Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a loosen-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 number 1 key. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and the webcast will be available on on the Cooper Standard website for replay later today. I would now like to turn the call over to Roger Hendrickson, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Vic, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you spending some time with us 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 Bannis, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I need to remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking statements. While they 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. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate this opportunity to review our third quarter results and provide an update on our ongoing strategic initiatives and the outlook. To begin on slide five, we provide some highlights or key indicators of how our operations performed in the quarter. We continue to perform at world-class levels in delivering quality products and services to our customers and keeping our employees safe. At the end of the quarter, 98% of our customer scorecards for product quality were green and 96% were green for launch. Most importantly, the safety performance of our plants continues to be outstanding. In the third quarter, our total safety incident rate was just .46 per 200,000 hours worked, well below the world-class rate of .57. I would like to specifically recognize and thank our teams at the 28th Cooper Standard Plants that have maintained a perfect safety record of zero reported incidents for the first nine months of the year. We are continually striving for zero safety incidents at all of our plants and facilities, and the dedicated, focused employees at those 28 locations are leading the way and continue to demonstrate that achieving our goal of zero incidents is possible. Despite lower than expected production volumes, our manufacturing operations and purchasing team were able to deliver $8 million in savings through lean initiatives and improving efficiency in the quarter. Our S, G, A, and E expense was down $4 million year over year. And the combination of past restructuring actions and strategic divestitures delivered $5 million in benefits in the quarter. Unfortunately, we continued to face significant ongoing challenges from volatile customer schedules, reduced production volumes, and tight labor availability in certain markets. In this low production volume environment, we've not been able to offset the widespread inflationary impacts we're seeing in materials, energy, transportation, and labor. This despite our improved operating efficiency. We're taking aggressive actions to mitigate or recover the incremental costs imposed on our business. I will provide more color on this initiative in a few minutes. Moving to slide six, we're proud of the culture we've established within our company and the progress we're making toward world-class status with respect to sustainability. We continue to garner recognition from outside organizations for our progress thus far. In the recent quarter, we were recognized by Corp Magazine for our culture of diversity and inclusion. We believe this type of recognition is an indication that we are headed in the right direction. We will continue to work hard to further align our priorities with those of our five stakeholder groups because we believe this will play a critical role in driving our long-term growth and success. Now let me turn it over to John to discuss the financial results of the quarter.