Ingevity Corporation Common Stock

Good morning or good afternoon all, and welcome to the Ingevity fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call and webcast. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator 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 floor to John Naipava to begin.

Thank you, Adam. Good morning and welcome to Ingevity's fourth 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 Luis Fernandez Moreno, our interim CEO, and Mary Dean Hall, our CFO. Our business leads, Rich White, President of Performance Chemicals, and Steve Hume, President of Advanced Polymer Technologies, are available for questions and comments. Ed Woodcock, President of Performance Materials, is traveling. In his place to answer questions is Jonathan MacGyver, our VP of Global Commercial for Performance Materials. Luis will start us off with some highlights for the year. Mary will follow with a review of our consolidated financial performance and the business segment results for the fourth quarter and full year. Luis will then provide closing comments and discuss 2025 guidance. Our prepared comments will focus on full year results.

we are happy to take questions on the quarter during the q a portion of the call with that over to you luis thanks john and good morning everyone please turn to slide four in 2024 we took proactive steps to improve performance and enhance shareholder value these actions which are already delivering results have significantly altered the way we perform as a company first We continue to reposition performance chemicals. This segment is now focused on higher margin than markets with improved raw material cost structure, which will be more visible once we consume the remaining high-cost CTO inventory. Second, we accelerated execution of our strategy. Performance materials had a record year in both sales and EBITDA, surpassing margins of 50%. And there is momentum behind this business as we see ICE vehicles continue to become more fuel efficient and consumer preferences trending towards hybrids, which require more advanced carbon technology. We're also making progress in developing new outlets for our carbon in silicon-ion batteries through our investment in Nexion. Performance chemicals margins improved in the second half of 2024. and we protected share and volume growth in APT in a difficult industrial environment. As a result, we generated over $50 million of free cash flow in a year where we had $200 million of repositioning cash costs. As we committed, we paid down debt and ended the year at 3.5 times net leverage. Third, we recently announced plans to explore strategic alternatives for industrial specialties product line, and North Charleston CTO Refinery. Industrial Specialties has a great team and we are extremely proud of the work they are doing. Nevertheless, we are assessing if Ingevity is the best owner of this cyclical business. We expect to have this assessment completed before the end of the year. All these accomplishments would be hollow without a good safety record that directly impacts the men and women of our team at facilities around the world. I am very pleased to share we achieved our goal to reach top quartile in personal safety performance in the American Chemistry Council's responsible care benchmarking. Even with all the changes we saw during 2024, the teams made safety a priority. and I couldn't be more proud of everyone's hard work. We were also recently named as one of America's most responsible companies of 2025 by Newsweek magazine for the third consecutive year. We're committed to advancing our mission to purify, protect, and enhance the world and are proud to be recognized for our efforts. Lastly, the search for a permanent CEO is progressing well. While the search is in progress, I continue to be focused on executing our business strategy, which is showing results. Now, I will turn it over to Mary, who will go through the 2024 numbers. After that, I'll be back to discuss 2025 guidance.