Jean-Marc Germain
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thanks, Ryan. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for your interest in Constellium. At Constellium, the health and safety of our employees is our first priority. We have implemented many initiatives to protect our employees in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have increased cleaning and sanitation and full social distancing and provided our personnel with personal protective equipment. We have also implemented strict visitor policies, banned business travels, and enforced a work-from-home policy wherever possible. Constellium is a key parts of the supply chain of many critical industries. To that end, in the U.S. our plants have received the distinction of an essential industry, which allows us to continue to operate despite state stay-at-home orders. All of our plants with the exception of our automotive specific plants have continued to produce, to meet demand for these critical industries such as beverage, food, healthcare, national defense and transportation. I’m very proud that, despite challenging conditions, Constellium team has stepped up to meet the challenge. I would also like to highlight our strong financial position. The finance team led by Peter Matt has worked extremely hard over the past three, four years to improve our cash flow profile, increase our liquidity and push outs our debt maturities. These actions will help us tremendously in successfully navigating this crisis. Now, turn to slide six and I would like to highlight some of the decisive actions Constellium has taken to limit the financial impact of the pandemic. Rest assured, this is not a complete list. I think it is important to lead from the top. Therefore, the Board, the Executive Committee and myself have only taken a temporary reduction in our compensation. We have aggressively reduced spending to match the challenging conditions that we are currently facing. These include flexing valuable costs to better match production levels. The reduction in our workforce was necessary to reflect current operating conditions. Nearly 5,000 or 13,000 employees or 40% of our workforce are on some type of partial unemployment of temporary layoff scheme. To build momentum around reducing our spend, we have established spending committees that must approve all spending over preset thresholds at plant and corporate levels. For example, any corporate spend above €1,000 is required to be approved by the corporate controller. For instance again, at our Issoire plant in France spend over €5,000 requires approvals by the Plant Manager. On capital spending, we are reducing our 2020 target to €175 million a €96 million or 35% reduction from 2019 and €75 million lower than the target provided in February. We are for the most part, limiting our capital spending to essential maintenance while spending to ensure all the restarts of capacity when demand returns. We are very serious about reducing spending and have already identified the specific cuts needed to achieve our revised targets. Any new cash flow projects requires executive committee level approval. We are also utilizing governmental aid programs where available to help weather the crisis. This includes utilizing partial employment programs in Europe, that reduce our costs during this period of reduced operating rates. In addition, we are deferring social contributions in Europe and deferring certain payroll taxes and pension payments in the U.S. We are also extremely focused on optimizing working capital. We are reducing our metal purchases to be in-line with our production rates and have shipped out of finished goods inventory where possible. Lastly, we have moved aggressively to argument our liquidity position. Our strong free cash flow generation in the first quarter brought our liquidity balance to €616 million. We signed a new $166 million delayed draw term loan that will add to our liquidity in April. We are also pursuing low interest rate loans through European government sponsored storing programs in France, Germany and Switzerland. Now let’s move to Slide 7 and discuss our very strong first quarter performance. Shipments were 393,000 metric tons a decrease of 5%, compared to the first quarter of 2019. Revenue decreased 6% to €1.4 billion. This was primarily driven by lower shipments and lower metal prices. It is important to remember that, we substantially pass through metal prices. Net loss of €31 million, compared to net income of €24 million in the first quarter of 2019. The change in net income was largely due to a non-cash unfavorable change in unrealized gains and losses of derivatives related to our commodity hedging positions. Adjusted EBITDA increased 9% to €147 million in the first quarter of 2020. PARP and A&T continues to deliver strong results while AS&I delivered much improved year-over-year results. I’m exceptionally proud of the AS&I team and believe this was a great first step in the right direction. Our very strong first quarter results came despite headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic in March, which we estimate to have been a headwind to adjusted EBITDA of between €10 million and €20 million across the three segments. Our free cash flow was very strong at €87 million. This performance underscores our objective of being consistent generators of free cash flows. Our first quarter free cash flow did benefits from some working capital release, due to the slowdown in activity at the end of the quarter. Deleveraging remains our top priority for free cash flow generation. As a result of a strong adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow performance in the first quarter of 2020, we have reduced our leverage to 3.7 times. Our liquidity position at the end of the quarter was strong at €660 million. Now, I will hand over to Peter to provide more details on our financial performance. Peter.