Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co

Greetings and welcome to the Reliance Inc. fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may press star one at any time to be placed into the question queue. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Kim Orlando with Addo Invest Relations.

Kim, please go ahead. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thanks to all of you for joining our conference call to discuss Reliance's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. I am joined by Carla Lewis, President and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Cook, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Arthur Gemmian, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. A recording of this call will be posted on the investor section of our website at investor.reliance.com. Please read the forward-looking statement disclosures included in our earnings release issued yesterday and note that it applies to all statements made during this teleconference. The reconciliations of the adjusted numbers are included in the non-GAAP reconciliation part of our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Carla Lewis, President and CEO of Reliance.

Thanks, Kim. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results. Collectively, the Reliance businesses demonstrated resilience in 2024 as strong execution of our model and strategy once again fueled solid financial results in a challenging market. Through our emphasis on smart, profitable growth, we grew our same store tons well above industry shipment levels, bolstering our earnings in a falling price environment. Importantly, we were able to grow our tons shipped while also delivering a strong full-year gross profit margin of 29.7% squarely within our sustainable annual range. Additionally, We successfully acquired and integrated four companies in 2024, adding approximately $400 million of net sales on an annualized basis and broadening our geographic footprint and processing capabilities in both new and existing markets. Our 2024 non-GAAP earnings per share of $15.92 reflected the benefit of our targeted growth strategies, diverse end markets served, strong pricing discipline, and expanded value-added processing capabilities, which collectively helped mitigate the impact of declining metal prices. Our profitability and effective working capital management led to the third highest annual cash flow from operations in Reliance's history of $1.43 billion. I'd like to thank our amazing teams across our entire family of companies who did an incredible job delivering more value to our customers in 2024 while, most importantly, keeping each other safe. We maintained our balanced and disciplined approach to capital deployment in 2024, investing $430 million in capital expenditures, $365 million in acquisitions, a record $1.1 billion in share repurchases, resulting in a 6% year-over-year reduction of outstanding shares and returning $250 million in dividends to our stockholders. Our capital expenditure budget for the 2025 calendar year is $325 million with an expected total cash outlay of approximately $375 to $400 million inclusive of carryover projects from prior years. As I mentioned, we acquired four businesses in 2024, bringing us to 76 acquisitions completed since our 1994 IPO and our acquisition pipeline remains robust and active. Before I conclude, I'd like to highlight a few corporate developments we announced yesterday. Brenda Miyamoto was promoted to Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning and Programs on February 18th, 2025. Brenda has been with Reliance for 23 years having served in various roles of increasing responsibility, most recently as our Vice President of Corporate Initiatives. In addition, Scott Ramsbottom was appointed Vice President, Chief Information Officer of Reliance, effective November 18, 2024. Scott is a veteran industrial distribution CIO with more than 25 years' experience. and we wish them both the best in their new roles. As we look ahead to 2025, our priorities are centered on striving to keep our people safe every day, increasing our volumes through our smart, profitable growth strategy, maintaining an annualized gross profit margin within our estimated sustainable range of 29% to 31%, enhancing our value-added processing capabilities, effectively managing expenses and working capital, maintaining our balanced and disciplined capital deployment strategy, promoting both growth and stockholder returns, and promoting increased collaboration and sharing of best practices throughout our family of companies. While macroeconomic uncertainty persists, We're excited about 2025 and well-positioned to continue to grow our business and have both the capacity and the capability to participate in any improvement in end market demand across our broad and diverse network arising from the many potential opportunities that exist, including infrastructure, military, data center, electrical grid, general manufacturing, and many other markets that we serve. Thank you all for your time today. I'll now turn the call over to Steve, who will review our demand and pricing trends.