Century Aluminum Company

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining today's Century Aluminum Company third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Regan, and I'll be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion for today's call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. And if you'd like to ask a question, you can do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I would like to pass the conference over to our host, Ryan Crawford with Century Aluminum. Please proceed.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the third quarter 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 with respect to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures in today's discussion. And with that, I'll hand the call to Jesse.

Thanks, Ryan, and thanks to everyone for joining. I'll start today with a note on safety before turning to our Q3 operational performance. including our timeline for resuming full production at Grundertage. I'll then update you on some of our key strategic initiatives, including progress on the Mount Holly expansion project, our Haasville strategic review, and our new U.S. smelter project, before concluding with a discussion of the outstanding global market conditions that we are operating in today. Pete will then walk you through our Q3 results and our Q4 guide and provide an update on the receipt of our fiscal year 2024 45X payment from the government, which occurred shortly after quarter end. I'll then end the call with an update on our capital allocation plans. Safety is core to everything we do here at Century. Every so often, the company is faced with extraordinary events, frequently outside of our control, that give us an opportunity to live up to our words and demonstrate our commitment to these core safety values. As everyone knows, on October 28, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica as one of the strongest hurricanes to ever make landfall in the Atlantic Basin. I'm proud to say that through the dedicated planning, hard work, and readiness of our Jamaican team members, Jamalco weathered this catastrophic storm, protecting the refinery from any significant damage, and most importantly, without suffering a single injury. Not only did the team secure the well-being of the facility and our employees, but then immediately began to provide assistance to the surrounding communities, providing potable water to local towns, villages and hospitals following the storm. We will continue to work with the government of Jamaica and our partners at Clarendon Illumina Partners to identify areas of need and provide support where we can. So we are very proud of the team at Jamalco and pleased to say that production has already restarted at the refinery and we expect to resume full production over the next couple of weeks. We do not believe that the storm or its aftermath will have any material impact on our financial results. Turning to page three in operations, as we announced on October 21st, the Grunertange smelter was forced to temporarily stop production in pot line two, following the failure of two of its electrical transformers over a seven-week period in September and October. Fortunately, the team at Grunertage was able to execute a safe and orderly shutdown of the pot line, despite these failures, tapping down the pots without injuries and leaving the line in as good a shape as possible for restart. These transformer failures were very disappointing, as both were well within their expected life. We are working with the designers and manufacturers of the transformers to better understand what caused these failures. The team at Gründertangi is wasting no time and has already begun preliminary preparations to restart production in line two. The timeline for restart is dependent on how quickly replacement transformers can be manufactured, shipped, and installed. Based on current estimates, we expect it will take 11 to 12 months for this work to be completed. Of course, we are working hard to optimize and reduce the timeline for restart on several fronts, including the potential to repair and reuse the failed transformers for some time period before the replacement transformers arrive. Although we are not yet certain this approach will be possible, we are working with the designer and manufacturer of these transformers to assess this path. If successful, the repair path could reduce the timeline for restart by several months. We will continue to provide you with updates on restart timing on our next earnings call. Finally, we have submitted initial claims to our insurers and continue to expect that the losses arising from these events will be covered under our property and business interruption insurance policies. Turning to Mount Holly, we were pleased to announce last month that we signed an extension to the Mount Holly Power Agreement through 2031. In addition to supporting the current operations, the new agreement provides all of the necessary power for our previously announced restart of more than 50,000 metric tons per year of incremental production at Mount Holly, which will return the plant to full production. The Mount Holly restart project is making great progress with hiring and capital work already underway at the site. We continue to expect that we will begin to produce incremental units at the beginning of Q2 2026 and complete the restart by the end of June. Production of the additional units will gradually increase throughout the second quarter. Unrelated to the restart, we did suffer some instability in Mount Holly production in Q3 that resulted in production from the plant falling below expectations by approximately 4,000 tons in Q3. Pete will provide you with more color on the impact on our Q3 results. This instability was fully resolved by mid-October, and the plant has been operating at normal production levels ever since. We do not expect any further production impact after October. Finally, at CBRE, we had another quarter of near record performance across a suite of operational and financial KPIs. The plan, our management team, and our employees there are really performing at the top of their game, and it's great to see. Turning to our other strategic initiatives, starting with Hawesville, After our last fall, we received a significant amount of additional interest in the site, including from new parties, which led us to extend the strategic review process. We are now proceeding with the final stages of those discussions with new and existing parties now. Suffice to say, there's been lots of excitement around the potential of the site. At the same time, rising aluminum prices and continued global shortages continue to bolster restart economics at the Haasville site and for our new greenfield aluminum smelter project. Once built, the new smelter project will be amongst the most modern and efficient smelters in the world. It will double the size of the existing U.S. industry, creating over 1,000 full-time direct jobs and over 5,500 construction jobs. During the quarter, we advanced negotiations with potential power providers. Good progress in this regard means we are now focused on a single site and power provider for the new smelter. We have also had lots of interest from potential joint venture partners for the smelter and have started discussions with select high-quality counterparties. While these conversations are still at the early stages, we are encouraged with the interest levels we have had to date and now see some form of partnership as the most likely path forward with the project. Altogether, President Trump's policies have enabled a future where we could see U.S. production triple by the end of the decade. We here at Century are proud to do our part to make this future a reality and bring industrial jobs back to America. I'd like to thank President Trump for the significant actions that he and his administration have taken to restore American manufacturing and stand up for American workers. The Section 232 tariffs have truly enabled a new future for the U.S. aluminum industry. Just before I turn things over to Pete, I'd like to review the very strong market conditions that we are operating in today and that we see persisting well into 2026. As you can see on page 4, Q3 saw aluminum prices rise across the complex as continued global demand growth paired with a persistently challenged supply side drove realized LME prices of 2,508 in the quarter, and continue to drive spot aluminum prices to approximately $2,850 today. As you can see on page five, the world has a shortage of aluminum units today, driving further contraction of global inventories to new post-financial crisis lows and leaving the market sensitive to even the slightest supply disruptions or increase in demand. This is especially true in our two core markets in the US and Europe. Regional premiums in the U.S. and Europe both strengthened in Q3 as a fundamentally strong U.S. economy and improving European industrial activity drove demand and caused premiums in both markets to rise. Wire-rod demand in both markets was especially notable driven by the well-publicized power infrastructure build-out. Power and data infrastructure build-out should continue to drive additional aluminum demand as we move forward into 2026. Realized Midwest and European premiums averaged $1,425 and $193 per ton, respectively, in the quarter, and have risen further in Q4 with Midwest premium spot prices at $1,950 and European duty-paid premium spot prices at $320 today. As we start to conclude the 2026 sales season, we are seeing increased demand across our customer base for all of our U.S. billet products. As the largest producer of primary aluminum in the United States, Century stands ready to meet this demand. We now expect that we will see an approximately $0.05 year-over-year increase across our 2026 bill of sales, which should generate an additional $30 million of 2026 EBITDA. Pete will now take you through our financial performance in more detail. Thank you, Jesse.