Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (NYSE:CLF) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call April 23, 2024 8:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Celso Goncalves - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Lourenco Goncalves - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Lucas Pipes - B. Riley Securities
Bill Peterson - JPMorgan
Phil Gibbs - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Alex Hacking - Citi
Tristan Gresser - BNP Parabas
Lawson Winder - Bank of America
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Rob, and I am your conference facilitator today. I would like to welcome everyone to Cleveland-Cliffs First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.
The company reminds you that certain comments made on today's call will include predictive statements that are intended to be made as forward-looking within the Safe Harbor protections of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although, the company believes that its forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
Important factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q and news release filed with the SEC, which are available on the company's website. Today's conference call is also available and being broadcast clevelandcliffs.com.
At the conclusion of the call, it will be archived on the website and available for replay. The company will also discuss results, excluding certain special items. Reconciliation for Regulation G purposes can be found in the earnings release which was published yesterday.
At this time, I would like to introduce Celso Goncalves, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
Celso Goncalves
Good morning, everyone. As I did on the last conference call, I'm going to start today by providing an update on capital allocation and M&A. On our last call in February, I indicated that we would be much more aggressive with returning capital to shareholders, and made it very clear that share buybacks are now the number one capital allocation priority for Cleveland-Cliffs.
Consistent with what we said we would do, we bought back more than 30 million CLF shares during Q1 by utilizing the remaining $608 million from our prior $1 billion share buyback program announced in 2022. In the last couple of years, we have reduced our diluted share count by over 100 million shares, or 17%, realizing an average purchase price of $18.79 per share on open market repurchases, significantly below where we are trading today.