Ingevity Corporation Common Stock

Hello everyone and welcome to the Ingevity fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call and webcast. If you'd like to ask a question on today's call or at the end of the presentation, please dial star followed by one on the telephone keypad. I'll now hand over to our host, Servi Varshney of Ingevity to begin. Servi, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Ingevity's fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. Last evening, we posted a presentation on our investor site that you can use to follow today's discussion. It can be found on ir.yongevity.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 gap 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 projections, and actual results or events may differ materially from these projections as further described in our earnings release. Slide three. Today, you will hear from Dave Lee, our CEO and President, and Phil Platt, Senior Vice President, Finance, and incoming CFO. Mary Dean Hall, our outgoing CFO, will also be joining us for Q&A. Our prepared comments will focus on full-year total company results and will include both continuing and discontinued operations which refer to the divested industrial specialties product line. We will take any questions related to the quarter during the Q&A session right after the prepared remarks. Dave, over to you.

Thank you, Surabhi, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide four. Before we discuss the financial results, I'd like to remind everyone that in early December, we shared the findings of our strategic portfolio review through a virtual event. During this presentation, we laid out our plans for growing adjusted earnings per share by 10% and free cash flow per share by 5% through 2027. We also announced the decision to initiate sales processes for our advanced polymer technology segments and road markings product line. If you've not had a chance to listen to the webcast, I would highly recommend reviewing the materials on our website under events and presentations. I'm also pleased to confirm that on January 1st of 2026, we completed the sale of our North Charleston CTO refinery and the majority of the industrial specialties product line to mainstream Pine products. With this transaction complete, we have reduced our portfolio volatility, strengthened our profitability and cash flow profile, and enhanced our strategic flexibility. Looking at our 2025 results, we are incredibly proud of the strong execution by our teams globally that enabled us to grow total company adjusted EBITDA by almost 10% over 2024, along with delivering industry leading margins of over 30%. These results generated $274 million of free cash flow, slightly exceeding our commitments. We use the cash to pay down debt and reduce leverage to 2.6 times and a buyback over 1 million shares. Performance materials continue to generate EBITDA margins above 50% and held revenue flat despite lower global auto production, which was impacted by tariff uncertainty and supply chain challenges, delivering another year of near record level sales. This strong performance is a testament to the differentiated value that our activated carbon technology delivers to customers globally. The momentum from continued adoption of hybrids and fuel efficient ICE vehicles is encouraging and supports our view of a long runway for this business. We also continue to be encouraged by the optimization of our filtration business. and see a bright future and good fit for the company in this application space. Within the performance chemical segment, we meaningfully lowered CTO exposure ahead of the industrial specialties divestiture. Also, pavement technologies grew year over year as our innovative solutions facilitated the extension of the paving season into late fall to allow catch-up of projects delayed by adverse weather earlier in the year. Advanced polymer technologies continue to face tough market conditions due to tariff uncertainty and competitive pressure, which we are addressing with disciplined commercial actions and productivity initiatives. Overall, we start 2026 with confidence and optimism as we continue to drive performance in our core businesses. And with that, I'll turn it over to Phil.