Arcelormittal SA

Hi, good afternoon and good morning, everybody. Welcome to ArcelorMittal's first quarter 22 analyst and investor call. This is Daniel Fagler from the ArcelorMittal investor relations team, and I'm joined on this call today by our CFO, Gemuino Cristino. Gemuino and I are here to answer your questions on the first quarter results, which we published this morning alongside the presentation with detailed speaker notes on our website. Today's call, which is being recorded, is scheduled to last up to 45 minutes. And if you would like to ask a question, then please do press star one on your telephone keypad. And as usual, we will, of course, answer the questions in the order that they're received. Before we begin the Q&A session, I'd like to hand over to John Wino for some brief opening remarks.

Thank you, Daniel. And good morning and good afternoon to everyone. I will spend this minute or so some very brief opening remarks. I will let our numbers do the talking mostly. So we are consistently posting strong operating results. This is the fourth successive quarter with EBITDA over $5 billion, demonstrating the strength of the business in our investigation. Yet again, an excellent contribution from JV and Associates, contributing 14% of net income Book value of the JVs reaching 12 billion. These are very material businesses that represent important cornerstones of our global business. Strong net income, 4.1 billion, with EPS of $4.28. And here, I would also highlight that this is the highest EPS More than a decade, clearly the benefits of our share buyback starts to become very visible on our reported numbers. Value creation, book value is up again to $57 per share, with trailing ROE of 36%. Equally important, strong free cash flow generation. So the company delivered 1.5 billion of free cash flow in first quarter and this is despite a $2 billion investment in working capital. We continue to bring down our net debt despite investments in working capital and despite returning cash to shareholders. That's a record low. Our confidence in our outlook allows for the announcement of an additional $1 billion buyback, bringing the total up to now to $2 billion. And if we look back a little bit, if we go back to September, 2020, and by the time we complete this extra billion dollars, we will have distributed $9.5 billion to our shareholders. We are focused on the consistent execution of our strategies. And I think today's results and update is a clear illustration of the progress we are making on our fronts. So now Daniel, I believe we can go straight to the questions.

Yes. Thanks, Gemino. So we'll take the first question, please, from Alain at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.