Howmet Aerospace Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the HowMed Aerospace first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Luther, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning and welcome to the HowMet Aerospace first quarter 2024 results conference call. I'm joined by John Plant, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Ken Giacobi, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After comments by John and Ken, we will have a question and answer session. I would like to remind you that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations. You can find factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these projections listed in today's presentation and earnings press release and in our most recent SEC filings. In today's presentation, references to EBITDA operating income and EPS mean adjusted EBITDA excluding special items, adjusted operating income excluding special items, and adjusted EPS excluding special items. These measures are among the non-GAAP financial measures that we've included in our discussion. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in today's press release and in the appendix in today's presentation. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to John.

Thanks, P.T., and good morning, everybody. Q1 2024 was an outstanding quarter for Hamet. Revenue, profit, margin, and earnings per share were records and all improved versus guidance last year and sequentially. More specifically, Q1 performance and year-over-year improvements were as follows. Revenue was $1.824 billion, up 14%. EBITDA was $437 million, up 21%. with a healthy incremental of 35%. EBITDA margin was up 150 basis points to 24%. Operating income was up 27%, with a margin rate of above 20. Earnings per share were 57 cents, an increase of 36% year-over-year, and 8% sequentially. We'll recall that in Q4, the earnings per share benefited by an unusually low tax rate of 20.7%, and also currency favorability and hence the sequential improvement was indeed excellent. Free cash flow was 95 million and marked the first quarter with an inflow to be followed by further inflows in Q2, Q3 and Q4. We were particularly pleased with the positive cash flow since for many years we've seen Q1 outflows which had to be overcome in later quarters. A total of $150 million of cash was used to reach purchase shares, just over 2.2 million shares at an average price of approximately $67. Dividends of $0.05 per share were paid, and you'll recall that these had been increased by 25% in Q4 of 2023. Finally, net debt to EBITDA was a record low of two times. I'll now turn the call over to Ken to cover the financials in more detail before returning to talk to the overall outlook for 2024.