NACCO Industries, Inc.

and gentlemen, welcome to the NatCo Industries first quarter earnings call. My name is Katie and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Christina Kometko, to begin. Christina, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2021 first quarter earnings call. I am Christina Kometko and I am responsible for investor relations at NatCo Industries. Thank you for joining us this morning. Joining me today are J.C. Butler, President and Chief Executive Officer of both NACO and North American Coal, and Elizabeth Lubman, NACO's Vice President and Controller. Yesterday, we published our first quarter 2021 results and filed our 10-Q. This information is available on our website. If anyone is not able to listen to today's entire call, an archived version of this webcast will be on our website later this afternoon and available for approximately 12 months. Our remarks that follow, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements made here today. These risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release issued last night and in our time queue and other filings with the SEC. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated, until our next quarterly earnings conference call, if at all. In addition, we'll be discussing non-GAAP information that we believe is useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. Reconciliations for these non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and on our website. In a moment, I'll discuss our first quarter results, but first let me turn the call over to our President and CEO, J.C. Butler, for some opening remarks. J.C.

Thank you, Christy, and good morning, everyone. I'm very glad to be on the call this morning. I had a lot of good news to report. I mentioned in our year-end call that I was optimistic about our future because I have a lot of confidence in our strategies to grow and diversify. In the first four months of this year, we've already delivered some very positive developments. North Carolina Mining entered into a 15-year mining services contract with a new customer at a limestone quarry in central Florida. We'll operate a smaller drag line at this quarry until a larger drag line that will increase production capacity is relocated and commissioned. We expect deliveries to be approximately one and a half million tons annually once mining commences with the larger drag line in 2023. North American Mining also amended a contract with an existing customer to operate an additional drag line at an existing limestone quarry in Florida. And in April, North American Mining entered into a new mining services contract with an existing customer for a greenfield sand and gravel quarry in Indiana. This customer is hopeful the quarry will operate for multiple years, providing aggregates for a multi-year transportation infrastructure project near Indianapolis. We expect deliveries from this quarry to be between 600,000 and 1 million tons per year. All of these new or revised contracts are expected to be accretive to our 2021 earnings. As I said before, there's a lot of growth potential in this business, and I note that North American Mining's pipeline of potential new projects is bigger and better than ever. Our minerals management segment is also showing continued success in its efforts to grow and diversify. Catapult Mineral Partners, which is our business that manages the oil and gas part of our minerals management segment, completed a small acquisition in the Delaware Basin for a purchase price of $300,000 and a larger acquisition in the Eagleford Basin. The Eagleford acquisition includes just over 14,000 gross acres and 1,700 net royalty acres for a preliminary purchase price of $4.7 million. Mitigation Resources of North America is actively working on opportunities in some very attractive growth areas in the southeast part of the country, as well as continuing to develop existing mitigation banks. We're finding a lot of opportunities to grow and diversify in this part of the business as well. Finally, our coal mining segment also had some very positive news during the quarter. GRE, the owner of Coal Creek Station and our customer for the Falkirk Mine, announced that it is in exclusive negotiations with a third party to sell Coal Creek Station. If GRE's efforts to sell the power plant are successful, we expect to continue to operate the Falkirk Mine under a new mining services agreement. While this is a positive development for us, this is GRE's deal, so we can't add anything further to the information they've already shared. I would also like to add that since our last earnings call, we have issued our 2020 annual report and investor presentation. These documents provide a thorough description of our key strategies to protect the core and grow and diversify, as well as the operating and financial objectives for each of our growth businesses. We've also included a description of what I think of as our core values. We've titled this piece Corporate Responsibility. In short, it describes how we strive to always do the right things to maintain a safe workplace, to take care of our employees, to be good stewards for the environment, and to be a good corporate citizen in the communities where we operate. We are quite proud of our culture and our legacy and believe that it's one of the keys to our long-term success. Our annual report and investor presentation are available on our website at NACO.com. I encourage any interested party to read these documents. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Christy to cover our results for the quarter in more detail. Christy?