Olympic Steel, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Olympic Steel 2021 first quarter financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen 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 hand the conference over to Rich Manson, Chief Financial Officer at Olympic Steel. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to Olympic Steel's earnings call for the first quarter of 2021. Our call this morning will be hosted by our Chief Executive Officer, Rick Marabito, and we will also be joined by our President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Greif. Before we begin, I have a few reminders. Some statements made on today's call will be predictive and are intended to be made as forward-looking within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and may not reflect actual results. The company does not undertake to update such statements, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting such forward-looking statements. Important assumptions, risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are set forth in the company's reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, and the press release is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During today's discussion, we may refer to adjusted net income per diluted share, EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA, which are all non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is provided in the press release that was issued this morning and can be found on our website. Today's live broadcast will be archived and available for replay on Olympic Steel's website. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Rick.

Thank you, Rich. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss Olympic Steel's results for the first quarter of 2021. I'll begin with some comments about our record performance in the first quarter and the overall strength of our markets. Then Andrew will review our business segment performance, and Rich will provide more detail about our financial results. And then after that, we'd of course be glad to take your questions. So as noted in this morning's release, our strong momentum continued in the first quarter, which was our most profitable first quarter ever. And overall, it was our third most profitable quarter in the company's history. Our performance resulted from the combination of several factors. But most importantly, I'd like to recognize and thank our employees whose hard work, talent, and dedication to our internal disciplines around safety, expenses, and inventory management were really critical to our success. Together, their focus on safety and performing for our customers every day helped drive an outstanding start to the year. Rapidly changing market conditions, which began to appear in the fourth quarter of 2020, also played a big role in shaping the first quarter of 2021. During the pandemic, mill production capacity was reduced. End-user demand has strongly returned and returned faster than forecasted, resulting in constrained metal supply and depleted inventories. The supply-demand dynamic has caused a disruption in the supply chain. Metal became difficult to source, lead times extended, and prices have risen to unprecedented levels. While long mill lead times and disruptions in the metal supply chain kept inventory at service centers at historic lows, our long-standing relationships with domestic mills enabled us to support our customers with metal during this supply-constrained environment. We performed well in all of our end markets with record net sales of $463 million in the first quarter and that's compared with $354 million in the first quarter of last year. Net income totaled $22 million or $1.91 per diluted share. That's compared with net income of $0.6 million or 5 cents per diluted share a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA was $37.8 million compared with $7.5 million in the first quarter of 2020. The strong first quarter has not changed our long-term focus. We understand that continuing to diversify our business is critical to the long-term value creation for all of our shareholders. Since 2018, through our strategic M&A focus, we have completed four acquisitions that have enabled us to add higher margin carbon and specially metal businesses. We are especially pleased with the smooth integration and strong financial performance of Texas-based action stainless and alloys, which we acquired in December 2020 to geographically expand our specialty metals product offerings. We're actively pursuing additional strategic growth via acquisitions and organic investments, which Andrew will discuss in a moment. Turning to the outlook for our markets, we expect strong demand, supply chain constraints, and high metal prices to continue in the near term. We believe we are still in the early stages of a strong demand cycle, and Olympic is in excellent position to continue to benefit from growing demand in all of our segments. We expect strong profitability to continue in the second quarter. Longer term, legislation to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, combined with the potential shifts in supply chains closer to our domestic manufacturing industry would extend the current demand cycle as infrastructure projects last multiple years. Olympic Steel is extremely well positioned to support an American rebuilding effort. So we're watching this legislation with significant interest and anticipation. So now I'll turn the call over to Andrew for some additional comments.