Freightcar America, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Pride Car America first quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief 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. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Stephen Paul, 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 Ton, 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, they include forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Participants are directed to Freight Car America's Form 10-K for 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 earnings release issued yesterday afternoon. Our earnings release for the first quarter of 2023 is posted on the company's website at greatcaramerica.com, along with our AK, which was filed yesterday after market. With that, let me now turn the call over to Jim for a few opening remarks.

Thank you, Stephen. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. Freight Car America delivered Q1 results in line with our expectations for the quarter. This included revenues of $81 million on deliveries of 738 rail cars and adjusted EBITDA of $2.1 million. We experienced significant sequential improvement in our gross margin, driven by the continued ramp up of our Castanos Mexico factory. and actions taken to mitigate supply chain challenges, which began to flow through during the quarter. Also within these results, we completed three line changeovers, or one per line, more than we would typically expect in a quarter. At this point, we remain quite confident in the guidance provided for the full year. Matt will cover our sales highlights in more detail, although I would like to point out that our inquiry levels and order intake continue to be very strong with a book to bill ratio of 2.6 this quarter. Our production schedule is essentially full for the remainder of this year, and we are now very much focused on building our order book and setting business goals for 2024. The multi-year restructuring we undertook, starting with the closure of the Danville, then Roanoke, and finally Shoals factories to remove fixed cost and unneeded capacity, and to simultaneously create the campus we now have in Mexico, is directly resulting in Freight Car America being able to win the business best suited for the company. To a much greater degree than at any time in our recent history, We are making better commercial decisions and no longer living in the days when excessive capacity clouded our decision making. When we last spoke, I shared our strategic priorities for 2023 and the Freight Car America team remains laser focused on executing these initiatives. I would like to update you on just a few of these priorities. First, We have continued to expand our manufacturing campus, both in terms of overall capacity and equally importantly, capability. To be clear on the capacity, our goal has always been to run four production lines and build 4,000 to 5,000 cars per year. This is expected to be 4,000 to 5,000 units of profitable business and represents a reduction of approximately half of the capacity available on the prior US footprint. The capability just mentioned refers directly to efficiency and vertical integration. Our goal is to be the best manufacturer in the industry, and even more than that, to be a world-class manufacturer irrespective of industry. Making everything we can in-house is part of this. It gives us more direct control over our supply chain, quality, and cost. We are on pace to complete the Castanos campus as currently envisioned by the end of summer, at which point we will have the fourth production line available, our fabrication shop fully outfitted, and additional infrastructure and material delivery and handling in the exterior areas of the campus. We have put as much thought into how material is received, unloaded, processed, and then taken to the lines as we have to the actual construction of the rail cars themselves. Our focus, starting about the end of summer, will be simply on building rail cars and not the combined activities of building both rail cars and the approximately million square foot facility. We're getting very close to this day. As to our balance sheet and as we highlighted during our last call, we executed a term sheet for a very important refinancing during the quarter with our current financing partner, an affiliate of Pacific Investment Management Company. This transaction is expected to close on May 22nd. In brief and as a reminder on what this transaction will do for the company, One, it will provide the company with approximately $15 million in additional cash to invest in new initiatives to accelerate the next phase of our growth. Two, it will provide the option for the company to pay the dividend on the preferred stock on a payment in kind or pick basis, which equates to approximately $10 million per year improvement in operating cash flows. Three, We will also move from a variable rate loan structure on the existing term loan to a fixed dividend on the preferred. And finally, by eliminating most of the debt from our balance sheet, this final transaction will place us in a better position for further and lower cost financings in the future. I'll now turn the call over to Matt for a few commercial comments. Matt.