Koppers Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to COPPR's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please alert a conference specialist by pressing star followed by zero. Following the presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. Please note that this event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Quinn McGuire. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and good morning. I'm Quinn McGuire, Vice President of Investor Relations. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. We issued our press release earlier today. You can access it via our website at www.coppers.com. As indicated in our announcement, we have also posted materials to the Investor Relations page of our website that will be referenced in today's call. Consistent with our practice in prior quarterly conference calls, This is being broadcast live on our website, and a recording of this call will be available on our website for replay through May 26, 2026. At this time, I would like to direct your attention to our forward-looking disclosure statement seen on slide two. Certain comments made on this conference call may be characterized as forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of assumptions, risks, and uncertainties including risks described in the cautionary statement included in our press release and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking statements included in the company's comments, you should not regard the inclusion of such information as a representation that the objectives, plans, and projected results will be achieved. The company's actual results, performance, or achievements may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call. Also, references may be made today to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The press release, which is available on our website, also contains reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. Joining me for our call today are Leroy Ball, Chief Executive Officer of COPPERS, and Brad Pierce, Interim Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer. At this time, I will turn the discussion over to Leroy.

Thank you, Quinn. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to join you this morning to provide more insight on copper's performance in 2025 and how we see 2026 developing based upon current information. So, let me start on page four, which lists highlights for last year overall, which include adjusted EBITDA of $256.7 million and a 13.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, the second highest year on record for both when you exclude KJCC And on an as-reported basis, 13.7% adjusted EBITDA margin actually represents a new high watermark for coppers. We reached operating profit of $167.8 million, also the second highest year on record, $4.07 in adjusted earnings per share, marking the sixth consecutive year above $4 after never reaching that mark previously, and operating cash flow of $122.5 million for the seventh straight year of more than $100 million in that category. In addition, we've tapered back our capital expenditures to a normalized $55 million, enabling a heavier capital deployment allocation to shareholders, as demonstrated by $38.2 million in share repurchases and $6.4 million in dividends. Also, $21 million went towards inorganic growth with a small acquisition of a utility pole procurement business in one of our targeted growth areas, UIP, and we still had $12 million remaining to pay down debt. In early 2025, we launched our transformation process named Catalyst, which delivered $46 million in benefits during the year. Catalyst helped to deliver EBITDA within 2% of prior year, while our sales declined by 10%. The conscious decisions to exit our thalic and hydride business and sell our railroad structures business accounted for 4% of the overall sales decline, with the other 6% resulting from softer market conditions and some net loss of market share. Other benefits derived from Catalyst in 2025 include reducing our adjusted SG&A costs by 15%, while also reducing our employee count by 11% from year-end 2024 and 17% from our employment high-water mark in April of 2024. With one year of Catalyst under our belt, I believe we're on track to reach our goals of double-digit adjusted EPS growth over the next three years, $300 million of cumulative free cash flow over that same time period, and a mid-teens margin run rate by 2028. Now, to ensure that our leaders remain highly motivated to achieve those goals, earlier this year our board approved a long-term incentive program that has target goals that substantively align with the external targets I just summarized. I'll speak in more detail on catalysts later in this presentation. Now let's move on to our zero harm accomplishments as seen on page five, which are just as important as our financial performance. We had 21 of our 41 sites work accident-free with our European CM&C and PC businesses, as well as our Australasian PC business having zero recordables in 2025. Significant improvement was achieved company-wide with leading activities up by 26%, which is a key contributor to our serious safety incidents being down by 70% compared with the prior year. It also led to a 19.5% year-over-year improvement in our total recordable injury rate, driving it to a new all-time best for the second year in a row. It's a true testament to our team and their leaders who persevered through a stressful environment in 2025 and never lost focus on what's most important, the health and safety of their colleagues. Congrats to the Coppers team on a tremendous accomplishment and never losing sight of our goal of zero. Turning now to page six, Coppers was named in Newsweek Magazine's listing of America's most responsible companies, 2026, representing our sixth consecutive year on that list. This honor is the result of some 600 companies being evaluated on upholding their social responsibility based on key performance metrics that include environmental, social, and governance performance, financial results, and more. During the past year, we also earned recognition as one of America's best midsize companies of 2025 from Time Magazine based on employee satisfaction, revenue growth, and sustainability transparency. Like Zero Harm, sustainability has been woven into the fabric of how we operate at COPPERS, which has enabled us to punch above our weight in this area. National recognition from organizations like Newsweek and Time help lend credibility to our results, and while this alone won't win us business, it will most definitely be part of the overall decision-making progress and maybe tip the scales in our favor when we're in a tight competitive situation. Kudos to the COPPERS team for refusing to just check the box on Zero Harm and sustainability and instead making it a way of life at Coppers. I'll return in a bit to provide my view on how we're seeing the current year within each business while also reviewing our 2026 projections and give more flavor for our potential in 27 and 28 as Catalyst hits peak acceleration. But before I turn things over to Brad Pierce, our Interim CFO and Chief Accounting Officer, I would like to take a moment to recognize Jimmy Sue Smith, who announced her retirement from Coppers earlier this year. Jimmy Hsu joint-coopers as our VP of Finance and Treasurer mere weeks before the pandemic in 2020. She was part of a leadership team that navigated the company through those trying times and positioned us for success as the world gradually returned to a new sense of normal. She was promoted to be the company's CFO in January 2022 and continued making her mark by leading the shift of capital deployments for shareholders by reinstating the company's quarterly dividend and taking a more aggressive approach to repurchasing our undervalued shares. I could go on and on with Jimmy Hsu's accomplishments, but I'll save that for her retirement celebration and just finish by saying that I thank her for her contributions and wish her the best in retirement. Now, I'll turn it over to Brad, who's done a wonderful job stepping into the CFO role as we go through a more deliberate search process for Jimmy Hsu's successor. He will speak in more detail to our fourth quarter and full year financial performance.