Westlake Chemical Partners LP

Good afternoon. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Westlake Chemical Partners third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, you will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, November 5th, 2024. I would now like to turn the call over to today's host, John Zeller, Westlake Chemical Partners vice president and treasurer. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Westlake Chemical Partners third quarter 2024 conference call. I am joined today by Albert Chow, our executive chairman, John Mark Gilson, our president and CEO, Steve Bender, our executive vice president and chief financial officer, and other members of our management team. During this call, we refer to ourselves as Westlake Partners or the partnership. References to Westlake refer to our parent company, Westlake Corporation, and references to Opco refer to Westlake Chemical Opco LP, a subsidiary of Westlake and the partnership, which owns certain Olofens assets. Additionally, when we refer to distributable cash flow, we are referring to Westlake Chemical Partners MLP distributable cash flow. Definitions of these terms are available on the partnership's website. Today, management is going to discuss certain topics that will contain forward-looking information that is based on management's beliefs, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to management. These forward-looking statements suggest predictions or expectations and thus are subject to risks or uncertainties. We encourage you to learn more about the factors that could lead our actual results to differ by reviewing the cautionary statements in our regulatory filings. which are also available on our investor relations website. This morning, Westlake Partners issued a press release with details of our third quarter 2024 financial and operating results. This document is available in the press release section of our webpage at wlkpartners.com. A replay of today's call will be available beginning two hours after the conclusion of this call. The replay can be accessed via the partnership website. Please note that information reported on this call speaks only as of today, November 5th, 2024, and therefore you are advised that time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the time of any replay. I would finally advise you that this conference call is being broadcast live through an internet webcast system that can be accessed on our webpage at wlkpartners.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jean-Marc Gilson. Jean-Marc?

Thank you, John. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us to discuss our third quarter 2024 results. In this morning's press release, we reported Westlake Partners third quarter 2024 net income of $18 million or 51 cents per unit. Compared to the third quarter of 2023, our third quarter of 2024 sales and earnings benefited from higher third-party ethylene sales price and margins. In an effort to better capture these attractive third-party margins, we opportunistically made the decision to defer the planned turnaround at our Petro-1 ethylene unit to the first quarter of 2025, while also shifting third party sales volume planned for later in the year into the third quarter. As a result, during the third quarter, we were able to generate our highest quarterly distributable cash flow since 2022, while also adding to our operating surplus. During the third quarter, we celebrated our 10th year as a publicly traded master limited partnership. Since our IPO in 2014, we have grown our quarterly distribution by 71% from the partnership's original minimum quarterly distribution of 27.5 cents per unit. Over that time period, we made 41 consecutive distributions without any reductions the stability of westlake's partners business model has enabled is enabled by our fixed margin excellent sales agreement which minimizes market volatility and other production risk the high degree of cash flow stability Paid with the predictability of our business has enabled us to deliver a long history of reliable distributions. I would now like to turn over the call to Steve, who will provide more detail on the financial and operating results for the quarter. Steve?