Ascent Industries Co.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Ascent's financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2023. Joining us today are Ascent's executive chairman of the board, Ben Rosenzweig, president and CEO, Chris Hutter, CFO, Bill Steckel, and the company's outside investor relations advisor, Cody Cree. Following their remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Cody Cree as he reads the company's safe harbor statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Cody, please go ahead.

Thanks, Victor. Before we continue, I'd like to remind all participants that the discussion today may contain certain forward-looking statements pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on information currently available to us and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. ASCENT advises all of those listening to this call to review the latest 10Q and 10K posted on its website for a summary of these risks and uncertainties. ASCENT does not undertake the responsibility to update any forward-looking statements. Further, the discussion today may include non-GAAP measures. In accordance with Regulation G, the company has reconciled these amounts back to the closest gap-based measurement. The reconciliations can be found in the earnings press release issued earlier today and posted on the investor section of the company's website at ascentcode.com. Please note that this call is available for replay via webcast link that is also posted on the investor section of the company's website. We've also uploaded an updated investor presentation to the investor section of the website, which we encourage you to view. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Ascent's Executive Chairman of the Board, Ben Rosenzweig. Ben, over to you.

Thank you, Cody, and good afternoon. Since we were just on the phone with everyone a little over a month ago, I'll try to keep it brief. On our last call, we were very clear that we expected the weakness from the fourth quarter to persist through our financial results into the first quarter. A meaningful portion of that headwind was attributable to the exit of our galvanized business in Munhall, which has mostly been completed and will not have a material impact on our results moving forward. As a refresher, when we inherited our galvanized business, we knew right away that it did not fit within our long-term plan for growth and profitability, mainly due to its commodity-like nature and susceptibility to import competition. However, we were able to generate significant cash from the business for a short period when the global supply chain was disrupted, particularly the import market, and demand and pricing for our galvanized products spiked. In light of that, We held on to the business longer than originally expected and capitalized on the positive impact it was having on our consolidated results. In the middle of 2022, the supply chain rebounded more rapidly than we anticipated as imports quickly became viable again, which put significant pressure on pricing. This negatively impacted the bottom line for our galvanized products and our Munholl facility as a whole. We've worked quickly to exit the galvanized product line while still fulfilling our contractual obligations. We continue to evaluate strategic alternatives for that facility and expect that, as we sit here on May 9th, the material negative results we reported over the past three quarters are largely behind us. Going forward, we anticipate our tubular product segment will begin stabilizing in the second quarter and continue to improve throughout the rest of the year. Despite the complexities we faced in Q1 from the confluence of our galvanized wind down and fairly broad channel destocking, We remain confident that we can produce a less volatile and more normalized earning stream in our tubular business over the latter half of the year. Recently, we were pleased to announce that Bill Steckel has joined Ascent as our new CFO. With his extensive experience in revitalizing and building finance organizations for both public and private companies, we're confident in his ability to lead our finance and accounting functions and help us drive additional operating efficiencies throughout the organization. Over the past two years, Chris and I have recognized the inherited challenges facing our tubular segment and have focused our growth and capital allocation priorities on our specialty chemicals business, which we firmly believe has the potential to be the long-term growth engine for Ascent. Despite industry-wide destocking trends affecting our sales base throughout the quarter, we remain optimistic about the opportunities in our pipeline and expect the headwinds to ease over the coming months. Additionally, We believe that our efforts on our specialty chemical segment will enable us to leverage its stability and diverse asset base, allowing us to secure longer and more stable contracts and revenue streams that are less vulnerable to macroeconomic pressures. We are excited about the growth potential in this segment and are committed to unlocking its value. As we pursue growth, we continue to prioritize efficiently managing our working capital and cash flow to drive tangible value creation. We're pleased with our progress in the first quarter as we generated over $12 million of free cash flow and we'll look to continue that trend over the balance of the year. As I've mentioned on prior calls, we believe that M&A will play an important role in achieving our long-term objectives for Ascent Chemicals. That said, we feel confident that our current public market valuation does not accurately reflect our more normalized earnings potential. As this valuation gap persists, we will continue to aggressively utilize share buybacks within our capital allocation strategy. Now I'd like to pass the call over to Chris to provide a summary of our operations across both segments, but I'll be available again later on to answer any questions. Chris, over to you.