Service Corporation: Notes and Quotes from the 4Q25 and Year-End 2025 Earnings Call

February 23, 2026/Finance/

As has become our custom, Funeral Director Daily reports and gives our commentary on Quarterly and Annual financial reports of the public companies in Death Care. And, then it comes to the principals of those public companies giving commentary and answering questions for financial reporters about their reports in what are called Earnings Calls.

In these Earnings Calls, Funeral Director Daily likes to simply provide quotes from the principals of the companies with no comment and then link the entire transcript of the call for you to take in without outside interference. Service Corporation International (SCI) recently held their Earnings Call for the 4th Quarter of 2025 coupled with the Annual Report Year-End numbers of 2025.

Here’s a few interesting comments from that Earnings Call that we thought you might find interesting:

Responding to a question on the emphasis of cemetery sales for Cremation customers–

SCI CEO and Chairman Tom Ryan: “We actually have piloted in a few markets now in the process of rolling out to more a specific focus on that cremation consumer. And some of that is putting videos into our locations that can show the opportunities to the cremation customer and just making it more visible to our visitors and to the clients that we’re serving.”

Responding to a question that asked “about the plans for developing and selling premium cemetery inventory —

SCI CFO Eric Tanzberger: “We’re going to deploy capital, which is the first part of your question, similar to last year, which our metric right now is about $165 million of very high returning opportunities. As you’re describing as you saw Memorial Oaks, we’re going to invest in tiered type inventory at each of our cemeteries that are going to give offerings all the way to the higher end in terms of families that want like private estates and such, then you go all the way down to the semiprivate areas, and then you get to some of the initial more lower-tier type offerings. . . . .

In terms of the cemeteries themselves, there’s relatively high barriers to entry. We’re very lucky to have this 35,000 acres that we had that were built over many, many decades by really the founder of this company over a long period of time where metropolitan areas have grown around these cemeteries, but yet we still have a tremendous amount of capacity and years left within these cemeteries. What you saw in Memorial Oaks, which Houston has now grown out and surrounded, still has many years left, many decades left in terms of inventory.

For those of you all on the call have been to Rose Hills, that’s a similar situation where L.A. has grown around it and many years left in that. So we’re very lucky to have it. We have good barriers to entry. We’re going to price it based on the tiering effect and type the value proposition that exists that we’ve always had. We feel that there’s a lot of opportunity with a strong cemetery consumer, especially as the demographics over the long term turn our way over a period of time.”

Responding to a question if SCI has reached the point where Insurance funded Preneed has now replaced Trust Funded Preneed —

SCI CEO and Chairman Tom Ryan: “Yes, that’s correct. . . , Answering the SCI Direct piece, we are 100% implemented in having the insurance product in those markets. There will still be some trust sales because some people aren’t insurable. But I would say over 90% of the sales are going to be insurance and therefore, generate a commission and generate the associated selling costs.”

Responding to a question about the SCI Mergers and Acquisition pipeline and the company’s priorities for expansion:

SCI CFO Eric Tanzberger: “ . . . we want to be in markets that we already exist in as the first stack ranking because we already have — we carry the national scale anywhere that we’re buying. But when we already have that local scale, it can really make 2 plus 2 equal 5, so to speak, when we have these larger really nice independents joining our company. So we’ll continue — you know, we have a broad base across the United States. We also have a wonderful business in Canada really from anchored in the West all the way over to the East, especially in Toronto.

And you’ll continue to — for us to develop very long-term relationships with a valuable pipeline that we have with those relationships and as those individual businesses and their owners and their families kind of raise their hand and are interested in discussing the next step and discussing liquidity event, we have the advantage of having tremendous liquidity and speed and really making it a win-win situation with our independent partners.”

In response to a question about funeral volumes being “flat or down” —

SCI CEO and Chairman Tom Ryan: “So as you look at the national data and again, it’s not perfect, as a country, volumes were down in 2024. Preliminary ’25, they’re down. So I think what we’re going through is a little bit of a trying to normalize out of this strange period. The other thing that we do is we go back and look at the CAGR of the 2019 numbers.

Tom Ryan
SCI CEO

So if you go back and look at pre-(pandemic) and you said, let’s expect volumes to increase 1% over the next few years. If you do that and look at our current volumes, you’d be very pleased about where we stand. As you think about market share, as you think about demographics. So it’s very confusing, and I understand why it is. It’s frustrating for us sometimes too. And look, we’re paranoid. We’re going to fight for volume for market share.

Are there markets we could do better as we think of cremation pricing, maybe, and we’re doing that every day and trying to fix it. But I think if you really take a step back and do the compounded impact of ’19, you feel very good about the volumes that we’re experiencing today. We still believe the demographics of this business, just the pure aging of society is going to have an impact, and it’s just challenging to understand exactly when you’re going to be able to see that. It isn’t being clouded by some of these other trends. But again, we’re going to manage our costs. We’re ready to take care of that.

On the good news front, so as I think about ’26, yes, we think it’s probably going to be flat to slightly down. January is a little soft, as we mentioned earlier, but we’d expect it to trend back towards flat. I think as you get out to ’27, ’28, ’29, we expect to see funeral volumes increase is the way our models are working. So we think we’re close. We’re poised and ready to do it. I’d say on the positive front, on the cemetery side, we’re seeing a lot of great things in our sales activity, both in large sales and in core. So still feeling good about ’26. Volumes could be slightly down to flat, like we said.”

If you would like to read the entire Earnings Call transcript you can access it here:

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