Morning, and welcome to the 126th Weyerhaeuser Annual Shareholder Meeting. I'm Rick R. Holley, the chairman of the board of directors. I'd like to start this morning by thanking you, our shareholders, for your continued support of Weyerhaeuser and our employees for everything they're doing for the company. Against challenging market conditions, the Weyerhaeuser team performed well in each of our businesses, which allowed us to achieve our multi-year targets. We also launched a new transformative strategy to accelerate growth to 2030, which you will hear more about later. All of this great work positions your company extremely well for continued success long into the future. We will start today's meeting with the formal part of our agenda. Shareholders are able to cast their votes and submit questions where indicated on the web portal.
As a reminder, questions should generally relate to the business and affairs of the company be in a general shareholder interest. After the formal portion of our meeting, Devin W. Stockfish, Weyerhaeuser's President and Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors, will give a presentation on the company's business. Following Devin's presentation, we will answer as many questions as time permits. Joining me on the call today are several other members of the board of directors. We have Mark A. Emmert, Sara Grootwassink Lewis, Deidra C. Merriwether, Al Monaco, James C. O'Rourke, Nicole W. Piasecki, Lawrence A. Selzer, and Kim Williams. Also joining us today are members of the senior management team. Brian K. Chaney, who is our Senior Vice President, Wood Products. Kristy T. Harlan, Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary. Paul Hossain, Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer. Travis A. Keatley, Senior Vice President of Timberlands.
Denise Merle, who's our Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, and David Wold, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We are also joined by KPMG, the company's independent auditors, and Broadridge Financial Services, the Inspector of Elections. Representatives from each organization are available to respond to appropriate questions today. I will now call this meeting to order. I'd like to first go over some preliminary items. We have the meeting guidelines posted on the virtual meeting website. Please be sure to review them. You'll be able to submit questions on the web portal. Questions will be answered after the business presentation. As a reminder, only shareholders who have validated their identity with a control number may vote or submit questions. Our record date for this annual meeting was March 17, 2026.
On that date, there were 721 million, 442,609 common shares outstanding. Shareholders of record on the record date were mailed proxy materials and are entitled to vote on the 3 matters of business. We have confirmed that a majority of outstanding shares are present in person or by proxy, and therefore a correct quorum was achieved for conducting business. There are 3 business items on the agenda for today's meeting. Each item is described in the proxy statement. First is the election of 11 directors for terms expiring at the 2027 annual meeting of shareholders. Professional biographies of the director nominees are included in the proxy statement. The board of directors recommends that shareholders vote to elect each of the nominees.
Second is an advisory vote to approve the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. As a reminder, this vote is advisory and non-binding. However, the board of directors and our compensation committee greatly value the opinions of our shareholders on this important topic. The board recommends that shareholders approve the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy materials. Third and last is ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent auditors for 2026. The audit committee has appointed KPMG to serve as the company's independent auditors for 2026. The board of directors asks, as a matter of good corporate practice, to ratify the committee's appointment on an advisory and non-binding basis. At this time, the online voting polls are open. Shareholders are entitled to vote until the online voting polls are closed.
If you have already voted by proxy, there is no need to vote now unless you are changing your vote. We'll pause for a moment to allow shareholders to cast their votes. Voting is now concluded, and the polls are closed. I will now turn it over to Kristy T. Harlan for the voting results. Kristy?
Thank you, Rick. In the election of the directors, each of the nominees received a majority of the votes cast and therefore has been duly elected. With respect to the advisory vote to approve compensation of the named executive officers as described in the proxy statement, the votes cast in favor of the proposal exceed the votes cast against the proposal, and therefore, the proposal has been approved. Lastly, with respect to the ratification of KPMG as the company's independent auditors for 2026, the votes cast in favor of the proposal exceed the votes cast against the proposal, and therefore, the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent auditors was ratified.
Thank you, Kristy. The formal business of the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is now adjourned. Devin Stockfish, President and Chief Executive Officer, will now provide an update on the company's operations. Devin?
Thank you, Rick, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to be sharing some of the great things we're doing at Weyerhaeuser. This morning, I'll walk you through highlights from 2025 and speak to some of our key priorities for 2026 and beyond, including our new growth strategy. After that, we'll take your questions with the time remaining. We'll go ahead and get started. Just a quick note here, I will be making some forward-looking statements, and the typical cautionary language will apply. Let's begin with a quick look at our investment thesis. At Weyerhaeuser, we're focused on 4 key levers to drive value for our shareholders, 3 of which have been core components of our investment thesis for many years, including our unmatched portfolio of assets, industry-leading performance, and disciplined approach to capital allocation.
Our fourth lever, which we outlined at our recent Investor Day, is accelerated growth. All of these are fueled by foundational strengths, including more than 125 years of expertise, our strong ESG foundation, and relentless focus on operational excellence and innovation. I'll speak to each of these here shortly. First, I want to take a step back and give a brief high-level overview of our company. For those of you that aren't as familiar with our story, Weyerhaeuser is the only large-cap integrated forest products company operating throughout North America. Our foundation is truly world-class, we have several distinct competitive advantages as a company. First, at the core of our company is our Timberlands business. We're the largest private owner of timberlands in North America, with more than 10 million acres of high-quality, highly productive timberlands across the U.S.
We manage 13 million acres in Canada under long-term license agreements. Simply put, the scale and quality of our Timberlands portfolio is unrivaled. We're also one of North America's largest producers of Wood Products, with 33 manufacturing facilities that produce Lumber, oriented strand board, and a variety of Engineered Wood Products. We also have 22 distribution facilities located in key markets across the U.S. We've long focused on operational excellence and cost discipline in this business, and we have industry-leading margins as well as strong brand recognition with customers. Lastly, our Strategic Land Solutions business is focused on maximizing the value of every acre we own and leveraging the optionality of our land base through real estate, climate solutions, and natural resources opportunities. Just a quick note here, Strategic Land Solutions is the new name of our Real Estate, Energy and Natural Resources segment.
The rebranding reflects our broadening scope and growth focus across these businesses. Underpinning all of this is our enduring high-performance culture. We have a strong track record of portfolio management, operational excellence, and innovation, and we've long been industry leaders in sustainability. All of our business segments have significant scale and industry-leading performance, and we manage them within a tax-efficient REIT structure. In fact, we're one of the largest REITs in the U.S. Before we go into more specifics on our investment thesis, I do want to take a moment here to reflect on what we've been able to accomplish over the past four years.
We set several ambitious targets for ourselves at our Investor Day back in 2021, we were able to deliver on our commitments despite a range of headwinds that we faced over this period, including hyperinflation, a dynamic trade and policy environment, and a myriad of other macro challenges. In Timberlands, we achieved our multi-year $1 billion timberlands growth target. Notably, we offset a substantial portion of our acquisitions with proceeds from divestitures of non-core acreage, effectively recycling capital to enhance the quality and value of our timber holdings over time. We've exceeded our target to grow our Natural Climate Solutions business to $100 million of annual EBITDA, ultimately hitting $119 million in 2025.
In the process, we've built the expertise to capture value and developed a strong pipeline of future opportunities to drive incremental growth, including in forest carbon, wind, and solar, among others. These investments will ultimately enable us to grow production as markets improve. As for our operations, we maintained strong relative performance across our businesses and met our multi-year OpEx targets, a notable achievement given the significant inflationary pressures we faced during this period. Lastly, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to returning meaningful amounts of cash back to shareholders through four consecutive annual increases to our quarterly-based dividend and over $6 billion of cash returned from 2021 through 2025, including nearly $1.1 billion of share repurchase.
We set ambitious targets at our 2021 Investor Day, and as always, we delivered, demonstrating once again our commitment to executing against our goals regardless of market conditions and positioning us well for our next step as a company. That next step is accelerating growth. All the work we've been doing over the past several years has been about building a strong foundation and putting us in a position to drive transformational growth and significant value creation across our company. At our recent Investor Day in December, we laid out plans to deliver $1.5 billion of incremental adjusted EBITDA through 2030.
We've developed a comprehensive growth program that will further strengthen our competitive position, improve our cash flow, and allow us to return a significant amount of cash to shareholders, ultimately improving our share price and putting us on a path to industry-leading shareholder returns. This is our roadmap to achieve that one and a half billion in incremental EBITDA measured against a 2024 baseline. Each of our businesses has a specific target, along with some enterprise-level initiatives that all add up to $1 billion in additional annual EBITDA for our company. The balance of our growth target comes from a modest improvement in pro-product pricing during the period. The specific growth initiatives we've identified span the breadth of our company, and we have multiple levers to meet our one-and-a-half-billion-dollar target. The vast majority of these initiatives are already underway and are mostly under our control.
We're not relying on any single project or business. Rather, we've developed a comprehensive set of initiatives across each of our businesses and functions to improve cash flow over this five-year period. That gives us multiple levers to achieve our overall EBITDA goal. The breadth and variety of our initiatives will help de-risk the overall growth program. I'll refer you to our Investor Day materials for more information on our growth initiatives. I'll just note I'm highly confident in our ability to achieve these 2030 targets, and I'm incredibly excited to deliver on this transformational program for our stakeholders. Okay. With that, I want to turn to the core components of our investment thesis, starting with our portfolio. Across each of our businesses, from our forests to climate solutions to our manufacturing operations, our portfolio is truly unmatched in the industry.
That starts with the foundation of our company, our Timberlands business. Weyerhaeuser has an unrivaled portfolio of timberland assets. As I mentioned, we're the largest private owner of timberlands in North America. This is a remarkable portfolio with both scale and diversity. We have a little more than 10 million acres of highly productive, high-quality timberlands across key growing regions in the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. South, and the Northeast. We also manage millions of acres of public forests in Canada through long-term licenses. Taken together, this geographic diversity gives us superior access to well-established domestic markets and a broad mix of customers. In addition, our timberlands portfolio in the U.S. is well-suited to serve a range of export customers. In the West, our export program is primarily focused on Japan, and this has been a significant value driver for Weyerhaeuser over the decades.
We also have long-term relationships with key customers in a number of other Asian export markets. We're well-positioned to serve these growing export markets over time, both out of our existing scaled Western program as well as our emerging Southern export program, which is one of our key growth opportunities for the company. Our unmatched scale and diversified market access, combined with the exceptional quality and productivity of our Timberlands, is a significant competitive advantage for us. We further build on that competitive advantage with our deep in-house expertise around forestry and silviculture, as well as our unrivaled supply chain expertise. All of this enables our Timberlands portfolio to deliver enduring value across market cycles. Now, as part of our five-year growth strategy, we've identified several initiatives to drive an additional $150 million in annual EBITDA by 2030.
Just a quick note on our ongoing approach to optimizing the quality and value of our Timberlands portfolio. Over the last 6 years, we have completed approximately $1.8 billion of high-quality Timberlands acquisitions. At the same time, we've divested non-core Timberlands, recycling capital to enhance both the quality and productivity of our holdings over this time period. These actions reflect our ongoing commitment to active portfolio management and creating value for our shareholders, and this is going to remain an important part of our strategy going forward. Managing such a large, diversified land portfolio also presents a number of opportunities for us beyond core timber value, and our Strategic Land Solutions business is very focused on maximizing the value of every acre we own.
This segment represents three distinct business lines to help us unlock value across our land base through our end-to-end portfolio management approach. This includes the work we've historically done around capturing HBU premiums and unlocking value through our Real Estate, Energy and Natural Resources businesses, as well as all of the growth in our Natural Climate Solutions business. Over the years, we've developed an unrivaled platform for evaluating and capturing the full value of every acre we own, and our ability to deliver value across market cycles through this segment is a significant competitive advantage for us. Notably, we've increased segment adjusted EBITDA by approximately 70% since 2020, with meaningful improvements from Real Estate, Energy and Natural Resources and a significant increase from Natural Climate Solutions. As part of our five-year growth strategy, we're looking to generate an additional $230 million in annual EBITDA by 2030.
Just to expand a little more on Natural Climate Solutions, which will be one of our key growth drivers, we've demonstrated steady momentum from this business over the last several years, as well as industry-leading expertise and technology to capitalize on emerging opportunities and demand. We launched this business back in 2021, and we're actively growing in each of these areas listed on the slide. We currently have 2 active agreements for potential carbon capture and sequestration development, with the first project expected to come online in 2029. We now have 2 operating solar sites. We have 3 additional solar sites under construction, along with 8 operational wind sites, and the renewables pipeline continues to grow. In forest carbon, we have 5 approved projects with 4 additional projects in progress.
We've monetized credits in the voluntary market in each of the last 3 years at premium pricing and continue to engage with buyers for both spot and long-term purchases. Looking back over the last several years, I am extraordinarily proud of the progress that we've made in our climate solutions business and the leadership we've demonstrated along the way. We were the first company in our space to embark on this journey in a comprehensive manner. We built a world-class team with deep technical expertise and strong commercial focus, and I continue to believe there's no company in our space with the capabilities or assets to deliver on this value creation opportunity at scale like Weyerhaeuser. A great example of that is our new partnership with Aymium to produce and sell up to 1.5 million tons of sustainable biocarbon annually by 2030.
This is an incredibly compelling opportunity for us to serve a new market for metallurgical biocarbon using our own pulpwood and mill byproducts. We're advancing the first biocarbon facility adjacent to our McComb lumber mill in Mississippi, and that may come online as early as late 2027, and we're working to build out additional sites across Weyerhaeuser's footprint over the next several years. Again, this is a completely new venture for us and something that could be a significant value creator over time. Finally, we're one of North America's largest Wood Products manufacturers. As I'll cover momentarily, we have made significant improvements in our Wood Products businesses over the years, all focused on reducing costs and improving profitability to maximize our margins through the business cycle. Our Wood Products business is an industry-leading, low-cost producer of lumber, oriented strand board, and Engineered Wood Products.
We have 33 mills across the U.S. and Canada that are well aligned with our timber base, including a brand-new Engineered Wood Products facility under construction in Arkansas, which I'll touch on more in a moment. We also have 22 distribution facilities, all located in key growth markets. Our mix of assets and geographic coverage allows us to serve a broad mix of customers and end markets all across North America. We've transformed our Wood Products business over the last number of years through disciplined capital investments and OpEx improvements. We see opportunities to continue to improve our performance and our product offerings over time, which will only further strengthen our position as a preferred supplier. Now, as part of our new growth strategy, we've targeted multiple initiatives to generate an additional $440 million of annual EBITDA by 2030.
One of those growth initiatives, which I mentioned a moment ago, involves capitalizing on a strategic investment that we're making in a brand-new state-of-the-art TimberStrand facility in Arkansas. Construction is well underway on the facility, which is set to come online early next year. At full capacity, we expect it to generate over $100 million in annual EBITDA, delivering significant portfolio benefits and strengthening our position in the highest margin segment of our EWP portfolio. The facility is strategically aligned with our Timberlands and distribution network, adding additional system margin, maximizing integration benefits, and supporting our long-term growth initiatives. Let's turn to the next lever of our investment thesis. A core part of our overall strategy as a company has been our tireless effort and intense focus on achieving and building on our industry-leading operating performance across the entirety of Weyerhaeuser.
As I just mentioned with our Wood Products business, our operational excellence focus has been a key part of that effort. When we talk about OpEx at Weyerhaeuser, we're talking about capturing gains and sustainable margin improvement, and then staying focused on maintaining our competitive cost structure over time. Our OpEx efforts have propelled us to industry-leading margins across most of our businesses, and we continue finding new opportunities to improve how we operate. In fact, we've captured meaningful OpEx gains over the last four years, a notable achievement given the significant inflationary pressures and market-related headwinds that we faced during this period. As you can see, these efforts have translated into meaningful improvements across our businesses. Looking at EBITDA margin for a multi-year period, we hold the number one position in all of our manufacturing businesses.
We're also number one in EBITDA per acre in Western Timberlands. We're continuing to focus our efforts on OpEx and innovation to drive further improvements going forward. OpEx is deeply ingrained in our culture at this point. We expect it to remain a significant competitive advantage for us well into the future. Another key driver of our success with OpEx is our continued focus on innovation. We made significant advances in a number of important innovation areas in 2025, including artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, and drone technology. We are really starting to create significant value through our focus on innovation. I believe this is an area of tremendous opportunity and ultimately a significant competitive advantage for Weyerhaeuser. Okay, now let me turn to capital allocation, another foundational piece of our investment thesis.
We continue to believe that disciplined capital allocation is a critical lever for driving long-term shareholder value. Starting with a quick review of our balanced and sustainable capital allocation philosophy, at Weyerhaeuser, we have three key priorities for capital allocation: returning cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchase, investing in our businesses through disciplined high-return capital projects and value-enhancing growth opportunities, all while maintaining an appropriate capital structure. Since implementing our new capital allocation framework in 2021, we've returned over $6 billion of cash back to shareholders, including a mix of base and supplemental dividends, as well as share repurchase. Over this same time period, we've continued to invest in our businesses and deployed capital towards strategic growth opportunities. This really underscores the power of our cash return framework across market cycles, as well as our commitment to returning a meaningful amount of cash back to shareholders.
As a reminder, our cash return framework targets a payout range of 75%-80% of our annual adjusted FAD. It includes two components. First is our quarterly base dividend, which is supported by the more stable cash flows from our Timberlands and Strategic Land Solutions segments. Our base dividend is structured to be sustainable across business cycles. We've raised it by 5% or more in each of the last 4 years. We expect to supplement the base dividend each year with an additional return of cash to achieve the targeted 75%-80% of adjusted FAD. We have the flexibility to return this additional cash either in the form of a supplemental cash dividend or through share repurchase, or a combination of the two.
Importantly, we retain 20%-25% of annual adjusted FAD, which can then be deployed to support our growth initiatives or for additional share repurchase or debt paydown. We're also investing back into our businesses through disciplined capital expenditures. These are organic investments to sustain and enhance our Wood Products and Timberlands operations, and they've been a key part of our operating improvements and cost reductions over the last several years. Going forward, we're planning $400 million-$450 million of CapEx annually, and this excludes the capital we're deploying for the construction of our new TimberStrand facility in Arkansas. The final part of our capital allocation approach is maintaining an appropriate capital structure. Core to this is maintaining an investment-grade credit profile, and we've taken a number of steps over the last several years to significantly strengthen our balance sheet.
Looking forward, our balance sheet, liquidity position, and financial flexibility remain solid, and we're well-positioned to navigate a range of market conditions and deliver on our accelerated growth plan. As always, we'll continue to balance our growth initiatives with other levers across our capital allocation framework and allocate cash in the way that creates the most value for shareholders over time. Finally, I want to end today with another area where we continue to lead our industry, which is through our ESG performance. We've been operating our business with integrity and a strong focus on sustainability for over 100 years, and this will remain a core part of how we do business going forward. As you can see from this slide, we have a lot going on in the ESG space.
Our commitment to environmental stewardship starts with our commitment to sustainable forestry practices, which really go back to the early days of our company. We're also very focused on minimizing the environmental footprint of our manufacturing operations, and we have a strong commitment to social responsibility and governance. Ultimately, our ESG practices help us attract and retain top talent, support strong relationships with our stakeholders, and ensure that we're managing our business and resources in the right way for the long term. We've worked hard to set and achieve ambitious sustainability goals, and I do wanna highlight one of our key focus areas around supporting our rural communities. Our citizenship work at Weyerhaeuser includes our company giving programs, employee donations, and employee volunteering. Several years ago, we launched a new initiative called THRIVE to leverage our size and influence to amplify the positive impact we have in our communities.
Our THRIVE program involves a commitment to invest a total of $5 million across five of our operating communities. We announced our third community in Buckhannon, West Virginia, last year, following our first two communities in Raymond, Washington, and Zwolle, Louisiana. We've already made meaningful progress in each of these communities, and one of the most exciting projects is taking place right now in Raymond, Washington. Together with partners in the community there, we recently launched the Raymond Housing Initiative to create more attainable workforce housing for folks living in the area. We've been able to secure lots in the town for development of homes, and construction is expected to start later this year or early next year. Importantly, these units will have built-in covenants to ensure that they remain affordable for the community over time.
Through this project, we have a chance to help address a real need in the community, something that will have a meaningful long-term impact, and we're really excited to see this effort take shape. We also have a long-standing focus on supporting our people. In closing today, I wanna take a quick moment and note none of what we've talked about today would be possible without the commitment, hard work, and contributions of our 9,500 employees. Our people are at the core of what makes this company special. Generations of employees have built and sustained our company for many decades, and I'm grateful every day for what we're able to accomplish together as we continue building on our history and legacy at Weyerhaeuser.
I also wanna share my sincere gratitude to our senior management team and board of directors and all of you, our shareholders, for your ongoing trust, support, and ownership in our company. I'm truly honored to lead this great company, and I look forward to all we'll be able to accomplish together in the years to come. With that, I think we can go ahead and open it up for questions.
Devin, the first question is, to what extent has wildfire damaged company property or timber stands?
Wildfire is an issue that we've been dealing with at Weyerhaeuser really going back to the early 1900s for the entirety of our company's history. It's unfortunately something that I expect we will continue to have to deal with. I would say in a typical year, it's a pretty small percentage of our ownership that is impacted by wildfire. It's always a risk. We take wildfire risk very seriously here. We have operational controls across our ownership. Our folks that work in the woods are very experienced in dealing with fire risk, and so we take precautionary measures, particularly during the warmer summer months. We also have helicopter assets that help us fight fire and make sure that we're getting at them quickly.
In a typical year, it's a pretty small percentage of our ownership that's impacted by fire, but certainly that's something that we're gonna continue to work on ourselves, as well as working in partnership with state and federal authorities.
Our next question is, what are the impacts of U.S. and Canadian tariffs on the company's business and plans?
Yeah, I mean, there are a few different facets of that question. You know, when we think about the broader trade and tariff environment generally, obviously over the last few years we've seen a much higher tariff environment. I would say on balance, that specifically hasn't had a material direct impact to our company. We've managed that fairly well. I would say the broader implication there is to the extent that, you know, that has had inflationary impacts more broadly, obviously we're subject to that. I think to some degree that has had some impact on the broader consumer confidence levels, which, you know, to the extent that consumer confidence is down, that's not the best environment for, you know, people buying homes.
I think the indirect impact on the overall economy has probably had some impact on our markets. I would say there's also another component of that, which is specifically the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the U.S. Right now there is an all-in tariff duty on lumber coming from Canada into the U.S. of about 45%, and so that has impacted to some degree how lumber is flowing across the border. Historically, the Canadian lumber industry has supplied, you know, in the ballpark of 20-25% of the lumber we use in the U.S. That has gone down somewhat. I would say to a degree that's been mitigated just because you've seen more production coming out of the U.S. South, which has made up for some of that volume. It's had some impact.
On balance for Weyerhaeuser Company, though, it's probably been slightly net positive, but something we're continuing to manage through.
Our final question today is, what do you look for when evaluating candidates to join Weyerhaeuser's board of directors?
Yeah. Maybe I'll add my thoughts, and Rick R. Holley, our Chairman, is here as well. You know, as we think about bringing expertise onto the board, we're obviously looking for a broad set of skills and background. As you look at the current makeup of our board, we have a broad background of experiences, and that brings, I think, just a breadth of knowledge to the decision-making, which is incredibly helpful. I would also say that, you know, we look for people that, you know, share the core values of the company: integrity, sustainability, citizenship. You know, those are all core aspects of how we run the business, we wanna make sure we have, you know, the right value system for folks that come into the company.
Devin, I think that speaks very well to how we look at candidates for our board of directors. You know, we want diverse candidates, both experience and background, and we do put a matrix together to look at all the experiences we already have in place and where we have maybe some areas where we want more experience, and that's what we look to. Really having a diverse board that culturally fits the culture of Weyerhaeuser is very, very important, and we have a terrific board of directors that looks after our company and your interests every single day.
Okay. Well, I believe that was the final question. With that, we'll conclude this morning's meeting. Once again, thank you for joining us, and thank you for your continued support of Weyerhaeuser Company.
Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call and webcast. We do thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.