Thank you for attending the conference. I'm Sandy Martin with Three Part Advisors. Next up we've got Core Molding Technologies. Traded on the NYSE, $200 million market cap, really exciting transformation over the last several years. Even more exciting investor day coming up in a few months. We want to make sure and get as many investors that want to RSVP to that captured over the next couple of days as well. With us today is Eric Palomaki, CEO, and Alex Panda, CFO. I'll hand it over to the management team. All right. Thanks, Sandy. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. I'm Eric Palomaki, President and CEO at Core Molding Technologies. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you a story today, who we are, how we've transformed the business, and why we believe Core is well-positioned for profitable growth and long-term value creation. Let me start with the investment case. Core brings more than 45 years of award-winning manufacturing experience and complex composite solutions. We've built a strong competitive position around specialized capabilities with long-standing blue chip customers, building strong relationships. We also have a disciplined approach to capital deployment. Historically, we've had the longest track record in the heavy truck space. Today, the company is much broader than that. We've increasingly diversified across power sports, building products, industrials, and utilities. We believe our capabilities position us for a much larger opportunity set over time. What makes Core compelling is the combination of improving margin performance, high barriers to entry, as many of our applications, and growing pipeline of organic opportunities. We're seeing that translate into new wins, stronger customer relevance, and a clearer path to long-term growth. The Core story over the last eight years has really been a transformative story. Fortunately, I joined the company around the same time as David Duvall and got the chance to participate firsthand in the engineering, program management, and operations as we turned the business around. Now I have the opportunity to succeed Dave as CEO. In 2019, we focused on the turnaround, stabilizing operations, focusing on refinancing our balance sheet, fixing equipment, and keeping the business moving forward. Internally, we called it our must-win battle. That mindset and term has stuck with us since then. In 2020, we navigated through COVID and the Texas freeze. In 2021, we began turning our attention to the culture and making Core a great place to work, continuing to standardize our operating systems and broaden our end market focus. In 2022 and 2023, we made meaningful progress in customer contracts at pricing and operational optimization. In 2024 and 2025, we worked to create room to shift from recovery into a growth mode, expanding our wallet share, winning new business, and investing in the future. In 2026, our focus is very clear, to execute that growth, including our Mexico expansion, while maintaining the operating discipline that got us here. For those less familiar with Core, we are a publicly traded company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with operations across North America. In 2025, we generated $274 million in sales, $30.7 million in adjusted EBITDA, and with a 17.4% gross margin. We employ 1,239 people, and we serve diversified end markets, including transportation, powersports, building products, and industrial and utilities. What ties all of this together is our mission to be the most reliable, innovative, and responsive partner in engineered material and manufacturing solutions. That's how we want our customers to experience Core, and that's how we intend to keep creating value. Our North American footprint is one of our strategic strengths. We operate across North America, including facilities in Columbus, Cobourg, Winona, Gaffney, Matamoros, and Monterrey. Across that footprint, we have more than 1.3 million sq ft, 82 presses, and very large-scale capabilities, including presses up to 5,500 tons. That matters because the parts we produce are large too, complex, and they're too demanding for most of our competitors to handle. This is not a commodity manufacturing. The scale of the assets, the process and know-how, and the execution requirements create real barriers to entry. Shown in the lower right is our 5,500-ton press producing a personal watercraft hull in a single cycle. We're proud of the customer base we serve. Core has deep relationships with heavy truck OEMs. We work with many industrial leaders in that space. In powersports, our work has been meaningful over time. Our relationship with Yamaha began in R&D material development over 25 years ago. Our BRP business, which came through acquisition, has expanded significantly, nearly quadrupled over the last 10 years. At the same time, we're building momentum in building products in industrial and utilities. That matters because it supports both our diversification and our growth while reducing reliance on any single cycle over time. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Alex Panda, our CFO. Thanks, Eric. Good afternoon, everyone. Over the past five years, our sales have fluctuated due to a combination of market dynamics and portfolio decisions. In 2022 and 2023, we experienced elevated demand driven by a COVID-related surge in powersports and building products, which represent 25%-35% of our total sales. Those markets normalized in 2024 and 2025, and demand declined. During this period, we also made a deliberate decision on not rebidding on a major Volvo program due to insufficient returns, which further impacted sales. In addition, we are currently in a trough in the heavy-duty truck cycle. A truck cycle typically lasts seven to 10 years, starts off with five years of increases, followed by two years of declines. Based on our outlook, we expect this cycle to begin recovering in the second half of 2026. While sales have declined, we've focused over the last three years on improving profitability and returns. We've enhanced operational efficiency, strengthened pricing discipline, and improved contract structures, implementing material passthroughs with our customers and securing rebate structures with our vendors. As a result, we are now consistently achieving gross margins in the range of 17%-19%, even in our truck trough. These levels of gross margins were not achieved except for when we had peak demand. Looking ahead, we are well-positioned to benefit from improving truck cycle, a recovery in powersports, and a launch of approximately $105 million of incremental program wins, which supports continued margin enhancement and revenue growth. As we look to deploy cash, our strategy remains consistent and disciplined, focused on maximizing long-term shareholder value. We maintain a very strong balance sheet with effectively net zero debt and over $20 million of cash, giving us significant flexibility. Today, our highest priority is organic growth, particularly as we invest in Mexico expansion and support the recently awarded programs. We're targeting approximately $25 million-$30 million of total CapEx spend in 2026. Sustaining CapEx is approximately 3%-3.5% on an annual basis. We continue to actively evaluate tuck-in acquisitions, but given current valuation levels and our robust organic pipeline, M&A is not our primary objective right now. We remain committed to returning capital through our share repurchase program, and over the past three years have captured approximately $3 million of value, reflecting a meaningful discount to intrinsic shareholder value. In March of 2026, we increased our authorization to $7.5 million. That'll be spent over the next three years. Overall, our capital allocation approach is focused on maintaining flexibility with prioritizing high return opportunities. Our cash flow profile over the last three years highlights both the strength of the business and our disciplined capital deployment. We generated approximately $90 million of operating cash flow and over $50 million of free cash flow over this period. We've reinvested selectively with roughly $12 million directed toward growth initiatives while maintaining strong free cash flows. Looking ahead, we're accelerating investment with approximately $25 million of incremental growth CapEx spent over the next nine months, primarily tied to our Mexico expansion project. Importantly, we have capacity in place to do $425 million-$475 million of revenue on an annual basis, providing meaningful operating leverage as volumes recover. This combination of strong cash generation and existing capacity positions us well to scale efficiently as demand improves. Finally, I'd like to close with our long-term financial targets, which reflect both our growth opportunities and operational improvements. We're targeting revenue in excess of $500 million over the next three to five years, driven by a combination of organic growth and selective acquisitions. We expect operating margins in the 8%-10% range, supported by continued operation improvements, value-based pricing, and fixed cost leverage. We're targeting a return on capital employed of 14%-16%, driven by disciplined capital investment, automation, and working capital efficiencies. While timing will depend on the pace of the end market recovery, particularly in truck and powersports, the underlying drivers of these targets are firmly within our control. With that, turn it back over to Eric. Thanks, Alex. When people hear those targets, they probably think, "Hey, that's pretty aggressive," right? Sounds like a lot to grow to $500 million from a $284 million. We don't think so. We think it's achievable because the opportunity set is so broad. Composites solve real customer problems. They solve problems in transportation, aerospace, construction and agriculture, consumer products, building products, industrial applications. The growth there supports conversions from wood, metal, and concrete to composites. Why does that conversion continue? It's because customers want lightweighting, they want durability, they want corrosion resistance, they want sustainability, they want design flexibility, and in some cases, even tariff pressure on metals helps improve the value proposition for composites. For CORE, growth comes from both new customers and deeper wallet share with our existing customers, especially where we are already a trusted supplier and we can solve additional problems. Customers choose CORE because our solutions do more than replace a part. They improve the total system. Across truck, powersports, building products, and industrial applications, composites offer weight reduction, corrosion resistance, part consolidation, durability, cost savings, and recyclability. That combination matters in real-world applications where customers are trying to improve performance. Reducing the total cost, simplifying an assembly, or strengthen the value proposition that we offer our customers. This is where we offer large and ultra-large molding expertise. It becomes especially important because of the size and scale of the parts. We often are solving problems that other suppliers cannot. One great example shown in the lower right is the hollow composite fan blade used in industrial cooling towers. This fan blade is 12 feet long, hollow in the center, and molded in a single shot. A truly awesome process. A major example of organic growth that's already underway is through our trusted customer and our Mexico Growth Expansion Initiative. We announced last year that we won a $150 million Volvo roof contract, and that would launch in Matamoros, beginning with production in 2027. We expect that program to be accretive in the first full year with returns above our five-year target of 16% return on capital employed. To support that growth, we are investing $25 million in CapEx. That includes expanding the Matamoros facility with two new 4,500 ton hydraulic presses, as well as leasing a new 200,000 sq ft facility in Monterrey and consolidating our current Monterrey footprint, transferring DCPD molding to better serve our customers, and adding top coat paint capabilities. This is an important strategic step. It strengthens our position in truck, expands our capabilities, and supports better service economics. It opens the door for additional work in the construction and agricultural business where customers want a more full-service solution. That investment also supports entry into new and expanded verticals. The recent wins shown here demonstrate real diversification across the medical space with patient beds shown on the bottom, the automotive industry with electric vehicle startups such as the electric pickup that launches later this year, EV battery control enclosures, this example shown on a bus. Additional, we'd announced in the first quarter of this year, battery products that go into grid hardening solutions. Some of these opportunities, they take time to scale. The most important point is that the team is solving customer problems in markets where our materials and manufacturing capabilities are highly relevant. This is not theoretical diversification, it's commercial progress. If those diversification topics aren't exciting enough for you, the magnitude of the wins should be. Our rate of wins continues to exceed our expectations. We booked $45 million in 2024, $63 million in 2025, and $17 million in the first quarter this year. That includes both replacement business and adds up to approximately $105 million of incremental opportunities across applications like truck roofs, door skin SMC, UTV skid plates, electric pickup truck beds, utility battery enclosures, SMC compound, and other projects. Importantly, much of this is not fully visible in our P&L today. The commercial traction that we have here is ahead of when the revenue will be realized in the P&L. Once we win a program, why do customers stay with Core? The answer is execution and value creation. We deliver quality parts on time, and we help our customers solve problems in ways that lower total installed cost, improve performance, and reduce complexity. Sometimes the value is obvious in part consolidation. Sometimes it's faster installation, like taking a product that once required heavy equipment, the concrete block shown on the left, to install with a backhoe and make it a composite part that the piece price might be more expensive, but it can be installed by two men 10 times faster than the concrete part can be installed, reducing the total cost. Our breadth of portfolio matters. We bring different technologies to a problem, and we solve it with the right solution rather than having to force a single process into every application. This case study is a good example. By working early in the development with the customer, we helped create a large format, one-piece composite solution that simplified assembly, reduced labor, improved employee safety, and integrated multiple features into a single part. You can see the impact, even in something as simple as the lid comparison shown here, moving from a 90-pound polymer concrete part to a 25-pound composite lid. Changes the installation labor, the handling, the safety in meaningful ways. That's the type of system-level value that we want to create. Another strong example, our customers had a legitimate consumer safety regulation concern related to debris penetration into a recreational vehicle or utility terrain vehicle. Our team moved quickly to fabricate a test rig over a weekend. We began testing samples within seven days, this solution met the impact requirement while keeping the part composite and avoid moving to steel. That preserved the advantages of lower friction, no corrosion resistance, limited rock chip noises, as well as solving the safety challenge. That kind of speed, technical partnership, and process capability is what builds customer loyalty and we make a solution that's harder to displace. In closing, our message is simple. We believe Core Molding Technologies is stronger, more capable, and more disciplined company than it was just a few years ago. We've demonstrated the ability to protect margins through a difficult cycle. We were winning in meaningful ways, new business, as well as investing with discipline in our opportunities that we believe can create long-term shareholder value. We have visibility to revenue of $300 million in 2027. We believe the truck market recovery, the powersport strength, and some of the recent program wins position us well for growth. As with our Mexico expansion, which comes online later this year, we expect Core to be the number one producer of sleeper roofs in North America while continuing to hold a leading position in the personal watercraft composite content. Thank you for your interest in Core Molding Technologies. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to any questions. Thanks. Yes, sir. Just a question on the repair and remodel market. Are you guys seeing any improvement there? I know that's been a tough market along with powersports. On the, sorry, which market? On the repair and remodel residential construction stuff. Yep. For us, it is relatively new. We do the lattice products as one of our big building products, something you would buy at a Lowe's or a Home Depot. That definitely went through the COVID boom, COVID trough, and now is at a moderate level, I would call it. Door skins is a new product for us. To us, it is growing rapidly. We wouldn't have as much data in that particular product. Seems moderate is what I would say. Not in a boom and not in a bust. You see that as such a huge market, you guys probably have a whole bunch of new product opportunities. It is going forward. Yeah. Even in that door skin market, we have one of three customers launched that have already told us they want to work with us. Seems like there is lots of opportunity for us to grow that. Right now, we won so many SMC compounds that we are trying to temper that and get those launched before we go sell more of them. Okay. Yep. I am trying to understand the business, and the competitive landscape. If somebody had a need for this type of size mold, how many people have a similar press that do that? In North America, we can count them on our fingers. Okay. We know where they are, right? Okay. Are those made to order, that type of thing? Yeah. If you do something like that, do you keep some sort of IP or protection or something to make it somewhat less competitive with the other people? How does it work? There's not a lot of IP in it, but generally, there's only one set of tools. Although our asset is very expensive, like this mold that's shown here, that's a block of steel that makes these tables look small, right? It's massive. Just to move that program somewhere or to move a roof or a hood program would cost millions of dollars, sometimes tens of millions of dollars. Once it's awarded and set, not only is the press, which is our asset, very fixed, very difficult to move, relocate, repurpose, so is the tooling and the infrastructure that goes around it, that may be customer owned. The good news is it's very sticky and that it doesn't leave, but that also makes it hard to ever transfer something. Typically, the only time you win a program is a new model, new design, new launch. How important is it to be near your customer? It is valuable for a lot of the big stuff because it costs a lot to ship. To ship these boat hulls. You can only stack nine in a trailer. You're only shipping 30. Some of the roofs we make, we can only fit nine total roofs in a 53-foot semi-trailer. You want to be within 100, 200 miles. Part of the reason that Volvo award, they're building a new manufacturing facility in Monterrey, Mexico. We'll be 180 miles away from their facility, so very convenient versus making them in Virginia, U.S. and trying to ship them to Monterrey. Okay. You don't have to actually literally be next to them. You can be within a couple of hundred miles. Yeah. Your market, potentially could be a much larger geographical area. Yep. Remember, we're from Canada to Mexico. We've got plants all along. Doesn't mean we have the technology in every business location, but we've historically moved technology. We used to make DLFT boat hulls only in Minnesota. We now make them in Minnesota and in Matamoros, Mexico. Our engineering team can help transfer that, the knowledge, the skills, to another Core location. I think the other thing to add to your question about proprietary products would be our SMC, our Sheet Molding Compound, which is the material we put in a press to mold a part. That is like baking a cake. We don't have patents on each different recipe. How we put each ingredient in, the order, the temperatures, the speeds, and feeds is what we would say. Only we know that, and we control that. We won't patent it, but it's our knowledge that Core owns. Think of the Coca-Cola recipe, right? They don't publish the Coke recipe. Yeah, Bill. You may have just answered this question, but you mentioned that you're going to be a bit cautious about new business until you get the SMC customers launched. I think in my mind, SMC business is pretty simple to launch. Why do you need to be patient and why can't you just charge forward at full speed ahead? It's more simple in comparison to a roof program. Yeah. Absolutely, faster. We think six months instead of 18 months. We won four and five new programs very quickly. We hope to announce another win this quarter, but we're slowing a little bit in terms of there are, for example, 12 more door manufacturing companies we've identified. We haven't sent somebody out to knock on all those doors yet. To just make sure that we grow at a pace at which our internal technical team, as well as manufacturing team, can launch those successfully. It's the right thing to do to make sure we don't overwhelm them. Nothing worse with a new customer than we're late by a day. We have a quality issue. We want to put our best foot forward on every launch. Essentially, Alex, as you were saying, it's a different recipe. Yeah. The issue here is getting the recipe. Right right at a commercial scale. That's Yeah what we're talking about? validated, whether some of them are brand Yeah They got to be validated. It's never been built before. You got to build small samples, test them in a lab, and then you build larger samples. Think of it like scaling up production is what that would look like. Thank you. Yep. We've won a few smaller customers, SMCs, that we don't specifically talk about because it's half a million, a million dollars. Yeah. That is literally just running a couple extra 100,000 pounds of our current SMC that we make today. That is as easy as get a customer on board, ship it, validate the part, and then move on. Those have been really fast, but nothing of scale at that level have we won yet. Yeah. Thank you. Go ahead. Okay. We have one in the back. Do you have competitors? Are any quite bigger than you are? Yeah. The question is about competitors. In the SMC, think of Sheet Molding Compound. There are compounders that sell compound. That is a unique, different set of competitors. We have historically never been a seller of compound. We would be the new guy on the block. Probably not significantly different in size. Just historically, we made all our own compound and used it ourselves. From 55 million pounds a year, there are other guys in that same size. When you looked at molded truck roofs and truck parts, there are really only two in the U.S. that compete at our scale, CSP and MFG. One of them being an ESOP, one of them being just recently acquired 18 months ago by private equity. Those would be the two competitors in that space. Again, when you shift into our structural foam, low pressure injection, where we're doing the skid plates, boxes, some other powersports parts, that's again another completely separate set of competitors. It's one of the things that makes Core unique. We have all of those processes, and each one of them has a different set of competitors. When we get a customer problem, and we like to call it a solution sale or solving a customer's problem, they come to us and say, "Hey, we want to do this." We don't have to push a SMC solution or a structural foam solution or a DLFT solution. We can take the best engineering approach, and really offer them a solution. Thank you. Yep. Bill? Eric, in the presentation you referenced, I think it was $425 million-$475 million at capacity. Yep. You just highlighted that there are some very distinct businesses. Specific to the SMC, given that you've had so much success winning new business there, how does the capacity versus win rate versus when do you need to go knock on Alex's door for some more money to build out some plant? Yep CapEx? How do you think about that equation? We model our predictions for the next five years and try to estimate those, some of them with hard names. We know the companies right now that we could go knock on. Some might be, "Hey, we don't know yet." One of the things we decided we would really focus on is continuous improvement of our current operation. One product, even this year, we've already increased the throughput, so pounds per hour, by 20%. That's a lot cheaper than ever building another asset. We go to Alex and say, "Hey, we need another $10 million to build another SMC compounding facility." We better be sure we're out of capacity before we do that. That's something we're studying because we want to know how much it's going to cost, where would we put it? Would we put it in the same location, or do we want it split, and physically located somewhere else? For example, we ship a lot of SMC compound to Matamoros, Mexico from Columbus, Ohio. We know how much diesel fuel we burn shipping that material. That's instant savings if we were to move physically closer. There's some good paybacks too that are hard costs. Any cost savings, I like to call them hard savings or soft savings. Hard, we can book it, right? Alex and I can look at it and go, "We know that's a real savings," versus, "We think we'll save," or, "We think we'll get additional revenue." Those may be a little softer. When do you guess you're going to need to expand capacity? Not in 2027. 2028? Maybe announce it in 2027 for 2028, would be if I were to estimate it right now, that's what I would say. Awesome. Thanks. Have you done an M&A? Have we? Yes. 2015 and 2018 were two of the last two. Nothing recently. We put organic growth higher. We're going to choose organic growth if we can. We have a robust pipeline. We have a lot of customers asking us to quote stuff that needs additional presses like we're doing in Mexico, bigger projects. We would definitely prioritize those, although Alex and I continue to look at diversification opportunities to get something outside of truck, outside of powersports. That is where a bolt-on acquisition might fit nicely for us. Do you pass through the cost of the molding compound, and are you worried about any supply chain disruption from what's going on now with chemical and energy? Yeah. Good question about passing on price of raw materials. Something that's really changed over the last five years at Core is every contract, if we have a contract, there's fewer contracts with customers. If we do have one, it has a raw material adjuster, or what we would call RMA in it. Which maybe we can't adjust it immediately, but in the next quarter or each semi-annually, we have the opportunity. You might have a little headwind on the way up, but you're going to have a tailwind on the way down for your long-term investors. It will net out. We don't want to take the risk on resins or on oil, that's almost 100% out of our entire business now. We have that shifted to the customer and agreed, or we have no contract, in which case we could adjust the price on any PO basis. Have those costs gone up significantly? Yeah. Well, since the Iran conflict in the last 60 days, absolutely. Polypropylene, polyethylene both have gone up substantially. That thermoplastic side of our business has seen it much quicker. The thermoset is going to be much slower to react. A lot longer supply chains, a little bit less direct tie to the price of oil. Definitely impacts them. We're able to do that calculation pretty quick. We took the entire month of May to basically walk through our entire portfolio and all of our parts, calculated by part what the impact was on the resin increases, and now we're working with commercial to talk to our customers. From a lag standpoint, we're pretty good and on top of it. COVID helped. We had a lot of practice. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about? You talked about Volvo twice. You talked about Volvo dropping them as a customer and then Sure Getting to a new one. How long are the contracts, and if they become unprofitable like the other Volvo contract, what was the process of actually terminating that? Uh- Do you have to wait until the end or some? Through that 2002, 2003, 2004 timeframe across many of our customers, we waited for contracts to expire. If there was a legal agreement contract that either had fixed pricing or some term to it that we didn't want to get into that legal battle, we waited until that expired and then either didn't renew or adjusted the pricing at that time. There is absolutely the story that we have shared, that as that last Volvo program, we were not terribly profitable on it. Our customer knew that. Our revenue went down, and our gross margins went up. You can see, even in the financials, that that was the right decision. What we're fortunate enough for the last 18 months is that they're asking us, they awarded us the roof. They're asking us to quote other parts. It is clear that the data would show they got a good deal for a number of years preceding that. You're building, you're putting $25 million. Yeah. How long of a contract is it and that you can justify that is not going to. Yeah all that is going to be there? Good question. Specific to that investment, we actually have written in the contract that if the volumes aren't there as promised, or as we're explaining to you, that $15 million a year, then they refund us of that $20 million that we're investing for, up to 100% of it. For example, if you canceled the whole project, we get 100% of our capital back. In a typical truck program, lasts 10-15 years. 10 years. We don't want to sign a legal contract for 10 years, right? We would never want that length because you always want that period at some point in three years to have a conversation. That's different than being awarded it, and it's probably not moving until you redesign that truck. In not every contract, you have to actually build a facility specifically for that. Right. When you do that, you must have a much more comprehensive idea about what you're getting into, right? When we're putting in a big investment, we want to protect that investment. Yeah. Do you do much R&D, or you rely on other people to do R&D in the core, into the molding technology, and you just adapt what they come up with? Yeah, good question about R&D. We do a little bit of R&D investing, right? We are not that big of a company to be at PhD level, university level R&D. Our version of R&D would be around a product or customer solution. They come to us with a skid plate and say, "I have this problem. Can you solve it?" That's where our higher-end engineers and R&D team. We have an application. We have a customer for it. If we can make it happen, that's a perfect spot for us to spend R&D money, time, and investment. We have a couple engineers that are working on what I would call advanced manufacturing. That's advancing robotics. That's advancing a molding process. That's improving the speed of our throughput of a line. We do have people working on that. It's a version of R&D, depending on how you judge R&D. Thank you. All right. I'm going to end with you all got to sign up to come to our investor day. When is it? It's September 29th and 30th. 29th in Brownsville, Texas. On the 30th, we're going to take people over to our Matamoros facility. We'll take care of all your transportation, get you over the border. You just got to bring a passport and Global Entry, preferably. You get to see those 4,500 ton presses. To see a press that is two stories underground, three stories above ground, that's what makes us who we are, and the uniqueness of large and ultra-large parts. We'd love to have you. Reach out Reach out to Sandy in Three Part Advisors. Send us an email. We'll get you on the list and make sure we get you signed up. Thank you.