Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard First Quarter 2024 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 a question, 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 is being recorded and the webcast will be available 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. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Chloe, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to join our call today. 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 Jeff Edwards.

Thanks, Roger, and good morning, everyone. How you doing? We appreciate the opportunity to review our first quarter results and provide an update on our business and the outlook going forward. So to begin on slide five, I'd like to highlight some key first quarter data points that we believe are reflective of our continued strong commitment to operational excellence and our core company values. In terms of product quality, 97%. of our customer scorecards were green in the quarter. For new program launches, our customer scorecards were 96%. So we continue to achieve outstanding operational performance, and this is allowing us to deliver exceptional value to our customers. In addition, the safety performance of our plants continues to be excellent as well. During the first quarter, we had a total incident rate of .38 reportable incidents per 200,000 hours worked. That's well below the world-class benchmark of .47. Leading this outstanding safety performance were the 39 plants that had a perfect safety record of zero incidents through the first three months of the year. I 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. In terms of cost optimization, we had another solid quarter with our manufacturing and purchasing teams delivering $19 million of savings through lean initiatives and other cost-saving programs. This improved efficiency combined with our enhanced commercial agreements enabled us to improve our gross profit margin by a solid 300 basis points compared to the first quarter of last year. While we have more work to do, we continue to make progress toward our profitability targets. Finally, we're continuing to leverage world-class service, technical capabilities, and our award-winning innovations to win new business. During the first three months of 2024, we were awarded $66 million in net new business awards. Importantly, we continue to partner with our customers to design and develop new technologies for some of their most important new vehicle platforms, including ICE, hybrid, and battery electric vehicles. Turning to slide six, another indication of our customer relationships, Valued technology and world-class service are the product and service awards we frequently receive. We're very pleased once again to be named as a supplier of the year for General Motors, one of our top global customers, and I think probably one of the most coveted awards in our industry. While the award was announced and presented during the first quarter, it's an annual award that is reflective of our performance throughout the past year. This is the seventh consecutive year that we've received this prestigious GM award, and we look forward to continuing and expanding our relationship with them going forward. Slide seven, while providing our customers with world-class products, technology, and service, that's certainly what we do, our commitment to doing business the right way with uncompromised honesty, transparency, integrity, and maintaining a continual focus on being a good corporate citizen says even more about who we are. We're pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, we will once again be publishing our annual corporate responsibility report. It covers a wide range of topics, including products, financial performance, corporate governance, and environmental stewardship, among others. We hope that you will take the opportunity to read through the report and provide any feedback you might have or you might like to share. Your input will be helpful to us as we strive toward our company purpose of creating sustainable solutions together. Now let me turn the call over to John to review the financial details of the quarter.