Ryerson Holding Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Ryerson Holding Corporation's first quarter 2026 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 1 in your telephone keypad at any time. Again, that is star 1 to ask a question. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Justine Carlson. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining Ryerson Holding Corporation's first quarter 2026 earnings call. On our call, we have Eddie Lehner, Ryerson's Chief Executive Officer, Rick Marabito, our President and Chief Operating Officer, Jim Klossman, our Chief Financial Officer, and Molly Cannon, our Chief Accounting Officer and Corporate Controller. A recording of this call will be posted on our Investor Relations website at ir.ryerson.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 call. In addition, our remarks today refer to several non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these adjusted numbers are also included in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Eddie.

Thank you, Justine. Good morning, and thank you all for tuning in to WRYZ. There is. I just had to say that. to discuss our first quarter performance, and I am compelled to say again how delighted we are to be working together in common cause with our Olympic teammates. If one half of a quarter is any indication, I can hardly wait to see what we will do together with full quarters. We entered 2026 with order activity at stronger levels than we have seen in quite some time going back to 2022. We achieved double-digit sequential volume growth, market share gains, solid margin expansion, excellent working capital management, and higher adjusted EBITDA, excluding LIFO, above our targeted range while already hard at work in getting at and to those synergies. The demand and order activity we referenced is corroborated by recent ISM Manufacturing Purchasing Manager's Index Readings, which reported expanding manufacturing activity for the past four consecutive months, the longest consecutive growth period since late 2022. Or, as I have been known to say, PMI, don't lie. Beneath the surface, we note that these early signs of recovery have been unevenly distributed across our customer base as our transactional customers showed particular strength, while many of our large OEMs exhibited ongoing demand stagnation following what had been a prolonged manufacturing contraction with high interest rates and prevailing tariff and geopolitical uncertainty. We would be remiss if we didn't mention the omnipresent AI infrastructure and compute build-out and its outsized impact to PMI and GDP growth, as well as our increasing participation in this secular super cycle as an AI infrastructure partner to our customers. This has and continues to be a significant contributor to the improving demand environment noted both year over year and sequentially. The most important question continues to be around the duration of demand conditions amidst supply side disruptions and inflationary wildcards, particularly considering heightened global unrest and whether economic expansion circuit breakers can absorb potential hyper shocks to the system. While industrial metal commodity price bellwethers continue moving higher, most notably aluminum, the real puzzle is how much and at what pace can higher input costs move through the value chain to end customers without triggering the dreaded boomerang effect whereby we inferred from current procyclical conditions to countercyclical conditions earlier than any of us would like. Further evidence of this ongoing dynamic is the onset of higher diesel fuel prices coupled with ongoing tightness in the trucking market resulting in further inflation of delivery costs industry-wide and the resultant lag effect in these cost increases propagating through the value chain. Looking inside RYZ, in the last six weeks of the quarter, we began the vital work of integrating with Olympic Steel, and I could not be more encouraged by how the early stages are progressing. From an organizational standpoint, we moved quickly to establish a unified leadership structure, bringing together talent from both legacy companies to drive alignment accountability, and execution against our synergy targets. In a few moments, I will hand the call over to our President and Chief Operating Officer, Rick Mirabito. But before I do, I would like to take the opportunity to express that it has been a true pleasure to participate in and witness the cross collaboration of our teams and see the expanded product and service offerings begin to benefit our customers across our larger, more capable enterprise and footprint. We are stacking wins and building synergy momentum, and I am exceedingly confident about the opportunities we have to create value together and creating the industry's best customer experience. I would like to thank my Ryerson and Olympic teammates for their adaptability, energy, and passion during this process and their continued focus on the customer. Their efforts are transforming us into a fully integrated platform of combined strengths, enabling us to capture the full value of our synergies, foster growth, and further elevate our offering to customers while further building enterprise value for our shareholders. And with that, I'll ask Rick to join us to discuss market conditions and industry trends.