Minerals Technologies Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Minerals Technologies fourth quarter 2025 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 Lydia Kopilova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Doug Dietrich and Chief Financial Officer Eric Alduck. Following Doug and Eric's prepared remarks, we'll open it up to questions. As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and on this slide. Our SEC filings disclose certain risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from this forward-looking statement. Please also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to gap financial measures can be found in our earnings release in an appendix of this presentation, which I posted on our website. Now I'll turn it over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks, Lydia. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today. I'll start today's call by giving you a high-level overview of our performance for 2025, and then Eric will walk you through our fourth quarter and full year financial summary, as well as give you a first quarter outlook. I'll then take a couple of moments toward the end to give you an overview of how we see 2026 shaping up in terms of our end markets and the sales growth we expect to see over the year in each product line. After that, we'll open it up to questions. 2025 was a more challenging year for us, especially compared to the record year we had in 2024. Like other companies, we experienced the impact of a dynamic and at times volatile operating environment. including geopolitical uncertainty, changing tariffs, and softer market demand. The ability to make the ongoing adjustments to these changing conditions while at the same time remaining focused on delivering the key drivers of our long-term strategy is a testament to the strength of our team. I'd first like to highlight that in 2025, the employees at MTI achieved a world-class safety performance and one that was the best ever in MTI's history. The health and safety of our people, partners, and communities are our top priorities. And though we continue to reduce the number of injuries that occur at MTI, we still haven't reached our goal of eliminating them altogether. But the progress we've made as a team this year is a positive step toward that achievement. Moving to our financial results, full-year sales came in at $2.1 billion, a similar level to last year. Full-year operating income was $287 million, and earnings per share was $5.52. Many of our key end markets either remain flat or weakened throughout the year. Our teams moved quickly to adjust to these conditions in our facilities by maintaining control of costs and managing inventories, while at the same time navigating changing tariffs and remaining focused on quality, customers, and safety. We also took proactive steps to improve our cost structure, including a company-wide cost savings program that we announced in the first half, which we will see the full year impact from this year. Despite the market and operating distractions, we meaningfully advanced the three pillars of our organic growth strategy in both of our segments, including expanding into higher growth consumer oriented markets, positioning ourselves in faster growing geographies, and introducing innovative higher margin products. We outlined for you a few examples of the investments we recently made to support this strategy, including upgrades to our pet litter facilities in the US, Canada, and China, expanding our natural oil purification operations in Turkey, building several paper and packaging satellite plants in Asia, and expanding our production of Fluorazor. Each of these investments has led to significant new sales growth in 2026, and I'll give you details on this later in the presentation. This is also a strong year on the technology and new product development front. Sales of our newest products accounted for 19% of our total sales, which is the highest level we've achieved and points to both the strength of our innovation engine and ability to continue to bring new value to our customers through the application of our core technologies. Further, we remain strong stewards of our capital, returning $73 million to our investors through dividends and share repurchases, while also maintaining a strong balance sheet that is well positioned to support both our organic and inorganic growth initiatives. With that, let me have Eric take you through our financials in more detail.