Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Following company-prepared comments, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. At that time, if you have questions, you will need to press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. As a reminder, this conference call has been recorded. and the webcast will be available on the Cooper Standard website for replay later today. I would now like to turn the conference over to Roger Hendrickson, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Keith, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for 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 Banas, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us this morning is Chris Couch, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Chris will be available to address relevant topics during the Q&A session. 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 closely and 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 Jeff Edwards.

Thanks, Roger. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate the opportunity to review our third quarter results and provide an update on our business and 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 certainly have maintained our focus and dedication to delivering quality products and exceptional service to our customers and keeping our employees safe in our workplaces around the world. In terms of product quality, you can see that 97% of our customer scorecards were green in the quarter. We also had 97% green scorecards for new product launches. So we continue to achieve outstanding operational performance. allowing us to deliver exceptional value to our customers. In addition, safety performance of our plants continues to be excellent. During the third quarter, we had a total incident rate of just .27 reportable incidents per 200,000 hours worked, and that's well below the world-class benchmark of .57. Leading this outstanding safety performance were the 31 plants that have maintained a perfect record of zero incidents through the first nine months of the year. I certainly want to recognize the teams at these plants for their ongoing commitment and leadership as we continue to strive for our ultimate safety goal of zero incidents for the entire company. I'm extremely proud of our global team for their continued commitment to workplace safety and certainly a big shout out to our plant managers. Thank you all very much. As global light vehicle production volumes continued to improve in the third quarter, our sales increased by a solid 12% year over year, significantly outpacing the market. In addition, we continued our focus and commitment to maximize operational efficiency and become as lean as possible. During the third quarter, our manufacturing and purchasing teams delivered $14 million in savings through lean initiatives and other cost saving programs. Finally, we're continuing to leverage our award-winning innovations to win new business, especially on new vehicle on new electric vehicle programs, hybrids, and also to upgrade our total content and margin on existing vehicle programs. During the third quarter, we were awarded contracts for $91 million in annualized future sales on programs that include our most recent technology innovations. This includes both new programs as well as upgrades on existing programs. Importantly, we continue to partner with our customers to design and develop new technologies for their most important electric vehicle platforms. New business awards for EV platforms worth $34 million in the quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to $89 million. We are pleased to see our hard work over the past couple of years begin to drive meaningful improvement in our financial results. The combination of leaner cost structure in our enhanced commercial agreements leveraged across increasing production volumes is certainly powerful. Turning to slide six, our company culture is based on providing value, frankly, to all of our shareholders, all of our stakeholders, and being good stewards of the environment and the communities in which we work and live. Within this culture, a focus on sustainability is kind of a natural extension. So it comes as no surprise that our performance in the areas of sustainability continues to garner recognition from within the industry as well as from sustainability experts. We recently learned that we have again achieved silver medal rating with Echovatus, which places us in the 87th percentile of responding companies in our segment. Based on this rating, Nissan also recently recognized Cooper Standard for outstanding achievement in sustainability. We continue to work on aligning our priorities with the values of our customers, and we believe this ultimately will provide opportunities for sustained growth and long-term value creation. and certainly not to fail to mention the type of company that the world's best and brightest want to be a part of. I'll now turn the call over to John to give you the financial details for the quarter.