Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Clean Harbors first quarter 2023 earnings call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, the floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. If you should require assistance throughout the conference, please press star zero to reach a live operator. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Michael McDonald, General Counsel for Clean Harbors. Sir, the floor is all yours.
Thank you, Karen. Good morning, everyone. With me on today's call are our Co-Chief Executive Officers, Eric Gerstenberg and Mike Battles, and our EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Dugas, and SVP of Investor Relations, Jim Buckley. Slides for today's call are posted on our Investor Relations website. We invite you to follow along. Matters we're discussing today that are not historical facts are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Participants are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these statements, which reflect management's opinions only as of today, May 3, 2023. Information on potential factors and risks that could affect our results is included in our SEC filings.
The company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to the statements made today other than through filings made concerning this reporting period. Today's discussion includes references to Non-GAAP measures. Clean Harbors believes that such information provides an additional measurement and consistent historical comparison of its performance. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in today's news release, on our website, and in the appendix of today's presentation. Let me turn the call over to Eric Gerstenberg to start. Eric?
Thanks, Michael. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Our first quarter results demonstrates the execution of our growth strategy and the resilience of our diversified business model. We delivered broad-based growth across our Environmental Services segment. In addition to the favorable market conditions, those results were driven by cross-selling and capitalizing on our platform of over 700 service branches while sharing our unique assets in our 22,000 employees. Before we dive into the numbers, let me first highlight our outstanding safety performance. The team got us off to a terrific start in 2023, delivering a first quarter best TRIR of 0.61, which is well below our ambitious goal of 0.70. The first quarter can always be a challenge from a safety perspective, given the frequency of icy surfaces, which increase the potential for slips, trips, and falls.
Hats off to the team on keeping yourself and your colleagues safe. Keep up the great work. Turning to our Q1 financial results on slide three, we had a solid start to the year, led by our Environmental Services segment, which again generated strong, profitable growth. Overall, we achieved a 12% top line increase to $1.31 billion. That helped drive our Adjusted EBITDA up by 19%, which was in line with our guidance for the quarter. Eric Dugas will talk a bit more about our margins, but those rose from a year ago as we continue to offset inflation through price and cost initiatives while maximizing the utilization of our people and equipment. Our results this quarter continue to demonstrate the considerable leverage inherent in our business model as we grow. We continue to see great momentum in the Environmental Services segment.
Despite some weather-related challenges in the network, demand remains strong, supported by the growth drivers we detailed at our Investor Day in March. Within SKSS, we experienced a difficult macro environment as the base oil market has gotten off to a slow start. That business experienced lower profitability, which Mike will talk more about in a moment, due to a decline in base oil pricing to start the year, resulting in short-term margin compression. Meanwhile, our corporate segment was down year-over-year as the cost management efforts and better healthcare costs more than offset inflation. We are proud of our efforts to bring this number down, even with revenues up 12% from a year ago.
Turning to our Environmental Services segment on slide four, the 13% growth in revenue was driven by a combination of volume and pricing, with growth in each of the four business units within Environmental Services. We continue to see considerable demand across the board for our services. Industrial services revenue grew 9% as we continue to see the benefits of the HPC acquisition in late 2021 and move forward under a unified brand throughout the U.S. Revenues in Safety-Kleen Environmental grew an impressive 18%, led by its core offerings such as parts wash services, which increased to $250,000 in the quarter, up 7% from a year ago. At the same time, our field services revenue was up 12% on the strength of pricing, cross-selling, and branch growth initiatives.
Technical services revenue was up 13% despite an increased level of unplanned outages at some of our disposal facilities, primarily caused from weather-related challenges. As a result, utilization at our incinerators in the quarter was lower than we expected, coming in at 80% this quarter versus 85% a year ago. We expect that utilization to move back into the mid-80s here in Q2 after a couple of tough quarters. In fact, as we sit here today, all of our incinerators are running well. Average incineration pricing was up 15% year-over-year in Q1, demonstrating the success of our strategy to focus on higher value waste streams and remain price competitive while offsetting rising costs. Landfill volume was up 8% from a year ago due to severe flooding at our site in Buttonwillow, California.
Excluding that site, landfill volumes are up year-over-year. Landfill price per ton was 17% higher in the quarter, reflecting strength in the base business along with a healthy mix of waste projects. Looking at segment profitability, Adjusted EBITDA growth again outpaced our top line, increasing by 24% and illustrating the leverage of our business model as demand for our services continue to be strong. We are also benefiting from a number of productivity programs and cost reduction efforts in recent quarters. As a result of these factors, we achieved a 190 basis point increase in ES margins from a year ago. Mike Battles will now take you through SKSS in our capital allocation strategy. Mike?
Thanks, Eric. Good morning, everyone. Let me begin by acknowledging the great work of our team in delivering for our customers. As Eric noted, the demand environment in ES is robust. Our people are playing an integral role in helping to drive that demand because of their valuable skill set and through the use of technology tools and resources that enable our customers to increase their efficiency and productivity. Moving to slide five, our SKSS segment had a challenging first quarter, falling short of our profitability expectations. The segment experienced a slower seasonal pickup in pricing in March than we had anticipated. As we move into Q2, the pricing environment for base oil has remained weak, as noted by the recent price decreases across the sector in early April.
On the top line, SKSS revenue grew 7% due to higher base oil volumes and revenue from the small acquisition we completed last June, as well as higher sales of ancillary services. SKSS Adjusted EBITDA decreased by 20%, resulting in lower margins. The variance was driven by weaker than normal seasonal pricing, which compressed our near-term re-refining spread. Buyers have been slow to come off the sidelines to start the annual driving season. We face a difficult comparison with the first half of last year when we saw five price increases in the first six months, leading to the significant margin expansion experienced in the first half of 2022. Our primary focus recently has been on the collection costs for UMO, which we manage in response to market pricing.
Waste oil collections in the quarter were strong at 59 million gallons, up 11% from a year ago. We began rapidly lowering our pay for oil pricing over the course of the quarter in response to the market, a decision we expect to help us in the coming months. Blended product sales accounted for 15% of total output from our plants. Our direct volumes, which we are implementing our closed loop approach, were at 7% or nearly 1/2 of all blended volumes. Despite a slow start in Q1, our goal remains to increase our blended volumes this year. We expect both our direct and wholesale blended sales to improve as we move deeper into 2023, given the investments we have made. Turning to slide six in our capital allocation strategy.
On the M&A front, we continue to see a good flow of potential transactions, particularly bolt-on deals for both operating segments. As Eric mentioned, we completed the Thompson Industrial acquisition on the last day of Q1 in an all-cash deal for approximately $110 million. This transaction expands our presence in the Southeast U.S. for industrial services. It also broadens our position in verticals where we have sold environmental services, but not industrial services, including paper, mining, and power. We're off to a great start and are impressed with the Thompson team. Whether in industrial services or other service businesses, we will continue to target companies that are synergistic and afford us opportunities to cross-sell.
Eric Dugas will touch on our balance sheet in his remarks. From a debt perspective, the key takeaway is that we're maintaining a flexible, strong balance sheet that will enable us to remain opportunistic with M&A. We continue to evaluate internal investment opportunities to drive organic growth. We've talked on previous calls about our new state-of-the-art incinerator in Kimball, Nebraska. That 70,000 tons of annual capacity remains on plan, on budget, and on schedule to open for business in early 2025. Given market conditions, we certainly wish it were sooner. Overall, we are pleased with how well we have started 2023, despite challenges on the base oil side and with some of our facilities. Within ES, we exited the quarter on a strong trajectory. Each of our businesses are in great shape as we move into our seasonally stronger quarters.
While questions about the macroeconomic environment remain, we have yet to see any slowdowns in our ES segment. Underlying market conditions remain favorable, which also speak to the essential nature of what we provide our customers. Our record backlog of waste positions us well for the rest of the year. Our Q1 performance also reflects the diverse nature of our business model. Within SKSS, we expect the market to stabilize with the approach of the summer driving season. That said, short-term pricing pressures is a challenge. Therefore, our focus is on continuing to control what we can control. That means controlling costs across this business. Specifically, we are aggressively managing our waste oil collection costs while ensuring we have enough supply to feed our re-refineries. Our Bulk Products and Services, or BPS organization, which we established three years ago, allows us to more nimbly adjust our collection costs.
Based on current market conditions, as we see here today, we are currently at a net charge for oil position with our collections. The current pricing environment is more challenging than we anticipated when we gave our initial 2023 guidance. This is why we are lowering our 2023 expectations for this segment, which Eric Dugas will share shortly. We believe our ES segment will be able to offset the slowdown in SKSS. We are going to continue to drive SKSS profitability to minimize the spread compression through several areas. These include greater base oil production compared with a year ago, as much as 10 million gallons more, accelerating blended sales, and cultivating interest in our environmentally friendly solutions through our new Clean Plus base oil brand.
We remain committed to the long-term growth of this segment as part of Vision 2027 plan we introduced at Investor Day. With that, let me turn it over to our CFO, Eric Dugas.
Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Turning to our income statement on slide eight. Q1 represented our eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit organic revenue growth, with March generating the single largest monthly revenue total in the company's history. Revenue for the quarter increased 12% to $1.31 billion. With the vast majority of that nearly $140 million increase fueled by strong organic growth in our environmental services segment. Adjusted EBITDA was $215.1 million, a 19% increase over the same period a year ago, and in line with the consolidated guidance we provided in early March. These results equate to a margin of 16.5%, a 110 basis point increase from Q1 of last year, reflecting gross margin improvements, fixed cost leverage, and lower SG&A as a % of revenue.
Gross margin improved 80 basis points to 28.7%. This improvement reflects our ability to offset inflation with appropriate price increases while also increasing productivity and realizing gains from operational efficiencies. SG&A expense as a % of revenue improved to 12.8% in Q1. The improvement reflects our strong commitment to holding the line on costs and leveraging our growth to drive value for our stakeholders. For full year 2023, we continue to expect SG&A costs as a % of revenue to remain in the low 12% range, essentially flat to 2022. Depreciation and amortization in Q1 increased slightly to $84.8 million, consistent with our expectations.
For 2023, we currently anticipate depreciation and amortization in the range of $350 million-$360 million, a slight increase from our prior guidance due to the addition of Thompson Industrial. Income from operations in Q1 increased nearly 40% to $121 million, driven by our strong revenue growth, combined with continued margin improvement in the environmental services segment. Net income for the quarter was $72.4 million, up 60% from a year ago, resulting in GAAP EPS of $1.33 per share. Turning to our balance sheet highlights on slide nine.
Cash and short-term marketable securities at quarter end were $376.1 million, down from year-end, reflecting the Thompson transaction and the fact that Q1 typically is a large cash use period due to the payout of year-end bonuses as well as the timing of interest and tax payments. We ended the quarter with debt of just over $2.4 billion. As we discussed on our last earnings call in January, we refinanced the then remaining $614 million of our Term Loan B that was due in 2024. We achieved this by issuing $500 million of new eight-year unsecured senior notes due in 2031 and by tapping our ABL revolver for $114 million.
We continue to feel comfortable with our overall debt portfolio as there are no significant amounts coming due for a number of years. With about 80% of our total debt being fixed at reasonable rates, we have lessened our exposure to the current higher rate environment. Leverage on a net debt to EBITDA basis as of March 31st was approximately two times, and our weighted average cost of debt today remains at approximately 5%. Turning to cash flows on slide 10. Cash provided from operations in Q1 was $28 million versus a use of cash of $39 million a year ago. CapEx, net of disposals, was $80 million in the quarter, up slightly from prior year and primarily reflecting higher year-over-year spend on our ongoing Nebraska incinerator project, where spend was roughly $13 million this quarter.
In Q1, adjusted free cash flow was a negative $51.8 million, which was slightly better than our internal expectations and represented a substantial year-over-year improvement. For 2023, we continue to expect our net CapEx to be in the range of $400 million-$420 million. Our Kimball investment this year is still expected to total approximately $90 million of CapEx as the spending ramps up in the summer timeframe. We are also continuing to invest in our transportation fleet and equipment to accommodate the growth of the business and minimize third-party rental spend. During Q1, we bought back more than 22,000 shares of stock at a total cost of $3 million. We have just over $100 million remaining under our existing authorized buyback program, which remains an integral part of our capital allocation strategy. Moving to slide 11.
Based on our Q1 results, current market conditions for both our operating segments and the addition of Thompson Industrial, we now expect 2023 Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $1.02 billion-$1.06 billion. Looking at our guidance from a quarterly perspective, we expect Q2 Adjusted EBITDA to be approximately 7%-9% lower than Q2 of 2022 due to a challenging year-over-year comp for our SKSS segment. I'll now provide a breakdown of how our revised full year 2023 Adjusted EBITDA guidance translates to our reporting segments. In environmental services, we now expect Adjusted EBITDA at the midpoint of our guidance to increase 12%-13% from full year 2022. Demand for our services and disposal facilities continues to be very strong, which should translate into a favorable mix and average price.
The ES segment now includes approximately $12 million in Adjusted EBITDA that is attributable to the Thompson acquisition. For SKSS, we now anticipate full year 2023 Adjusted EBITDA at the midpoint of our guidance to decrease in the high 20% range from 2022, reflecting current base oil pricing and demand trends. In our corporate segment, at the midpoint of our guide, we expect negative Adjusted EBITDA to be up mid-single digits for the full year 2023. This increase reflects wage inflation and rising insurance expenses, partly offset by cost savings and lower overall bonus compensation. The corporate segment guide now includes approximately $3 million of negative Adjusted EBITDA attributable to Thompson. We continue to expect 2023 adjusted free cash flow in the range of $305 million-$345 million.
While we had a better than expected Q1, I want to remind everyone that our guidance includes approximately $90 million of spend for the new incinerator in 2023. If you added that spend back, the midpoint of our adjusted free cash flow guidance range would be about $415 million. In summary, Q1 marked a promising start to the year for our environmental services segment. As Eric Gerstenberg highlighted, demand for disposal remains very strong, which has created a robust backlog of waste across the industry. Healthy facility volumes are being further supported by continuing high utilization of our people and equipment across many of our service businesses. With the exception of our base oil business, the favorable market dynamics and underlying trends that led to a record 2022, and that we outlined at our recent Investor Day remain intact.
Our growth prospects in our environmental services segment this year are as strong as ever. We will manage our way through the slowdown in SKSS, as we have and done in previous cycles, with the initiatives that Mike mentioned earlier. Overall, we expect another solid year for Clean Harbors here in 2023. With that, Karen, could you please open the call up for questions?
Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions . We'll take our first question from Michael Hoffman from Stifel. Please go ahead, Michael.
Hi. Good morning. Sorry. I managed to lose my voice at WasteExpo. Nice quarter. Deferred revenue, strongest, as far as I can tell, the strongest ever. How much of that is just pure demand versus the utilization issue in the quarter?
Michael, this is Eric Gerstenberg responding. The increase in deferred is really predominantly due to the low utilization on the incinerators.
it would have still been up versus 4Q because of the underlying demand environment, or more likely flat?
More likely flat.
All right. If you had hit your utilization, then ex Thompson, you would have been raising your numbers as well, given the level of profitability on $7 million of revenue.
That's right, Michael. That's right.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's part of my point is guidance is going to be reaffirmed ex Thompson, and you were gonna raise it anyway.
Sorry, Mike.
That's right. That's right, Michael. This is Mike Battles. you got it right. It really was. We would have been better. Some plant disruptions caused us to have a lower utilization, which resulted in a little lower ES. Prior to what we said, you know, 60 days ago, it was actually much higher even with those problems.
Right. At the beginning of the year, one of the things you shared with us is trying to help the market appreciate that base oil in 2022 was above average because of the global imbalance on supply/demand, and that we knew we were coming back into balance, and your guidance expected to reflect that. You'd sort of, without being absolutely precise, had guided us towards sort of a $250 million was sort of a baseline, and then anything you did better around blending and more capacity utilization would have been upside. Do you still feel that the underlying baseline still lives somewhere in that mid-$250 and that we're, you know, we're in a short term imbalance around seasonality?
Yeah, Michael, I firmly believe that. I think that the challenge you have is that we assumed pricing would come up with the summer driving season, and it just didn't materialize. Matter of fact, it went down. That in my mind. We-- as I said in the call, you know, we adjusted our collection costs, our UMO pricing aggressively, but there's a lag there. That lag is kind of ripping its way through the financial statements, and you see it here in Q1. In an effort to be thoughtful and make sure we don't have any further problems, we lowered it, you know, quite a bit from where we were, let's say, 60 days ago.
Okay. Another way to say this is the upside to 2019 from IMO 2020 still very strongly was something in the low $100 million. That puts you in that approaching 250x whatever the global supply and demands did to base oil in 2022.
Yes, sir. I mean, our Vision 2027 we shared a month ago would have this come back up to 300 by the end of the five years. You know, it's not a straight line. You know, we're going to continue to work through that. The team's done a good job this quarter as prices started to decline to kind of drop, you know, kind of UMO pricing from, let's say, the low $0.20, you know, to a charged oil position, which I said on the call.
You're in that sort of low single digit on the charge for oil now?
I think we are, very low single digit.
Okay.
Yeah, Michael, I think it reiterates the strength of our BPS organization and how effective they have been to be able to respond quickly to market conditions to drive down our UMO collection costs.
Last one for me. Industrial production as an indices has been tracking down. All of you who have reported so far across the industrial services markets have showed really good activity. Are there any end market pieces that were a little weaker but others were stronger, and that's one of the strengths of Clean Harbors today is you have this broader, more balanced portfolio? How do I think about correlating your business relative to industrial production trend?
Michael. I would say that we are obviously very balanced, as we said in the investor presentation. All of our four business units and environmental services experience strong continued growth and strong continued need of their services as we look in through the year. We have not seen any slowdown across the verticals that we serve.
Industrial production, industrial services in particular, Michael, they had a pretty good comp the prior year. Q1 was kind of one of the first full quarter we owned Hydrokem. That was a tough, kind of a tough quarter for us as we did a lot of change management. I would say that also helped us out, is that we had. I think HPC is doing terrific. I think that acquisition is gonna turn out to be a home run. We did have a pretty good comp in Q1 versus Q1 last year.
Okay, fair enough. Thanks for taking the questions.
Hope your voice feels better. Thanks, Michael.
Yeah. Just gotta stop talking.
Impossible.
Thank you.
Impossible.
next we'll go to Jerry Revich from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, Jerry.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone.
Hi, Jerry.
Morning, Jerry.
I wonder if we could just talk a little bit more about ES, really strong pricing across incinerators and then the hazardous waste landfills. How much of that is mix? You know, how does that look from here based on what you expect to churn through the business over the course of two Q?
Yeah, Jerry. We've continued to say we continue to drive favorable mix by focusing across the incineration network on those higher priced direct burn and drum quantities to manage through our network, and that'll continue to be our strategy across the boards. The volume is up as well as noted. We've seen improvement as we've driven pricing across all the segments of our businesses in ES, and we'll continue to do that.
You know, maybe just to pick up, there, so nice continued margin expansion, for you folks, in the quarter. Can you just talk about the cadence of margin expansion that you expect over the course of 2023? I know you laid out the EBITDA growth outlook, but I'm wondering could we just expand that conversation to margins given what you laid out as the opportunity set at the analyst day?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, Jerry, this is Mike Battles. I'll answer that. Q2, you know, modest margin expansion, I would say, given, you know, such how Q2 was such a strong quarter for us last year. Q3 and four, I think the margin expansion is at the same level or even a little faster than where we landed in Q1. I'm again, I'm really bullish about the ES business. I think that it had a great start, and I think there's gonna be more ability to drive kind of margin expansion in the back half of the year.
Okay, super. Lastly, can I ask, on the additives topic, it sounds like we started to see better supply. Can you just talk about where that's tracking and how you expect your mix to evolve as a result?
Yeah, Jerry, the additive supply issue has subsided. We're able to get additives to continue to grow our blended growth strategy.
Hey, Jerry, your question you asked earlier, did you want to know the ES margins or the consolidated margins? I was answering the ES margins, not the consolidated margins. I hope that was your question.
Mike, you read my mind well, as usual, the ES. Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you. Next, we'll go to Jim Ricchiuti from Needham. Please go ahead, Jim.
Hi. Thank you. Just wondering if you can size the impact of the disruption, the flooding in California on the business in the quarter?
Yeah, sure. We think in the ES business, it was kinda $8 million-$10 million, where, you know, plant disruptions in general, not just the flooding in California, but we had some unplanned outages early in the quarter in the ES business. I think that drove that. I wanna caution you, Jim, though, that when you think about the bad weather and you say, "Well, you take your results and add, you know, $8 million-$10 million on it, that's even better." That may be true, but, you know, bad weather is sometimes a good thing for us, right? Because it helps us with in our field service business, you know, as Eric said, we're across the board, way up.
Field service had a great quarter this quarter, and I think at least part of that was due to bad weather. The fact there was a lot of manhole cleanups in the utility space and a lot of work to be done there, that field service takes advantage of. It's always dangerous to, you know. We're trying to explain the weather challenges on the plants because 80% utilization is low and landfill volumes are down, we make sure that The Street understands what happened and why that was very temporary. I wouldn't take our results and just add $10 million and call it good.
No, that's fair enough. Apart from the, what you saw in field services, were there any unusual, emergency response, work in ES that you saw in Q1?
No, Jim, there really wasn't. We saw a continued across-the-board demand, no large projects to really call out.
Just a lot of small ones, really.
Got it. you know, you talked about pricing for a while now and in the ES side of the business. I'm wondering, yeah, to what extent pricing is a tailwind in the current quarter and then as you look out to the second half, because there have been, like, a few price initiatives that you've taken over the course of the last several quarters.
Yeah, Jim. When you think about pricing in Q1, I'd say about 75% of the ES growth is pricing, and a quarter of it is, as Eric said, is mix and volume. Mix and volume. I think we've done a really good job at pricing. We had a decent comp from prior year. We didn't really get into the price increases until, let’s say, mid-Q1, if you recall from last year. Really, we had a relatively decent comp to kinda work against on the ES on the pricing side. That said, we continued to drive price kind of across the network on all, you know, whether it be FS, PS, IS, SK Brands business. We’ve been able to drive price across the board, and I think that continues. You know, our costs are way up.
You didn't ask the question, but I'm gonna answer anyways. Whether it be, you know, our maintenance costs or our facility costs, or our people costs, you know, they still remain really high. You know, our need really is to drive, continue to drive price across the network and also take out costs. I wanna stress that, especially to our customers who may be listening, that we are very aggressive in driving costs out of the business. You see it in our corporate costs. They're down year-over-year. I haven't seen a company yet that's had corporate costs down year-over-year.
That's due to our ability to kind of really try to manage our cost structure very well, move headcount to low-cost jurisdictions and really drive that business and keep those costs low while we service our customers.
Got it. Thank you, guys.
As a reminder, that's star one if you do have a question or comment. We'll take our next question from Tobey Sommer from Truist. Please go ahead, Toby.
Thanks. I wanted to ask a couple of pricing questions. With respect to pricing in ES at the industry level, how do you think the experience at Clean Harbors and pricing trends compare to the industry as a whole to the extent you can see into that?
Tough to say, Tobey, exactly. You know, we kinda focus on what we can do versus talking about what the industry it has done. I can't. It's hard for me, Tobey, to speak to. First of all, welcome. Welcome to the call. Thank you for your coverage. You know, I'm not really sure about that. I wouldn't wanna speculate as to industry trends. Certainly, you know, Clean Harbors, as I said, we had a pretty easy comp, not easy comp, but a decent comp. We've been, you know, aggressive on price because we've had to because of our cost structure and our costs have gone up so much.
Another question on price. I appreciate that answer. Are there any businesses, certainly incinerators, you talked about that pricing being very strong or pockets of customers where there is more resistance to price increases? What's your process for handling those customers and maintaining discipline where there is pressure?
Yeah, Tobey, this is Eric. I'll answer that one. There is. The industrial business has been traditionally one of the areas that has been the toughest to push price. However, we've been very aggressive in our position with those customers. We've aligned ourselves with the right customers, so to speak, based on our increase in costs and trying to push our increase in labor across to them, and we've been aggressive in doing that. At the end of the day, there always is some customers that we need to walk away from so that we can utilize our assets and people and those customers that we wanna align with. Across the board, though, we push hard and we value our relationships across the board with our customers.
Shifting gears, what's your experience been year-to-date with respect to employee trends for retention and acceptance rate for new hires? Across our coverage, we've heard of a pretty marked improvement in both those dimensions, at many firms, so we're curious if you're experiencing the same thing.
Yeah, Tobey, Eric Dugas here. I'll address that one. You know what? I think what we're seeing here in the first quarter is on the retention front with employees, turnover really improving. I think, you know, if we look at our stats, our turnover rate is down closer to what it was pre-pandemic in 2019. Really that's helping us see, going back to the cost play, that's certainly helping us see wages moderate a little bit, against the backdrop of inflation. That's helpful. On the hiring front, certainly made great headways, particularly with drivers over the last 12 months, which again, having more internal drivers drives internalization of that transportation cost and is helping us there as well.
Our HR team has been quite busy over the last several quarters with hiring, and we're really being able to kinda close some strategic positions on the direct labor side that's helping us drive our revenues.
Yeah, Tobey, as we said in our Investor Day presentation, we've put a lot of emphasis across the board on our employee programs to lower our turnover, drive additional net headcount. Those dividends have really paid off across the board as show up in our numbers as well.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Noah Kaye from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead, Noah.
Thanks for taking the questions. wanted to talk about some of the M&A you've done in the past. you know, you talked about HPC being a winner. Sometimes the focus on synergies capture, both from a cost side and revenue side, tends to dissipate as you lap that first full year, but it's really only been basically a year and a half since you closed that. It would just be great to get an update on where ultimately, you know, synergies have shaken out from both a cost and revenue perspective. The second part is, you know, now that you have Thompson Industrial in the fold and HPC, just wanted to get your appetite on additional M&A opportunities in industrial services and within ES more broadly.
I'll answer the first one, and I'll let Eric G. answer the second part. You know, you see it, Noah, in a lot of different areas. First of all, we signed up to $40 million of cost savings within the HPC acquisition. I think we've hit that and more. And we didn't sign up for any revenue synergies, but we gave the guidance because, you know, as you and I think have talked before, it's really hard to identify a cross-sell opportunity because, you know, who got the sale? Did the field service person who's calling on that customer get the sale, or was it an HPC employee?
Clearly, you know, we are getting a lot more work from our a lot more field and tech service and SK business out of our industrial services businesses. It certainly is happening. Hard to pinpoint exactly how much, and that's why we don't kinda guide to that. We don't put that in numbers. I do think that there's plenty of upside there.
The other thing we talked a lot about, which we're seeing a lot of progress on is the automation services that the Hydrokem team did, and bringing that, you know, to Canada, bringing that type of technology to our customers to our legacy industrial business that didn't really have much of it, nor in our Canadian business, which didn't have much of it, and really been very busy trying to do more automation, which is safer and more profitable, you know, in our legacy customers, both in the U.S. and Canada.
Again, I think that's been a really good win, and the margins are getting kinda up to, you know, where we bought it kinda on the low end, mid-teens to maybe hopefully high teens over the next few years, as we talked about kind of in Investor Day. The last thing I'd say is that we took a lot of the good learnings and applied some of that to Thompson. I know it's only been one month, and we've only been in doing it for, you know, for a few weeks now, but I think Eric and I are both really pleased with kind of the early returns and their thoughtfulness and their processes, and I think that'll turn out to be a winner as well.
Eric, if you wanna talk about kinda M&A.
Noah, just one other comment to add to what Mike just said on Thompson Industrial. Day one with Thompson Industrial that the operations and sales team over there was excited to join the team and have the ability to sell our disposal network in the same customer base that they've been driving revenue from. When we look at M&A across the board in environmental services, the pipeline continues to be strong, not only in IS opportunities, but we're seeing opportunities in TS businesses, FS businesses as well. It continues to show signs of robustness as we get more into 2023 here.
Okay. Question on SKSS. I think you identified improving mix of blended as one of the controllable levers for maintaining profitability in this segment over the course of the year. Can you expand on what impacted the mix of blended this quarter and how you might expect mix to trend over the course of the year? I'm really interested in any sort of substantive color you can give on what's happening in the segment there.
Yeah. Q1, you know, not a great start in blended gallons, down a little bit than what we expected, but I do think the team has done a good job of driving blended gallons. I think we're gonna beat last year's number. We'll do better than that. You know, it's not a straight line, and so Q1 was a bit of a disappointment. Put a little more pressure on the results now, right? I think that there's gonna be 20% more blended kinda year-over-year when the dust settles on this, certainly not in Q1 so far.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Bye, Noah.
We'll take our next question from David Manthey from Baird. Please go ahead, David.
Thank you. Good morning. Sorry, I've been jumping between calls here, so I apologize if you've answered this already. Could you talk about incinerator price mix during the quarter and just general activity levels among the key customer groups, particularly the chemical complex, and any comments on turnarounds for 2023?
Yeah. Dave, this is Eric. Mike alluded to earlier, we're seeing really, about 75% really price, 25% mix and volume improvement, that's strong. Across the chemical vertical, strong volumes. Direct burns continue to, we see that throughout our network and are driving that and continue to be strong outlooks across the board.
Okay. This is a conceptual question. You guide to Adjusted EBITDA, not revenues. I'm just wondering why is that? Do you feel you have more control over EBITDA regardless of what the market throws at you? Just any background there would be helpful.
David Manthey. The reason why we don't guide on revenue is because, you know, in the oil side of the business, you know, we're a price taker, right? It's very hard for us to guide on an oil number when that can move around as you know pretty rapidly. We tend to kinda focus on kinda managing a spread between the price we sell base oil on and the collection, the price we pay or charge for dirty motor oil. You know, that's really, we try to stick to the EBITDA number on that side. Because that's 20% of the business, we tend not to give revenue guidance because of that.
That makes sense. Thanks very much, guys.
Okay, David.
Thanks, David.
Once again, that's star one if you do have a question or comment. There appear to be no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Gerstenberg for closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Mike, Eric, Jim, and I will be participating at the Oppenheimer and Goldman Sachs conferences next week and a handful more in early June. We look forward to seeing some of you at those events.
Excellent. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a great day.