Minerals Technologies Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the first quarter 2020 Minerals Technologies earnings call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Matt Garth, Chief Financial Officer at Minerals Technologies. Please go ahead, Mr. Garth.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chief Executive Officer Doug Dietrich and myself, Chief Financial Officer Matt Garth. Following our prepared remarks, we will open it up to questions. I'd like to remind you that beginning on page 15 of our 2019 10-K, we list the various risk factors and conditions that may affect our future results and also point out the safe harbor disclaimer on this slide. Statements related to future performance by members of our team are subject to these limitations, cautionary remarks, and conditions. Now I'll turn the call over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks for the introduction, Matt, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to first express my thanks and concern to everyone on the call. I know you're dealing with the recent challenges in your lives, and I appreciate you joining us today. As you can imagine, this call is being conducted a little differently than our regular earnings calls. Despite the current circumstances, we're doing everything possible to make this a standard call as each of our business unit leaders is on with us and able to answer your questions. This time, though, we'll be doing the call from our home, so bear with us as we go through the remarks and answer your questions at the end. While I'd normally begin by discussing our first quarter results, I'm going to start by outlining how COVID-19 is impacting our company and the actions we're taking across our operations. I'll then highlight our first quarter results. That will follow with more detail on our financial results and commentary on our capital structure and liquidity. I'll wrap up my prepared remarks with insight on the current end market dynamics, the state of our operations, and how we're positioned to manage through this environment. MTI is a global company with more than 150 locations in 35 countries, and we've been navigating through the realities of the COVID-19 outbreak since it was first reported in China in January. As we dealt with these issues in China, we developed plans to protect our employees manage our worldwide operations and support our customers, including heightened virus-related safety protocols, such as sanitary procedures and social distancing, arrangements for remote working, and contingencies for our global supply chains. Best practices that we developed early on in China helped inform the business continuity plans and safety and operating procedures that we've now implemented across the rest of the company. First and foremost, our focus has been and continues to be on the health and safety of our employees consistent with MTI's core values. We have teams in place at local, regional, and global levels to ensure the safety of our people and the continuity of our operations while monitoring the status of each location and recommending specific risk mitigation actions. I'm in daily contact with our business leaders to gather the most current information on how COVID-19 is affecting our people and operations so that we can take actions to help them manage through any potential issues. Right now, our operations have not been affected by COVID-19 related illnesses. Out of our employee base of approximately 3,600, we've had three confirmed cases. Each of these employees contracted the virus outside of the workplace and are doing well and have since recovered. Overall, Nearly all of our global production facilities continue to operate as our products have been deemed essential for the markets we serve. As we run our facilities, we've put in place standardized COVID-19 related protocols across all of our global operations. In addition, wherever possible, our employees are working remotely, adapting to maintain our business process continuity. Now let me give you more detail on which of our facilities were impacted during the quarter. and what we saw change toward the end of March. Out of 15 locations in China, our seven PCC plants remained fully operational with the exception of a short outage at one of them. The majority of the impact in China came in our metal casting business due to closures from foundry customers. In total, our one refractory and two metal casting facilities were down for about four weeks. In March, these facilities started to reopen and currently all of our locations in China are fully operational. Additionally, while our facilities generally have been exempted from government-related mandates, locations in a few countries were impacted by these circumstances. Specifically, our eight locations in India and three sites in South Africa were temporarily closed during the last few weeks of March and part of April due to the government directives. These sites are either now back in operation or will be coming online in the next week. A few other facilities, primarily paper PCC satellites, were temporarily idled in March due to customer-driven outages related to the virus and have since returned to production.