Kaiser Aluminum Corporation

Welcome to the first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. My name is Vanessa, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. During the question-and-answer session, with your question, please enter the queue by pressing star, then 1 on your touch-tone phone. I will now turn the call over to Melinda Ellsworth.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Kaiser Aluminum's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. If you have not seen a copy of our earnings release, please visit the investor relations page on our website at kaiseraluminum.com. We have also posted a PDF version of the slide presentation for this call. Joining me on the call today are President and Chief Executive Officer Keith Harvey, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Neil West, and Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer Jennifer Huey. Before we begin, I'd like to refer you to the first three slides of our presentation and remind you that the statements made by management and the information contained in this presentation that constitute forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations. For a summary of specific risk factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, Please refer to the company's earnings release and reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the full year ended December 31, 2020, and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. The company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements to conform the statement to actual results or changes in the company's expectations. In addition, we have included non-GAAP financial information in our discussion. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the earnings release and in the appendix of the presentation. Reconciliations of certain forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures to comparable GAAP financial measures are not provided because certain items required for such reconciliations are outside of our control and or cannot be reasonably predicted or provided without unreasonable effort. Any reference in our discussion today to EBITDA means adjusted EBITDA, which excludes non-run rate items for which we've provided reconciliations in the appendix. At the conclusion of the company's presentation, we will open the call for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to Keith Harvey. Keith?

Thanks, Melinda. and welcome everyone to Kaiser Aluminum's first quarter 2021 earnings call. The Kaiser team delivered another strong quarter as pandemic-related conditions impacting our markets began to normalize. All our major end markets continued to improve sequentially from second half 2020 results through the first quarter in 2021. We also reached a significant milestone in the evolution of the company on March 31st by successfully completing the acquisition of the Warwick Rolling Mill in Evansville, Indiana from Alcoa, adding the attractive growing aluminum packaging end market to our portfolio of served markets. With the addition of Warwick, we'll now have a significant position in the North American beverage and food can markets which highly complements our strong position in aerospace and high-strength automotive and general industrial end markets. I'll add additional color to our outlook with the addition of Warrick to our full-year 2021 consolidated outlook later in the call. Our first quarter 2021 results reflect adjusted EBITDA of approximately $38 million with improving value-added revenue of $172 million. which I remind you did not include work results. As mentioned earlier, we saw improvement in each of our served markets, with double-digit growth in value-added revenue in our general engineering and automotive-focused businesses in the quarter. Aerospace and high-strength is expected to continue to improve through the balance of the year, with demand continuing to improve on business jet and defense-related programs. Demand for our products related to large commercial airframe production appears to have stabilized with continued recovery expected through the 2023-2024 time period when we expect demand similar to levels experienced in 2019. Auto demand, as expected, is robust with multiple new programs successfully launched and underway. We have experienced slight delays in some programs, mainly due to the chip shortage, which has been well publicized. While we anticipate production interruptions experienced in the first half of the year to potentially be recoverable in the second half of the year, we could see a slight impact to expected full year automotive value added revenue if shortages continue. Our general engineering customers are experiencing strong demand and we are going through a period of restocking as lead times from mills continue to extend. We expect continued strong demand for our general engineering products into the second half of the year. North American service center shipments for soft alloy rod and bar products experienced a 20-year record high in March, which gives you some insight as to the strong demand on our mills. Demand for our general engineering plate products driven by continued strong semiconductor and other application demand also remains very robust. Overall, with improving in-market demand, our mills have increased their throughput during this period. Manufacturing efficiencies are improving. And as planned, we have been slow to add back overhead and fixed operating costs reduced in 2020. which favorably impacted our results for the quarter. I'll now turn the call over to Neal to provide more detail on our first quarter results. Neal.