Ryerson Holding Corporation

and welcome to the Ryerson Holding Corporation's fourth quarter 2022 conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. There will be a question and answer session later. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at any time. Again, that is star one to ask a question at any time. I would like to turn the conference over to Jorge Berstein, Vice President of the Finance at Ryerson. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Thank you for joining Ryerson Holding Corporation's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. On our call, we have Eddie Lehner, Ryerson's President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Burbach, our Chief Operating Officer, Jim Claussen, our Chief Financial Officer, and Molly Cannon, our Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller. John Orth, our Executive Vice President of Operations, and Mike Hamilton, our Vice President of Corporate Supply Chain, will be joining us for Q&A. Certain comments on this call contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by the forward-looking statements and are not limited to those set forth under risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 and in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made and are not guarantees of future performance. In addition, our remarks today refer to several non-GAAP financial measures that are intended to supplement, but not substitute for, the most directly comparable GAAP measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is provided in our earnings release filed on Form 8K yesterday, also available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Eddie.

Thank you, Jorge, and thank you all for joining us this morning. As we reflect on the fourth quarter and full year 2022 results, I want to start by expressing my heartfelt appreciation to our 4,200-plus strong Ryerson team for their hard work and continued dedication, which now includes new businesses added to Ryerson's family of companies in Ford Tool Steels, Apogee Fabrication, Howard Precision Metals, and Excelsior Metals, as well as our first additive manufacturing investment in Freeform Technologies. Our team is integral to our mission to deliver great customer experiences which we provide through our network of intelligently connected industrial metal service centers. Industrial metals are the recyclable, reusable, and sustainable enablers essential to shaping the world around us and paving the way for the required advances in the human experience, living conditions, and well-being. The fourth quarter was a period of rolling headwinds and reemergent tailwinds as we saw a continuation of the countercyclical environment for most of the quarter. However, prices for the metals commodities in our product mix started to find support in November and have continued to see steady increases into the first quarter of 2023. Domestically, we saw volumes experience familiar seasonality via slowdowns in industrial purchasing, as well as distortions requiring rebalancing that had accumulated earlier in the year, particularly with respect to stainless steel and carbon steel. While the pricing and demand landscape still obeys the laws of general cyclicality, I would note the more important changes in Ryerson's atmospherics, as well as those pertaining to industrial metals, which support our optimism about our company and industry. During 2022, we set the stage for Ryerson's future and displayed that we are a much stronger company through the cycle as we saw higher highs as well as higher lows during a period of heightened volatility catalyzed by ongoing pandemic and geopolitical distortions. While this was another transformational year for our business to employ an overused, but in our case, true descriptor of our progress, our accomplishments have come from years of intentional efforts to eliminate our high-yield debt, improve our capital structure, and invest in the next stage and phases of our strategic business plan. I can't fully express to you in this script how great it feels to be high yield debt free and better yet, how it feels to see the onset of counter cyclical conditions knowing we can continue investing in our business through the cycle while confidently returning capital to shareholders. Ryerson has come a long way over the past decade, but the opportunities within our sites to innovate and bring forward an industry-leading operating model for all stakeholders is now front and center free of legacy burdens. On September 9th, we shipped our first customer order from our new state-of-the-art service center in Centralia, Washington, and expect our new CS&W University Park Service Center to be operational in the third quarter of 2023. On November 8th, we celebrated 180 years operating under the Ryerson brand at our investor day in the New York Stock Exchange, where we showcased our operational, financial, and digital initiatives and unveiled our next phase financial targets. In December, we were proud to publish our inaugural ES&G report, which showcases the integrity with which Ryerson operates and outlined important sustainability initiatives we have underway for a cooler and cooler future, including our target of reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 80% by 2040, as well as the release of our proprietary emissions illuminator application. Our team efforts over the past few years, and especially in 2022, have culminated in modernizing our service center network, transforming our balance sheet, and making material down payments toward Ryerson's next stage of growth. Emerging trends in onshoring, shifting trade paradigms, and fiscal investments in infrastructure, climate transitioning, and semiconductor manufacturing will likely mean the beginning of an imperative metals-intensive overhaul of our society and economy. In this new paradigm, Larrison's investments in value-added manufacturing, customer-centric connected distribution networks, and modernized operations position us for a bright future for all of our stakeholders. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike to further discuss the pricing and demand environment.