Core Molding Technologies Inc

Good morning and welcome to the Core Molding Technologies fourth quarter and fiscal full year 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sandy Martin with three-part advisors. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Core Molding Technologies Conference Call to review fourth quarter and full year results for 2022. Joining me on the call today are Core Molding's president and CEO, Dave Duvall, and the company's EVP and CFO, John Zimmer. This call is also being webcast and can be accessed through the audio link on the events and presentations page of the investor relations section at coremt.com. Today's call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded. Please be advised that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the date of any replay or transcript reading. I would also like to remind you that the statements made in today's discussion that are not historical fact, including statements or expectations or future events or future financial performance are forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements by their nature are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to the earnings press release that was issued today for our disclosures on forward-looking statements. These factors and other risks and uncertainties are described in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Core molding technologies assumes no obligation to publicly update, or revise any forward-looking statements. Management will refer to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow, return on capital employed. Reconciliations to the nearest GAAP measures can be found at the end of our earnings release. Finally, the earnings press release we issued earlier today is posted on the investor relations section of our website at coremt.com. A copy of the release has also been included in an AK submitted to the SEC. And now I would like to turn the call over to Dave Duvall. Dave?

Thank you, Sandy. Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year earnings call. I'd like to start by congratulating our teams across the company for a year of record-breaking great performance. It's exciting to see our clear business strategy and focus on people, processes, and execution is gaining momentum. As always, this is best demonstrated in the results of the game. We had a year of record-breaking by the core molding team. We had record-breaking revenue at $377 million, a 23% increase from prior year, record-breaking EBITDA at $32 million, and record-breaking net income of $12.2 million. Thank you to the entire core molding team for making this happen. You can see and feel the difference as we continually improve, build, and institutionalize our business, organizational, and operational systems. The process of improvement is never complete, and we still have many opportunities for improvement. But what is important is that we are a winning team, and we are seeing this accelerate, which is demonstrated by continually improving results. This is exciting and rewarding for all of us at Core Molding. So thank you again to the entire Core Molding team for all the hard work that went into making this happen. Before we dive deeper into our results and outlook for this year, I first want to review a few other important 2022 achievements. We are excited and proud to announce the launch of Core Molding's first sustainability report by the end of this month. Many people contributed to this major endeavor, but a special thanks goes to Marshall Starr, our sustainability leader. who spearheaded this project and will continue to drive progress on our efforts moving forward. We continue to invest in our people and organizational capabilities. We graduated 16 more people from our year-long management leadership training program and implemented a frontline leader training program. We launched an online technical and engineering training program to leverage the knowledge of our core subject matter experts and further institutionalize their knowledge. The results of these efforts and many, many more are seen in internal promotions, which account for over 30% of our outstanding positions in 2022. In addition, we recently made a strategic decision to hire Michael Gayford as our vice president of operations to help our team accelerate our operational excellence program throughout our operations. John and I will cover this more in a few minutes. Also, we have continued our partnership with the Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence, and expanded our technical internship program to a total of six colleges and universities. In summary, we fully understand that recruiting, retaining, and developing a highly motivated and knowledgeable team is a competitive advantage and, quite simply, the most important factor in driving future success. Entering 2023, customer demand remains strong. and we are closely monitoring forecasted business for impacts of macroeconomic events and monetary policy changes. As our available excess capacity tightened in 2022, we were more selective on new business and focused on winning programs that better align with our margin goals. This means that we need to remain disciplined and potentially pass on lower return programs. We are bullish on our long-term potential in the industries we serve, and we are evaluating growth opportunities in the future through acquisition or the addition of new capacity. We remain disciplined in advancing our business transformation through a combination of sales growth, enhanced margins, improved plan efficiencies, and maintaining a return on capital employed consistent with our long-term goals. We continue to drive our industry diversification strategy in 2022, and we saw meaningful growth in our power sports and industrial utilities industries. Increased demand in our truck market combined with our ability to recover material costs drove truck revenue to 45% from 41% in 2021 as a percent of product sales. Our current industry mix provides us with a solid platform to continue winning new business with customers needing a technical solution and supporting existing customers with composite solutions from design and development to launch. We are especially encouraged by our expansion of industrial utilities and packaging verticals, where we see long-term growth trends. For 2023, our technical solutions teams are continuing to be selective and will be diligent about growing sales, utilizing our capacity and resources with the highest value industries and opportunities that benefit our benefit from our engineered material solutions and conversions. Turning to a few comments about the fourth quarter, we continue to see substantial progress in product launches during Q4. Product sales represent new wins in 2022 and 2021 that are now in production. We reported strong fourth quarter increases in product sales of 22% versus Q4 of 21. We continue to launch programs in the industrials and utilities categories, specifically a number of projects related to stormwater solutions, flush covers, and in-ground bulk products, along with other industrial utility projects that we expect to be in full production by Q3 of this year. We are excited about these launches because they represent growing ed markets where we have created engineering solutions that provide a unique solution to our customers. Each of these projects are important because they drive margin enhancements and customer confidence in core molding, as well as improved performance, lower costs, and reduced complexity for our customers. With that, I would now like to turn it over to John to cover the financials in more detail.