Ascent Industries Co.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Ascent's financial results for the second quarter ended June 30th, 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'd like to turn the call over to Cody Cree as he reads the company's safe harbor statement within the meetings of the Private Securities and Legation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Cody, please go ahead.

Thanks, Michelle. 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 Investors section of the company's website at ascentco.com. Please note that this call is available for replay via a webcast link that is also posted on the Investors section of the company's website. We have also uploaded an updated presentation to the Investors 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, everyone. During our last few earnings calls, we've been transparent about the issues we faced as an organization and the expected softness within our tubular product segment as we transition out of the Munhall facility. While this transition has been more of a drag on our business than originally anticipated, macro headwinds and execution issues across many of our end markets in both segments have simultaneously affected our consolidated results more than we originally anticipated. Speaking on behalf of our board and senior leadership team, we do not view our current performance as acceptable and are working hard to take immediate corrective action. That said, I am pleased that during the second quarter, we made a strong push in our efforts to finalize the permanent closure of our Munhall operations, which we expect to be fully shut down by the end of August. As of today, there is very little left at Munhall, which is why we have moved it into discontinued operations and are now showing the core business as it will be going forward, as well as in prior periods to enable a proper comparison. The process of the Munhall closure has involved a lot of moving parts, including finishing production at Munhall, transitioning the remaining volume, and evaluating the movement of certain mills to our facility at Bristol. All of this has unquestionably been a distraction for our ability to execute on the core business, but it had to be done in order to remove the unnecessary volatility from our business that came from a product line outside of our core area of differentiation. We are pleased to be moving on from this legacy element of the business and expect this will have a long-term effect of stabilizing our tubular segment with a focus on higher margin, more defensible product lines. More broadly, we still view Ascent Chemicals as one of the long-term growth engines for our company. Although macro volatility has made sales cycles even longer than typical, our team has been hard at work building relationships and expanding our pipeline. As you may have seen in the 8K we filed over a month ago, we parted ways with our head of our segment. This was an amicable parting, and we feel very confident in who we'll be bringing on to next lead that segment, so stay tuned. We're very focused on empowering leadership to further scale the chemical segment and unlock the embedded growth and profitability potential where Confident is there over the coming years. Despite all the challenges we faced in Q2, we continued to focus on closely managing our working capital. We were able to generate cash, pay down debt, meaningfully clean up our accounts receivable, and repurchase shares as aggressively as possible. So far in 2023, we repurchased over 50,000 shares, and our top capital allocation priority remains continuing to buy back stock given where our price is today. During the second quarter, we authorized a 10b5 repurchase plan and have effectively been repurchasing stock in the open market every single day. Although we're constantly evaluating additional strategies to further deliver value to shareholders, we strongly believe this is a very attractive use of capital right now. Based on the visibility we continue to gain in our future performance, now that we've streamlined our operations, we expect to remain active repurchasers of our stock, and the Board is open to all alternatives to more aggressively repurchase our shares if the stock continues to trade at these levels or even lower. Though not ideal, we firmly believe the short-term impacts that come with the changes we're making today are the right moves for the business in the long term. We believe the largest of our hurdles are now behind us, and we anticipate seeing improvements in our consolidated results beginning next quarter, then having more of a positive impact in Q4 and beyond. We appreciate the patience of our shareholders as we work through these challenges and set our business on the right course to ultimately deliver significant shareholder value. Our leadership team remains highly aligned with the interests of our shareholders, and we continue to believe in our ability to execute the long-term goals we've set for ourselves. Now I'd like to pass the call over to Chris to provide more details on our operational performance in both segments, and I'll be back to answer any questions during the Q&A portion. Chris, over to you.