Good morning. Thank you for attending today's Stelco Holdings Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings call. My name is Quita. I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with the 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 your host, Trevor Harris with Stelco. Trevor, please go ahead. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Stelco's quarterly earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today to discuss our fourth quarter and full- year results for 2021 will be Alan Kestenbaum, 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 fourth quarter and full- year of 2021. This press release, along with the company's financial statements and management's discussion and analysis, have been posted on SEDAR 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'd like to inform everyone that the 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 on them. Stelco management disclaims any obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that in mind, I would ask everyone on today's call to read the legal disclaimers on page 2 of the accompanying earnings presentation and also refer to the risks and assumptions outlined in Stelco's public disclosures. In particular, the 2021 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 of 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'd ask that all participants who would like to ask a question, please limit themselves to one question and one follow-up before re-queuing. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Alan. Thank you, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. I am extremely proud of our team for leading Stelco to our most successful year on record. Over the past four and a half years, we have worked around the clock to reduce and control our costs while also investing strategically in our business. Today, I am pleased to report that our tireless efforts to build a business with an industry-leading low-cost position has delivered these remarkable results. We have taken full advantage of the opportunity presented by favorable market conditions throughout the majority of 2021 and continued to allocate our capital in the way to benefit our shareholders with whom we are directly and uniquely aligned. As a result of our continued success, we have continued to return capital to our fellow shareholders, including $ 562 million via share repurchases just in the last six months, bringing our total capital return to shareholders to almost $1 billion since our IPO in 2017. Relative to our market cap, we have returned by far the largest amount of capital to our shareholders of any reporting steelmaker or downstream steel company in North America, and more than four times the amount raised in our IPO. We are very proud of this return of capital record. We ended the 2021 calendar year with over $2 billion of adjusted EBITDA, resulting in an industry-leading adjusted EBITDA margin of 50% and a cash balance of CAD 955 million. This achievement goes beyond taking advantage of the exceptional price levels we saw through much of the year and speaks directly to our ability to employ our model of tactical flexibility and utilize our low-cost structure to drive revenue through to the bottom line. To this point, for the second consecutive quarter, we were able to generate adjusted EBITDA of more than $1,000 per ton. Furthermore, we continued to convert almost 80% of our EBITDA into net income in the fourth quarter, and we converted 83% of our EBITDA into net income overall of 2021. However, like the entire industry, we have seen our costs creep up due to inflationary pressures. As a result, for 2022, we have committed to lowering our costs and attacking the impact of these inflationary pressures. First, we will complete the final stages of our $ 700 million strategic capital plan that commenced in 2018 with the completion of our Lake Erie Works coke battery rehabilitation upgrade and the commissioning of our new 65 MW electricity cogeneration facility. Additionally, we have identified additional significant cost savings of approximately $ 75 million, which will come from operational changes and other initiatives that don't require capital expenditures. Consistent with our philosophy of low to no debt, I want to remind everyone that all of these investments and massive return of capital have been made while keeping our commitment to a strong balance sheet and utilizing our free cash flow and without incurring any restrictive long-term debt or equity issuances. In 2022, we expect to see downward pressure on margins due to lower steel pricing, softer demand, and the previously mentioned inflationary pressures. Our key concerns relate to the lack of visibility and also uncertainty evidenced by the recent significant shortening of lead times industry-wide, and the falling benchmark CRU hot-rolled coil price index. Until the auto sector begins to again produce to its capacity, we anticipate continued weak visibility of the supply-demand balance in the flat-rolled steel industry. These recent poor dynamics of the steel market will only deepen our resolve and make us more relentless in managing our costs. Our team has proven that they are capable of responding and adapting to changing market conditions and deploying the full strength of our tactical flexibility strategy, deepening our core and competitive advantage and achieving our goal of remaining profitable through every point of the market cycle. Moreover, it underscores the importance of our principles of avoiding friction-creating outside forces, such as the impact of restrictive debt and unending legacy costs. As we chart our course through the next year, a year which has started with oversupply and weak demand, we will of course remain committed to our core principles by keeping our balance sheet strong, by pursuing opportunities to improve our industry-leading cost position, and by deploying our capital in a manner that affords as much upside as possible for our investors considering current market conditions. With that, I would ask Paul to provide some additional comments regarding our financial performance. Thanks, Alan, and good morning, everyone. While the third quarter of 2021 was the high point of what was a record year for our business, the fourth quarter, although strong on a relative historical basis, was impacted by declining market conditions starting in November, which accelerated throughout the fourth quarter and continued through to today. However, looking back on 2021, we exceeded $4 billion in revenue for the year and generated adjusted EBITDA of more than $ 2 billion. As Alan mentioned in his remarks, the 50% adjusted EBITDA margin we achieved over the full- year of 2021 was the highest margin of any of our reporting peers in North America. This type of continued success is testament to every employee's focus on controlling our costs and maximizing our productivity. Despite the reduced shipments that we noted in our guidance issued in early January, we did benefit from a modest increase in selling prices quarter over quarter and generated almost $.2 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter. Our shipping volume for the full- year, just under 2.7 million tons, is the highest volume we have seen since acquiring the business in 2017 and is a clear demonstration of the value we are extracting from the upgrade of our smart blast furnace and other strategic capital investments. Looking forward to the first quarter, we continue to believe that the weaker demand conditions being experienced currently, as well as increased COVID-19-related disruptions with respect to labor force availability, which has impacted this quarter's production, logistics, and customer demand, will result in shipments that are even lower than those of the fourth quarter. An additional challenge we face is the recent decline in pricing. Since the start of the fourth quarter, we have seen hot-rolled pricing fall by approximately $900 from historic highs achieved last year. However, we are confident in our strategic approach and in our ability to keep our costs low and compete at every point in the market cycle. Our business is structurally sound, and we are prepared to respond to whatever challenges the market brings. Our investments to date and further cost reductions that we anticipate from our coke battery rehabilitation and upgrade and our electricity cogeneration facility will certainly assist in reaching that goal. In addition to the almost $1 billion we have returned to shareholders since 2017, which includes the $ 164 million deployed for a share buyback through the recently closed substantial issuer bid, we have also strategically invested $ 700 million into our business without incurring any restrictive long-term debt. At the end of 2021, we continued to maintain an undrawn revolving credit facility with $ 240 million of availability, and we closed the year with $ 955 million in cash. Continuing that stellar track record of capital returns, our board has authorized a continuation of our $0.30 per-share quarterly dividend and authorized further share repurchases via a newly filed normal course issuer bid for up to an additional 4.4 million shares, representing 6% of the total shares outstanding currently. We will repurchase these shares opportunistically over the next 12 months if and when we see the share price trade at a level that we think is advantageous for the company to execute on. We are certainly pleased with our overall results for 2021. While we recognize we benefited greatly from a robust market and exceptional pricing, our ability to convert that opportunity to EBITDA and then to the bottom line validated our commitment to the fundamentals that form the backbone of our business. Going forward, we will not deviate from those fundamentals. As a management team, we remain very closely aligned with the interests of our investors, and that alignment will serve our business well as we navigate whatever challenges we face in the upcoming year. Thank you all for taking the time to join our call. Thank you, Alan and Paul. That concludes our prepared remarks for today, and I would now like to turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A. Operator? Absolutely. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you're using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question is from David Gagliano with BMO Capital Markets. You may proceed. Okay, great. Thanks for taking my question. So I appreciate the prepared remarks. They went pretty quickly, so I apologize if I missed some of these things that were covered. Just first of all, on the near-term outlook commentary, I didn't quite catch. I know you said down quarter-over-quarter in shipments. You know, what are you seeing from your customers, you know, and in terms of, you know, nature of these continued weakness into the first quarter on the volumes? Is it destocking or is it, you know, end market demand being weak? Then again, this is my first question. If you can talk a little bit about, you know, obviously spot price is down, you know, $900 a ton. What does that translate to a realized price decline in the first quarter for you, given, you know, lags are all over the place, and factoring in that it's basically two-thirds of the way through the quarter, so I'm assuming you already know what the price is by the end, you know, for the end of this quarter. That's my first question. Sure. You know, with respect to the end markets, you know, we can go one at a time. As everyone knows, the auto sector remains, you know, extremely weak. In terms of because of the chip shortage and other types of issues there was the recent border issues. That pushes up the entire supply chain. It goes all the way through the tier ones, the service centers. Those companies that have been in the midst of destocking now for several months continue to destock with no end in sight. You know, OEM orders that we have, again, same thing. You know, as they cut production, those orders get pushed back. You know, you're seeing a very significant chunk of the demand side of things be impacted by the auto industry. The same with the construction industry. There are numerous construction sites that are down because of worker absences due to COVID. You know, that might change soon. Interest rates are going up. I think people are getting a little bit leery about holding too much inventory anticipating interest rate increases, which has a direct impact always on the real estate market. We're seeing that. You know, the oil market in drilling a little bit of a sign of light over there but not much. That's also been slow, and I think there's also a significant amount of inventory in the pipeline. By way of example, my son is a pipe distributor and he you know he's sitting on inventory, and his suppliers are sitting on inventory of many months. What we're seeing here is a you know dramatic destocking and just a wait and see from the customers. Also, frankly, a lot of panic from steel mills you know including us to some degree. I think you know if you go back a few months ago at the time I alerted the market to what was happening. At that time, CRU was quoted at $1,490. Today, it's a bit over $1,000. At that time, people were saying, "No, it didn't. You know, it's not really falling that much." Well, it did. You know, it fell by over 35%. The CRU is out there right now. At that time, CRU was probably 20% over the real market, and that has not changed. It doesn't actually reflect the real market that's going on right now. You know, there's a lot of oversupply, overcapacity. You know, last few days we've seen a little bit of retrenchment there, but you know, it doesn't really move the needle. We're playing it really cautious. You know, you ask about price realizations. Frankly, we're not sold out for the quarter yet, so I can't even give you a good guidance on price realizations, 'cause like every mill, you know, our lead times, we still have plenty of availability for March. So, you know, to give you some sort of a real type of view on what prices are gonna be, we just don't have that visibility just yet. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. On the capital return, I, you know, the commentary there, obviously things have changed quite a bit. Company did generate, I think, you know, what a $ 570 million of free cash flow just in the fourth quarter alone. That's 23% of the equity market cap, I think. Still quite a bit of cash. Can you talk through a little bit more about your current thinking on you know, how you plan to deploy the capital in the near term? The cash in the near term, if you do plan to deploy it. And if you could also comment on the inventory monetization, which I believe is coming due in four days or five days. It's a $400 million number. What's the plan there? Thanks. A couple things. Just so with respect to capital return, I mean, we've made two announcements today that should be reflective of our capital return policies, which are to continue the dividend. Also, we announced the NCIB, which is continuation of share buybacks. That's responsive to the capital deployment question. In terms of the inventory monetization agreement, that will continue. It's a very, very good arrangement for us and that will continue. Okay, thanks. You're welcome. Thank you. The next question is from David Ocampo with Cormark Securities. You may proceed. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. When we take a look at your cost per ton for the balance of the year or even into next quarter, should we expect this to trend lower with scrap prices coming off their highs and all the internal initiatives that you guys cited on the call, like the coke battery rehab and your cogen facility, or will inflationary pressures keep a lid on any of those improvements? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of crosscurrents. First of all, we're not really seeing scrap prices drop all that much yet. You know, with recent tensions overseas, we're not sure that scrap price is really gonna retreat. Not too confident about seeing any kind of dramatic change in scrap prices. You know, when you look at some of the other costs, whether it's alloys or, you know, ferro alloys like ferrosilicon and stuff like that, I mean, that stuff has been going up in price. You know, we really don't see that changing. Again, turning towards events overseas just this morning, you know, that potentially could get worse. You know, not seeing. You know, natural gas price is another one. We saw a little bit of relief, couple of months ago. You know, again, world events may push that higher as well. We're fighting. You know, there's certain things we can't control. The items like I've just mentioned are things we can't control. The things that we, you know, do have in our control, some, you know, I think we've got, you know, the best COO in the business. I mean, this man is, he just is relentless finding every single dollar to take out. We're gonna fight like hell to try and offset those inflationary pressures. I don't see the input side of things, you know, changing very much. If anything, with world events, it could potentially get worse. You know, as I mentioned, we have identified $75 million in cost savings that do not involve reduction in cost of raw materials. You know, we think that, you know, we think we're gonna be able to go after those and get those as the year draws on. You know, as I mentioned in my remarks, those inflationary pressures are definitely there and, you know, will have an impact on our cost structure in the near term. You know, we need to keep fighting it. You know, we face it like everybody in the industry. We're not different. We buy the same stuff everyone else buys. You know, but we have, I think, shown and demonstrated through our margins that we've got, you know, a lot more room before it, you know, starts hurting us. I think I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to do a good job offsetting part of the inflationary pressures, but part of it is simply out of our control. No, that makes sense. Then as a follow-up, can you remind us how much the cogen and the coke batteries take out of your cost structure? Then the timeline on the $75 million, when that flows through to the income statement. I think you could look at that coming in pretty evenly over the course of the year, the $75 million. As far as the cogen, we believe we're gonna save about $18 million a year. That 18 million a year is not in the $75, so that's additive. As far as the coke battery, it's about $ 7 a ton, we expect to be able to save on that. Also not in the $75 million. Perfect. I'll hand the line over. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from Alexander Jackson with RBC Capital Markets. You may proceed. Yeah. Thanks for taking my question, guys. I guess just in terms of operating costs, the impacts of inflation, you know, are you able to quantify some of that maybe on a quarter-over-quarter basis from Q4 to Q1 here? I can't. I don't know if, Paul, you have any insight on that. Alex, I mean, as you know, we typically don't give guidance, and I think that's starting to get pretty close to it. But as Alan said, we're definitely seeing inflationary cost pressures in Q1. Okay. Fair enough. Thanks, guys. That's all for me. Thank you. The next question is from Michael Doumet with Scotiabank. You may proceed. Hey, good morning, guys. A couple follow-up to some of the questions. I guess for the Q1 shipments, what I'm trying to figure out here is, you know, what the main driver would be for, you know, the shipments there to get a little bit more close to the Q4 shipments, that 625, or how far behind it could fall. If my interpretation of the main driver there being demand or, you know, other issues. Just any sort of way to think about how shipments could bounce back through the year would be helpful as well. You know, when we put out guidance a couple of months ago and we said that we expected Q1 to be level with Q4, that was under the assumption that was based on production capability. The production capability is back to where we need it to be. We did get through some of those outages that we accelerated into Q1. Those went well. It's all demand right now. You know, we're at a situation where in order to ship in this quarter, we need orders in the next you know, week or two. You know, a lot's gonna depend. We're not seeing the order flow like we would expect in order to get to Q4 shipment levels, and that's why, as Paul indicated, they'll probably be a little lower than Q1. As far as the outlook, you know, I've been saying this now for a couple of months. I mean, what we lack right now is visibility, which, you know, means that we run our business, we have a tactical flexibility model. We respond instantly to changes in demand both up and down. Right now, visibility is our biggest challenge. We're fighting the fight every day to get what we can get. I, you know, we just don't. We're not in position at this point to make any predictions. I think that's where our tactical flexibility model really works because we don't sit and build inventory. We don't sit in, you know, with our hands up and saying, "But what do we do next?" You know, we go out, we fight, we move quickly, we get orders as much as we can. You know, I think we've got the benefit of a low-cost position and a healthy balance sheet to carry us through. I mean, I really wish I could give you some better view on, you know, if and when things might turn around. We just don't see it. That's helpful. I guess the second question, you know, back to the cost per ton. You know, the cost per ton, the way I calculate it, is about $100 more in 2021 when compared to 2018 and 2019. You know, obviously it's understandable, and you've commented on some of the inflation and where that's coming from. If I start to think about, you know, the cost per ton longer term, what would be the main drivers to reducing cost towards the historical average, and presumably even below the historical average, given some of Stelco's, you know, structural cost improvements? Yeah. I mean, a couple of things. You know, in the number that you cited, there's a few things going on. There's the inflationary pressures, including increases in price of scrap. You know, we like increases in price of scrap because it raises the costs for everybody else, so you know, we never look at that as a bad thing. But in that number is some increases in costs and some of the inflationary pressures that you know, that you cited. You know, but the other thing that you don't get really is mix. If you look at on a brighter note, you know, we have continued to improve our percentage of value-added products, downstream products. A lot of that has to do with our continued penetration into the auto industry and other industries. As you see, mix shift, that's also gonna impact the cost per ton. Those are the factors that go in it. Some of it is good news, like the scrap price going up, like our increased penetration into downstream markets, and some of it is bad news, like the inflationary pressures. The things that we can control, the things you know are where we're focused right now in terms of operational improvements. When you look at the efficiencies of our blast furnaces, you know, we're tops in the industry. If scrap prices do go down, then, you know, you'll see that impact it, and then the implementation of our cost reduction. That's the single biggest thing we can do is selling product, being quick on our feet to our customers, and being able to lower our costs. You know, that's what we, you know, we're really good at that. But you're correct. Our costs have gone up, and a lot of it has to do with the inflationary pressures that are continuing. Thanks for the helpful comments. Thank you. The next question is from Seth Rosenfeld with BNP Paribas. You may proceed. Good afternoon. A couple of questions, please, starting out with pricing strategy and then secondly on pig iron. When it comes to your sales and pricing strategy, your comments strike me as being much more cautious than we've heard from any of your peers through earnings season. With that in mind and given the history of hedging, why has Stelco decided to not hedge in the current pricing environment? I think you commented earlier that even CRU benchmark is perhaps 20% above the real market. Why is now not a good time to be hedging? We'll start there, please. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the technical. You know, my background is trading, and we went the route of hedging about a year ago, and hedging is a complete fool's game. Why? Because if you look at the CRU, and I don't know why this happens, but it does happen, the CRU is significantly higher than the forward curve. Which means if you hedge, and then you have to buy back under your position based on the CRU, you're screwed. I mean, just take it right now. You know, if you wanted to hedge forward, you'd be hedging at, like, $900 a ton. And if you want to buy CRU, it's ten whatever. And this has been consistent the entire way down. Anyone that hedged got totally screwed. I don't know who's playing around with it, but the CRU is the benchmark with which you undo the hedges. You know, we don't feel like giving up $200 a ton, because a few traders wanna, you know, play around with this market. Okay, understood. Just to clarify on that point with regard to the disparity, can you comment on the gap between current CRU and where you see volumes being transacted in the spot market, please? Consistently it's been over 20%, and that has not changed. Thank you. These are historic And- Historic gaps. I mean, it used to be, you know, $50 a ton. Of course, that's when CRU was at $500-$600. You know, when we're at $1,490, it was outrageous. It was, you know, 25% off. You know, now it's, you know, maybe the other side of 20%, but it's significant. Okay, very interesting. I guess one last question with regards to product mix. Stelco's quite well-positioned right now from a mix or optionality perspective given the pig iron caster I think you recently completed building, but I don't believe has been actually fully ramped up or utilized. With the concern over pig iron supply out of Russia and Ukraine now, under what price or demand environment would you consider selling pig rather than steel? Obviously spot HRC has fallen a great deal but, you know, with the spot HRC price north of $900, is pig attractive or would you prefer to stick with finished steel grades for now? You know, listen, the situation just broke this morning. It's really too early for us to see what the impact. You know, I think we've seen over time, you know, these sanctions that come out, people expect all kinds of things. You know, take the oil price for instance. The oil price shot up this morning. I don't know. Russia's got a lot of borders, and why wouldn't they put more oil into the market and break with OPEC or whatever? No one knows what's gonna happen. It's way too early for us to, you know, to make decisions that, you know, that are all longer term. We have customers that we need to serve and, you know, we have to see. I mean, the news just broke this morning, and we're just not in a position yet to you know make decisions like that just you know on a whim. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. There are no questions waiting at this time. I would like to pass the conference back to the management team for closing remarks. I'd like to thank you all for joining the call today. Okay, go for it, Trevor. I'd like to thank you all for joining the call today. It's very appreciated for you taking the time. Everybody have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. That concludes the Stelco Holdings Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.