Ecovyst Inc.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Beau and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to the ECOVIS third quarter 2025 earnings call and webcast. Please note today's call is being recorded and should run approximately one hour. Currently, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone. If you do want to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 2. When posing your question, we ask that you please pick up your handset to allow for optimal sound quality. Lastly, if you should need operator assistance today, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Gene Shields, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Ecovist's third quarter 2025 earnings call. With me on the call this morning are Kirk Bidding, Ecovist's Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Fien, Ecovist's Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks this morning, we'll take your questions. Please note that some of the information shared today is forward-looking information, including information about the company's financial and operating performance, strategies, our anticipated end-use demand trends, and our 2025 financial outlook. This information is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results and the implementation of the company's plans to vary materially. Any forward-looking information shared today speaks only as of this date. These risks are discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures mentioned in today's call with their corresponding GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and in the presentation materials posted in the investor section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Kurt Bidding. Kurt? Thank you, Gene, and good morning.

The third quarter of 2025 was a pivotal quarter for EcoVist. Following an extensive strategic review of our advanced materials and catalyst segment, we announced an agreement to sell the business to Techmeet Energies for a purchase price of $556 million. The anticipated close of this transaction in the first quarter of 2026 is expected to result in net proceeds of approximately $530 million. and we currently plan to apply $450 to $500 million of the net proceeds to reduce our long-term debt, resulting in an expected net debt leverage ratio of less than 1.5 times. Moving forward, our strategy will focus on acceleration of growth through organic growth initiatives and by pursuing attractive inorganic opportunities. In addition, we plan to return capital to our stockholders through an active stock repurchase program. To facilitate this active return of capital to stockholders, the ECOWIS Board has amended our existing $450 million stock repurchase plan to remove the April 2026 expiration date. The repurchase program has approximately $200 million of remaining capacity. During the third quarter, we repurchased $5.5 million of our common stock, and we intend to repurchase up to $20 million of our stock in the fourth quarter of 2025 with further repurchases anticipated in 2026. From a business standpoint, the company delivered positive results in the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA increased 18% driven by favorable contractual pricing for regeneration services and higher sales volume for virgin sulfuric acid. However, our financial results for the third quarter do not reflect the full potential of our regeneration services business, as regeneration volume was adversely impacted by unplanned and extended downtime at several of our customers' refineries during the quarter. We believe these outages are transitory, and we do not expect a significant impact from customer outages as we move into 2026. Turning to demand trends on slide five, we believe the near and longer-term outlook for the company remains favorable. For our regeneration services business, we expect favorable alphabet economics will continue to drive demand for our regeneration services with growth in the business driven by both volumetric and pricing dynamics. In 2025, we expected a higher than average number of planned refinery customer maintenance outages. In addition to these planned outages, one refinery customer experienced extended downtime throughout most of the year due to a fire incident. Regeneration volumes in the third quarter were moderately impacted by unplanned customer production restrictions, including one customer who extended their planned turnaround by 30 days. In the fourth quarter, we now expect two of our major refinery customers to execute unplanned outages to address mechanical issues. Looking out to 2026, we do not anticipate the same high level of planned or unplanned maintenance at our refining customers. For virgin sulfuric acid, we continue to see very strong demand in the mining sector. Mining currently accounts for 20% to 25% of our virgin sulfuric acid sales, and as previously discussed, we have had two expansion projects with existing customers come online in the second half of this year. Global demand for copper is steadily rising due to its essential role in supporting infrastructure for data centers, renewable energy applications such as wind and solar power, and the production of electric vehicles. In addition, tariffs and trends towards onshoring are increasing the focus on domestic supply. Longer term, we believe the strategic shift towards the mining and processing of critical and rare earth minerals in the U.S. will also contribute to an increase in sulfuric acid demand. We are already engaged with customers to address their needs for these future opportunities. We also supply only in grades of sulfuric acid to producers and suppliers of the precursors of nylon, including nylon 6 and nylon 6-6. This end use also represents 20 to 25% of our sulfuric acid sales. With global overcapacity, we expect stability with modest volume growth in 2025. However, we believe the longer-term outlook for this end use remains positive. The balance of our sulfuric acid sales support varied industrial processes, including approximately 10% of our sulfuric acid that is under contract with our refining customers as make-up acid used in our regeneration process. This basket of industrial applications typically exhibits demand growth in line with GDP. However, the prospect of further onshoring in the U.S. may drive incremental demand for sulfuric acid in a number of industrial applications. The addition of the Wageman Sulfuric Acid Plant has already had a positive effect on our manufacturing and supply chain network. With the positive network effect from the Wageman Sulfuric Acid Plant and capital projects underway to support organic growth, we believe we are well positioned to address attractive growth in sulfuric acid demand over the next few years. These expansion projects include the expansion of tank capacity at our Houston site, already underway, as well as planned investments in our Wagamon site to enhance efficiency and increase capacity for virgin sulfuric acid and regeneration services. At the same time, we are evaluating options for future de-bottlenecking and capacity additions to address longer-term growth in demand we see for virgin sulfuric acid. Lastly, we continue to see robust demand for our Chem32 catalyst activation services, and this is driven by activation of third-party catalysts used in both conventional and sustainable fuel production. We have already completed the first phase of our de-bottlenecking at our Orange, Texas site to support the growth in demand. As we look forward, we see favorable demand trends for the company, and we believe we have a solid strategic plan in place to position Ecoviz for growth through both organic and inorganic projects. I'll now turn the call over to Mike, who will review our financial results.