Ryerson Holding Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Ryerson Holding Corporation's fourth quarter 2024 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 via the telephone, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at any time. Again, that is star 1 to ask a question. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Pratham Deer. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Thank you for joining Ryerson Holding Corporation's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. On our call, we have Eddie Lehner, Ryerson's President and Chief Executive 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 Jorge Beresine, 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 31, 2024, and there are 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, also available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Eddie.

Thank you Pratham, and thank you all for joining us this morning. It is never easy to do the hard things. The fourth quarter of 2024 And all of 2024 can be summed up by doing hard things through a hard macro time for the right reasons. As we completed year three of a record CapEx cycle for Ryerson, we're confident the payoff will come as this was always about curing a legacy investment deficit and renovating our operating model to generate higher and less volatile earnings through future business cycles. As more of these investments operationalize to their expected potential in 2025 and beyond, and as cyclical industry conditions improve, Ryerson and our stakeholders should see the proof we've been working for. The fourth quarter was the continuation and we hope culmination of a long and winding manufacturing downturn. Commodity price bellwethers, most notably in stainless steel and industrial metals demand, declined throughout the quarter as they did through the prior three quarters of 2024, resulting in lower volumes, margin compression, and slack service center capacity utilization. January 2025 saw the tailing out effects of these recessed industry conditions with a post-holiday season hangover on slow OEM program shipments and contract price reset lag effects through the first half of January. Over the past 30 plus days, however, we have seen a significant increase in sales quote and order activity particularly in transactional and value-added sales. Our bookings since mid-January are at their highest levels since the second quarter of 2021 as pricing trends in carbon and aluminum are improving with stainless steel and nickel still lagging behind. With respect to tariffs and trade policy impacts, it is still too early to call the magnitude and duration of what these prospective changes may bring in demand and price conditions. But we expect we will know more as we move through the balance of the first and second quarter of 2025. At present, we view the improvement in business conditions more as a function of self-help restocking scrap price increases, and commodity price resets from their recent cyclical autumn, while acknowledging that mill lead times have recently started to extend, along with expectations of higher metal supplier spot prices looking beyond the first quarter. At this point, I'll turn it over to Jim Claussen to discuss market conditions and our financial results.