Worthington Steel, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Worthington Steel's first quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during that time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Melissa Dykstra, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Worthington Steel's first quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. On our call today, we have Jeff Gilmore, Worthington Steel's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Adams, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made today are forward-looking within the meaning of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those suggested. We issued our earnings release yesterday after the market closed. Please refer to it for more detail on the factors that could have caused actual results to differ materially. Unless noted as reported, today's discussion will reference non-GAAP financial measures which adjust for certain items included in our GAAP results and which are presented on a standalone basis. You can find definitions of each non-GAAP measure and GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations within our earnings release. Today's call is being recorded and a replay will be made available later today on worthingtonsteel.com. Now I'll turn it over to Jeff Gilmore.

Good morning and thank you for joining Worthington Steel's first quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. As always, I'll begin by thanking the people of Worthington Steel. I'm incredibly proud of our team's commitment to safety, quality, and our customers throughout the quarter. I want to extend a warm welcome to the CDEM team. We completed our acquisition of 52% of CDEM in June. To our CDEM teammates who may be on the call, we are thrilled to have you join the Worthington family, and I'm excited about what we'll accomplish together. We're off to a strong start in fiscal year 2026, driven by disciplined execution and a soft market, resulting in year-over-year volume growth. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $75.2 million. Earnings per share were 72 cents, and net sales were $872.9 million. This performance reflects the strength of our base business, the advantages of our commercial and operational agility, and the benefits of our ongoing transformation. An important highlight of our quarter was safety. Through training, continuous improvement, and the commitment of every Worthington Steel employee, we achieved our safest quarter on record. But there is still work to do to ensure every employee goes home safely and we meet our goal of zero injuries. Congratulations to our environmental health and safety team, our operations team, and all Worthington Steel employees on this vitally important achievement. Looking at our key end markets and business trends, the macro environments remain mixed. Visibility is limited in several sectors, and we expect this to persist for the near term. That said, we are cautiously optimistic despite continued uncertainty in the market. At Worthington Steel, we are not waiting for clarity to act. We're focused on what we can control, and we are positioning ourselves to win in any environment. Uncertainty can create opportunity, and that's where we lean in. When supply chains shift, we collaborate. When customers face complexity, we deliver solutions. This quarter, we saw continued growth in automotive with new programs ramping up to drive volume. In fact, during the period, the Detroit 3 saw a 5% year-over-year production increase, while our shipments increased by nearly 13% compared to the prior year. Our commercial teams are doing an outstanding job winning new business. We remain cautiously optimistic about the automotive market for the rest of calendar year 2025. We also offset some of the slowness in the heavy truck market with an increase in market share during our first quarter. Construction in the subsectors we serve remain soft but steady. We are disciplined and efficient in how we serve the space. The ag market continues to experience challenges, but we remain committed to our customers and ready to adapt. I'd like to commend our commercial team for their focus on proactively serving our customers. The strong relationships they build and cultivate help us capitalize on opportunities and gain new customers, new business, and new market share. Turning to our long-term strategy. Our team continued to make progress on electrical steel investments, margin accretive growth, and base business transformation. In Canada, we remain on schedule to start production in early calendar year 2026, expanding our ability to support the ever-growing need for electricity in the United States with transformer cores. Transformers remain in short supply and the market is expected to grow by up to 7% per year over the next decade. The expansion of our facility in Mexico will begin production in just a few months, and trials are currently underway. This facility will supply electrical steel laminations for traction motors in hybrid and electric vehicles as the electrification of transportation continues. With the close of our CDEM acquisition, We've expanded our reach in the global EV market and are now integrating CDEMS automation and tool making capabilities to strengthen our competitiveness across our electrical steel platform. Transformation at Worthington Steel is a daily discipline. It's how we improve safety, productivity, and customer outcomes. We now have the opportunity to fuel and accelerate that work with artificial intelligence. We are using AI to gain insight, assess strategies, and automate low-value tasks. We are testing use cases like predictive maintenance and intelligent reporting, and we are confident about the gains we will see over time. Adding AI to our transformation toolbox, both in operations and the back office, will allow our teams to focus on the critical 20% of their job that drives the most value for our business. At the same time, our employees will gain more fulfillment from their careers as the more repetitive tasks are cleared from their daily work. This quarter, we identified, launched, and are advancing four critical AI-driven pilots. Demand forecasting to improve capacity planning and inventory management. Predictive inventory optimization to reduce inbound raw material inventory. predictive maintenance to reduce downtime, and forecast and demand planning automation. All four of these are expected to provide cost savings and or free up cash flow when fully implemented. Additionally, we continue to see progress as we apply the transformation to our back office functions. As examples, we launched a project to automate daily cash posting, reducing effort by more than 10 hours per month and increasing reliability. We streamlined IT access provisioning, creating a more efficient process for adding software and system access for employees, which saves our IT staff 20 hours per week. And we applied process automation to significantly cut manual work in our back office credit function, saving 80 hours per month. These are just a few samples of ongoing work, but these are real improvements, measurable repeatable, and aligned with our long-term goals. I believe our culture of continuous improvement through the transformation, combined with our golden rule of treating people the way we want to be treated, is our secret weapon. Alongside that is our sound strategy and a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Our priorities are clear. Generate strong free cash flow, invest in the high return opportunities, and pursue M&A that creates strategic value. With a 70-year heritage, we are building a company that is stronger, more efficient, and more valuable year after year. To close, I want to thank our 6,000 employees, our customers, and our shareholders. Worthington Steel is operating with a clear strategy, a culture of execution and continuous improvement, and a deep bench of talent. That's a powerful combination, and I believe it sets us apart. Thank you for your time today and for your continued interest in Worthington Steel. Now I'll turn it over to Tim Adams to walk through our financials.