The head of waste management company GFL Environmental Inc. says the firm could use more than $2 billion from the recent sale of its environmental services unit to repurchase its own shares for the first time since going public in 2020.
GFL’s CEO and Founder Patrick Dovigi told BNN Bloomberg in a Tuesday interview that the majority of the proceeds from the $6.2 billion sale will go towards paying down debt, with much of the remainder available to be used for buybacks on Canadian and U.S. exchanges.
“We filed our normal course issuer bid paperwork to buy back up to 10 per cent of the float… expect to see us be active buyers in the market of our stock starting on March 4,” he said.
Dovigi said he expects the sale of the environmental services unit to officially close on Saturday, and the proceeds from it to go into company coffers on March 3.
“We think there’s significant upside to the stock from here and obviously the more amount of stock we can buy back at these levels, the better for us and all shareholders,” he said.
Dovigi’s comments came a day after GFL reported its fourth quarter and full year earnings from 2024. The company said it brought in $1.99 billion worth of revenue in the fourth quarter, and $7.86 billion for the full year.
The firm reported a net loss of $737.7 million for the year, compared to net income of $32.2 million for 2023. GFL’s TSX-listed shares were down more than three per cent in afternoon trading on Tuesday.
Dovigi said that going forward, GFL’s operational plan is to do “exactly what we’ve done for the last 17 years,” noting that he’s pleased with the market share the company has been able to capture in 20 U.S. states and all 10 Canadian provinces.
“We feel very good with the geographies we’re in and now we’re just going to continue densifying those existing markets we’re in and utilizing the assets that we have,” he explained.
“The playbook is the same, it’s been the same for 17 years, I don’t anticipate it’s going to change today, we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve done for a long period of time. We’ve created significant shareholder value.”
Police probing violent incidents
Dovigi also commented on the string of violent incidents reported on GFL property over the past year, including reports of shots fired at his own Toronto home in October of 2024.
Later that month, Bloomberg News reported that Toronto police were investigating reports of shots fired at GFL’s office in the northwest part of the city. There were also reports last summer of police investigations into potential arsons on other GFL properties in Ontario, according to Bloomberg.
“We don’t have the answer to that question,” Dovigi said when asked why these incidents had occurred, “but from what we hear from police, they’re very close to an arrest, it sounds like one person’s already in custody and they have leads on a couple of others.”
“We’ll all learn soon enough, but what I can say is, we’ve always competed fairly, we’ve been doing this for 17 to 18 years, we’ve never had (incidents) like this. It will be interesting to see what comes of it, but we put our trust in the police… they assure us that resolution is around the corner.”
With files from Bloomberg News and The Canadian Press
