Constellium SE

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Constellium First Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. It is now my pleasure to introduce Director of Investor Relations, Jason Hershiser.

Thank you, Operator. I would like to welcome everyone to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. On the call today, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Jean-Marc Germain, and our Chief Financial Officer, Peter Matt. After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. A copy of the slide presentation for today's call is available on our website at consilium.com, and today's call is being recorded. Before we begin, I'd like to encourage everyone to visit the company's website and take a look at our recent filings. Today's call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements include statements regarding the company's anticipated financial and operating performance, future events, and expectations, and may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. For a summary of specific risk factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the factors presented under the heading Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 20F. All information in this presentation is as of the date of the presentation. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. In addition, today's presentation includes information regarding certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please see the reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures attached in today's slide which supplement our IFRS disclosures. I would now like to hand the call over to Jean-Marc.

Thank you, Jason, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for your interest in EconStellium. Let's turn to slide five and discuss the highlights from our first quarter results. I would like to start with safety, our number one priority. We delivered best-in-class safety performance in the first quarter with a recordable case rate of 1.6 million cases. per million hours worked. In the first quarter, we had several sites achieve safety milestones with anniversary for a number of years, up to seven for one of our plans, without a recordable case. I want to congratulate all of our employees on this excellent performance. But the safety journey is never complete, and we all need to remain focused on this critical priority. While our performance in the quarter was excellent, we are always focused on maintaining and improving our safety performance. This can never be taken for granted. Turning to our financial results, shipments were 401,000 tons, up 4% compared to the first quarter of 2021, due to higher shipments in PARP and ANT. Revenue increased 48% to 2 billion euros. This was primarily due to higher metal prices. Remember, While our revenues are affected by changes in metal prices, we operate a pass-through business model, which minimizes our exposure to metal price risk. Our value-added revenue, which reflects our sales, excluding the cost of metal, was 652 million euros, up 21% compared to the first quarter last year. Our net income of 179 million euros compares to 48 million euros in the first quarter of 2021. As you can see in the bridge on the top right, adjusted EBITDA was 167 million euros, 38% above the first quarter of 2021, with SPARP adjusted EBITDA increasing by 14 million euros and ANT adjusted EBITDA increasing by 34 million euros versus the prior year. This performance was ahead of our expectations for the quarter, and a new record for us in the first quarter. Underlying this performance was a rebound in aerospace demand and solid cost performance, as well as continued strong demand from packaging and industrial customers. We are experiencing significant cost pressures, which Peter will discuss in more detail, but thanks to our pricing power, contractual protections, and our work on costs, we are managing the current inflationary environment very well. Moving now to free cash flow. We extended our track record of consistent free cash flow generation with 26 million euros in the quarter. As you can see on the bottom right of the slide, we demonstrated our commitment to deleveraging and ended the first quarter at 3.2 times or down 1.4 times from the end of the first quarter last year. we remain committed to achieving our medium-term leverage target of 2.5 times. Overall, I am very proud of our first quarter performance. We delivered a strong adjusted EBITDA, solid free cash flow generation, and further deleveraging, despite significant inflationary pressures. Looking forward, there are clearly uncertainties on the macroeconomic front and on the geopolitical front with the war in Ukraine. which I will come back to later in the presentation. However, on a positive note, we have demonstrated our ability to successfully manage the business through challenging times, and we are demonstrating our ability to offset the current inflationary pressures. In addition, we are seeing a strong order book in most of our businesses. As a consequence, we are optimistic about our prospects for the remainder of this year and beyond, And we are raising our 2022 adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of 640 to 660 million euros. That increases our previous guidance of 600 to 620 million euros. In addition, we now expect free cash flow in excess of 170 million euros in 2022. That increases our previous guidance of greater than 150 million euros. At our recent Analyst Day, we presented a long-term vision for the company that includes volume growth underpinned by sustainability-driven megatrends, improving profitability and returns, and an ambitious set of sustainability targets. We're highly focused on executing our strategy, achieving our ESG targets, delivering on our long-term guidance of greater than €800 million of adjusted EBITDA by 2025, and increasing shareholder value. With that, I will now hand the call over to Peter for further details on our financial performance.