United States Steel Corporation

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United States Steel Corporation's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I'll now hand the call over to Ken Lewis, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate at P&A.

Thank you, Tommy. Good morning, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining me on today's call is U.S. Steel President and CEO Dave Burrett. and Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer, Rich Ruhoff. Also, a special welcome to our Senior Vice President and CFO, Jessica Graziano, joining us this morning for her first earnings call at U.S. Steel. This morning, we posted slides to accompany today's prepared remarks. These can be found on the U.S. Steel Investor page under the Events and Presentations section. Before we start, let me remind you that some information provided during this call may include forward-looking statements that are based on certain assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, as described in our SEC filings, and actual future results may vary materially. Forward-looking statements in the press release that we issued yesterday, along with our remarks today, are made as of today, and we undertake no duty to update them as actual events unfold. I would now like to turn the conference call over to U.S. Steel President and CEO Dave Burt, who will begin on slide four.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning to everyone joining us today. We appreciate your continued support of U.S. Steel. We delivered another strong performance in the third quarter. Most importantly, we did it safely. We had one of the safest summers in our history and are on track for a third consecutive year of record safety performance. While we certainly don't focus on safety for awards, we are pleased that our industry-leading safety performance was recently recognized, not once, but twice. Both the National Safety Council and World Steel awarded U.S. Steel safety programs with Safety Excellence Awards, further validating our leadership role in placing safety first. At U.S. Steel, we have a culture of caring that extends through our facilities, Exceptional safety means exceptional operations. Thank you to my U.S. Steel colleagues for doing your job safely for yourself, for your coworkers, and for your families. We'll spend the next 15 minutes or so providing you with a business and strategy update. There's a lot of noise out there, but one thing is clear. We are confident in our ability to execute our best for all future. I remain bullish on US Steel's future. We are better positioned now more than ever to confront market uncertainty and to prove the foundational strength of our business. The challenges we face today remain transitioning to a less carbon and less capital intensive business model while becoming the best steel competitor. Our strategy creates the path to achieve these goals and reach our best for all future. To become the best, you have to outperform the best. That's why we're expanding our competitive advantages and expanding our low CapEx, low GHG emission EAF steelmaking and value-added capabilities to meet customer demand. For example, we are leveraging our unique raw materials advantage to support our growing electric arc furnace fleet. Earlier this month, we were joined by Governor Walz in Minnesota at the groundbreaking ceremony for our DR grade pellet upgrades at Ketak. The excitement from the team and from the community was invigorating, and everyone involved appreciates the importance of this investment as an integral part of our best-for-all strategy. We are another quarter closer to the earnings and free cash flow growth our strategic projects will generate. Each project remains on time and on budget. This means we'll continue to have a balanced approach to capital allocation focused on driving long-term stockholder value. We're also pleased to see the recent reinforcement of trade policies by the U.S. government. These policies are critical to ensuring national and economic security and ensuring a level playing field for American steelmakers. We are also optimistic that the CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and Infrastructure Bill will positively impact steel demand in 2023 and beyond. Our country is a leader in sustainable steelmaking, and we are encouraged the administration continues to support the role American manufacturing plays in the global economy. This gives us the confidence to deliver our best for all strategy for our employees, our customers, and most importantly, our stockholders.