Nucor Corporation

Good morning and welcome to Nucor's fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise and today's call is being recorded. After the speaker's prepared remarks, I will provide instructions for callers wishing to ask questions. I would now like to introduce Chris Jacoby, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin your call.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Nucor's fourth quarter earnings review and business update. Leading our call today is Leon Topalian, Chair and CEO, along with Steve Laxton, President, COO, and CFO. Other members of Nucor's executive team are also here with us today and may participate during the Q&A portion of the call. Yesterday, we posted our fourth quarter earnings release and investor presentation to Nucor's IR website. We encourage you to access these materials as we will cover portions of them during the call. Today's discussion will include the use of non-GAAP financial measures and forward-looking information within the meaning of securities laws. Actual results may be different than forward-looking statements and involve risks outlined in our Safe Harbor Statement and disclosed in NUCOR's SEC filings. The appendix of today's presentation includes supplemental information and disclosures, along with a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures. So, with that, let's turn the call over to Leon.

Thanks, Chris, and welcome, everyone. For as long as I've been Nucor's CEO, we have opened our earnings calls by recognizing our safety performance. And I am pleased to continue that tradition again. In 2025, our team achieved the lowest injury and illness rate in our history, marking the eighth consecutive year of improvement. And we finished the year with incredible momentum as the final two months of the year were the safest two months we have ever recorded. These milestones have occurred during a period of significant growth and transformation for Nucor, and I am extremely proud of how our team continues to prioritize safety in everything we do. However, as we pursue our goal of becoming the world's safest steel company, our safety journey will not be complete until we operate injury-free every day. Before I comment on our results, I would like to briefly address the management changes we announced at the end of last year. Effective January 1st, Steve Laxton, was promoted to President and Chief Operating Officer. Throughout his 23 years at Nucor, Steve has demonstrated strong leadership and has played an important role in shaping our growth strategy. In this expanded role, he will have an even greater impact on the company's future. Steve will also continue to serve as CFO until a successor is named. Congratulations, Steve. I would also like to acknowledge the many contributions of Dave Samosky. Dave has served as our Chief Operating Officer since 2021 and will retire in June after more than 30 years at Nucor. Over that time, Dave has been a trusted leader and his deep operational expertise and strong commitment to advancing our safety culture have made a lasting impact on the company. He will be missed by all of us when he begins a well-deserved retirement in June. On behalf of our teammates across Nucor, we wish Dave and his family all the best. Turning to our financial performance, we delivered adjusted earnings of $1.73 per share in the fourth quarter and $7.71 per share for the full year. EBITDA totaled $918 million for the quarter and approximately $4.2 billion for the year. We remain committed to balancing long-term growth with meaningful shareholder returns while maintaining the strongest credit profile in our industry. For 2025, we, reinvested $3.4 billion into the company, with the majority of that capital going to projects that were completed in 2025 or will be completed later this year, returned $1.2 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, representing approximately 70% of net earnings, and finished the year with $2.7 billion in cash, providing ample liquidity to support the business and finance our growth objectives. We begin 2026 with real momentum built on years of hard work, disciplined investment and a relentless commitment to grow the core, expand beyond and live our culture. Since 2019, we have strengthened our steel mill segment through 15 major projects across our sheet bar and plate groups. These investments have enhanced our capabilities while shifting our product mix toward higher margin products that address growing customer needs in key markets. We have also expanded our steel products portfolio by delivering more comprehensive customer solutions and adding steel adjacent businesses supported by strong secular demand trends. The progress we made in 2025 marked a meaningful inflection point as a number of projects transitioned from the construction phase to the ramp up phase. Major projects completed include our new rebar micro mill in Lexington, North Carolina, a new melt shop at our bar mill in Kingman, Arizona, a new Nucor towers and structures facility in Alabama, and new galvanizing and pre-paint lines at our Crawfordsville sheet mill in Indiana. All of these projects are on track to be fully ramped up and operating at positive EBITDA run rates within the year. Our growth strategy has never been about simply getting bigger. It's about generating more value for our customers, shareholders, and teammates. Even as we've executed on these growth projects we've also taken deliberate steps to realign our asset base and improve our cost structure. By restructuring operations and repurposing facilities to better serve fast growing end markets, for example, we converted to existing steel products facilities. To support our new core data systems business as it supplies the rapidly expanding data Center market this demonstrates a core strength of new core. With the broadest range of capabilities in the North American steel industry, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on new opportunities wherever they emerge. Turning to 2026, several remaining projects will reach completion this year, and our teams are focused on bringing them online safely on time and on budget. Within the sheet group, we're on schedule to complete construction of our new mill in West Virginia by year end. Once online, this mill will begin supplying some of the cleanest and most advanced sheet steel in North America, serving automotive, construction, and industrial customers. We will also start up the new galvanizing line at our Berkeley County mill with commissioning planned for mid-2026. Within towers and structures, construction continues on our Greenfield utility pole production facility in Indiana, which is expected to begin full operations in the second quarter. Our third greenfield project in Utah remains on track for completion in 2027. When these facilities are fully online, we will operate four highly automated state of the art production sites with national coverage in the high growth utility transmission tower market. Since 2020, we have invested approximately $20 billion through capex and acquisitions to grow our core steelmaking capabilities and expand into downstream businesses while returning nearly $14 billion of capital to shareholders and improving our credit profile. With the majority of our recent investments largely complete, I'm confident it sets up Nucor to enter its next phase of growth from a position of strength focused on disciplined capital allocation while driving long-term value for our shareholders. Moving to trade policy, vigorous enforcement of our trade remedy laws and the full reinstatement of the Section 232 steel tariffs without exemptions last year have helped drive down steel imports. Foreign imports share of the US finished steel market has dropped from approximately 25% at this time last year to 16% in October and an estimated 14% in November. We expect imports will continue to trend at or below those levels in 2026 as the market absorbs the full impact of the Section 232 tariffs and recent trade case determinations. During 2025, the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission made important rulings regarding unfairly traded imports of corrosion resistant steel and rebar. Together, the Section 232 tariffs and product specific trade cases provide vital defenses against countries that seek to dump their steel into the U.S. market. We appreciate the efforts the federal government took in 2025 to level the playing field for the American steel industry. Looking ahead, trade policy will remain a priority for our industry. The formal USMCA review beginning in July offers the opportunity to drive additional steel demand in North America, crack down on efforts to transship steel through Mexico and Canada. and address steel subsidies provided by the Canadian government. We must also continue to implement common-sense policies like Buy America that incentivize the use of American-made steel for infrastructure, shipbuilding, and defense. Turning to our expectations for 2026, we continue to see strength in many of our primary end markets, including infrastructure, data centers, and an energy infrastructure. We are also seeing healthy demand related to advanced manufacturing in the border fence. While those markets remain strong, we have yet to see much improvement from interest rate sensitive markets like automotive and residential construction. In total, we expect domestic steel demand to be slightly up relative to 2025. And as I mentioned earlier, we expect the full impact of the Section 232 tariffs and recent trade determinations will lower levels of imported steel in 2026. against this supply and demand backdrop, we enter the year with historically strong backlogs, up nearly 40% year over year in the steel mill segment and 15% in steel products. Within that, our structural group really stands out. The team set a record in the first quarter of 2025, and the structural backlog we are carrying into this year is more than 15% above that, reflecting sustained demand across key non-residential and infrastructure markets. For the full year, we currently expect Nucor steel mill shipments to increase approximately 5% compared to 2025. With that, I will turn the call over to Steve to provide additional details on our fourth quarter and full year performance, as well as our outlook for the first quarter. Steve.