Scott Anderson: Okay. David, just on the ags, you know, the pricing, when you think about it, Q4, the comp does get harder. If you remember last year, our price increase in Q4 was about 13.9%. So that does get harder. So you won’t see quite — the margin or the price increase in Q4, but we still think the mid-teens or low-teens is attainable on the full year. Was that the?
Anne Noonan: Yeah. Let me talk about the ready-mix side. So all of our markets have held up really well, honestly, with 20% down in volume, David. I’ve been extremely impressed by our ready-mix team. They’ve managed to keep in that 20s, which we’ve done. And I’ve said before that Summit is very good in the downstream, and we’re even better today because we’re in the right markets with leading assets and leading positions, and we’ve added our centers of excellence where we’ve been able to expand those margins as well. So I wouldn’t focus too much on the pricing in those ready-mix markets because we’re really just pass through and then we always add a little bit of margin. It’s much more important to be in the right markets, to be able to add our center of excellence value proposition onto our margins to expand.
But the pricing is going to go a little bit with where cement goes in those various markets and/or, you know, short load fees, et cetera, that we’re very focused on.
Scott Anderson: I might add one more thing, David, just on the ag pricing too. When you think of the seasonality, as we get into the colder months, that’s where you start shifting away from your clean stone, your higher ASP clean stone and more to your base materials. So that — the mix will actually bring that down just inherently a bit too in that Q4.
David MacGregor: Okay. Thanks very much.
Anne Noonan: Thanks, David.
Operator: All right. Our next question comes from the line at Adam Thalhimer. Adam, please go ahead.
Adam Thalhimer: Hey, good morning. Nice quarter.
Anne Noonan: Thanks, Adam.
Adam Thalhimer: Anne, can you talk about seasonality in the cement segment? I wasn’t modeling margins down that much sequentially. So I’m just wondering if that was a maintenance timing issue and what your outlook for cement margins is.
Anne Noonan: Yes. You know, I would talk, if you’re talking about seasonality in cement, I would say, if you’re looking at Q3 volumes, the impact there — we always got to watch the amount of import we did one year versus the next. So if you look, our volumes were down in Q3 in cement and the major reason for that was — about 50% of that decline was because we’d more imports last year. We had more of those LNG projects, which of course is dilutive to margin, good for dollars EBITDA. On the other side, we had a little bit of weather in Minnesota and Iowa. So that’s why you see kind of volumes down in Q3, but they’re just kind of one-time events. I would say our ability to continue to expand margins in cement is very strong. On a year-on-year basis, we were up 260 basis points.
This team has done a phenomenal job of increasing towards that trailing 12-month, you know, North Star objective of 40% EBITDA margins. At this quarter, we were at 37.6% on a trailing 12-month basis and that’s from the value pricing that we talked about a lot earlier in the call. But it’s also about the investments we’ve done around improving what you call our operational equipment effectiveness which for Davenport were best in class. Hannibal has a ways to go to get to that 85%. Our team is very focused on that. We also invested in the Davenport Storage Dome, which has helped our operational costs. We continue to drive PLC across all of our network. And then, as you go into ’24, think about Green America Recycling. We’re expanding that in Davenport with our flex fuel technology investment, which will allow us again to continue to expand margins.
So all those four key elements of pricing, operational excellence, Green America, and PLC will allow us to continue to have that strong pricing capability and supply to underpin by strong supply-demand dynamic in cement, Adam.
Adam Thalhimer: Thanks, Anne.
Anne Noonan: Thanks.
Operator: All right. Our next question comes from the line of Brent Thielman from Davidson. Brent, please go ahead.
Brent Thielman: Hey, great, thanks. Just had a question on aggregates and the — maybe just the different cost buckets. I think you indicated the costs are hanging around higher for longer, maybe where are you seeing some abatement and where are you seeing some influence for a higher costs in that business going forward?
Scott Anderson: Brent, this is Scott. I’ll answer that one. When you think of ag cost, your two biggest — your two biggest cost drivers there is your labor and your equipment costs. And frankly, Brent, we’re not seeing those abate. Those are still driving up there. And you know, like, I commented earlier, the labors up, they’re pushing double-digit. And on your equipment cost, you know, the fuel, earlier this year, we thought we were going to get some tailwind on fuels and unfortunately that’s kind of went away since fuel cost have upticked. And as you know, our ag business is very dependent on diesel fuel. So where we thought we were going to get maybe an $8 million, $6 million to $8 million tailwind on that is actually probably more like a $2 million, and most of that’s already been realized.
So don’t anticipate any tailwind on the fuel cost going into Q4 either. So not a lot of abatement going into Q4. We are hopeful for next year that labor will start coming off and, you know, we’re hearing the signs of that. We’re just waiting for it to see — waiting to see it pass through now.
Brent Thielman: Great. Thank you.
Anne Noonan: Thanks, Brent.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Mike Dahl from RBC. Mike, please go ahead.
Mike Dahl: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just to stick with the cost side, I know there’s a lot of moving pieces here, but based on what you’re seeing today, you know, now I’m betting into your fourth quarter guide. You’ve talked about it moderating or you think it will moderate in ’24. Can you give us any sort of finer point on what your current planning assumption would suggest for cost increases in both ag and cement for ’24?
