Freightcar America, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to FATCA America's first quarter fiscal 2022 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a lesson-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Lisa Fortuna, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome. Joining me today are Jim Meyer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Reardon, Chief Financial Officer, and Matt Hahn, Chief Commercial Officer. I'd like to remind everyone that statements made during this conference call relating to the company's expected future performance, future business prospects, or future events or plans may include forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Participants are directed to Freight Car Americas Form 10-K for a description of certain business risks, some of which may be outside of the control of the company, that may cause actual results to materially differ from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. We expressly disclaim any duty to provide updates to our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. During today's call, there will also be a discussion of some items that do not conform to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the press release issued this morning. Our earnings release for the first quarter 2022 is posted on the company's website at freightcaramerica.com and our 10-Q, which will be filed after the market today. With that, let me now turn the call over to Jim for a few opening remarks.

Thank you, Lisa. Good morning, and thank you all for joining today. As you saw in today's press release, Freight Car America continues to build on the momentum started in 2021. We delivered our strongest quarterly revenue result in nearly five years and first double-digit gross margin since the first quarter of 2016. As I've said on nearly every call over the last several years, our goals are to be the best manufacturer in the business and to keep getting better from there. To us, to be the best manufacturer means to be the best in safety, quality, and efficiency. Our safety performance in Q1 was flawless, quality good, And if manufacturing operating income is a proxy for efficiency, then we outperformed our much larger competitors by more than 20 to 1 on a percentage basis. In short, our efforts to position the company for long-term growth by becoming the best manufacturer in the business are paying off. And we look forward to the challenge of further differentiating our performance as we progress through 2022 and beyond. Matt will provide more detailed industry comments, but at a very high level, we continue to see more positive trends in the industry than we do warning signs, and order and queries remain relatively strong. We are, however, watching this space carefully, as well as trends in the overall economy. As a reminder, and as we said on the last call, however, All of our decisions related to production planning are based on firm orders. Our new manufacturing footprint in Costanos continues to run very well, as evidenced by our financial performance in the first quarter of 2022. Furthermore, we continue to prepare to scale the operation, and we will be ready to capitalize on improving demand. Our revenues for the first quarter were up 188% year over year. Along with strong top line growth, we achieved double digit gross margin of 10.8%, which was $10.1 million of gross profit on just 783 rail cars. We feel that this is a good barometer reading of a business currently running with just two production lines. but with two more lines and an in-house fabrication shop in the works. I specifically mentioned the latter because our fabrication shop will bring further improvement benefits to our operational efficiency. Despite our improving financial results, supply chain and inflationary headwinds remain very real challenges and continue to put pressure on the company. But with that said, I could not be more proud of our team's ability to continue to navigate through these challenges and mitigate the effects. While we are pleased with the progress and results achieved during the quarter, we are also still building out the facility, hiring, training, and implementing better processes. In many respects, we are still ramping up and learning on where and how we can improve. As you know, in the past we have been reluctant to provide much in the way of forward-looking targets as we were focused on ensuring the successful transition to Kastanos. We are pleased for the first time in at least a long time to introduce revenue guidance. For the full year of 2022, we are forecasting revenue to be between $320 million and $340 million up approximately 63% year-over-year at the midpoint of the range. This projection is based on expected deliveries of between 2,800 to 3,000 rail cars, an increase of approximately 68% from the midpoint of the range, and up from our previously stated delivery guidance of between 2,600 to 2,900 rail cars. And as we proceed through the year, we will continue to have a very strong focus on gross margin percentages and gross profit dollars. In summary, our team is performing well, and we expect our performance to only get better as industry conditions improve and we continue to scale our operations with the same levels of focus on cost discipline and manufacturing excellence. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Mike for a review of our financials. Mike?