CF Industries Holdings, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first nine months and third quarter 2021 CF Industries Holdings Earnings Conference Call. My name is Erica, and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. We will facilitate the question and answer session towards the end of the presentation. To post a question at any time, please press star 1 on your touch-tone telephone keypad. If at any time during this call you require assistance, please press star zero, and a coordinator will be happy to assist you. I would now like to turn the presentation over to the host for today, Mr. Martin Jarosik with CF Investor Relations. Sir, please proceed.

Good morning, and thanks for joining the CF Industries Earnings Conference Call. I'm Martin Jarosik, Vice President of Investor Relations. With me today are Tony Will, CEO, Chris Bone, CFO, and Bert Frost, Senior Vice President of Sales, Market Development, and Supply Chain. CF Industries reported its results for the first nine months and third quarter of 2021 yesterday afternoon. On this call, we'll review the CF Industries results in detail, discuss our outlook, and then host a question and answer session. Statements made on this call and in the presentation on our website that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and will involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed or implied in any statements. More detailed information about factors that may affect our performance may be found in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our website. Also, you will find the reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures in the press release and presentation posted on our website. Now, let me introduce Tony Will, our president and CEO.

Thanks, Martin, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday afternoon, we posted our financial results for the first nine months of 2021, in which we generated adjusted EBITDA of $1.5 billion. These results reflect the drastically improving industry fundamentals that we experienced over the course of the year. Nitrogen prices are at their highest levels in over a decade, as strong demand and lower worldwide production have tightened the global supply-demand balance considerably. At the same time, energy spreads between North America and high-cost regions have widened dramatically, supporting margin expansion for our cost advantage network. The CF team also continues to perform exceptionally well, navigating a couple of severe weather events in the U.S., our highest levels of turnaround in maintenance activity ever, and a challenging natural gas situation in the U.K. Most importantly, they did so safely. Our recordable incident rate at the end of September was just 0.24 incidents per 200,000 labor hours, significantly better than industry averages. These factors have driven substantial cash generation over the last year. Our trailing 12-month net cash from operations was $1.7 billion, and free cash flow was $1 billion. As we look ahead, we're excited about the opportunities to build on this performance. We have good visibility into the fourth quarter of 2021. We have priced virtually all of our product shipments through the end of the year, while also hedging our natural gas requirements. While there is always some uncertainty about the volume of ammonia that will be applied in Q4, given the dependency on weather, we would expect full year 2021 adjusted EBITDA to land between $2.2 and $2.4 billion. Further out, we believe nitrogen industry conditions will remain positive for an extended period. As Bert will describe in a moment, we see very strong demand, constrained global supply, and wide energy spreads between North America and Europe to persist for some time. These factors support our ability to continue to generate significant free cash and to deploy that capital to create shareholder value. Our priorities remain the same. Invest in growth where opportunities offer returns above our cost of capital and return excess capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. We remain focused on disciplined investments and are excited about the two new projects supporting our clean energy growth platform. Once completed, these projects will enable us to produce over a million tons of blue or carbon-free ammonia. Chris will share more about our announcement yesterday in a moment. We are also pleased to have achieved investment-grade credit ratings, which recognizes and underscores all of the work we have done to remove fixed costs in the business, reduce debt, and highlights the positive industry fundamentals for a North American producer. On the balance sheet, we are quickly closing in on our target of $3 billion of gross debt and expect to repay the remaining $500 million outstanding on our 2023 notes on or before their maturity. However, that still leaves a substantial amount of excess free cash flow we expect to generate. And as such, the Board has authorized a new $1.5 billion share repurchase program to facilitate the return of capital to shareholders. With that, let me turn it over to Bert, who will discuss the Global Nitrogen Outlook in more detail. Then Chris will follow to talk about our financial position and clean energy initiatives before I return for some closing comments.