Ryerson Holding Corporation

Thank you for joining Ryerson Holding Corporation's first quarter

2024 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, Mike Hamilton, our Vice President of Corporate Supply Chain, and Jorge Berestain, our Vice President of Finance, 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. These risks include, but are not limited to, those set forth under risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2024, 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 measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is provided in our earnings release filed on Form 8K yesterday and also available on the investor relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Eddie.

Thank you, Pradham, and thank you all for joining us this morning. I want to start by recognizing our 4,600-strong Ryerson team for prioritizing a safe and productive operating environment for our over 110 facilities across North America and China. In the first quarter of 2024, our service center network celebrated two major keystones, the startup of operations at Central Steel and Wire's flagship location at the University Park, Illinois Service Center, as well as completing the conversion of 17 service centers to a unified ERP system. Since 2022, We have converted 31 of our service centers or one third of our North American footprint to a unified ERP platform, moving us closer to our digitally enabled organization objectives. All of our investments in CapEx and acquisitions are geared toward delivering the best possible customer experience with a next generation operating model delivering improved operating and earnings leverage through the cycle with less volatility. We cannot continue subsisting and thriving on yesteryear's workarounds and patches for customer experience delivery systems and infrastructure that are outdated and have no hope of delivering competitive differentiation. It is not an easy or comfortable process to endure, particularly through a protracted industry counter cycle, but it is necessary and will be well worth it over the long run. We're glad to do the harder things now as we move from current counter cyclicality toward the next synchronized industry upturn. As a good friend of mine in the industry has said to me, grow when it's slow. And so we're doing that given the opportunity afforded us from record years in 2021 and 2022. The list of investments made over the past two plus years and continuing through 2024 is too numerous to list here, but it is consequential. Please pardon our construction as we build a better Ryerson. And so it goes that as we move from a heavy planting season, we are preparing for the harvest. And with that comes removing some inertia and excesses engendered from the level of investment undertaken relative to Ryerson's size and history and amidst post-pandemic investment frictions. It is now the appropriate time to transition to an investment integration and optimization phase as we grow up and grow into these investments while pairing and pruning transitory expenses taken on over the past several years and in advance of revenue and cash flow generation across new asset and acquisition additions. As for our results during the quarter, while our business met the top end of our volume guidance, our financial results and miss on earnings guidance reflected greater than expected and intensifying margin compression through the quarter across are carbon steel and stainless steel product franchises. I am encouraged to note the commodity price bellwethers inflected toward the end of the quarter as moving averages across carbon, stainless, and aluminum price indices began moving higher. Additionally, we experienced incrementally higher quoting and order conversion rates in the second half of the quarter as we appear to be moving off of a counter cyclical bottom in aggregate with the stocking activity and post pandemic effects dissipating and giving way to a more familiar supply demand environment. The counter cycle that began in the second half of 2022 is getting long relative to historical norms and societal needs requiring industrial metals continue to accumulate. As I remarked in my annual letter to shareholders, doing the hard and necessary things isn't the expedient or easy way, but for the benefit of reasonably patient long-term stakeholders, it is the only responsible way. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our Chief Operating Officer, Mike Burbach, to further discuss the pricing and demand environment.