U.S. Silica Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the U.S. Silica fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce you to Patricia Gill, Vice President of Advanced Relations and Sustainability.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. I'd like to thank you for joining us today for U.S. Silica's fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Leading the call today are Brian Shin, our chief executive officer, and Kevin Howe, our interim executive vice president and chief financial officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you of our standard cautionary remarks regarding the forward-looking nature of some of the statements that will be made today. Such forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events are based on current expectations and assumptions which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. For a complete discussion of these risks and uncertainties, we encourage you to read the company's press release and our documents on file with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. Additionally, we have provided a supplemental fourth quarter earnings presentation on our website in the investor section to accompany today's discussion. On today's call, we may refer to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA, segment contribution margin, net debt, and net leverage ratio. Please refer to today's press release, our public filings, or the accompanying earnings presentation for a full reconciliation and discussion of adjusted EBITDA, segment contribution margin, net debt, and the net leverage ratio. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Brian Shin.

Thanks, Patricia, and good morning, everyone. During the fourth quarter, we continued to strengthen our financial foundation and advance our growth strategy while closing out an exceptionally strong and historic year for the company. During 2023, we delivered on profit guidance with 24% year-over-year adjusted EBITDA growth while increasing company contribution margin 16% and net income 88%. We also generated $264 million of cash flow from operations. These impressive annual results were driven by a combination of strong customer demand and disciplined pricing in oil and gas, and increased pricing and improved product mix in industrials, all supported by our optimized and lean cost structure. Furthermore, we repurchased and extinguished a total of $184 million of debt, improving our balance sheet and delivering a low net leverage ratio of approximately 1.4 times TTM EBITDA at year end. It's also worth noting that both business segments delivered record annual profitability during the year, with annual sequential contribution margin dollar growth of 10% for ISP and 20% for oil and gas. During 2023, we also delivered many non-financial achievements, including our fourth year in a row of record employee safety performance, selling enough bleaching clay to purify 1.7 billion gallons of edible oil, and selling enough diatomaceous earth filter aid to filter 13,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of beer. While our purified product was used in blood plasma protein processing to produce roughly 9 million vials of albumin medicine, serving millions of patients in a year. And finally, we completed 160 community events in 2023, including education for local students, sponsoring multiple recreational sports leagues and local FFA and 4-H organizations, along with participating in numerous volunteer events across the country. In all, 2023 was a fantastic year, and we certainly had a lot to be proud of. In corporate news, we appointed Gene Padgett as Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer, and Controller of the company in late December. I'm very excited to welcome Gene to our leadership team and believe that His extensive accounting and financial expertise will be a key asset for the company as we continue to advance our growth strategy. I'd also like to provide an update on our CFO search. We've had the opportunity to meet with a number of talented, high-quality candidates with a broad range of backgrounds. I'm very pleased with the search process so far and expect to have our new CFO in place in the next few months. I'll now turn the call over to Kevin, who will discuss our financial results in more detail. Kevin?