Constellium SE

Director, Investor Relations for Concelium to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Angela. I would like to welcome everyone to our second quarter 2024 earnings call. On the call today, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Jean-Marc Germain, and our Chief Financial Officer, Jack Guo. 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 Concelium.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 presentation, which supplement our IFRS disclosures. Before turning the call over to John Mark, I wanted to remind everyone that beginning last quarter, we revised the definition of adjusted EBITDA at the consolidated level, based on prior discussions with the SEC. The new definition will no longer exclude the non-cash impact of metal price lag. We will continue to provide investors and other stakeholders with the non-cash metal price lag impact as it is necessary to get a true assessment of the economic performance of the business. Our segment adjusted EBITDA will continue to exclude the impact and any guidance we provide for adjusted EBITDA will also exclude the impact. And with that, I would now like to hand the call over to John Mark.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for your interest in Constellium. Let's begin on slide five and discuss the highlights from our second quarter results. I would like to start with safety, our number one priority. Our recordable case rate was lower in the second quarter, leading to a rate of 2.1 per million hours worked for the first half of the year. While this safety performance puts us among the best in manufacturing, the rate is higher than where we want it to be, and we have done better in the past. This is a humbling reminder that while we always strive to deliver best-in-class safety performance, we all need to constantly maintain our focus on safety to achieve the ambitious target we have set, which is a never-ending task for our company and one we take very seriously. Turning to our financial results, shipments were 378,000 tons, down 5% compared to the second quarter of 2023, mainly due to lower shipments in bark and AS&I. The lower shipments in AS&I were largely a result of the German extrusion business we sold last year. Revenue of 1.8 billion euros decreased 8% compared to last year, primarily due to lower shipments and unfavorable price and mix, partially offset by 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 net income of 71 million euros in the quarter compares to net income of 32 million euros in the second quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA was 214 million euros in the quarter, though this includes a positive non-cash impact from metal price lag of 42 million euros. If you were to exclude this impact of metal price lag, which you should, as Jason mentioned earlier, the real economic performance of the business reflects a adjusted EBITDA of 172 million euros in the quarter compared to the record 209 million euros we achieved last year. As we mentioned in April, our second quarter results this year reflect the impact of two large planned maintenance outages during the quarter. In addition, we saw slowing in certain end markets as we moved through the second quarter, which we expect to persist in the second half of the year. Looking across our end markets, aerospace demand remained strong in the quarter and packaging demand continued to improve. Automotive demand remained healthy in North America, though demand continued to weaken in Europe. Demand in most industrial and other specialty markets remained weak in both regions during the quarter. Jack will go through our detailed segment performance in a few moments. Moving now to free cash flow. Our free cash flow in the quarter was strong at 75 million euros. I am pleased to report that we increased our share buyback activities in the quarter. During the quarter, we repurchased nearly 1.6 million shares for around 33 million US dollars. Our leverage at the end of the second quarter was 2.5 times and remains within our target leverage range. While it did not have a significant impact on our second quarter results, in late June, we experienced an unprecedented flooding event at our operations in the Valais region of Switzerland. I wanted to take a moment to thank our entire team in the Valais for their incredible resolve and courage during this very difficult time. I will give you a full update on the current situation in Valais a little later on. With that, I will now hand the call over to Jack for further details on our financial performance. Jack?