Core Molding Technologies Inc

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Core Molding Technologies second quarter fiscal 2024 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. 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. Now, I will turn the call over to Sandy Martin, 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 second quarter results for 2024. Joining me on the call today are the company's president and CEO, Dave Duvall, and EVP and CFO, John Zimmer. This call is being webcast and can be accessed through coremt.com via an audio link on the investor relations events and presentations page. Today's conference 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 facts including statements or expectations or future events or future financial performance or forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. By their nature, forward-looking statements are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Please refer to today's earnings press release for our disclosures on forward-looking statements. These factors and other risks and uncertainties are described in detail 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-GAP measures, including adjusted EPS, adjusted EBITDA, debt to trailing 12-month EBITDA ratio, free cash flow, and return on capital employed. Reconciliations to the nearest gap measures can be found at the end of our earnings release. Finally, this release has been submitted to the SEC on a Form 8K. Now, I would like to turn the call over to the company's president and CEO, Dave Duvall.

Thank you, Sandy, and thank you all for joining to review our 2024 second quarter results. I want to start today with some important achievements by the core molding team in the first half of 2024. We were recognized this year with the 2023 PACCAR 10 PPM Quality Award. This is in addition to the 2023 BRP Gold Supplier Award we discussed last quarter. PACCAR awards this to suppliers that achieve and sustain exceptional quality. We are pleased with this exemplary quality performance achievement of less than 10 defects for every million final assembly shipped. This demonstrates our commitment and understanding of what our large OEM customers require in a supplier partner. In addition to high quality standards, we maintain strong customer partnerships through excellence in customer service and continuous improvement processes. Operational excellence is a continuous journey and is a mindset that we purposefully strive to embed in our culture. It is part of who Core Molding is as an organization. We have made significant improvements on our operational performance and continue to invest in our operational systems, both in growing skills and improving processes. It is never complete, but our focus is always safety, people, quality delivery costs, in that order. In late 2018, we began implementation of our strategic transformation plan to create an inspiring and engaging culture, robust business systems, and execute a strategy pillars to enable growth. Our first two priorities were on creating a winning culture, which to me means engaged, empowered, and skilled team, and implementing robust and transparent business systems within which we operate. This includes purposely developing our organizational capabilities, engagement systems with transparency of business objectives, operational infrastructure, and financial discipline as a platform to grow both organically and inorganically. This multi-year transformation plan also involved in an aggressive revenue diversification program, which strategically shift us from being solely a truck supplier to a much more diverse business. Our goal is to create flow in everything we do by enabling a culture that embraces challenges and drives to make it easy for the customer, or more specifically, make the hard things easy to do. Technical solution sales. And operational teams now support highly differentiated material conversions, proprietary processes, and uniquely designed and manufactured products that continue to drive further market penetration into our focused end markets. In 2024, we are focused on strategically investing and accelerated growth to specifically leverage the business we've created. Everything we've been doing was to enable and support the growth of our company, both in revenue and organizational capabilities. We will discuss this initiative and our lead generation campaign in more detail in a moment. Turning to a summary of the second quarter's financial results, going into this year, we signaled that 2024 sales expectations would be below 2023. Today, we reported the second quarter with $88.7 million in sales, down 9.2% compared to the second quarter of 2023, primarily due to end market headwinds that we will discuss in detail. When looking at sales sequentially compared to the first quarter of 2024, net sales for the second quarter increased 13.6%. Gross margin for the 2024 second quarter was 20% compared to 17% in the first quarter and up 520 basis points from 14.8% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Anticipating the current demand environment, We proactively rebalanced our cost structure to minimize lower fixed cost leverage. We also generated $11.6 million in adjusted EBITDA, or 13% of sales, which improved over the first quarter's EBITDA margin of 11.2%. We generated solid free cash flows of over $16 million in the first half of fiscal 2024. The business execution improvements we introduced over the last 18 months allow us to generate higher cash flows on fewer sales dollars with greater stability and consistency. Now I turn the call over to John to cover the financials in more detail.