Livent Corporation

Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth quarter 2021 earnings release conference call for Livent Corporation. Phone lines will be placed on a listen-only mode throughout the conference. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer period. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Daniel Rosen, Investor Relations and Strategy for Livent Corporation. Mr. Rosen, you may begin.

Thank you, Emma. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Livent's fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. Joining me today are Paul Graves, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Gilberto Antoniazzi, Chief Financial Officer. The slide presentation that accompanies our results, along with our earnings release, can be found in the investor relations section of our website. Prepared remarks from today's discussion will be made available after the call. Following our prepared remarks, Paul and Gilberto will be available to address your questions. Given the number of participants on the call today, we will request a limit of one question and one follow-up per caller. We will be happy to address any additional questions after the call. Before we begin, let me remind you that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning specific factors, including but not limited to those factors identified in our release and in our violence to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Information presented represents our best judgment based on today's information. Actual results may vary based upon these risks and uncertainties. Today's discussion will include references to various non-GAAP financial metrics, definitions of these terms, as well as a reconciliation to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP are provided on our investor relations website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Paul.

Thank you, Dan, and good evening, everyone. There's a number of topics we'll cover today, including how we finish 2021, what we see at the start of 2022, and how we see the full year developing. We'll give an update on market conditions and what we think the medium-term holds for our industry, and how we're investing to meet the rapid-growing customer demand that's underpinning the growth that we see. Starting with 2021, we deliver stronger results in the fourth quarter compared to earlier commitments by the end of the third quarter, giving us a greater ability to take advantage of consistently improving market conditions in the final quarter. While we're able to recognize higher average prices across our portfolio in Q4, we'll see an even greater increase in realized pricing in 2022, as we will discuss shortly. Four-year results for 2021 came at the top of our guidance as a result of the strong Q4 performance. Looking at 2022 guidance, high realized pricing will drive a significant increase in profitability compared to 2021. This is despite flat year-over-year volumes. Prior to our capacity expansion, we fill out incremental volumes in 2023. We expect this higher realized pricing to drive four-year adjusted EBITDA up to almost three times that of 2021 at the high end of our guidance range. Beyond 2022, we expect demand to continue to grow at rates similar to today. Supported by increased visibility and focus from our customers on securing reliable long-term battery-grade lithium supply, we're announcing today that we've commenced engineering work to add a further 20,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate capacity in Argentina, which we expect to be in production before the end of 2025. When combined with our current 20,000 metric tons of So before I get into more detail about 2022 and beyond, I'll turn the call over to Gilberto to walk us through our Q4 and 2021 financial results, as well as our 2022 outlook.