Good morning, everyone. This morning, we're starting with Reliance, and with us today is CEO, Karla Lewis. Karla, over to you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you to BMO and Katja for inviting Reliance to the conference. We're just gonna kick it off with a really quick overview of who Reliance is. We're a metal service center and processor, most diversified and largest company. We've been in business since 1939. We've grown through acquisitions, 76 acquisitions completed since our IPO in 1994. We think we have a bit of a differentiated approach with a really local focus, where we are generally delivering to customers within a 200-mile radius, decentralized operating model, putting decision-making close to the customer. We really focus on managing our inventory, strong pricing discipline, and have limited contractual sales. This shows our product diversification. We believe the most diversified in the industry, and that's on purpose, because not all metal prices go up and down at the same time, and we sell into cyclical end markets, so we think the diversification's important. Last year, $14.3 billion in sales, with an average order size of about $3,000. 40% of our orders, customer calls today, we deliver tomorrow, and that's really kind of our sweet spot that we think helps us drive up our gross profit margins, which you see here, our trajectory over time, rising our gross profit margin. The sustainable part of that is really through doing increased levels of value-added processing. Recently, we've, in the last few years, been focused on growth, and our people have really been out there taking market share, and we've been growing, our tons shipped significantly more than the industry average. Countercyclical cash flows, so, we seem to perform well with our model through different cycles. As I mentioned, we continue to invest through both organic growth with capital expenditures and also through acquisitions, and also focus on returning value to our shareholders through both our dividend, which we just increased again for the 33rd time since our IPO, and also through share repurchases, and just a visual of our stock price, compounding above the S&P 500 over the years. That's the intro. Perfect. Thank you. If anyone has any questions, please send them in through the app. Maybe starting off with the current market condition, can you talk a bit about your major markets, what you're seeing, what your customers are saying? Yeah, as mentioned, you know, we try to be diversified and sell into many different end markets. Many times, we don't know exactly where our product is going because we sell to a lot of subcontractors of the OEMs. We do some sales direct into OEMs, but a lot through small job shops and tiers two and three. Our largest end-market exposure is in non-residential construction, which we would also throw infrastructure in there. For Reliance, similar to many other companies, data centers has been a big driver of demand for all of us. You know, at Reliance, we have the part of the data center that would fit into the non-residential construction part with the building, but we're also selling products that would go into the interiors of the building, also into the energy grid. We're selling tubing. We're, you know, we're selling to go into the racking on the interior. We're perforating metal for the enclosures around the servers. We have tubing for some of the cooling systems and some of our high-end, you know, liquid tubing that the water travels through for the coolants. We're selling copper into it. We're touching data centers in many different ways with our diversified product mix. Data centers in the non-res side, infrastructure has been strong. We also have continued to see a lot of public infrastructure works with hospitals, airports, schools. That has stayed strong for us. Reliance and service centers, typically, we're selling into, like, 5-story and below buildings. We're not doing the big high-rises. There's been a lot of bridge work, general manufacturing. There's a lot going on in the defense world. The government's been pretty active, a lot of related companies around that. We've seen consumer products come back a bit, industrial machinery, some of the heavy construction equipment. Ag continues to be weak, we see that continuing to lag. We also touch automotive through our toll processing companies. Toll processing means that we don't own the metal, so we don't take on any price risk, but we inspect, process, and deliver a lot of metal into the automotive companies with the steel and aluminum producers as our customers, we've seen auto holding up, at least for the part of the business that we have. Aerospace, we sell a lot into aerospace. There has been a bit of an overhang in the supply chain for the last year and a half to two years. We are seeing that being worked out, with build rates improving in 2026, we look for continued improvement in that end market as we, as we continue through 2026. Also semiconductor we touch. That had been a really hot market. For us, it's been a little slower the last couple of years because, again, they also bought heavy coming out of COVID, are still working through some of the metal that they have in their supply chains. Overall, going into 2026, our customers are optimistic. We're seeing a lot of activity, a lot of inquiries, a lot of big projects out there. Again, a lot of government and defense projects, that are in the works, so we're excited about 2026. We do have a follow-up question from the audience on the semiconductor business. The question is: How big is your semiconductor business, and what kind of growth do you see this year and next year? Yeah, for us, with semiconductor, we generally sell into kind of two different channels in semiconductor. One is really to the equipment makers, that part of the business, we have seen a little bit of improved activity for certain types of metal. What we're selling in there is a lot of, like, thick general engineering aluminum plate is the main product we're selling. There has been a shift of some of that business going overseas the last couple of years, and with the tariffs, maybe with the tariffs, I don't know these days, but, you know, some of that metal has not been coming back to the U.S. the way it had been. That's keeping that, we think, from coming back more significantly than it might. We do think that we'll continue to see modest improvement in 2026, but that's probably more towards the end of 2026, going into 2027. I think semiconductor in total is a little less than 5% of our total revenue dollars. Then we have a company that, what they do for semiconductor is more in the project phase when the semiconductor fab plants are being built, and then for repair and maintenance afterwards. They're actually manufacturing the ultra-high purity gas systems that are kinda the plumbing within the fab plants that take the clean gases and filter those throughout the plant. More specifically for us with the customers, with our largest customers in that space, they've had a lot of starts and stops and slowed a lot of their projects of building, so we're not certain when that comes back. It's somewhat customer-dependent. Maybe shifting a little bit to the, on the pricing side, the underlying commodity prices have mostly been moving higher, but there was some, I guess, challenges with pushing prices higher on the aluminum side. Is that behind you now? Are you able to fully push all the prices to your customers? Yeah, I mean, 2025 was a unique environment, you know, we were really proud of what our people out in the field were able to do in that type of an environment. On the carbon steel side, in early 2025, when the tariffs came in, our people executed really well and expanded gross profit margins, which is our typical model, because we have limited contractual sales, because it's kinda that next-day delivery. Typically, you know, we buy in the spot, we sell in the spot, so when the customer calls us with an order, we're pricing that order, if there's a announced mill price increase, we try to pass that price increase on right away. There's a lag before we get the higher cost metal in. Typically, we can expand our gross profit margin when mill price hikes are announced. We were able to do that primarily on the carbon steel side, first half of 2025. The aluminum tariffs came in, and those, you know, the U.S. aluminum producers actually had to pay the tariffs, so their cost went up. Our cost went up significantly. Customers were very aware, so on the aluminum side, we had more pushback because demand wasn't there, and that's what's important on the carbon side. We were able to get the higher margins because there was good underlying demand to help support that. On the aluminum side, demand was weaker, so it's much more difficult to pass through a price increase when people aren't buying. We were not able to do our normal, where we would push through the full price increase day one or even before we had the material. We didn't see the expansion in our aluminum margins and stainless steel also in the back half of 2025, the way we typically do. By the end of the year, we're covering the higher cost, but prices keep going up to the Midwest premiums at, in record levels, which is good for us. We're still making more gross profit dollars per pound on the aluminum we're selling, which is good for us. It's just when you do the math on the percent, it compressed a little bit. Coming into 2026, aluminum prices are still elevated, which is good for us, and we'll continue to push those through. We may not get the margin on top of the cost, but we'll fully cover our costs. We expect, and especially if demand improves, as we talked about aerospace and some of the other markets, we should see our margins come back to more normal levels. To your point on the margin side, right, we're currently staying towards closer to the lower end of your sustainable range. When you look maybe even longer term, in the past, we talked about adding more value-added processing that could support higher margin. Is that still a possibility over time, that you could drive the sustainable gross profit margins higher? So we do talk about, and we had a slide on the intro that, you know, as we've done more value-added processing, we've been able to drive our gross profit margin higher. The sustainable part of that, we did talk about being driven a lot by the increased levels of processing that we're doing because the processing is not dependent on the metal price, the underlying cost of our metal. Excuse me. When, you know, prices are higher and demand is strong, that also adds into the, into our overall gross profit margin, but it's hard to quantify how much of that lift comes from the pricing environment. We do believe a 29%-31% sustainable gross profit margin is our target on an annual basis. We did dip a little below that, in 2025. No reason for a downgrade, of course, because we think that that's transitory. You know, we think some of the pressure on some of the higher value products we have, particularly in aerospace and semiconductor that we talked about, were a little bit of a headwind on that margin. Long term, you know, we still expect to be in that range, and we are continuing to invest in value-added processing equipment and expanding facilities. You know, in 2025, we increased our tons sold by over 300,000 tons. That's pretty significant in our space, and again, and w e were able to keep our gross profit margin up. Most of that growth was in carbon steel products, where we did increase our gross profit margin. We hear some questions are, "Is Reliance going more after volume than after margin?" We're going after both, and we think, given the market in 2025, you know, our people did a great job of balancing, maintaining the margin along with the growth. We do have a question from the audience on the strategy to grow volumes, and it's: How do you balance volume growth while also ensuring you're getting the full margin for the services you provide? Is there a willingness to trade margin for volume? Yeah. Again, as I just mentioned, you know, our people in the field ask us: "Well, you know, what do you want? Do you want volume or do you want margin?" We want both, right? We think bottom line, is growing our earnings dollars. There's some business that's good business. It might not be 32% gross profit margin, but it might be 27%, and it might be good. You know, we're making profit dollars on that, so we should go after that business because we also have inflation impacting us, our costs are going higher. We need earnings dollars to be able to cover that. It's that balance of, you know, still going after good business, but there's good business out there at 27% margin, but you have to still be able to get 35% margins on some of your other products. It will vary for us by company, depending upon what their product mix is, because not all markets, not all margin profiles are the same for the different products and end markets we sell into. There's a lot to balance there, but we think bottom line for our shareholders, the more earnings dollars we can generate for you, the better. It is still a strategy to focus on both volume and margin. Typically, with, you know, when we see focus on growth on the upstream steel or aluminum side, it comes with a lot of CapEx spending. Will you have to spend more on CapEx in order to grow? Well, I think we've done a really good job growing over the last couple of years. We had that one chart showing our ton ship growth. We had record ton shipped in 2025. We have had kind of a higher than normal capital expenditure budget in 2023 and 2024. It came down a little bit in 2025. Our budget for 2026 is a little lower than it has been, but it still has a lot of growth opportunity, again, mainly through value-added processing equipment. We do have some greenfield and some expansions, but we really have a focus this year on, you know, really making sure we're utilizing the spend of the last couple of years. So that's really a focus for us, and we can do more with the equipment, with the spend that we've already incurred, and that's what we're really pushing our people to do. We will continue to grow, and our CapEx budget for 2026 at $275 million. As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of customer optimism, a lot of jobs being quoted out there, that we're fully capable and willing to increase that budget if we see good opportunities brought to us by our customers. You know, that's really how our CapEx budget is built. It's from opportunities with customers, and we wanna be there to support them in their growth. I think you mentioned the CapEx spending for this year. If I'm not mistaken, half of that is directed to growth, right? Can you maybe talk a bit about what type of projects, if there are larger projects that you're investing in? For Reliance, which is different than a lot of other companies here you'll talk to, a big CapEx spend for us is maybe $40 million, and that's you know, buying property, building a new service center facility, and putting equipment in it. You know, I think our largest-ever CapEx spend was, like, $70 million. You know, if you're a producer or a miner, you're spending hundreds of millions to billions of dollars on a single item. You know, we're buying saws for $600,000 or $100,000 each. We're buying, a lot. There's been a big advancement in both flat and tube laser processing equipment. Those pieces of equipment might be $1 million-$2 million. If we put in, like, a full slitting line for flat-rolled products, that might get up to $5 million-$6 million, maybe $10 million on the high side. It's a lot of individual pieces of equipment, that add up to that total. Karla, you spoke earlier about your diversified product mix. Are there any products that you would still like to grow more than others? Well, we'd like to grow all of our products more, as long as it's profitable business. With our service centers, you know, it's not like a Walmart, where everybody carries the same thing. Most of our service centers, we have, you know, 310+, service center locations, predominantly in the U.S., North America range, but a few overseas, and a lot of them specialize. Some sell primarily into the aerospace industry, and they have to have certifications for that. Some have auto certifications. We've got general line companies that sell into multiple different industries. Some focus more on non-residential construction. There's typically, even though we might have 3-10 locations in a, in an urban area, there's still room for us to grow in certain products there. We're very opportunistic, and, you know, look to our people running our businesses to tell us what the customer need is in that area. We can grow organically, or, you know, we look at the acquisition opportunities that come before us and evaluate. There's room to grow, you know, quite a bit more in most markets. Maybe staying on the acquisition side, we've seen two larger deals announced or mergers announced. How do you think that impacts the industry? Is that a positive from your perspective, or how are you looking at it? Yeah, it should be a positive for the industry because, you know, what we look for, we think we're pretty good at pricing discipline. Our gross profit margins are among the highest in the industry, we do have competitors. Typically, the fewer the competitors, the more pricing discipline you see. If those mergers result in better pricing discipline because of fewer players in the market, that would be something that we and everyone would benefit from. Also, when there are mergers like that, there is disruption, for Reliance, we also look at it as opportunity in a couple of other ways. One, that we might pick up some customers, we might pick up some good salespeople or employees with the disruption going on. With the two mergers that Katja is speaking about, that creates bigger, more diversified companies that might be more attractive acquisition targets for Reliance at some point in the future. From your perspective, as you mentioned earlier, you historically, you've been very acquisitive. Can you talk about right now what you're seeing in the marketplace? Are there any good opportunities for you to grow through M&A? We did not complete any acquisitions in 2025. We completed four in 2024, we were busy looking in 2025. Just because we don't complete any, doesn't mean that we're not looking. Our appetite's still there, as, you know, Reliance gets bigger, and we continue to grow, and we have really solid management teams, we might be a little more selective sometimes, we really weigh the opportunities. As I mentioned earlier, you know, we grew our tons sold by over 300,000 tons last year. You know, that's equivalent to doing an acquisition of a company of, like, $650 million plus, and we paid a lower price, so to speak, to grow those tons than if we would've paid a premium to acquire a company. That doesn't mean, I mean, we still wanna buy good companies that fit, but we are, just because we didn't do any acquisitions last year, doesn't mean we're not growing the company. Maybe lastly, quickly on shareholder returns, how are you thinking about it this year and longer term? We do think about shareholder returns over the long term, and as I mentioned in the intro, we think we've been pretty active and pretty balanced. You know, we've, as I mentioned, we've paid a quarterly dividend for, I think 66 years now. We've increased it 33 times. You know, we've never not paid our dividend, and we've never decreased our dividend. We want to consistently grow the dividend at a sustainable level. We're opportunistic on our share repurchases. We look at the market. You know, the one thing I think that's important at Reliance is we've been able to be very balanced with our financial strength. We don't have to pull back in shareholder returns to be able to do an acquisition. We're able to execute on all the good opportunities we see in front of us. Perfect. Thank you so much, Karla. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Katja.