Good morning. Thank you for joining us this morning. And we are kicking things off with Reliance. Reliance is the largest metal service center and processor in North America. It operates over 300 locations in 40 states in the U.S. and also has international presence. With us today is Reliance's CEO, Karla Lewis. Thank you, Karla, for being with us. And maybe to kick us off, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what you're seeing in your major end markets right now? Yeah, great. Well, thanks, Katja and BMO, for having us here today. Thanks to those of you who came into the presentation this morning. So, you know, at Reliance, we're a pretty diversified metal service center company, both from the types of products that we sell as well as the end markets that we serve. We do that purposely because we sell into cyclical markets, and there's metal pricing volatility. So we try to minimize the volatility by being so diversified. So to go through some of the end markets that we sell into, our primary end market that we sell into is non-residential construction. That's a little over 30% of our sales dollars. And we include infrastructure in there as well. That's a lot of carbon steel, structural tubing, and plate products that go into the non-res construction end market. We also sell, you know, aluminum and different products as well. For us at Reliance, you know, that market has held up for us throughout 2024 and coming into 2025. At a service center, we're typically doing like four- to five-story buildings and lower. We're not on the big high-rise buildings, where we've seen, you know, I think strength. It wasn't growing so much during 2024, but it was holding steady, which is our outlook right now. And in that, you know, there's a lot of data center work, the grid. There's been a lot of building manufacturing facilities with people reshoring back to the U.S., a lot of public projects, schools, and things like that. So we see non-res remaining steady. If infrastructure, if we do see some of the funds that we've been waiting for for a few years start to get approved, that's good for Reliance as well. We sell into the automotive market, but we do that a little differently. We purposely don't sell metal direct into the automakers, but we process, we call it toll processing, a significant amount of metal, both carbon and aluminum, that goes into both in the U.S. and in Mexico. We do that. The reason we don't sell them the metal is we try to maintain a reasonable profitability level, and we don't have to take on any metal price risk when we're toll processing. So that's a really good business for us. Auto, we has held. We have been increasing capacity of our facilities on the toll processing side. And so we saw our total volumes processed pick up in 2024, and we expect that to continue into 2025. Although there may be a temporary slowing in some of the activity in automotive, we expect that to still be a healthy market in 2025. Aerospace is about 10% of our sales dollars. About half of that is commercial aero, and then the other half is defense and space. And we have locations in the U.S., primarily, you know, servicing Boeing and their subcontractors. We also have operations over in Europe supporting Airbus quite a bit. We support both platforms from our companies, but we have a presence with both. Certainly, there was some slowdown in the U.S. last year with some of the issues at Boeing and their lower build rates, but we do expect that to improve this year. And so we're looking for upside on aerospace. There's been a little extra inventory in the supply chain right now, but that's being worked out, and so we look for aero to be strong for the long term. We sell into general manufacturing would be our next largest behind non-res construction end market, but that's extremely diverse. We sell so many different products into so many different markets within that. Rail, barge, those were decent markets for us through 2024, coming into 2025. There are a lot of military applications where we've seen strength for products into different projects there. I saw a little bounce back in consumer products, which had been down. Ag and heavy equipment continues to be probably the weakest market within the general manufacturing. We also sell into semiconductor. That's a small part of our business, but when semiconductor is strong, it's a really nice part of the business. For that market, there has also been extra inventory in the supply chain, so that's been a little weaker. It had been at record levels, though, a couple of years going into 2023. We've seen that slow down. We expect that to continue at least through the first half of 2025, but long term, we're still very bullish on semiconductor. Maybe just staying on the semiconductor side, you last year or the last two years, you were investing and expanding that, and you said near term is a little softer, longer term still positive. How are those investments progressing right now? Can you update us on that? Yeah, so in particular, those investments were in a very niche company that Reliance has, and they sell electropolished stainless steel tubing and fittings into semiconductor, and it's the ultra high purity gas system, so these are the gases going throughout the chip manufacturing plant into the clean rooms, and with all of the semiconductor build going on, particularly in the U.S. right now, we are expanding our capacity there. Our smaller expansion in Texas has been up and running. It's been a little slower startup than we had hoped, still working on getting certifications with some of their customers, and then our larger facility, because of the kind of slowdown, we haven't put that into full production mode yet, but we do have capacity there. That company also has locations in South Korea and China, which is where over the last 10 years, 10 to 15 years, most of our growth has been there, but then moving back to the U.S. with the current builds here. And maybe on the tolling business, you mentioned the auto side, but if I'm not mistaken, there's also appliances side. Can you talk about how much, what the split there is and how you're thinking about future investment in that business? Yeah, so for our U.S. toll processing business, which is our largest, there are about 70% of the metal they process goes into automotive, about 20%-25% goes into appliance, and then there's just some miscellaneous, like tab stock for cans and things like that. Our company tries to do kind of the more difficult types of toll processing for those markets. We're one of the few companies when there was the push to more aluminum used in automotive. We're one of the few companies who've been able to handle surface exposed aluminum and process that for our customers. So that's been a high growth area for us and a lot of the capacity expansions. Down in Mexico, we're not on platforms down there with much aluminum, so it's primarily carbon steel. And those operations, we've, I think, expanded each of the four locations. We added a fourth and have expanded the other three a couple of times since we acquired that company in 2008, and that market, you know, has been strong. We'll see what happens between the U.S. and Canada and automotive with all the tariffs, but right now, both companies have been very strong. Maybe staying on the topic of tariffs, which is very topical, obviously, you do have exposure to your point to Mexico and Canadian market. How do you think the tariffs are going to impact you directly? And then in general, what are your customers saying? How are they getting ready for, you know, what's going on or how fluid this situation is? Yeah, so it's very fluid, and you don't know until it's final. We certainly haven't changed our strategy. At Reliance, we've been a longtime buyer of domestic metal. About 96% of our purchases last year were from U.S. mills. So we see, you know, limited direct impact to us. Certainly, we do import a little bit of metal for certain products. There could be some disruption of metal flowing over the borders here in North America, but we think that would be a minimal impact on Reliance. Generally, part of our model also is that we can pass through price increases or decreases to our customers. In prior cycles where tariffs and trade policies have been increased, it's generally driven the U.S. price of metal up. So we have a pretty consistent gross profit margin, kind of in a 29%-31% range. And so if we're getting a 30% markup on top of higher priced metal, that puts more earnings dollars to the bottom line for us. So, you know, who knows on this cycle, but previously it's been positive for Reliance. You mentioned your, you know, you target smaller customers. You're more spot or fully spot exposed. Can you maybe talk just on the pricing side? To your point, prices have moved higher. How quickly can you push prices to your customers? Yeah, so generally, and Katja kind of mentioned, you know, Reliance, part of our model is, you know, quick delivery to smaller customers. You know, last year we were about a little under $14 billion in sales, and our average order size is $3,000 an order. So that's a lot of orders every day. 40% of those orders, our customer calls us today, we deliver it tomorrow. So our customers find value in that. When they're buying smaller quantities, they're not as price sensitive as if they were at a large OEM putting in, you know, a buy for the month or something. So that, you know, makes us a little less price sensitive. Typically, when the mill announces an increase in whatever metal it is, we start to push that through to our customers even before we get the higher cost metal into our inventory. So we usually see a little expansion in our gross profit margin at the time of announcements, but we also kind of caution people that sometimes in our world, unfortunately, just because a mill says they're increasing prices, it doesn't mean prices go up. Sometimes, you know, they have to wait to see if the market will hold. Sometimes, even though there's a published price, they might be discounting and in the market selling below that. But typically, it's positive for us when there are price increase announcements. Maybe to that point, we've seen price increase announcement, actually multiple announcements on both the sheet, the HRC, as well as on the plate side, and you have exposure to both. Would you say right now that those prices are sticking or are we still seeing discounting? I would say they're not decreasing. So we do feel there's been a floor for those products, and we are seeing the increases start to stick. So we think they'll be real this time. The mills, you know, when we talk to them, they're busy, their order books are full. So that's a very strong sign and means they're not going to discount if their order books are full. Maybe just on the demand side, one of the conversations we're having right now is because of this threat of tariffs, right, March, it's starting, are customers in a way buying and building inventory ahead of that, or is this actually an underlying demand that is driving also the prices higher? Yeah, you know, there has been certainly an influx of imported material into the U.S. I think some foreign mills trying to get ahead of the tariffs, some, you know, U.S. customers buying import ahead of the tariffs. We, in our book of business, we haven't seen a significant change on that, but we are hearing of whether it would be customers of ours or competitors of ours. If they typically were buying offshore, some are scrambling a bit now to try to, you know, get the domestic mills to recognize them. So there is, you know, a bit going on with buying patterns. I don't know within the channel how much people are stocking up right now. And, you know, at Reliance, we really try because of our models I talked about and because we're, you know, buying on the spot, selling on the spot. We just focus on turning our inventory. You hear a lot of people talk about, you know, destocking and restocking, and that's not the model that we pursue at Reliance. We try to just be buying in line with our shipment levels, but certainly it does happen throughout the industry, and I'm sure there are some people buying ahead a bit now before prices go up. Maybe taking a step back on the sourcing, you said primarily you source domestically, but there is some exposure to sourcing internationally. Which products specifically or material are you sourcing internationally? And is there a reason why that is happening or you have optionality domestically also? Yeah, there are a few, and I'm not going to get off the top of my head right now with all the different products that we carry, but there are a few specialty products that aren't produced in the US. I think generally some of the specialty type stainless products, there are some produced in the US, but that's typically where we'll go offshore. You know, we do buy a little of kind of a more commodity type of metal, depending on the markets, what's going on, partly just to be aware of the offerings that are coming into the US. But, you know, the US mills, we feel we treat them well and they treat us well. Buying from them, it's shorter lead times. It allows us to manage our inventory better. You know, if you go offshore, you could have, you know, be tied up for months while you're waiting on the metal to come in. It could get delayed. There's price risk while it's on the way here. So it's just been better for us to buy domestically. And then maybe shifting gears to your sustainable gross profit margin, it's been sustained between 29%-31%, as you mentioned. Let's say longer term, is there opportunity to further grow with and how would you achieve that? Yeah, so we hope that we will continue to grow, increase our gross profit margin. Historically, we had been kind of in a 24%-26% gross profit margin range, and about 10 years ago, we've always done some value added processing. We used to process about 40% of our orders that we shipped, and then about 10 years ago, we saw that the equipment, the processing equipment we use, the saws, the lasers, et cetera, had really advanced, and, you know, they could process faster. They could give us the metal a better finish, a tighter tolerance than the former equipment had, and we at the same time, our customers were asking us to do more for them, and so we started investing pretty significantly into more value added processing equipment. So we raised our gross profit margin range to currently 29%-31%. That came in stages. We process about 50% of the orders we ship now. We've been continuing to invest in a lot of value added processing equipment over the past few years. Some of that's still coming online, being installed. So in 2025, we processed more metal than we did in 2024 and, you know, 2023, 2022, et cetera. It's been stepping up, but about half of our orders processed, half are just more pure distribution. Through acquisitions and organic growth, we've been growing both parts of the business, processed and distribution. So we were still at about 50% of our number of orders processed in 2024, even though we did more processing. And with that, that's the value added processing is typically priced on a time or a piece basis. So that the profit we get for the value added processing doesn't fluctuate with metal prices. So that helps keep our margins up when metal prices go down and also helps drive up our, you know, gross profit margin range. So as we do more and more value add, we would expect, but we don't know exactly when and exactly by what amount we'll raise our gross profit margin range. Now you have, you know, when you compare your gross profit margin to your peers, it's significantly above peers. And some of your peers are talking more about investing in value added processing. The view is that they can bring that margin higher. Is there a concern that if the industry continues to move more aggressively in investing in value added processing, that over time that will take some of that margin benefit away? I think there's an opportunity for some of our competitors to increase their margins as they do more value add. But it's also, it's not just having the piece of equipment, it's knowing how to operate it. And, you know, with Reliance being the largest and we've by far been the leader in investing in equipment, you know, we have a lot of know-how spread out through our 320 locations of people who can come in. We can get our equipment up faster. We think we can run it a little better, but it also depends what your customer base is. So just because your processing doesn't mean you're going to automatically get a higher margin. You've got to be able to provide the service behind it and have the right customer base. Most of the value added processing you currently do is what we call first stage processing. Is there any desire to move up the value chain? Yeah, so typically we're changing the size or the shape of the metal so that it can go onto our customer's production line more, you know, kind of go directly onto it for them. So we see a lot of, you know, continued activity there, but we have had a lot of customers now, like take non-residential construction, the structural fabricators. They used to call us and they would just want like a beam. And so we would sell them the beam and then they would do two or three different processes to the beam within their facility before they took it to the customer site. And a lot of those customers now ask us to do that, but they buy the beam from us and ask us to do the processing and sometimes ask us to deliver it directly to the customer site on their behalf. So that's an example where, you know, we're doing multi-steps sometimes of processing for our customers. We also do have a couple of smaller companies that we would call fabrication companies where they're doing kind of widgets, right? They're doing components, small pieces, typically with laser processing that then go to our customer. It's still not a finished part, but it is a little further downstream. And so we continue to look at opportunities to do that, but we also try to be very careful not to compete with our customers. And Karla, you have said in the past that you want to grow volume. Can you talk a bit about is this going to be driven organically and/or through acquisitions? Yeah, so we at Reliance, a couple of years ago, we started talking internally to our teams about smart profitable growth. And what that means, Reliance, there was a period where we were really focused on quality of earnings. And we really only went after the really high margin business throughout the company. And we turned down some orders. And a couple of years ago, we said, well, we want those orders too, especially we know that metal prices will come down. We need more profit dollars to cover our expenses, to drop our earnings line. And so we have been, our teams have done, we think a great job. We've been outpacing the industry from a shipment level. So we've been taking share, but at the same time, we've maintained the 29%-31% gross profit margin range. So we're not going after every piece of business, every ton that's out there, but we're going after, you know, the ones that are reasonable profit levels. Maybe a question, kind of what's next for Reliance at this point? Yeah, what's next is, you know, we just want to keep growing. There's always room to do better. We think our teams do a really good job out in the field. We've, you know, got strong cash flows to continue to invest both organically and through M&A. There are still a lot of good companies out there. We've been, you know, returning value to our stockholders. We just increased our dividend again and had record share repurchases in 2024. So we just want to keep doing more of what we've been doing for the last several years. When you do look at acquisitions, what are you specifically looking at in a target? Yeah, so primarily we're looking for, you know, a company and a team that has high integrity, treat their customers and their employees well, profitable companies that, you know, have been successful on their own, and we just want to bring them in, provide more resources and let them continue to prosper and grow. Are there any specific areas that you would like to grow more? We'd like to continue to grow in most areas that are profitable. We generally don't have a target list or, you know, we look at the opportunities that are available and see how that fits in from a geographic, a product, and end market standpoint, and there's still, because our service centers are generally specialized, we might have five to 10 service centers in the same geographic area, but they're generally each servicing a different end market or carrying different products, so that leaves a lot of opportunity where we can still grow and expand. And maybe one last one. Are these the sizes of these potential targets? Are those smaller type of companies or are there any larger opportunities out there? Yeah, most of the potential acquisitions that we see and just the metal service center industry in the U.S. is primarily made up of, you know, family owned and operated service centers. Generally, maybe a revenue base of $30 million-$100 million would be the majority of the companies that are out there. But there are some multi-billion-dollar revenue companies and we certainly are interested in those companies as well. Karla, thank you so much for being with us today. All right, thanks Katja. Thank you everyone.