Rayonier Advanced Materials Inc.

Good morning. Welcome to Rainier Advanced Materials' first quarter 2022 earnings call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions with instructions to follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Mr. Mickey Walsh, Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations for Rainier Advanced Materials. Thank you, Mr. Wallace. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome again to Rainier Advanced Materials' first quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. Joining me on today's call are Vito Consiglio, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Marcus Maltner, our Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Finance. Our earnings release and presentation materials were issued last evening and are available on our website at rainieram.com. I'd like to remind you that in today's presentation, we will include forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities laws. Our earnings release, as well as our filings with the SEC, list some of the factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements we may make. They are also referenced on slides two and three of our presentation material. Today's presentation will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, as noted on slide four of our presentation. We believe non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for management and investors, but non-GAAP measures should not be considered an alternative to GAAP measures. A reconciliation of these measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included on slides 16 through 20 of our presentation. I'll now like to turn the call over to Vito. Thank you, Mickey, and good morning, everyone.

I am pleased to report that we have significantly advanced our efforts to improve reliability and manage inflationary costs in order to position the business for EBITDA growth. Starting on slide five, sales for the quarter increased 10% to $352 million, with price increases across all segments driven by strong demand, including double-digit price increases for our cellulose specialties products. As previously communicated, the EBITDA results started the year slowly as we focused on these historic maintenance outages and managed extraordinary inflationary costs. Turning to slide six, we made great progress on our Jessup and Fernandina maintenance outages with each facility coming back online at the beginning of the second quarter. These outages were some of the largest and longest outages that we have executed in our 95-year history of the company. We made significant investments to increase productivity, including rebuilding a large recovery boiler. To build on this momentum, we recently made the strategic decision to accelerate TARDIS's planned maintenance outage into the second quarter from the original plan in the fourth quarter. This outage, along with Tameska Means second quarter planned outage, will further position our assets to operate with greater reliability and productivity and help mitigate current impacts from supply chain disruptions. Additionally, we are doing our best to absorb and mitigate the impacts of inflation and supply chain challenges. We recently implemented a cost surcharge on all Cellulose Specialties products to help offset the inflationary cost. These actions will allow us to better service our customers and generate improved financial results. As such, we remain on track to deliver improved EBITDA in the second quarter, and we reaffirm our guidance to generate higher EBITDA in 2022. Earlier this week, We also announced the sale of our shares in Green First Forest Products for $43 million. This transaction represents the final consideration for the sale of the lumber and newsprint assets and the culmination of our portfolio optimization initiative. It also represents a 26% premium above the original plan executed nearly a year ago. The sale agreement contains a purchase price protection clause whereby the company is entitled to participate in further stock price appreciation under certain circumstances. Now I'd like to ask Marcus to take us through the financial details for the quarter. I will then come back to provide additional perspective on the business and our market outlook. Marcus?