Ingevity Corporation Common Stock

Good morning, all. Good afternoon, all. Welcome to the Ingevity first quarter 2024 earnings webcast. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator for today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand the call to John Leipharver to begin. So, John, please go ahead when you are ready.

Thank you, Adam. Good morning, and welcome to Ingevity's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Earlier this morning, we posted a presentation on our investor site that you can use to follow today's discussion. It can be found on ir.engevity.com under events and presentations. Also, throughout this call, we may refer to non-GAAP financial measures, which are intended to supplement, not substitute, for comparable GAAP measures. Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release and are also in our most recent Form 10-K. We may also make forward-looking statements regarding future events and future financial performance of the company during this call. And we caution you that these statements are just projections and actual results or events may differ materially from those projections as further described in our earnings release. Our agenda is on slide three. Our speakers today are John Fortson, our President and CEO, and Mary Dean Hall, our CFO. Our business leads, Ed Woodcock, President of Performance Materials, Rich White, President of Performance Chemicals, and Steve Hume, President of Advanced Polymer Technologies, are available for questions and comments. John will start us off with some highlights for the quarter. Mary will follow with a review of our consolidated financial performance and the business segment results for the first quarter. John will then provide closing comments and discuss 2024 guidance. With that, over to you, John.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide four, we had a good, strong start to 2024. Performance materials, revenue, and EBITDA were both up strongly, and the segment generated margins close to 54%, exceeding expectations and executing well. This performance is the result of a lot of hard work by the PM team. Volumes were up from a year ago, and the business benefited from higher pricing, improved throughput, and lower input costs. APT performed relatively well this quarter. While revenue and EBITDA were down versus a year ago, they are being measured against a tough comparable period. First quarter 2023 was the last quarter before the stocking began. Positively, though, they have now posted two quarters of sequential volume improvements, and this is hopefully a good sign of a gradual recovery in their end markets. Importantly, despite these lower volumes, they maintain strong margins in the quarter. Performance Chemicals is tracking in line with our expectations for our repositioning strategy. The first quarter is a seasonally light quarter before the paving season really kicks in, and it is also being negatively impacted by the cost we are paying for crude tall oil. Our savings targets remain on track. The transition to reduce our reliance on CTO is moving forward as we complete the shutdown of our Derrida site during the quarter, and we are increasingly using oleo-based products coming out of our CrossFit facility in existing end markets like pavement and lubricants. In a few moments, I'll review our 2024 guidance and provide some perspective on expectations for the rest of the year. But before that, let me turn it over to Mary for more details on the quarter's results.