Hello, welcome to The Watchlist. I'm Karina Robertson. Joining me is Carson Urlacher, Senior Financial Officer of the Mullen Group. He's here with the financial update. Nice to see you, Carson.
Nice to see you, Karina.
Mullen released the first quarter results yesterday, which came in below market expectations. Can you give us a summary of the results?
Sure, sure, Karina. Before I do, I'd start off by saying this, that here at Mullen, we have two rules in business. Rule number one is always protect the balance sheet, and rule number two is, don't forget rule number one. Now we can talk about the core. The overall market in 2024, it's much more competitive than what we had in 2023. It's really not a surprise to us that our results are down. In fact, we articulated in our outlook at the beginning of the year, that the first half was gonna be soft, and we saw, you know, the economy facing some serious headwinds. That first quarter came in as we predicted, but predicting that change is one thing. The most important thing is how you prepare for it.
You know, we've been in business since 1949, seen all sorts of market cycles. What I can tell you is that the companies that are able to predict and adapt changing market cycles can actually take advantage of the opportunities that arise from them. You know, in 2022 and in 2023, we saw some of the best market conditions that we've ever seen, and we benefited simply by just letting our business units capitalize on strong demand. We knew that this wasn't sustainable, and we did one important thing, and that was to not do acquisitions at the peak of the market and overpay. Now we have a strong balance sheet going into a very competitive market. I can tell you, doing acquisitions in a downturn is much less risky, and it helps us prepare for that next upcycle.
We're kind of countercyclical in our approach, and we're gonna use this downturn to prepare ourselves for that next upcycle. When's that happen? That's anybody's guess. It's obviously contingent upon many factors outside of our control, but what I can tell you with confidence, though, is that we're gonna be ready.
All right, given the changing market conditions, how stable is the dividend going forward?
Our dividend is rock solid for a couple reasons. Most importantly, we generate free cash each and every year. Done so over the past 10 years. In fact, we've averaged over CAD 100 million of free cash generation per year while going through many different market cycles. Really, the secret sauce is that we focus on free cash, not EBITDA. EBITDA is gonna fluctuate through the different cycles, but one thing that doesn't fluctuate is our ability to generate free cash. The other main reason is quite simply, that we own our own real estate. It supports our dividend.
Well, thank you so much, Carson, for the update. For The Watchlist, I'm Karina Robertson.