Century Aluminum Company

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Century Aluminum Company first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Chad Rigg, Vice President, Finance and Treasure. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the first quarter conference call. I'm joined here today by Jesse Gary, Century's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Peter Trypkowski, 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, and thanks to everyone for joining. I'll start today with a discussion of the dynamic global aluminum market and the opportunities that we see for Sentry going forward to provide secure supply chains into the U.S. and European markets. I'll then review our first quarter operational performance, including the excellent progress we made on our Mount Holly expansion project and the restart of Hotline 2 at Grundertage. Pete will then walk you through our Q1 results and Q2 outlook before I conclude the call with the latest on our new Oklahoma smelter project with EGA. Just before we get started, I'd like to thank the Sentry team across our sites for a strong quarter of safety performance, especially while executing major capital projects at each of Grundertaghi, Jemalko, and Malholly. You should each be proud. At Sentry, ensuring that each of our employees returns home safely at the end of their shift is our first priority. Turning to the market on page five, it is certainly obvious to all of those on the call that we find ourselves today in one of the most dynamic markets for aluminum in recent memory. Strong global aluminum demand driven by macro trends and lightweighting and electrification have persisted into 2026 and accelerated into other sectors as demand for power and data infrastructure build out, commercial aviation, and defense and rearmament manufacturing has increased. In the US specifically, we are already beginning to see increased value-added product demand following President Trump's April 2nd executive order that closed valuation loopholes that importers have been using to cheat the Section 232 system, especially in downstream extruded products. We are grateful to President Trump for taking this additional action to ensure that the entire US aluminum supply chain is able to grow and expand to meet our domestic national security needs with American metal. As the largest U.S. producer, Century will continue to do its part to invest in expanding and building the U.S. aluminum base, starting with our Mount Holly expansion and continuing with our Oklahoma smelter project. Back to each of those in a bit. Turning to the supply side, the importance of ensuring secure U.S. supply chains has never been so evident as today following disruptions in production in the Middle East. We estimate that approximately 2.5 million tons of production in the Gulf countries has been disrupted by either production curtailments due to raw material shortages arising from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz or direct Iranian drone and missile attacks. We stand by our industry colleagues who have been so unfairly affected by such attacks. Note that while the large majority of Middle Eastern metal goes to the European and Asian markets, James Meeker & Century has been supporting our existing US customers that have been impacted by the Middle East disruption through the placement of our expansion times from mount holly to repair these strains supply lines and ensure us customers have access to the metal that they need. James Meeker & The timing of our mount holly restart could not be better in this regard, providing additional American metal units to the domestic market. As you can see on slide six, the Middle Eastern disruption has expanded our expected 2026 global deficit to 1.4 million tons. Over the course of 2026, this supply deficit should lead to further de-stocking from global inventories, creating a healthy go-forward environment for century in both the US and Europe. Turning to page four in operations, our smelters had an excellent first quarter with strong operating performance across Grindertongi, Mount Holly, and Seabree. We are now moving into a very busy second quarter for the operations team. The strong operating performance and stability throughout our smelters enabled the timely startup of our expansion project in Mount Holly and the restart of Potline 2 in Grundertage last month. Both projects are off to an excellent start. At Mount Holly, the team started the first pots three weeks ago, and the startup is progressing on schedule to bring the full expansion project online by the end of June. As a reminder, this project will increase Mount Holly's total production to approximately 230,000 metric tons and add over 125 full-time U.S. manufacturing jobs as a plant, increasing total U.S. primary aluminum production by nearly 10%. As we've discussed in the past, the project should increase Mount Holly's profitability significantly and fully repay its capital cost by the end of 2026. Please keep in mind that due to the incremental nature of the restart process, we will not see the full impact of our expanded Mount Holly production run rate until Q3. We've included the incremental tons that will be produced in Q2 in our Q2 outlook that Pete will cover with you in a bit. At Grundertangi, we restarted the first pots on Line 2 on April 23rd, just one week after commencement of new pots at Mount Holly. The restart has gone well, and we remain on schedule to restore all pots on line two by the end of July. As we discussed last quarter, following the return of all pots to service, the plant will return to nearly full production, but will run on a slightly reduced amperage until our new replacement transformers have arrived and are installed in the fourth quarter. Our anticipated production for both projects is included in our Q2 outlook and our full year volume guidance shown on page 16. Pete will give you some additional detail on spending on both projects, as well as associated insurance recovery for Brindertonghi in a minute. At Jamalco, the refinery continued its recovery from Hurricane Melissa and associated power instability in Q1 and progressed with the commissioning of its new steam generation turbine, which we expect to be completed later this quarter. The global Illumina market has been impacted by the conflict in the Middle East, where smelter closures have temporarily decreased global demand for Illumina and weighed on global Illumina prices. At the same time, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has impacted Cossack soda and heavy fuel oil prices, although our HFO hedge book has offset some of this impact. The plant has been experiencing some lower quality bauxite than expected from certain of its mining areas. It is in the process of adjusting its mining plan accordingly. Finally, Seabury had another excellent quarter of performance in Q1, overcoming higher energy prices arising from winter storm fern to deliver another strong set of results. Seabury is off to another great start in Q2. I'd like to extend a special thank you to the entire Sentry Operations and Technical Teams for their tremendous performance over the last six months to enable these two major projects at Mount Holly and Grunertangi to proceed successfully at the same time. Their skill and hard work has delivered these projects on or ahead of schedule, bringing significant production back into a market facing significant disruption from elsewhere in the world. This is not easy, and our team has knocked it out of the park. Pete will now take you through our first quarter financial performance and Q2 outlook.