Tronox Holdings plc

and listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I will now turn the call over to Jennifer Gunther, Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call and webcast. Turning to slide two, on our call today are John Romano and Jean-Francois Tourjon, co-chief executive officers, and John Srivastol, senior vice president, chief financial officer. We will be using slides as we move through today's call. You can access the presentation on our website at investor.toronox.com. Moving to slide three, a friendly reminder that comments made on this call and the information provided in our presentation and on our website include certain statements that are forward-looking and subject to various risks and uncertainties. including but not limited to the specific factors summarized in our SEC filing. This information represents our best judgment based on what we know today. However, actual results may vary based on these risks and uncertainties. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. During the conference call, we will refer to certain non-US GAAP financial terms that we use in the management of our business and believe are useful to investors in evaluating the company's performance. Reconciliations to their nearest U.S. GAAP terms are provided in our earnings release and in the appendix of the accompanying presentation. Additionally, please note that all financial comparisons made during the call are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to John Romano. John?

Thanks, Jennifer, and good morning, everyone. We'll begin this morning on slide five with some key messages from the quarter. We delivered fourth quarter top line performance in line with expectations. TIO2 sales volumes declined approximately 4% in the quarter compared to the third quarter. Volumes were slightly lower than expected due to more seasonality in North America than anticipated, and we also experienced some shipment delays as a result of congestion in the Red Sea that delayed some stock transfers to cover our bottlic outage in Europe. Our TIO2 pricing was only down 1% compared to the third quarter, which was better than our previous guide. Our Zircon volumes increased 82% versus the third quarter, higher than expected and communicated on our last earnings call. However, we did experience some unfavorable product and regional mix, which negatively impacted our marginal quarter. Zircon pricing was down 9% compared to the third quarter due to product mix and some regional pricing adjustments, primarily in Asia Pacific. Revenue was also higher from other products due to additional sales of pig iron, as well as opportunistic sales of melmanite and a portion of our rare earths tailing deposit in South Africa, which is a key part of our funding strategy for our rare earths business. Our adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter came in 11 million below our guided range. This was primarily driven by a delayed restart of our steam supplier at Botlik and higher costs from unanticipated downtime stemming from running at lower rates. While the Botlik situation is now under control and our suppliers back up and running, we saw approximately 10 million more in costs than forecasted due to the longer downtime. Importantly, our supplier outage did not disrupt our ability to fulfill customer demand as we were able to reposition inventory from our other global assets to meet customer demand in Europe. We expect to recover at least $15 million in insurance proceeds in 2024 as a result of the downtime at public in the second half of 2023. This amount represents the cost incurred to continue to provide uninterrupted service to our customers while working around the supplier outage. The operating challenges we experienced in the last six months are not indicative of the standard we hold ourselves to at Tronox. And we're addressing these challenges head on in 2024. In 2023, we ran at the lowest utilization rates on record in order to manage inventories and free cash flow in light of the lower market demand. As we look into 2024, we're adjusting our operating rights to support the market recovery currently underway. This will set Tronux up to realize a step change in earnings power after we work through the remaining high-cost inventory on the balance sheet. Our free cash flow for the quarter came in higher than expected at $51 million despite the lower than forecasted earnings owing to our cash management initiatives. We saw positive inflow of nearly $60 million from working capital quarter. I'll let John run through more of the year-end numbers from the balance sheet, but we're very comfortable with where we are from liquidity and debt position. Despite the lower market demand, we took action at the right time in 2023 to bolster the balance sheet and ensure we had sufficient liquidity. I'm proud of our team, how our team has proactively prepared for a variety of scenarios. And Tronox is very well positioned as we stand today, especially considering the key capital projects we've planned for 2024, which we'll discuss a little bit later on the call. Turning to slide six, I'll now review a few updates on some of the key sustainability initiatives. We are nearing the conversion of 40% of our power in South Africa to power from the significant solar project we helped develop in partnership with the solar group. This project is one of South Africa's largest solar installations. We expect to receive power in the coming months, which will significantly reduce our carbon emissions globally and mark the first significant step on our journey to net zero in 2050. Renewable power and energy efficiency projects are key to achieving our 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions target of 50%, so we're excited to mark such a significant milestone. We have another renewable project in development in South Africa that we hope to provide more details on soon. Also underway are various initiatives to achieve our stated targets towards reducing our waste to external landfills. This includes exploring alternative uses for waste in a number of opportunities, including cement, road base, bricks, and water treatment chemicals. We are also continuing to evaluate opportunities to extract valuable minerals and metals from waste, including rare earths, scandium, and vanadium. We're excited about the progress we've made and look forward to continuing to updating you on our journey. I'll now turn the call over to John to review some of our financials for the quarter in more detail. John?