Compass Minerals International, Inc. (NYSE:CMP) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call February 8, 2024 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Brent Collins - Vice President of Investor Relations

Edward Dowling - President and CEO

Lorin Crenshaw - CFO

George Schuller - Chief Operating Officer

Ben Nichols - Chief Sales Officer

Jenny Hood - Chief Supply Chain Officer

Conference Call Participants

Joel Jackson - BMO Capital Markets

David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank

Jeff Zekauskas - JPMorgan

David Silver - CL King

Seth Goldstein - Morningstar

Vincent Anderson - Stifel

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Abby and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Compass Minerals First Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded and all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions]. And I will now turn the conference over to Brent Collins, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Brent Collins

Thank you, operator. Good morning. And welcome to the Compass Minerals fiscal 2024 first quarter earnings conference call. Today, we will discuss our recent results and update our outlook for 2024. We'll begin with prepared remarks from our President and CEO, Edward Dowling; and our CFO, Lorin Crenshaw. Joining in for the question-and-answer portion of the call will be George Schuller, our Chief Operating Officer; Ben Nichols, Chief Sales Officer; and Jenny Hood, our Chief Supply Chain Officer. Before we get started, I'll remind everyone that the remarks we make today reflect financial and operational outlooks as of today's date, February 8, 2024. These outlooks entail assumptions and expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially. A discussion of these risks can be found in our SEC filings located online at investors.compassminerals.com. Our remarks today also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of these items in our earnings release or in our presentation, both of which are also available online. I'll now turn the call over to Ed.

Edward Dowling

Thank you, Brent. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us on our call today. I look forward to engaging with you as Compass Minerals new President and CEO. I'll begin my remarks today by discussing some of the announcements we've made over the past several weeks. Yesterday, we shared within our quarterly earnings that we decided to terminate our lithium project in Utah. As I expect most of you know, this was a brownfields project that would have enabled the extraction of one additional mineral salt, in this case, lithium fluoride to carbonate as a co-product within our existing SOP salt, magnesium chloride production streams at the Ogden operations. Unfortunately, the environment surrounding this project has evolved drastically from when we began advancing this project several years ago. The proposed regulatory changes have led to significantly increased uncertainty. When you combine an uncertain regulatory environment with other changes that have occurred within the commercial landscape for lithium with all the project it has a higher than acceptable degree of risk and uncertainty. This requires a higher return in order to justify such investment. So I understood that projects like this carry risk and willing to take and manage measured risk. However, we will not invest into uncertainty. We ultimately concluded there’s just too much uncertainty in this project.