Olympic Steel, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Olympic Steel 2021 Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on 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 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn 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 third quarter of 2021. Our call this morning will be hosted by our Chief Executive Officer, Rick Marabito, and we will also have 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 releases filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During today's discussion, we may refer to adjusted net income for 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 measure is provided in the press release that was issued last night 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, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss Olympic Steel's record results for the third quarter of 2021. I'll begin with some comments about our very busy and successful quarter. including exciting progress on our longterm strategy. Then Andrew will review our business segments together with commentary about our end markets. And then after that, uh, rich will provide a more detailed look at our third quarter financial results. And of course, as always, we'll wrap up and take your questions. The third quarter was phenomenal in many ways, and we are proud of the entire Olympic steel team for their outstanding execution. Not only did we achieve record-setting financial results, but we also continued to successfully execute our long-term strategy to further diversify our business, deliver consistent profitability, and enhance shareholder value. Highlights of the quarter included the exceptional performance of all three of our business segments, the continued success of our recent acquisitions, which have contributed to our profitable growth, and the mid-September sale of our Detroit operation, which was primarily focused on processing and distributing carbon flat roll products to domestic automakers. Then, two weeks after the Detroit sale, on October 1st, we used a portion of the Detroit sale proceeds to acquire Shaw Stainless and Alloy, a stainless steel distributor, fabricator, and end product manufacturer. The Shaw acquisition further expands our specialty metals geographic footprint and our product and processing capabilities, while allowing us to immediately replace the former Detroit earnings stream at a fraction of the investment. We believe this back-to-back sale and acquisition transaction is a meaningful demonstration of our strategic execution to build higher, sustainable returns for our shareholders. Next, I do want to comment on our safety performance, and we are proud that this year 18 of our locations received safety awards from the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, including 12 that received the highest safety award of honor for having a perfect safety record and no recordable injuries or illnesses in the prior year. These awards reflect our employees' commitment to a strong safety culture and their dedication to keeping each other healthy and safe. Turning now to the financial results, as noted in our release, our third quarter performance was the strongest quarter in company history. And in fact, it was better than all but three full years in Olympic Steel's history. Net sales totaled $668 million. Net income was $44.5 million. And adjusted EBITDA was $70.5 million, all of which significantly exceeded our previous all-time best quarter which was the second quarter of this year. These strong results were driven by our continued discipline around controlling expenses and tightly managing working capital and inventory levels, combined with accretive acquisitions and robust market demand and metals pricing. As I previously mentioned, we are excited to further diversify and expand into higher return specialty metals businesses with the recent acquisition of Shaw Stainless. This transaction marks our fifth acquisition in four years, and Shaw is a perfect fit for Olympic. It's immediately accretive, it's well-run, and dedicated to exceptional customer service with strong core values and really excellent growth opportunities. In addition to acquisition growth, we continue to invest in internal initiatives such as automation to help solve labor challenges, improve safety, and build additional efficiency into our operations. We also remain laser focused on managing our costs and inventory levels. All of these actions support our continued pursuit of higher returns in each of our three business segments. Looking forward, we anticipate that market demand will remain steady in the fourth quarter and heading into 2022. We are well positioned to finish our record 2021 on a strong note. and we remain optimistic about 2022. So with that, now I'll turn the call over to Andrew for some additional comments.