SunCoke Energy, Inc.

please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Shantanu Agrawal. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us this morning to discuss Suncook Energy's first quarter 2021 results. With me today are Mike Rippey, President and Chairman and Allison Lawson, Interim Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Controller. Following management's prepared remarks, we'll open the call for Q&A. This conference call is being webcast live on the investor relations section of our website, and a replay will be available later today. If we don't get to your questions on the call today, please feel free to reach out to our investor relations team. Before I turn things over to Mike, let me remind you that the various remarks we make on today's call regarding future expectations constitute forward-looking statements. The cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements in our SEC filings apply to the remarks we make today. These documents are available on our website as are reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today's call. With that, I will now turn things over to Mike.

Thanks, Shantanu. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Today, we announce Suncoke's first quarter results. And before I turn it over to Allison, who will review the results in detail, I want to discuss a few highlights. First on safety, I would like to thank all of my fellow Suncoke teammates, as well as congratulate them for their continued commitment and contributions. The dedication of our team is clearly visible to our excellent safety performance, where we achieved zero recordable injuries during the first quarter, a record for our company. On the coronavirus front, we continue to take all necessary measures to ensure the health and safety of our workforce and have implemented policies and procedures that follow the guidelines established by the CDC, OSHA, and local health and governmental authorities to protect our workforce and contractors. Turning to our results, in the quarter we are extremely pleased with the operational performance that our team delivered across both our coke and logistics segments. Our coke making operations returned to running at full capacity and our logistics operations saw significant uptick in volume. We achieved record setting first quarter results with adjusted EBITDA of 70.6 million, a 14% improvement over Q1 2020. We're also pleased with our initial performance in the foundry and export coke markets. Our products are well received, and we are excited about the possibilities in these markets in the future. We will continue to work on optimizing our production and growing our market participation for these products. A very encouraging development for our logistics segment this quarter was the signing of a new take-or-pay agreement to handle iron ore pellets at CNT. As we discussed in our last call, we successfully tested this product during the fourth quarter of last year, which has resulted in a take-or-pay agreement and a new product for our logistics business. Looking at our capital structure and deployment of cash in the first quarter, we reduced debt by $33 million during the quarter and continue to execute on our deleveraging initiative while also maintaining our $0.06 per share quarterly dividend. We are well on our way to achieving our long-term gross leverage target of three times or lower by the end of this year. Overall, very strong operational and financial performance in the first quarter provides a solid foundation to build on for the rest of the year. We now expect results at the top end of our 2021 guidance of $215 to $230 million. With that, I'll turn it over to Allison to review our first quarter earnings in detail. Allison?