Okay. Good morning, everyone. Our next presentation of the day is Metallus to Okay. Good morning, everyone. Our next presentation of the day is Metallus to Okay. Good morning, everyone. Our next presentation of the day is Metallus to MTUS. For those who are not familiar with the company, Metallus is a manufacturer of alloy, carbon, and micro-alloy steel products. We are fortunate to have with us today CFO Kris Westbrooks. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. Please utilize the Q&A box for questions, and I'll present them to management. With that said, Kris, thanks for being with us. The floor is yours. Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. As John mentioned, my name is Kris Westbrooks, CFO with the company. I've been here since late 2018. Joining me today is Nick Yacobozzi, Nick's our Chief Accounting Officer, and Jenna Johnson, who manages our financial reporting team. With that, we're going to kick it off on slide three. Just a little background on who we are as Metallus. We're a specialty steel manufacturing company. Been in operation for over 100 years, based in Canton, Ohio, primarily serving U.S. customers. We were a division of the Timken Company until mid-2014, when the company was spun out as a separate independent public company. As a result of that connection to a bearing company for many years, we develop clean steel practices, and those are required and very critical to all of our end markets today. We're known as a high-quality clean steel producer, and we've expanded that primarily bearing applications back in the day, now to automotive, industrial, aerospace, and defense, as well as the energy supply chains. We were named Timken Steel up until about one year ago, and we rebranded the company to Metallus. That rebranding recognized our evolution into a specialty metals company, broader than just steel, and that includes the processing and finishing of other metals to serve defense and industrial customers. We have about 1,900 employees in our company, including about 1,200 United Steelworkers, and the majority of those folks are all located here in Ohio. Jenna, if you flip to slide six, I'm going to spend a minute to talk about the transformation that the company's been on over the last 10 years, and more specifically the last few. Since the spin in 2014 through 2020, the company had struggled to be consistently profitable through the cyclical steel industry, the various demand cycles that we experienced. We had new leadership that joined the company in 2020, and then Mike, our CEO, joined us in 2021, and that marked a period of significant transformation and cost reduction. At that point, we had taken out about $100 million of cost of the business during that period, and that cost takeout continues to benefit us today, partially offset with some inflation that we've experienced. We had a new leadership team. It's been now over two, pushing on three years, a new leadership team under Mike's direction, focused on operational and commercial excellence, and we've been supported by an enhanced focus on safety. Our safety management system is much improved, and we've really accelerated our employee training and development programs. As we enter 2025, our focus is on operational excellence to deliver what we believe in an increasing demand environment for our customers and continue to focus on safety as we drive profitable growth for the company. Turning to slide seven, we do serve a very diverse and demanding group of customers in a variety of end markets. The 2024 year, it was a low point for the steel industry in the cycle, and that was reflected in our total shipments, and we had about 60% melt utilization last year. Our product offering is really three primary areas. We produce round steel bars that's known as SBQ or special bar quality steel. We also produce seamless mechanical tubing, also known as SMT, and then we produce manufactured components, primarily for the automotive industry, but also for some industrial and defense applications. Our end market participation, it's fairly balanced between automotive and industrial, and we have targeted growth within aerospace, defense, and the energy markets. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had our year-end earnings call, and Mike, our CEO, highlighted several of the new product wins in these markets, and I would encourage you to take a look at those. These are very highly engineered products where performance and our unique assets are critical, and as a result, the margin opportunity on these new products is significantly higher than our historical average. There are several defense applications that Mike talked about, as well as an oil and gas application, and we're excited about supporting our customers in those, and that's just a subset of the types of programs that we're looking to expand and grow in 2025. We also see growth in automotive and industrial, and that's primarily through targeted share gain at certain important customers. Moving on to the next slide is the quick summary of our financials. The fourth quarter performance is highlighted here. It was a step improvement from the third quarter, but still a very weak market as we closed out 2024. Looking at our outlook for the first quarter, overall, we do expect to see improved profitability on higher shipments this year. It's a combination of targeted share gain that I mentioned earlier, as well as strength in aerospace and defense demand. Commercially, we target about 70% of our order book to be on annual pricing agreements, and given some of the weaker demand we experienced closing out the year, our base pricing in 2025 is expected to be down for those contracts, low to mid-single digits on a percentage basis relative to 2024 average pricing, but still solid prices relative to historical cycles. The remaining 30% of our order book, that's priced on the spot market. We do expect to see strengthening in spot pricing as the tariff impact is fully realized and demand begins to recover throughout 2025. Our lead times right now, they're extended versus a few months ago. We're currently booking orders into late second quarter. In terms of distribution inventories, we do support our customers through the distribution channel. About 20%-25% of our business goes through distribution. We have seen inventories come down over the last few months. There are still pockets of some excess inventory, specifically in the energy market down in Houston, but we do see improvement in distribution demand to start the year. We are seeing an uptick in customer inquiries, and our order intake has been higher, pretty consistent on a weekly basis since late 2024. We believe that is partially due to the trade environment, which will be a net positive for the company, which we believe will be a net positive, but we also are getting benefit of the restocking and distribution, as well as the share gains that I mentioned earlier. From an operating performance perspective, we do expect to have a higher melt utilization rate in the first quarter. We targeted approximately 70% utilization versus we were in the mid-50s in the fourth quarter and a full year number of closer to 60% last year, and that's driven by the higher demand. In terms of scrap prices, we have seen those begin to rise the last couple of months, generally positive for the steel industry and ultimately our raw material spread. In terms of cash flow, to round out this slide, we do expect first quarter cash flow to be negative, primarily driven by two things: higher working capital. As demand improves, you see higher receivables, higher inventory to support that demand, but we also have a significant pension contribution that's required here in March that we'll be making shortly. As the year continues, I anticipate our cash flow is going to improve, and we'll drive, as we drive profitability, as we efficiently manage our working capital and as our pension contributions come down to a much lower level. Jenna, if you flip over to page nine, our long-term relationships with our customers span decades and primarily blue-chip customers across all of our end markets, including within distribution, and we have several tailwinds that are in place today that we believe will benefit the company as we progress throughout the year, first being the defense munition restocking. We are a critical long-term supplier of quality steel for munitions. Last year, we were awarded a significant $100 million government grant to increase our capacities to support those requirements, and we announced a couple of quarters ago that we're targeting now $250 million of total sales, over $250 million in total sales of aerospace and defense products in 2026, as the demand for those products steadily increases over the next couple of years. That's more than double the level of sales we had in that market in 2023, and that is a strong margin business that we're excited to support our important customers there. The second tailwind we see is the onshoring. We're seeing customers really do two things. They're de-risking their supply chains. That started a couple of years ago coming out of COVID. That's now accelerated. Customers are seeking dual sources, and they're spreading out their risk with a variety of domestic producers, and we're one of those that are happy to step up and support, and we're seeing that strengthen now with the trade environment. About 40% of our tube products that are consumed in the U.S. are imported, and about 15% or so, maybe a little bit higher, of bars are also imported into the U.S. That is a significant opportunity to the extent the trade environment sticks, which we believe that it will for steel and aluminum. That will drive down that level of import and give us an opportunity to competitively support our customers in those spaces. The third tailwind we see is the increasing requirement for specialty metals. Those are much higher value products per unit, and they're used in demanding defense and industrial applications, some of which we make, some we procure from the outside. We're currently buying specialty metals from others, and then we use our highly efficient producing process downstream for tubing and for rolling to make these products with shorter lead times. That's an opportunity for us. Oftentimes, these products are vacuum arc remelted or vacuum induction melted products, which are very high quality, and we're excited to support our customers in that space. The volume is not as significant as some of these other markets, but the price per pound in some cases is significantly higher. The last one to mention is the automotive propulsion systems. That is transitioning on a slower pace than people initially thought, but it's also a catalyst for our business. We support all propulsion systems, internal combustion hybrid, as well as electric vehicles, primarily for light trucks and SUVs. Jumping further back in our presentation, back to page 23, we set some long-term targets, and we captured those on this page. We established these targets in early 2022, and they represent a five-year through cycle average through 2026, and we're on track to achieve our return on capital target even with the challenging 2024. I see opportunity for improvement here as we deploy approximately $125 million of CapEx this year, with approximately $90 million of that funded by the government with no repayment or cost. That is going to drive an improvement in return on capital once those assets are in place, and we ship higher levels of volume through those new assets. We are below the adjusted EBITDA margin target, and that's driven by 2024's performance, but we still have two years left with improving demand. Melt utilization, that's an important measure for the industry, and it's generally a measure of efficiency and demand, and we have an opportunity to improve that as well here in 2025. Our average was negatively impacted by the demand environment last year, as well as some operating challenges back in 2022 that we've worked to remediate. We have also invested considerably in our assets and our employees, specifically aimed at this metric, as well as targeted a higher base load of automotive and industrial products for our mix this year to drive that utilization back up again. These targets, they're supported by a very strong balance sheet. We have minimal debt and ample cash. Turning two pages further to our capital allocation strategy, we've talked about most of these elements already, how we focus around commercial excellence, manufacturing, and reliability, and we seek to balance that capital allocation and maintain a very strong balance sheet. Number one, maybe go one more page. Yep, from a capital allocation standpoint. Number one, we invest in profitable growth. That's going to be a continued focus supported by the strong CapEx spend this year and government funding. Second, the balance sheet, we're targeting to continue to maintain a strong balance sheet through all steel cycles, and we've been active repurchasing our shares, returning capital to shareholders. We've considerably reduced our shares outstanding 22% over the last several years, and that's going to be a focus for us as we move forward, leveraging our strong balance sheet. To wrap up my comments on page 26, we're really proud of our team's accomplishments over the past few years in a challenging demand environment, and we're excited for what is to come here in 2025. We're expecting this year to be much better than 2024, supported by several market and regulatory tailwinds that I mentioned earlier. I want to say thank you for your time, and I'm happy to take Q&A here for the next 15 minutes or so. All right. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A box, and I'll address it to Kris and his team. I'd like to kick it off, Kris, with what you mentioned in your prepared remarks. You talked about scrap. Steel prices have risen notably this year. Two things. Can you provide a little bit of color of the potential impact and timing to your business, and maybe discuss why your share price hasn't reacted much to the changes in steel pricing? Is there not a lot of belief out there? Can you talk to those? Yeah, sure. The first part around scrap, it was pretty depressed last year, the scrap prices, primarily driven by demand. We did see an uptick in the month of March, or February. It was around a $50 increase in the busheling, which is the prime scrap that all of our customer agreements and sales are indexed on. That was a significant step up, and then there's a one-month lag. You see that in your results the following month in March. Really only one month of the first quarter has benefited by these higher prices. Fast forward to the month of March, we recently saw another increase of about $30 a ton that'll benefit our sales in April. We have now had consecutive strength in the scrap market. Typically, when you see prices rise quickly, like we did in those two months, that creates something called raw material spread, that is profit. We are not managing the business to maximize that, but it is an impact or a benefit when you see pricing rise. In terms of why that is the case, those prices have risen. I think we are seeing demand grow. Inventories were low at the mills at the end of the year. There was really cold weather. The start of 2025 is tough for scrap yards to process scrap, and that drives up costs. Those are all factors, and exports play a big part of that as well. We are a net exporter of scrap. This year, we expect to see, outside of Metallus, other steel companies ramp up capacity with quite a few new investments, and that's going to consume more scrap as well. That That should put a good positive base underneath the scrap pricing. Generally, when scrap prices are higher, the profits of the steel industry are stronger as well. In terms of our share price, it's hard for me to say exactly why. There's still a lot of uncertainty in the market, but what our focus is on is daily execution, and we believe that if we execute our plan, we're going to deliver stronger profits, positive cash flow through the cycle, and our share price should be rewarded for that. We are coming off a very low point in 2024, yet we were still profitable and cash flow positive. We're in a much better position than we were years ago, and we're set with a fully staffed organization to capitalize on growing demand. There are several questions from the audience about your growing participation in the aerospace and defense market. I think at this point, maybe it's best just to break them down. First, can you discuss the ramp that you touched on in your prepared remarks? Up to $250 million next year. What does that ramp look like? What are the capital requirements behind it? Yeah. It's a pretty steady ramp. Now, it requires our customers who are also installing capacity to increase through that period of time. There's been some challenges in that supply chain really getting legs underneath them, but we're seeing the consistent growth in that end market. It's primarily going into munitions. The big player there is it's the 155 millimeter shells. That's the largest consumer of our aerospace and defense sales, but there's a bunch of other programs too, smaller programs that are high value, missiles, and other systems that we ultimately are supporting. Pretty steady. About 75% of it is reliant on that 155 millimeter shell, and then the rest is things that are in our pipeline that we've either won or we have a high probability of winning. Sometimes they're one or two off. Orders Mike talked about some canister products on the earnings call, and we see opportunities like that elsewhere. We are continuing to quote new business. There's a big summit this week that our team is at, meeting with our important customers as well as the army to make sure they think of us when they have needs. In terms of overall aerospace and defense, it's primarily defense. There's very little aerospace. We do see that as an opportunity for growth, but where we participate today in aerospace is primarily in the landing gear through forging companies. Fair enough. You touched on new customers in your prepared remarks. Can you share your insights on existing and new customer relationships and how they evolved over the past years? Yeah. We've had long-standing relationships that we're growing with as their businesses grow or as they diversify their supply chain. We're excited about that. There's also some opportunities in the rail industry that we've historically supported, but we haven't for years, and that's good base business for us. We've had some wins there, again, as a dual source against others in the U.S. There are some of the foreign Japanese automotive companies that produce in the U.S. that bought from domestic sources, but then they also imported product, and we're having wins in that space. There are some oil and gas players that we've not done business with for a long time that we're actively talking to as well. In terms of new products, this is these specialty metals we're buying from the outside, oftentimes supporting existing customers. There's a really great application we're working on right now for the Air Force through a defense company, and that's using outside product that we ultimately then roll and pierce in a very efficient way. We are seeing considerable opportunities there as well. It is really spread across all end markets, but leveraging that base of trusted long-term customers is the starting point. Another question from the audience about what your current order book looks like and what level of visibility you have in 2025 and beyond. Yeah. Our order book has strengthened considerably over the last three to four months. We're currently booking into late May at this point, actually a little bit later. Shortly, we'll be into late second quarter. We do have some underlying feelings of what the full year are going to be, but we really are taking orders still for the second quarter to fill that out. It got pretty low, the order book. Our visibility was a month or a few weeks as we were in mid-2024, late 2024. It is really the order book has doubled almost, and our visibility is pushed out later into the quarter. A question about the transition to electrical vehicles and how that's affected Metallus's steel products in the automotive industry. Yeah. Like I have mentioned, we are lucky to be a player in all of those applications, all different propulsion systems. EVs do consume slightly less SBQ than an ICE. However, it is really model-dependent. It depends on if we are on the GM automatic transmission vehicle, we actually have less content on that than we do on the new Silverado EV. It really depends on the vehicle. Our goal is to get out there and quote all of those programs and secure as many of them as we can, going direct to the OEM as well as some important tier one suppliers as well. It is something we are watching closely. It is moving slower. Some of the EV programs that we have won, they pulled at a much slower rate than we were originally anticipating. That's fine because the ICE program is also pulling strong, and we typically have that as well. Got it. Got it. Question about the balance sheet, giving you strong liquidity positions, are acquisitions part of your 2025 growth strategy? If so, which products or end markets would you be targeting for growth? We're always looking for creative acquisitions that will expand our product offering as well as our end market participation to get us closer to the customer. In our base plan, there's not acquisitions in there. We're focused on executing the base plan. There's plenty of opportunity to grow, but we continue to look for those other opportunities, people that consume our steel or that expand our offering to our customers. It is really dependent on the flow of those transactions, and we're going to continue to do that. Our strong balance sheet supports our ability to do that to the extent it makes sense, but we're also going to be thoughtful and not rush to do it just to do it. It's got to make sense. Another question from the audience about some of your prepared remarks. You mentioned some older oil and gas customers that have come back to work with you again. Maybe you could discuss what separates your offerings from competitors that continues to drive demand from those past existing and new customers. A lot of it's around service and quality. That's what we're known in the industry for. When we had our challenges back in 2022, we weren't able to support them as greatly as we had liked. We have deepened those relationships. I'll be in Houston next week. I have an opportunity to meet with some of our important customers, and I'm looking forward to hearing exactly from them what they see in the outlook and how we can better support them. We are committed to that market. That said, it's a smaller portion of our overall order book than it was maybe 10 years ago or 5 years ago. It comes down to service and quality. Price is important, but I don't think it's number one. We have to be competitive. We're generally not the lowest price, but we're being pulled in because of that service and quality offering and the ability to provide domestic steel and not have to pay that 25% tariff from the imports. We used to have our own machine shop down in Texas. That was closed years ago, but we still leverage a network of suppliers to support that market, and we've deepened those relationships as well. Question about mill utilization. Is it lagging behind your projections or targets? Is that a function of volume, or is there an operational issue that's behind that? It's primarily volume. In 2022, though, we did have an operational challenge, and we were down for a month. We have recovered from that. Right now, we're running full. We need to execute daily to hit our targets. In 2024, we shut down for a week or two if we didn't have strong demand and started back up again. We took some time out of the schedule in 2024 to balance production with demand. That was more intentional last year. As we ramp up in 2025, I expect those utilization rates to continue to increase as the demand is there in front of us. We've made considerable investments in the people and to our assets to ensure the security of that for the future, and we're very comfortable where we're at. Question about who your primary competitors? Yes. We have a strong competitive set out there, but we generally perform well against them. When you look at the competition on the small bar sizes, Gerdau is a strong competitor supporting the automotive industry. They're probably the largest supplier of automotive SBQ out there. We come up to them quite often. On the mid sizes and larger sizes, you get into Steel Dynamics as well as Nucor on the larger sizes. We're still a larger share of that market than they are, but we see them some as well. Those companies typically like the higher volume, longer runs of consistent products. Where we differentiate ourselves is we're willing to take the complexity. We're willing to take the one-off heats of complex products and make those. In one day, we may make 10 different grades of steel. Other companies may make one grade of steel for a week. It is a very different model, and we generally are compensated for that. Imports are also part of the competition. I mentioned that on the tubing side, about 40% of the U.S. consumption is imports. On the bars, it is about 15%. It is higher on the large bars. We are typically a medium to large bar company, which is what we're known for, and the imports are even higher in that space. No one has the range of size offering that we do. Those companies I mentioned, they typically have one facility that makes what we make, but it's in certain size ranges, and we have the full range from just shy of 2 inches all the way up to 16 inches in diameter. Right. Right. Actually, follow up on your M&A comments. Is there any sort of specific product components or end market that you'd find most beneficial to your business in your search? Companies that consume our steel are very important to look at because there's an opportunity for synergies there. Industrial manufacturing companies are one area of focus that make high-quality parts for that industry, as well as aerospace and defense that, again, consume our steel. What we have to be cognizant of is our trading multiple relative to some of these companies to make sure that we can bridge that gap and drive growth as well as synergies. Downstream producers are typically what we're focused on. Wouldn't say we wouldn't look at another producer of melted products, but right now, the capacity is pretty balanced in the U.S. from an SBQ standpoint. Our opportunity is to grow downstream. Got it. Question about capital spending needs. We know we had the defense rollout that's required capital spending. How does that spending outlook kind of look in light of that and post that? Yeah. We're still comfortable with that $30 million-$40 million range of base CapEx. That's what we're focused on. We're in that range for 2025. We were a bit higher than that the last few years, mainly because we saw some opportunities to invest in good return assets, as well as we had higher safety spending the last couple of years. I think $30-$40 million for base. We're always looking strategically at what larger investments may happen in the future. We have not committed to any of those. We have our hands full for the next few years with these existing assets that we've announced, and we're focused on that. Okay. We're just about out of time. Kris, do you have any closing comments? I really appreciate everyone's time today. Hopefully, a few of you we get a chance to talk throughout the day today and encourage you to reach out if you want to have any follow-ups. We welcome the opportunity to engage and also welcome you to come and visit us and see our facilities. It is an impressive set of assets, and they show well. I would love to show them to you. Please let us know. Thank you for your time today. Thank you all. Everyone, have a great day. Appreciate it.