J. Thomas Hill
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at Vulcan Materials
Thank you, Mark, and thank all of you for your interest in Vulcan Materials today. 2024 was another year of successful execution. Our two-pronged growth strategy of enhancing our core and expanding our reach is working. We improved our industry-leading aggregates cash gross profit per ton by 12% and deployed over $2 billion towards value-creating aggress-led acquisitions. These acquisitions expanded our presence into new attractive growth areas and strengthened our existing franchise in three of our top-10 revenue states. We finished the year strong. We plan to capitalize on our solid momentum and deliver attractive earnings growth again in 2025.
Before discussing our outlook in more detail, I will provide you some key highlights from our 4th-quarter performance. Our teams delivered $550 million of adjusted EBITDA in the 4th-quarter, a 16% improvement over the prior year. Importantly, adjusted EBITDA margin improved on a year-over-year basis for an eighth consecutive quarter. In the aggregate segment, cash gross profit per ton expanded 16% to $11.50 in the quarter through a combination of continued pricing momentum and moderating year-over-year unit cash cost-of-sales. Average freight-adjusted price improved 11% in the quarter, consistent with full-year results. Price improvement remained geographically widespread. Agri shipments were more mixed in the quarter across geographies and end uses. Shipments were 3% lower than the prior year.
Growing public shipments and strong demand in the storm impacted areas of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee helped to particularly offset headwinds in private construction activity. With less disruption from weather and our consistent focus on maximizing efficiencies through our Vulcan wave operating efforts. Freight-adjusted unit cash cost-of-sales increased 5% compared to the prior year. This was a meaningful improvement compared to previous quarters and a testament to the execution of our operating teams. This continued execution will be a focus for us in 2025.
The pricing environment remains healthy and we expect freight-adjusted aggregate price to grow between 5% and 7% in 2025. Now this includes an over 100 basis-point negative mix impact from recent acquisitions. Inflationary cost pressures continue to moderate and we are making progress on our with operating process intelligence adoption. We expect freight-adjusted aggregate unit cash cost to increase low-to mid-single digits in 2025, leading to another year of double-digit year-over-year expansion in our aggregate unit profitability. We expect 2025 aggregate shipments to increase between 3% and 5% compared to last year. This growth outlook is driven by recent acquisitions, coupled with expectation of stable demand for our legacy business. I expect that continued growth in public construction activity will offset ongoing more modest contraction in private activity.
Over the last year, trailing-12 months, highway starts have increased by another $7 billion to $122 billion. Highway input cost inflation and continued IIJA-related spending support ongoing growth in highway shipments in 2025 and beyond. Additionally, $45 billion of funding initiatives were passed at the state and local level in recent election -- in the recent election cycle to spur additional transportation investment in local states. Affordability and elevated interest rates remain headwinds for residential construction activity.
Increasing single-family starts over the past 12 months support modest growth in single-family housing in 2025. But multifamily storage data and elevated vacancy rates point to another year of declining demand in multifamily housing. Because the demographics in Bulkan markets support a consistent need for additional housing, the timing of additional interest rates, reductions and overall improvement in affordability will dictate when residential construction activity returns to growth. Likewise, a return to growth in private non-residential construction will also be a matter of timing. While we expect lower private non-residential demand in 2025, we currently anticipate that starts will bottom by mid-2025 and may begin to recover by the second-half of the year, boding well for 2026 activity.
Recent trends in both warehouse starts and data centers have been encouraging. Trailing 12-month warehouse starts, the largest category in private non-residential construction have continued to flatten out pre-pandemic levels after a precipitous drop from historic highs throughout 2023. Current planned data centers activity in our markets remains robust. And according to CoStar data, approximately 7% of proposed data center activity is within 20 miles of a Vulcan facility. As I said earlier, the focus of our teams is execution, controlling what we can control. Against the demand backdrop I just described, we expect to deliver between $2.35 billion and $2.55 billion of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.
Now, I'll turn the call over to Mary Andrews to provide some additional commentary on our 2024 performance and more details around our 2025 outlook. Mary Andrews?
