Century Aluminum Company

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the Century Aluminum Company fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Matt, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines be needed during the presentation portion of the call for an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I'll now have to pass the conference over to our host, Chad Rigg, vice president of finance and treasurer. Chad, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. and welcome to the fourth quarter conference call. I'm joined here today by Jesse Gary, Century's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Peter Trapkowski, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. 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 two, 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, Chad. Thanks to everyone for joining. I'll start today with a discussion of Sentry's leading position in the American aluminum market, including exciting developments on our Oklahoma smelter partnership with EGA and the redevelopment of the Hosville site into an AI digital infrastructure campus. I'll then review our Q4 operational performance, including good news on the timing of the restart of line two at Granger-Tonge before concluding my initial remarks with a review of the outstanding global market conditions that we're operating in today. Pete will then walk you through our Q4 results and Q1 outlook before I conclude the call with a discussion on the significant tailwinds we see for the company in 2026, including our Mount Holly expansion project. No company is more dedicated to U.S. aluminum production than Century. Century is already the largest producer of aluminum in the United States, smelting nearly 60% of the country's primary aluminum, employing more American primary aluminum workers than any other company. And thanks to President Trump's leadership and the Section 232 program, we plan to invest billions more in new and expanded production at Mount Holly and our Oklahoma smelter project. This has all been enabled by President Trump and the administration's policies, including the Section 232 program, which continues to be enforced with no exceptions and no exemptions. This sacred program has leveled the playing field for American aluminum producers and workers, and now, for the first time in a generation, is leading to the reshoring of production of this critical mineral and a new modern smelter in Oklahoma. Century is grateful to President Trump for his leadership, and we intend to continue to invest in America as the largest supplier of this critical mineral in the United States for decades to come. To this end, Century made substantial progress on our new smelter project in 2025, culminating in our recently announced partnership with EGA to build the first new smelter in the U.S. in nearly 50 years. By combining efforts with EGA, we will pair Century's significant operating and supply chain expertise in the U.S. with EGA's world-class expertise in aluminum smelting technology, construction, and operations. As partners in the Oklahoma smelter, EGA will own 60% and Century will own 40%, and the project will benefit from our previously announced $500 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The project recently retained Bechtel to complete the next stage of engineering work, which should enable a final investment decision and groundbreaking by the end of the year. In addition, the Oklahoma smelter will be the first new smelter built with EGA's state-of-the-art EX smelting technology, which will integrate cutting-edge Industry 4.0 and AI applications into the design and operation of the smelter. And it's expected to improve production capacity by over 20% from previous technology. This has allowed us to increase the expected size of the smelter to 750,000 metric tons. which alone will more than double total U.S. aluminum production and expand centuries position as the largest American producer. Truly, once built, the Oklahoma smelter will be amongst the most efficient and advanced in the world and a crown jewel of the U.S. industrial base. We were also very pleased earlier this month to announce the sale and redevelopment of the hospital site into a digital infrastructure campus, supporting high performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads by terrible. This was an excellent result for the site and the community, which will benefit from the significant investment in job creation that will come from the data center development. Under the terms of the transaction, Century received $200 million in cash and a 6.8% interest in the completed data center. We are very glad to retain the stake in the future of the Haasville site, which will allow us to participate in the value creation of a cutting edge AI data center with ready access to 482 megawatts of immediately available power. The speed to power possibilities of the site have driven lots of immediate demand from hyperscalers and should drive desirable lease rates for the site. And Tara Wolf has indicated it could have a data center online by the second half of 2027. We are confident that this equity state should provide returns well in excess of the initial cash payment. Our 6.8% interest does not require any additional funding toward the multi-billion dollar data center build out, and we have the right to put our interest to TerraWolf on the first anniversary of data center operations commencing, providing a certainty of exit should we so choose. Turning to page four in operations, we saw excellent performance across our smelter assets in the fourth quarter. with Grunertage quickly and safely restoring stability following the outage of Potline 2 and Mount Holly returning to the strong performance we've come to expect from the plant. I would like to take a specific moment to commend the team at Seabree who battled through some tough weather in the fourth quarter to conclude a record year for the smelter across a suite of KPIs and profitability metrics. To be able to achieve record performance after 50 years of operations is a testament to plant management in our entire workforce at Seabree. Congratulations to all. At Jamalco, as everyone knows, in late October, Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane. Our team did a good job preparing the plant, which included exercising their precautionary shutdown procedures ahead of the storm. This preparedness paid off as the refinery made it through the storm without significant damage and without suffering a single injury. Following the storm, the plant was able to quickly restart basic operations. Damage to the broader Jamaican grid, however, did create significant instability in the supply of electrical power to the refinery, including lengthy periods where the refinery was without external power at all. This instability in electrical supply led to higher than expected costs in November and December and lower production volumes from a number of outages and a slower return to full capacity. Good news is the refinery is now well on its way to full and stable production. Importantly, at Jamalco, we are also nearing completion of our first major capital improvement project at the plant, with the installation of our new onsite power generation turbine, known as TG4, on track to be completed in April. Once complete, TG4 will enable us to run the refinery with entirely self-generated energy, eliminating expensive purchases from the Jamaican grid and allowing us to run the entire refinery independently. The completion of TG4, which will gradually ramp up over the second quarter, will substantially lower the cost structure of the refinery and is a big part of our overall goal of returning the refinery to the second quartile of the global cost curve. Nice job to the Gemalco team on keeping this project safe and on track despite the hurricane. Turning to Iceland, we have good news to report at Grundertangi, where our global team is working tirelessly to return the smelter to full production much faster than originally anticipated. As we announced in October, the Grundertangi smelter was forced to temporarily stop production in Potline 2 following the failure of three of its electrical transformers, and the timeline for restart was dependent on how quickly replacement transformers could be manufactured, shipped, and installed at Grundertangi. With global supply chains for transformers stressed by the unprecedented demand from global data center construction, we continue to expect it will take until Q4 of this year for the new replacement transformers to be installed. The replacement transformers have all been ordered and are being manufactured now. The good news here is we now expect that we will be able to repair some of the damaged transformers and begin to restart line two at the end of April, about six months sooner than originally anticipated. We still plan to install the new replacement transformers once they are completed, but we are confident that the prepared transformers will allow us to return the line to close to full production in the interim. While we'll be conservative in our ramp-up plans and operations to avoid undue stress on the repaired transformers, we expect that Line 2 and Grutter-Tonge as a whole will return to close to full production by the end of July. This schedule and our anticipated production is included in our full-year volume guidance shown on page 12. Finally, our insurers have now confirmed coverage from the event and the subsequent business interruption as we anticipated. We have recently received our first payment under these insurance policies, and we expect to receive additional payments under the policies on a lag as the claim is processed month by month through the end of the year. Pete will keep you updated as the cash comes in. If you turn to page five, let's take a minute to review the excellent market conditions that we find ourselves in before I turn it over to Pete. Aluminum prices continue to rise in Q4 and into Q1 as global demand growth, paired with a persistently challenged supply side, drove aluminum prices to a four-year high of $3,325 in January, with spot prices today of approximately $3,100. The concurrent rally in copper and other industrial metals are providing additional support to the aluminum price rally. As you can see on page six, we continue to project global deficits of aluminum units in 2026, driving further contraction of global inventories to another post-financial crisis low and leaving the market exposed to further supply disruptions. A good example of the supply side challenges is the recent confirmation that the 580,000 metric ton Mosul smelter in Mozambique will curtail full operations in March, causing a further drop in global inventories in order to replace those units in the market. The Mosul closure is likely to have the largest impact on the European regional premium, as it is one of the largest suppliers of low-carbon aluminum to continental Europe. Mosul, like Grundertanghi, benefits from tariff-free access to the EU market, but replacement units will likely need to be sourced from tariffed countries, putting further upward pressure on the EU duty-paid premium and providing a benefit to other European producers like Grundertanghi. The European premium has already begun rising following the initial implementation of Europe's carbon border adjustment tax, otherwise known as CBAM. In the U.S., the increasing strength of the U.S. economy, as demonstrated by strong industrial manufacturing activity and end-user demand, and improving building and construction data, has continued to drive the Midwest premium higher in Q4 and into Q1. Power and data infrastructure build-out should continue to drive additional aluminum demand in both the U.S. and globally. Midwest and European spot premiums have climbed to $1.04 per pound and $365 per ton, respectively, as of today. Pete will now take you through our financial performance for Q1 and full year outlook.