholders. And it's got the ability for us to continue to work on our environmental footprint and their sustainability and what they do to help others build on an environmentally responsible manner is huge. It checks all the boxes. I was speaking yesterday to one of our institutional investors who was pretty big on the deal, and we were both excited. I was pretty happy. And he says to me, Mike, he says if there's anyone who doesn't like this investment, they don't like your business model. And I thought about it, that might be the best description of Northern Mat I can give you. These guys are the next piece of EIC. They fit like the other pieces of the puzzle we already have. And so I'm really excited to invite up 3 of the key guys from our management team. Darren Francis, our CEO; Scott Henderson and Scott Vyse, our BD development guys, and they're going to walk you through Northern Mat. And at the end, I'll come back up and we'll -- and they can answer the hard question. Oh, you made it too. Excellent. So everyone's here. I'll hand it off to you.

Well, thanks, Mike, for that introduction. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure for us to be here. As Mike said, my name is Darren Francis. I've been the President and CEO of Northern Mat & Bridge for almost 15 years now. Very, very excited to be joining the EIC family. And happy to be here with my executive team. As Mike said, we've got Scott Henderson here, EVP, Finance and CFO; Shane Stewart, who just arrived in the nick of time, EVP Operations; and Scott Vyse, EVP Business Development and Marketing. Collectively, we have just about a century of industry experience. I know we all look pretty young, but we've been around for a while with about half of that time in senior leadership roles right here at Northern Mat. The management team held a material equity position with the former ownership group. And we took a significant amount of stock in the sale of the business to EIC. So we remain very much invested. Just to give a quick overview of our business. I want to start with this video. I think it does a good job. It's a little bit dated from about 5 years ago, but I think it will give you a good look at what it is we do, who we are. [Presentation]

As you just saw in the video -- so we are the leading provider of safe, environmentally friendly temporary access solutions to various industrial sectors across Canada. From coast to coast, we serve a diverse space of end markets. We're also the largest manufacturer of wood and access mats in Canada and have the largest fleet of rental mats and portable bridges in Canada. Health and safety is a cornerstone of our business. It's been a part of our DNA from day 1. If you ask anyone who works for us at Northern Mat, anyone of our employees, they'll tell you that safety is always #1. Environmental sustainability is also a cornerstone of our business. Every project we're involved in is better from an environmental perspective because we help minimize the impact on the environment. In addition, 100% of our domestic lumber supply comes from sustainable management certified vendors. We have many, many important indigenous partnerships across Canada, which I'll speak to in a later slide. So as far as our operational footprint, as you can see from the map, we have a geographic presence right across Canada from coast to coast. Our facilities are strategically located based on proximity to what we feel are active regions for us and to major infrastructure projects. We also have our manufacturing facilities located near our key lumber sources. Our corporate headquarters is in Calgary, Alberta. Our Western operational headquarters in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and our Eastern operational headquarters is in Orangeville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto. We have just over 300 employees and over 150 pieces of machinery and equipment. For our service offerings, we offer a turnkey fully integrated platform from in-house manufacturing, all the way through to cleanup and disposal services. We help our customers identify their need, find the right solution and build a plan specific to the project and its unique challenges. We manage customer-owned inventory as well as our own large internal rental fleet. And as you can see, we have many, many touch points with our customers, including planning and consultation, delivery and installation, logistical support, removal, washing and disposal services. For our product offerings, we have basically 4 types of products. Our primary product is the access mats, the 8x14 3-plywood mats that you saw in the video that we basically use them to build wooden roads. That's the largest product that we have in our rental fleet, and that's what we manufacture. The rig mats and timber mats are a supplementary line of business for us. The rig mats are constructed using steel and wood and are mostly used for the heavy loads. So ideal for under drilling rigs and things like that. We also use them for pipeline crossings. The bridges for us, we have 3 different styles of bridges. It's -- we have the largest fleet of rental bridges in Canada. It's still very small relative to the size of our matting fleet. But the bridges are very complementary, a very complementary product to our matting and providing that sort of total access solution, that turnkey solution, particularly on the big infrastructure work, the long linear work, where you can imagine we're building roads, and there's a lot of water crossings as part of those roads. So bridges are a highly complementary product that we offer. In terms of operations, we have the largest fleet of specialized mat handling equipment and trucks in Canada. With the service model that we have, it sort of comes with the territory of having the largest fleet of rental mats, and in addition, we service very large client-owned mat fleets as well. The field operations for us is the largest of our business segments by revenue contribution. And in many ways, it's the most important. It's where we most often interface with the clients. And it's their ability to access their sites depend on our ability and our crews' abilities to execute when they need it to execute. Mat washing has become very important in the last few years. You see the picture in the lower right corner is one of our Matador portable mat washing systems. It's become important just to minimize the risk of soil contamination as we move these mats around from site to site. So we have 2 of these portable mat washing systems. They -- designed and built internally and they clean and disinfect the used mats. It's a closed loop system. So the water is recycled and the solids are removed and for proper environmental disposal. Our manufacturing facilities are located in British Columbia. We have 2. One in Prince George is our largest facility with a second smaller facility in Creston, BC. With our size, scale and proximity to wood fiber relative to our competitors, we benefit from preferential supply and pricing for lumber, which has become very important, certainly since COVID. For the end markets, we service a broad range of diversified end markets across Canada. We have them listed here by revenue contribution from left to right, with the largest being pipeline and the smallest being emergency response and other early stage end markets like renewable energy and mining. The pipeline sector is the largest for us, followed by transmission and distribution. We see a lot of runway for us in both of these industries with projects involving the new construction of the larger linear projects that everyone hears about, but there's also ongoing programs for maintenance required to support the vast network of infrastructure that we have in Canada that needs upgrading. The oil and gas sector is #3 for us in terms of revenue contribution. However, it probably has the greatest potential near-term upside for us with the recent increases in commodity prices and increased capital spend programs from our E&P customers. Forestry is next. It's an exciting and growing opportunity for us. This industry is increasingly adapting our products and services as a best practice. Projects involved providing access for the harvesting operation, the harvesting and removal of logs to be delivered to sawmills. It's a unique industry for us in that the majority of our customers are also suppliers of the wood fiber we use in our manufacturing operations, making us their client as well. So it's a neat relationship. We're literally -- the timber, we -- they supplied us last year, went into building the mats, and we're going to build the roads for them to -- for their new harvesting programs. And the last slide here is just on our indigenous engagement. We currently have 49 indigenous partnerships across Canada, and we're continually seeking to expand. Scott Vyse here has put many, many years in building these partnerships, and I expect he's going to be devoting a lot more of his time particularly in the East as we build out our business in the East. And as we all know, there's a growing movement towards environmental and social stewardship that encourages meaningful engagement and consultation with indigenous groups, particularly the groups with traditional lands impacted by the construction of this critical infrastructure that we need in Canada. So we are very well-aligned with all the stakeholders there. As I said earlier, our products and services facilitate this construction process while minimizing the impact on -- and the disturbance to the environment. Our indigenous network is also a competitive advantage for us in accessing new and preferred opportunities. We know many of our large customers we work for have plans to increase their individual spends in the future. And with that, we'll take any questions if there are any. Thank you.

Thanks, Darren. So if anybody's got any questions on anything we spoke about today, I think we got a microphone there in the middle. By all means step up and try it. If not, if everyone's shy, what we'll do is we'll hang around, have a cup of coffee and you can certainly talk to as individuals. Anybody interested in big question? Well, that's perfect with you. So well, we don't have any questions. Thank you to everybody for coming today. It's an exciting day for EIC and join us for a coffee before you go home.