Century Aluminum Company (NASDAQ:CENX) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 9, 2023 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Ryan Crawford - Financial Planning & Analysis and IR Manager

Jesse Gary - President and CEO

Jerry Bialek - EVP and CFO

Conference Call Participants

Lucas Pipes - B. Riley

Operator

Good afternoon and thank you for attending today's Century Aluminum Company Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Shesan [ph] and I'll be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for question and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Ryan Crawford.

Ryan Crawford

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the conference call. I'm joined here today by Jesse Gary, Century's President and Chief Executive Officer; Jerry Bialek, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Peter Trpkovski, Senior Vice President of Finance and Treasurer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions.

As a reminder, today's presentation is available on our website at www.centuryaluminum.com. We use our website as a means of disclosing material information about the company and for complying with Regulation FD.

Turning to slide one, please take a moment to review the cautionary statement shown here with respect to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures contained in today's discussion.

And with that, I'll hand the call to Jesse.

Jesse Gary

Thanks Ryan. Thanks to everyone for joining. I'll start today by reviewing our second quarter financial and operational performance before discussing the current market conditions. Jerry will then take you through the financial results, and I'll wrap-up before turning it over for questions.

Turning to slide three, continued strong operational performance and falling input prices in our smelters drove Q2 adjusted EBITDA of $30 million, which was an improvement of about $6 million over Q1.

We made significant progress over the last several months welcoming our new Jamalco colleagues and beginning to integrate the Jamalco operations into the Century System. We are encouraged by the quality of the people at Jamalco and perhaps most especially, by their excellent safety culture.

Jamalco has a long history of prioritizing the safety of its workforce and the sustainability of its operations with excellent systems in place, to ensure that people will return home safely each day.

We have some nice opportunities to import some of the Jamalco Safety Systems and procedures into the rest of Century's operations. Jamalco did suffer an adverse weather event in early June when lightning strikes damage the local grid. This caused a complete disruption of power to the refinery for several days and resulted in damage to several key pieces of equipment. The outage resulting in stability and a staged restart of the plant resulted in lost production in June.