Albemarle Corporation

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Q1 2022 Albemarle Corporation Earnings Conference Call. My name is Darius, and I'll be moderating your call today. Before I hand you over to your host, Meredith Bandy, I'd like to remind you, if you would like to ask a question during a Q&A session at the end of the call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I now have the pleasure of handing you over to Meredith Bandy, Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead, Meredith.

All right, thank you, and welcome everyone to Albemarle's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Our earnings were released after the close of market yesterday, and you'll find the press release and earnings presentation posted on our website under the investors section at albemarle.com. Joining me on the call today are Kent Masters, our Chief Executive Officer, Scott Tozier, Chief Financial Officer, Rafael Crawford, President Catalyst, Nessa Johnson, President Bromeen, and Eric Norris, President Lithium. As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call, including our outlooks, guidance, expected company performance, and timing of expansion projects, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our press release and earnings presentation. That same language applies to this call. Please also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release and the appendix of our earnings presentation. And now I'll turn the call over to Kent.

Thanks, Meredith, and thank you all for joining us today. On today's call, I will highlight our results and achievements during the recent quarter. Scott will provide more details on our financial results, outlook, and balance sheet. I will then close our prepared remarks with an update on our growth projects and sustainability before opening the call for questions. Albemarle's leadership positions in lithium and bromine and our team's ability to execute have enabled us to generate increasingly strong results. In the first quarter, we generated net sales of $1.1 billion, up 44% compared to prior year, and that's excluding fine chemistry services in the comparison, which we sold in June of last year. This fundamental strength allowed us to more than double our EBITDA year over year. The supply-demand balance remains tight in the markets we serve. This has enabled us to significantly increase our 2022 outlook based on continued pricing strength in our lithium and bromine businesses. Scott will dive into the key elements of that outlook later in today's presentation. In terms of operational highlights for the quarter, the restart of our Wajana lithium mine and our marble joint venture is progressing well. First spodumene concentrate from train one is expected in May. We've agreed with our partners to accelerate the restart of train two with first spodumene concentrate from that train in July. Together, these two trains can feed conversion assets with annual capacity of around 70,000 tons of lithium hydroxide. Now I'll turn the call over to Scott to walk through our financials.