Olympic Steel, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Olympic Steel 2021 fourth 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 fourth quarter and full year 2021. Our call this morning will be hosted by our Chief Executive Officer, Rick Mirabito, 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 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-setting results for the fourth quarter and the full year 2021. I'll begin with some comments about our performance for 2021, as well as the significant progress we've made with our diversification strategy, and how we are better positioned to succeed through all market cycles. Then Andrew will review the performance of our three business segments and share some perspectives on our end markets. And then after that, Rich will provide a more detailed look at our fourth quarter financial results. And then of course, as always, we'll take your questions. So 2021 was a phenomenal year for Olympic Steel. It was a year of records, and our strong fourth quarter was really a fitting capstone to the most profitable year in our company's history. Highlights included sales reaching record highs of $625 million for the fourth quarter and $2.3 billion for the year, total assets exceeding $1 billion for the first time in the company's history, and all three of our business segments delivering record sales and earnings for the year. And to put our performance into perspective, our carbon flat segments EBITDA of $121 million in 2021 by itself surpassed the entire company's previous earnings high. Our performance in 2021 reflected not only the strong demand for our products, but also the continuing benefits of our diversification and acquisition strategy, combined with our focus on controlling expenses and aggressively managing working capital to achieve record inventory turnover. And of course, this success would not have been possible without the resilience and outstanding effort of our employees across the organization. So I want to thank and recognize our entire team for a job well done. In addition, we continue to strengthen our business through our capital deployment strategy. Our actions in 2021 helped us further diversify the business and reduce our exposure to cyclical risks. We started the year with newly acquired action stainless immediately contributing. We then sold our Detroit flat rolled operations and assets in September at the height of market pricing, and we redeployed a portion of those proceeds into higher return growth opportunities, like the acquisition of Shaw Stainless and Alloy. We also invested in automation expanded in the growing southeast and southwest U.S. markets, and we grew our market share in pipe and tube, aluminum, and stainless steel product lines. All of these actions, along with our ESG efforts, combined to successfully build a more diverse and aware culture at Olympic Steel, strengthening who we are as a company. We have an exceptional team at Olympic, and I am proud of the progress we have made. We will continue to strategically deploy capital into the right investments while maintaining our disciplines around expenses, working capital, and high velocity inventory turnover. We remain confident in our ongoing strategy to diversify the business and earn more consistent returns in all market cycles. In terms of access to capital, we have built maximum flexibility through the various programs we've initiated. As witnessed during the declining price cycles, We expect to see a significant increase in our free cash flow as the year progresses. In 2021, we also extended our credit facility for five years, and that provides $475 million of borrowing capacity with the ability to further upsize. We also filed a stock ATM program under our shelf registration statement in 2021 to accompany our board-authorized share repurchase program. We have the desire and ability to continue to seek accretive acquisitions and additional organic growth while simultaneously rewarding our shareholders, as evidenced by a recently announced increased dividend of $0.09 per share per quarter. That's $0.07 per share higher than our previous quarterly dividend, and Rich will discuss that later. We're also optimistic and really excited about 2022. So now I'll turn the call over to Andrew.