Stelco Holdings Inc.

Hello and welcome to today's Delco Holdings Inc. second quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Bailey and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to Trevor Harris, Vice President of Corporate Affairs. Trevor, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Stelco's quarterly earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today to discuss our 2023 second quarter results will be Alan Kastenbaum, our Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Paul Scherzer, our Chief Financial Officer. Yesterday, after the market closed, we issued a press release overviewing Stelco's financial results for the second quarter of 2023. This press release, along with the company's financial statements and management's discussion and analysis, have been posted on CDAR and on our investor relations website, at investors.stelco.com. We have provided a link to the presentation referenced on today's call on our website as well. I would like to inform everyone that comments made on today's call may contain forward-looking statements, which involve assumptions which have inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from the statements made today, so do not place undue reliance upon them. Stelco management disclaims any obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that in mind, I would ask everybody on today's call to read the legal disclaimers on page two of the accompanying earnings presentation and also to refer to the risks and assumptions outlined in Stelco's public disclosures. In particular, the second quarter 2023 management's discussion and analysis sections relating to forward-looking information and risks and uncertainties, as well as our filings with securities commissions in Canada. The appendix for our presentation and the non-IFRS performance measures and review of non-IFRS measures of our MD&A provide definitions and reconciliations of the non-IFRS measures that we use today. Please also note that all dollar figures referred to on today's call will be in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Following today's prepared remarks, Alan and Paul will be taking questions. To maximize efficiency, we would ask that all participants who would like to ask a question please limit themselves to one question and one follow-up before recueing. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Alan.

Thank you, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. The second quarter of 2023 showed substantial improvement over the first quarter of this year and saw Stelco once again leading the North American steel industry with a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin. The $215 million of adjusted EBITDA that we reported for the quarter represents a 231% increase over the previous quarter. Across the board, our financial metrics for the quarter showed great improvement as the business continued to experience relief from certain inflationary pressures that have impacted our costs for the last several quarters. We also experienced positive shifts in the market with improved pricing and a return to more historically normalized lead times. Those, together with continued resilience in the broader economy, allowed us to take advantage of our industry-leading low-cost position and effectively deploy our tactical flexibility business model to deliver stronger results in the second quarter. As a result, we remain in a position to continue to deploy our capital in the best interests of our shareholders, with whom our management team remains closely aligned. Accordingly, we are once again paying a cash dividend of 42 cents per share. With this dividend, Stelco will have returned $1.9 billion in capital to our shareholders over the past five and a half years. When taken as a percentage of market capitalization, this level of returns to our shareholders leads the entire North American industry over that time period. It also represents a return of more than eight times the equity capital raised from our IPO. I'm very pleased with the efforts of our entire team that led to our success this quarter. In the coming months, I am optimistic that we will realize continued cost reductions as we expect to sell out our production in the third quarter and take advantage of opportunities in the market. I also look forward to further demonstrating our alignment with and a commitment to our valued shareholders by continuing to evaluate means to deploy our capital in a creative manner. Having said that, we do remain cautious about the broader economy sector headwinds, including upcoming auto labor negotiations, and shrinking lead times across our entire industry as we head into the fourth quarter. Thank you for your time this morning. I will now ask Paul Scherzer to detail some of our financial results.