Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. During your presentation, all participants will be in the listen-only mode. Following company progress comments, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded, and the webcast will be available on the Cooper Standard website for replay later today. I will now turn the call over to Roger Hendrickson, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Livia, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you spending some time on the call 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 Banas, 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. With those formalities out of the way, I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Thanks, Roger. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate the opportunity to review our third quarter and year-to-date results and provide an update on our business and the outlook going forward. To begin on slide five, we provide some highlights or key indicators of how our operations performed in the third quarter. We continued to execute at world-class levels by 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. Our launch performance scorecards were at 96% green for the quarter. More importantly, the safety performance of our plants continues to be outstanding. Through the first nine months of the year, we have 28 plants that still have a perfect safety record of zero incidents. I want to recognize the teams at these plants for their continued commitment and leadership as they once again confirm that achieving our ultimate goal of zero incidents is possible. I could not be more proud of the global team for their continued commitment in world-class achievements in maintaining a safe workplace for all. While conditions in the global automotive industry obviously remain challenging with continuing supply chain uncertainty, reduced production levels, and high inflationary pressures, we've maintained our focus on reducing costs across the company. Our manufacturing operations were able to deliver $22 million in savings through lean initiatives and improving efficiencies in the quarter. Our SGA and E expense was down $7 million year over year as we continue to right-size our fixed costs. And past restructuring actions delivered $2 million in benefits in the quarter. We also saw incremental benefits from our enhanced commercial agreements on pricing and cost recoveries in the quarter as more negotiations were concluded and additional adjustments were implemented and realized. Moving to slide six, our new product innovations continue to garner recognition from trade groups as well as our customers. This morning, I'm pleased to announce that our Advanced Thermoplastic Thermal Management Solution for Electric Vehicles has been named a finalist in the Society of Plastic Engineers Annual Automotive Innovation Competition. Our new PlastiCool 2000 tubing technology was developed specifically for the operating temperature and pressure environments required for glycol thermal management systems in battery electric vehicles. It also aids in optimizing flow and provides a weight reduction of 60% compared to more traditional EPDM tubing technologies, helping to improve overall vehicle efficiency. Combined with our latest Ergolock plus Quick Connect technology, the system also improves the flexibility and efficiency of the OEM assembly process. a significant value add for our customers. While we're pleased to be recognized by the Society of Plastic Engineers, we're even more pleased with the new business awards that our customers are giving us, largely driven by our continued focus on value add innovation. Turning to slide seven. Continuing on the topic of product innovation, during our last conference call in early August, I spoke about the progress we're making in expanding the scope and opportunities within our fluid handling business. Internally, we call it our 4C strategy, which refers to our four critical functions of fluid systems in a vehicle. Connect, convey, control, and communicate. Our traditional suite of products has focused primarily on the connect and convey functions. We have established a track record of providing world-class technology in many different types of tubing and related connectors, and they have garnered recognition and driven new business, as I just discussed. Through our comprehensive product strategy in the joint development agreement with Solari, we announced in August, we're rapidly progressing the development of new skip generation technology that integrates the functionality of pumps with advanced fluid control, routing and connection technologies into a single device. These new systems are expected to further optimize the cost, efficiency, and complexity of thermal management in technically advanced electric vehicles. For our OEM customer, it will add value through system simplification, enhanced performance, light weighting, and improved fluid management efficiencies. For Cooper Standard, the new technology will significantly expand the scope of our product offering and increase our revenue and margin opportunities. Our fluid systems engineers are already collaborating with OEM design teams under multiple nondisclosure agreements to explore how our new capabilities and patented technologies can help them solve some of their biggest system design challenges. The early response has been very favorable, and we're excited about the potential new growth opportunities our expanded capabilities will provide. Moving to slide eight. Our sealing products team is also delivering exciting new innovations for the electric vehicle market. Among these are flush seal and frameless sealing systems. These technologies are rapidly becoming favored design choices for the premium and electric vehicle markets as automakers work to differentiate their vehicles through a range of styling options. Of our most recent ceiling business awards, 30% have been for frameless technology, and we expect this trend will continue. And this represents additional growth opportunity as the frameless technology drives a significantly higher content per vehicle. In some cases, more than 100% higher than traditional ceiling systems. We continue to believe our investments in product and technology innovation are the key to driving future profitable growth. We expect this will benefit us even further in the months and years ahead as we optimize our cost structure and as production volumes and inflationary pressures normalize. Now let me turn the call over to John to discuss the financial details of the quarter.