CF Industries Holdings, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CF Industries' first nine months and third quarter of 2023. All participants will be in a listen-only mode, and should you need any assistance during the call, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. We will facilitate a question and answer session towards the end of the presentation. To pose a question at any time, please press star then one on your touchtone phone. I would now like to turn the presentation over to the host for today, Mr. Martin Jurasic with CF Investor Relations. Sir, please proceed.

Good morning, and thanks for joining the CF Industries Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Tony Will, CEO, Chris Bone, CFO, and Bert Frost, Executive Vice President of Sales, Market Development, and Supply Chain. CF Industries reported its results for the first nine months and third quarter of 2023 yesterday afternoon. On this call, we'll review the results, discuss our outlook, and then host a question and answer session. Statements made The 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 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 your performance may be found in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our website. Also, you'll find 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 2023, in which we generated adjusted EBITDA of approximately $2.2 billion. Our trailing 12 months net cash from operations was $2.9 billion, and free cash flow was $2 billion. These results reflect continued strong execution by the CF Industries team, a constructive global nitrogen supply-demand balance, and energy spreads favoring North American production. Looking forward, we remain very positive about the opportunities that lie ahead. In the near term, we expect strong demand for the 2024 application season in North America due to low nitrogen inventories across the supply chain. We expect to close the acquisition of the Wagman ammonia plant this year, adding that facility to our network and production volumes for 2024 and beyond. In the medium term, industry fundamentals point to a tightening global nitrogen supply-demand balance. Over the next four years, construction of new nitrogen production capacity does not keep pace with the expected demand growth of approximately 1.5 percent per year in traditional applications. Additionally, several important regions are projected to have reduced nitrogen production, given constraints around the cost and availability of natural gas in those regions. Finally, longer term, we expect our clean energy initiatives to provide strong returns and multiple growth opportunities for the company, while helping us to meet our decarbonization goals. Taken together, we are very optimistic about our ability to drive strong cash generation in the years ahead. This will enable us to continue to create value over the long term through disciplined investments and growth opportunities, as well as returning capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. With that, let me turn it over to Bert, who will discuss global nitrogen market conditions in more detail.