Century Aluminum Company

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Century Aluminum Company First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Micaiah, and I'll be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call or the opportunity for your questions and answers at the end. At this time, I'd like to pass the call over to our host, Ryan Crawford, Investor of Relations. Ryan, you may proceed.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the conference call. I'm joined here today by Jesse Gary, Century's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Peter Trypkowski, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions. As a reminder, today's presentation is available on our website at www.centuryaluminum.com. We use our website as a means of disclosing material information about the company and for complying with Regulation FD. Turning to slide one, please take a moment to review the cautionary statements shown here with respect to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures contained in today's discussion.

And with that, I'll hand the call to Jesse. Thanks, Ryan, and thanks to everyone for joining. Just before we dive into the results today, I'd like to congratulate Pete Tchaikovsky on his recent promotion to CFO. Many of you have gotten to know Pete over his last 12 years at Century. He has extensive knowledge of the company's operations and a proven track record of success in every area that he's led. I have every confidence that his expertise and leadership will continue to drive Sentry's long-term success as we move forward. Congrats Pete. Okay, I'll start today by reviewing our first quarter results and the strong market conditions we've had so far in 2025. I'll then walk through our operational performance for the quarter and some initiatives we have planned for Q2. Pete will then take you through the details of the Q1 results and our second quarter outlook before we turn the call over for questions. Century's safety performance got off to a good start in Q1 with improved outcomes at each location versus the last year. This is rewarding to see as we continue to invest substantial time and effort towards improving the safety culture at each of our locations. Safety is our number one priority and is fundamental to our high performance culture. Turning to financial results, Century generated $78 million of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter, driving a reduction in net debt of $55 million and increasing liquidity by $94 million. Pete will walk you through the details here, but we are really pleased with the way the business performed and the excellent job the team did to bring working capital levels down in the quarter. Overall, continued strong LME and rising Midwest premium offset higher energy prices in the first quarter. Realized LME prices averaged $2,553 in Q1, while realized Midwest and European premiums averaged $602 and $336 in the quarter, respectively. Regional premiums have seen the most movement so far in Q2, with spot Midwest premium today sitting at close to $850 a ton following the implementation of the Section 232 tariffs and spot EDPP falling to roughly $200 a ton. I'll provide some more color on the Section 232 and other tariffs to conclude the call. Turning to slide four, cold winter temperatures led to higher realized market energy prices at Seabree in the first quarter. Prices have now returned to normalized levels in Q2. The polar vortex also led to unusually cold temperatures in South Carolina in Q1, which combined with generation outages led Santee Cooper to declare an emergency economic curtailment across its system. which affected Mount Holly. While this did not result in an interruption in power supply, it did contractually allow Santee to pass along higher emergency power rates to Mount Holly over several days. This was an extreme event, which we do not expect will occur in the future. Turning to page five, as you can see in the top left graph, we expect constraints on new global supply to drive a global market deficit in 2025 of approximately 400,000 tons, as China reaches its 45 million ton production cap. Global inventories have reached new lows of only 46 days so far in Q2. These low inventory levels combined with continued demand growth should be supportive of higher aluminum prices as we move forward in the year. We have seen increasing demand in the U.S. following the effectiveness of the revised Section 232 tariffs on aluminum in March, especially for domestically produced billets. Exclusion shipments were up 6.7% year-over-year in March, as downstream customers looked to shift supply chains back to the US. US billet orders have remained strong so far into Q2. Turning to Illumina, global supplies recovered from the extreme tightness we saw year-end, with market prices returning to normalized levels over the quarter. Spot API prices are approximately $350 today. Turning to page six, you can see that Coke pitch and caustic soda prices rose in the first quarter, but remain constructive at current price levels. HFO prices under Jamalco have fallen substantially recently in line with global oil prices, which should begin to roll through our results on a one month lag basis and help to offset some of the increased caustic soda prices at the refinery. Turning to operations, our assets continue to deliver strong operating results in Q1. In Iceland, Grundertagni returned to full production levels in March, following the end of the previously announced power curtailments in Iceland. The team did an excellent job bringing the additional pots back online safely. We are also very happy to announce that we reached an extension agreement with one of the largest power providers to the Grundertagni smelter, called Owen Power, to continue to supply the plant into 2032. It was a pleasure to work with Outney Haraldson and his team to reach this good outcome, and we look forward to continuing working with ON for years to come. Billet orders out of Grunertangi were a bit lower than anticipated in Q1, as demand weakness in the European market continued. We are seeing a small uptick in European billet orders as we enter Q2, but we will need to see this continue before we consider the trend. Please just remember that the European billet market works a bit differently than the U.S. with the European market generally operating on a lagged spot price basis versus the annual contracts we are used to in the US. So Grundertage will be well positioned to benefit from higher spot prices when European demand recovers. As I've discussed on the Q4 call, Mount Holly did suffer some minor operational instability in Q4, as an excursion on the carbon side of the business increased operating costs and drove slightly lower production across the plant. Plant management has done a good job bringing production back to normalized levels But it's taken a bit longer to bring the operational efficiencies back to where they should be. So this will remain a focus item as we progress through Q2. At Jamalco, we're focused on executing the major capital improvement program we have previously discussed to return the refinery to its nameplate capacity levels of close to 1.4 million tons. The major focus item for this year is the installation of a new steam power generation turbine at the plant. which will enable Jamalco to be fully self-sufficient in its power generation and lower its cost structure by reducing expensive third-party power purchases. We remain on track to complete this project by year-end and to begin realizing the cost savings from the project in Q1, 2026. Our evaluation process at Hosville remains ongoing, with due diligence continuing among a group of interested parties. We will keep you updated on progress here as we move through the year and we expect to have a more fulsome update on our Q2 call. SEBRI had another excellent quarter in Q1 with quarter over quarter improvements across most operating KPIs, higher volume and lower operating costs. The continued strong performance of SEBRI has given us the opportunity to bring forward some major maintenance in the carbon plant that we had originally planned for next year. During the quarter, we will take the green section of the carbon plant out of service and refurbish the anode press and ancillary equipment. By taking the outage now, it will reduce risk and improve reliability and operational performance of the carbon plant before we head into the hot summer months. The outage will drive a one-time increase in maintenance spend in the second quarter of about $10 million. This will obviously not repeat in Q3 or beyond, and we will reap the benefits of the increased reliability and operational security of this key area of the plan over the back half of 2025 and beyond. With that, I'll turn it over to Pete to walk through the financials.