Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following company-prepared comments, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. At that time, if you have a question, you will need to press star followed by the one key. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, and the webcast will be available on the Cooper Standard website. We'll replay later today. I would now like to send the call over to Roger Hendrickson, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Maddie, and good morning, everyone. We really appreciate you taking the time to join our call this morning. The members of our leadership team who will be speaking with you on the call this morning are Jeff Edwards, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and John Banas, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I need to remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking statements. While these statements are made based on current factual information and certain assumptions and plans that management currently believes to be reasonable, these statements do involve risks and uncertainties. For more information on forward-looking statements, we ask that you refer to slide three of this presentation and the company's statements included in periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the appendix to the presentation. So, with those formalities out of the way, I'll turn the call over to Jeff Edwards.

Thanks, Roger, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate the opportunity to review our first quarter results. and provide an update on our ongoing strategic initiatives and outlook. To begin, on slide five, we provide some highlights or key indicators of how our operations performed in the quarter. In the critical areas of providing quality products and services to our customers and keeping our employees safe, we continue to perform at world-class levels. At the end of the quarter, 98% of our customer scorecards for product quality were green, and 98% were green for launch. Most importantly, the safety performance of our plants continues to be outstanding. Through the first three months of the year, our total safety incident rate was just 0.45 per 200,000 hours worked, below the world-class rate of 0.57. I would like to specifically recognize and thank our teams at the 44 Cooper Standard plants that had a perfect safety record of zero reported incidents in the first quarter. We're continually striving for zero safety incidents at all of our plants and facilities, and these 44 are leading the way and clearly demonstrate that achieving our goal of zero incidents is possible. From a financial perspective, our results were nearly on track with our original operating plan for the quarter, despite the number of external challenges. Semiconductor shortages, historic winter storms and power outages, and disruption of natural gas and other commodity supply issues resulted in abrupt changes to production schedules that impacted volumes on some of our key platforms. Through the uncertainty, our teams pulled together to deliver $18 million of manufacturing cost savings in the quarter, offsetting the impact of the volume lost. In addition, our continued aggressive actions to reduce overhead costs and optimize our supply chain resulted in a $10 million improvement in SG&A and ETH expense. and $10 million in purchasing savings versus the first quarter of last year. Combined, these initiatives were a significant factor in achieving a 450 basis point improvement in our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin. Moving to slide six, we are improving the performance of our business and have an unwavering commitment to doing business the right way. With integrity, transparency, and adherence to our corporate values, this commitment is at the core of our company culture, which benefits all of our stakeholder groups. We continue to receive public recognition for both who we are and the manner we conduct business, as well as the quality of our products and the service we provide our customers. In the first quarter, we were pleased to once again be recognized by Episphere is one of the world's most ethical companies. This is the second consecutive year that we have received this prestigious award, and we are proud of our entire team for making this recognition possible. Moving to slide seven. In the next couple weeks, we will publish our 2020 Corporate Responsibility Report on our website. As in the past, this report will offer transparent reporting on our material ESG topics. We're also pleased this year to share an update to the long-term ESG priorities and goals we defined last year, along with some additional goals which we believe further strategically align our ESG initiatives and business priorities. Within environmental, Cooper Standard is making strides to further sharpen our sustainability strategy They focus on climate change, low-carbon economy. We have committed to source 100% of our electricity with renewable energy sources by 2025. We have also committed to a 100% waste diversion rate globally by 2025. and reduce the amount of solid waste our operations generate by 4% each year until 2025. For social, one of the highlights this year's report are initiatives around diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Diverse talent has been a core value of Cooper Standard for many years, and one we felt could use increased focus. In 2020, the company officially published a global diversity policy and assigned a diversity inclusion and belonging action group to help promote a culture that values the perspectives and leverages the strengths of all employees as we continue building a diverse workforce. During the first quarter, the action group began implementing new communication channels. investing in focused training, enhancing interview techniques and strategies, and auditing for exclusionary norms, processes, policies, and inequities. This is in its early stages of implementation, but we're making strong progress on this important element of our company culture. We're proud of the culture that we've established and how it's contributing to the improved performance and results every day. We hope you will take the time to learn more by reviewing this year's Corporate Responsibility Report when it becomes available. Now let me turn the call over to John to discuss the financial details of the quarter.