Michael Bless
Analyst · David Gagliano with BMO capital markets
Thanks very much, Pete. And as usual, thanks to all of you for joining us late in your afternoon. If we could just flip to Page 3 please, I'll give you a rundown of the last couple of months. Just in a couple of minutes Craig will give you detail on the results for the third quarter but let me just make couple of quick comments before we get started. The results for the quarter came in just where we expected with one exception. We had a significant alumina quality issue at Hawesville that began to cause real disruption to the cells late in the summer time and that compelled us to make the decision to shut the last remaining continuously operating potline just a couple months earlier than we had originally planned. This resulted in some missing volume and a little bit of added cost for the quarter. And I'll give it some more detail on the Hawesville restart program in total and this alumina quality issue in just a moment. Otherwise the company is operating quite well, all the plants continued to see excellent management of controllable costs and tight working capital management. The company's financial condition remains strong. As Craig will detail and as we've long expected, we'll see a significant decline in the realized alumina cost in the fourth quarter results. And even at recent metal prices, this will produce a meaningful improvement to EBITDA in the fourth quarter. You're already seeing that impact in a declining working capital balance, again, Craig will take you through that. Pete's going to give you some data on industry fundamentals in just a couple of minutes but let me just make a couple quick points to put the rest of my comments into perspective. It goes without saying that geopolitical conditions haven't gotten much clearer since we reported Q2 results to you a couple months ago. Obviously, we've seen some recent developments trending in the right direction, but that said, significant uncertainty continues to hang over manufacturing activity and obviously, financial markets in general. The impact on commodity valuations has been obvious, the metal price has been trading at up to press level and in a recently narrowed band. And obviously in our view it's too early to determine if the recent movement denotes a trend. In the physical market, we have seen reasonably consistent signs of slowing growth in some key end markets in both the U.S. and in Europe. And the data shows that actually the growth began to slow earlier in the year than perhaps was understood until recently, where you saw slowing order rates throughout the value chain. Of course, some sectors have been hit harder than others, for example, the conditions in the automotive industry have been well reported. In our markets specifically the situation is felt most directly in product premiums. Again, it's been very well reported in the industry value-added product premiums will be off meaningfully in the U.S. and in Europe in 2020. This is due to slowing demand, but also to an increase in imports, especially in the U.S. We think it's important to keep in perspective where we are now from a relative standpoint. If you go back and look, today's conditions aren't even approaching what we saw in the last 2 difficult cycles, obviously those being 2015 going into a '16 and of course, 2009. And obviously, the macro backdrop is much healthier, especially, in the U.S., where you've got employment interest rates, consumer spending, other key factors still at healthy levels. These factors reinforce the thesis that conditions could improve reasonably quickly. That all said, we think it's prudent to prepare for a prolonged period of softish conditions over the next couple of quarters. Moving along, as expected, the slide in the alumina prices continued, we've been talking about this for some time. And new supply has been coming on as expected notably in the Atlantic Basin. Of course, general macro conditions aren't providing much underpinning to the alumina price. All that said, we haven't seen any meaningful smelting curtailments yet. And if any of these were to occur, we think the alumina price could have significantly further to fall. At this point, the alumina price is within a range we consider to be within the long-term, fair value. The current index price represents just under 16% of the metal price. Price development of other key inputs in our business continues to be favorable. Coke prices continue to ease and U.S. power prices remain attractive, especially the commodities to which we're exposed, those are obviously wholesale power prices in the Midwest and the price of natural gas. Let me just take a step back now, and as promised, talk about the Hawesville restart program. This is some background, those of you who have been following the company for some time know all this. Plant has 5 potlines equal each produce 50,000 tons when producing fully. As you know in late 2015 when the commodity price started to fall precipitously, we curtailed 3 of those 5 potlines, they were all down by the end of 2015. And the remaining two have continued to run well past their approximate 5-year service life. Again, as you know, in March of 2018, we announced our intention to restart the 3 lines that had been curtailed. These all required a full rebuild as they were also well past their service life. The process of rebuilding and restarting these 3 lines were completed per the original schedule with the third line becoming fully operational earlier this year. Then again, consistent with the original schedule, we took down the first of the 2 lines that had been continuously operating. That happened in the spring right when the third line came back up. The rebuild of that, in essence here, fourth line is on schedule. We expect to begin to restart those cells in January and have the line producing at full production by the end of the first quarter. And at that point we'll have full 4 lines up running so the plant obviously will be at 80% of capacity, 4 or 5 lines. As a reminder as we told you last time, we had hoped to keep that last of the 2 continuously operating lines, in essence the fifth line here, going for as much as 2019 as possible, hopefully, into December, right before it was time to start -- restarting that fourth line. The cells were at this point -- or are at this point over 6 to 8 years old. So very fragile, way past their service date. At the end of the day, as I said, we made a decision at the end of summer to curtail the remaining line. A very poor quality alumina supply caused these already fragile cells to become unstable. And we made the decision proactively and prudently in our opinion to disconnect this line before experiencing any safety or certainly any quality problems that would manifest themselves with our customers. Again, this was just a couple of months before we had originally intended to take that line down. And this is the reason, as I have said, why production and shipments look a bit light in Q3. And Craig will give you all the details of the full financial impact of that poor quality alumina in just a couple of moments. Hawesville is now performing much better but it took a couple of months to get the plant out of the soup. The other plants are performing well as I said, and in just a couple moments, I'll give you detail on the operations as I normally do. Lastly, before we move along, we had an encouraging development at Mt. Holly this quarter. This is on the long-running process as you know to achieve full access to the wholesale power market. You may have noted that the city of Goose Creek announced in early September that the city council had voted to hold a referendum to form a municipal utility. Our plant sits on land that's just contiguous to the city at Goose Creek. The vote of the citizens is scheduled for early December and if approved, under state law that new utility would have the right to serve Mt. Holly. As a reminder, and again as you know, the plant is currently, has been for several years now, running at half capacity and for the power to power that half of the plant, we've been purchasing 75% of the power acquired from the competitive wholesale market and 25% from the legacy power supplier. The natural gas generated wholesale power is priced in the attractive part, i.e, the lower part of the second quartile and the global power cost curb to smelters. But the legacy power is squarely in the fourth quartile, it's almost double the price of the wholesale power. And thus the weighted average of that mix puts us in the third quartile and this is the reason the plant obviously, has been running at half capacity now for the last 4 years. Service from the city utility would be 100% at the wholesale price, fully at the wholesale price. And that would enable the restart of the second potline and a return to full production capacity. A lot still has to happen, a lot of requirements have to be satisfied, but we're really excited about this opportunity. And if it were successful of course, it would allow this excellent plant to operate as originally designed. And with that, I'll turn it over to Pete to talk about the industry.