Arcelormittal SA

Good afternoon, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to ArcelorMittal's first quarter 2023 Analysts' Investor Call. As Frances said, this is Daniel Fairclough from the ArcelorMittal Investor Relations team. And as usual, I'm joined on this call today by Germina Cristina, our Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand over to Jane Wino, I'd like to mention a few housekeeping items. Firstly, I want to refer everybody to the disclaimers on slide two of the results presentation that we published on our website this morning. I'd also like to remind everybody that today's call is being recorded and it's scheduled to last up to 45 minutes. And finally, I'd just like to reiterate Francie's instructions. If you would like to ask a question, then please do press star one on your telephone keypad and we will take the questions in the order that we received them. With that, I'd like to hand over to Gemini for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Daniel, and welcome, everyone. My remarks today will be brief and focus on three points only. Results continue to demonstrate improved profitability relative to prior cycles, growth The capital we have allocated to growth is delivering and supporting high and normalized profitability for ArcelorMittal. And the third point I will address is capital returns. The positive outlook for the business and for free cash flow generation, we are launching a new buyback program. Firstly, on results. As expected, the end of the stock has supported a strong recovery in our shipment volumes. This has underpinned the sequential improvement in profitability. EBITDA per ton improved to 126 the first quarter, comparing very favorably with prior cycles. This further highlights the benefits of our cost actions and portfolio upgrades in recent periods. Secondly, on growth, this quarter we completed the acquisition of CSP in Brazil. adding 3 million tons of highest quality capacity at the bottom of the cost curve, you will see the full impact on shipments and profitability in the second quarter. Together with the Texas HBI plant we acquired last year and the contribution from the new hot strip mill in Mexico, our investments are clearly supporting high normalized profitability. And our investments continue. We have this quarter announced the formation of a JV with Casa dos Ventos to develop 554 megawatt wind power project in Brazil. With a modest equity contribution, this project can supply up to 38% of our electricity needs in the country. Finally, on capital returns, our capital allocation and return policy is working very well. We are growing the earnings power of the business through investments now a strategic capex in M&A, and we are gearing the benefits of this to shareholders by buying back shares and reducing the share count. We have now bought back 31% of our equity since September 2020 and still developing the business strategically and maintaining a strong balance sheet. Given our positive outlook for the business and for free cash flow, we have today announced that we will buy back up to a further 85 million shares over the next two years. We see our shares as fundamentally undervalued and our buybacks represent the best way for us to capitalize on the disconnect between our view on the outlook for solar metal and what is being priced today by the markets. With this brief opening remarks, then I think we can then move to the Q&A's.

Great, thank you, Jeremy. So we have a queue formed of questions, and we'll take the first question, please, from Alain at Morgan Stanley. Go ahead, Alain.