Ampco-Pittsburgh Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the AmpCo Pittsburgh fourth quarter and full year 2019 earnings results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Did you need assistance? Please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Melanie Sproulson, Director of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead. Thank you, Andrea, and good morning to everyone joining us on today's fourth quarter and full year 2019 conference call. I'm joined today by Brett McBrayer, our Chief Executive Officer, and Mike McCauley, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Also joining us on the call today are Sam Lyon, President of Union Electric Steel Corporation, and Terry Kenney, President of Air and Liquid Systems Corporation. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that participants on this call may make statements or comments that are forward-looking and may include financial projections or other statements of the corporation's plans, objectives, expectations, or intentions. These matters involve certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of the corporation's control. The corporation's actual results may differ significantly from those projected or suggested in any forward-looking statement due to a variety of factors, including those discussed in the corporation's most recently filed Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any obligation to update or otherwise release publicly any revision to our forward-looking statements. A replay of this call will be posted on our website later today and remain available for two weeks following the conclusion of the call. To access the earnings release or the webcast replay, please consult the investor section of our website at amcopgh.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brett McBrayer, AMCO Pittsburgh CEO.

Thank you, Melody. Good morning and welcome to our call. First, let me begin with a note on environment, health, and safety. We have an unwavering priority to protect the health and safety of our employees as well as ensure we protect the environment and the communities where we operate. Although we are not pleased with our safety performance to date, I am encouraged by the actions we are taking to drive improvements. Across our businesses, we have increased safety observations, leadership walks, and fatality prevention assessments to ensure we safeguard the well-being of our employees globally. From an environmental perspective, I am proud to report that the corporation operated our facilities incident-free. We can summarize 2019 as a year of execution. I'm excited about the work accomplished as we took targeted and decisive actions to improve our performance. Our focus has been on reducing complexity in our manufacturing processes, implementing operational improvements, and right-sizing the business. Defining our core businesses and required capabilities we continued to divest non-core and excess assets. These divestitures began with Vertical Seal, our specialized parts and service provider to North American rolling mills during the second half of 2018. In the third quarter of 2019, we complete the sale of our North American cast roll operation in Avonmore, Pennsylvania. During this same period, we also complete the sale of our Canadian specialty steel business, ASW Steel. The divestitures of these assets significantly improved our cost structure without compromising our ability to serve current and future customers in our forged and cast engineered product segment and provided immediate positive improvement in operating results for our company. I'm excited to announce that we are now seeing the benefit to our P&L with a return to profitability in the fourth quarter. Our performance improvement actions for our core assets began in our U.S. forging facilities during the first half of 2019, where we focused on lowering operating and overhead costs and improved efficiencies. Once we confirmed we had systems in place to sustain and improve our U.S. forging businesses, we quickly moved our efforts to our European cash roll facilities, where we launched restructuring initiatives during the second half of 2019. These efforts also focused on lowering our cost structure while improving efficiencies. Although these initiatives were launched during the second half of the year, we have only begun to see the improvements in the fourth quarter. The full impact of these actions will be realized in 2020. I will now turn the call over to Sam Lyon, Union Electric's still president, who will discuss in more detail some of the significant accomplishments of last year, as well as some of the challenges we faced in the forged and cast engineered product segment. Sam?