Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Century Aluminum Company Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. My name is Makia, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I'd like to pass the call over to our host, Ryan Crawford. Ryan, you may now begin today's call.

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; and Peter Trpkovski, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer 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 1. Please take a moment to review the cautionary statements with respect to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures in today's discussion. And with that, I'll hand the call to Jesse.

Thanks, Ryan, and thanks to everyone for joining. We find ourselves today in an excellent market environment for Century. So, I'll start by reviewing our second quarter performance and the strong macro conditions we've had so far in 2025. I'll then walk through our operational performance for the quarter and an update on some of our strategic initiatives, including our very exciting announcement regarding the restart of 50,000 metric tonnes of additional production at Mt. Holly. Pete will then take you through the details of the Q2 results and our third quarter outlook before we turn it over for questions. Let me begin with safety, which is core to everything we do here at Century. Our safety performance has shown improvement across our assets in the first half of the year. This is rewarding to see as we continue to invest substantial time and effort towards improving the safety culture at each of our locations. We've been specifically focused over the first half on the launch of our new safety program. Mt. Holly will be the pilot site for this new initiative that we have been working on with DuPont Safety Systems, and we are really excited to get it off the ground as we head into the second half of the year. Turning to financial results. Century generated $74 million of adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter. Rising Midwest premiums offset lower realized LME and European premiums, as well as higher-than-expected market energy prices in the second quarter. Realized LME prices averaged $2,540 in Q2, while realized Midwest and European premiums averaged $850 and $220 in the quarter. Midwest premiums saw significant positive improvement during the quarter as we began to see the benefits from President Trump's Section 232 tariffs impact our results. As we have discussed, in February,…

Thank you, Jesse. Let's turn to Slide 7 and review our Q2 performance. On a consolidated basis, second quarter shipments increased to approximately 176,000 tonnes, an increase of 4% sequentially, reflecting strong operational performance across all of our smelters. Net sales for the quarter were $628 million, a $6 million decrease primarily due to lower third-party alumina sales, partially offset by higher shipments and all-in metal pricing. For the quarter, we reported a net loss of $5 million or $0.05 per share. Our adjusted net income was $30 million or $0.30 per share, excluding exceptional items. Adjusted EBITDA was $74 million for the quarter. As we've discussed, the Section 232 aluminum tariffs were increased to 25% with no country exemptions on March 12. While the Midwest premium began to increase from 25% tariffs in Q2 as a result, lower realized LME and European duty paid premium partially offset this benefit. Moving on, we continue to make progress on improving our balance sheet during the quarter. Liquidity increased to $363 million, up $24 million quarter-over-quarter, and our cash balance stood at $41 million. Net debt was relatively flat from the prior quarter at $446 million. As you saw us announce in July, we successfully completed the refinancing of our $250 million senior secured 7.5% notes with new $400 million senior secured notes at 6.875% extending the maturity to 2032 and simplifying our debt structure. We are pleased to substantially lower our borrowing costs, which speaks to the improvements in our business over the past several years. The use of proceeds will be to pay down our existing credit facilities across the U.S. and Iceland, including our Icelandic casthouse facility, which will lower overall interest expense for the company. We will maintain our net debt level from before the transaction after we…

The first question is from the line of Kat Jancic with BMO.

Starting on Mt. Holly, can you talk a bit about your sourcing plans for raw materials, especially alumina?

Sure. Thanks for the question. Yes, we'll be able to service the additional alumina needs for Mt. Holly within our already set alumina book for 2026. So, we don't see any changes necessary to our current alumina sourcing planning in order to serve the additional alumina needs for the smelter. You can continue to use the alumina information that we include in our slide deck on Page 18 to model our alumina exposure for 2026.

And then maybe just on the 45x credit, I'm assuming that, that incremental 50,000 tonnes is going to get that benefit as well. Is that fair? And how much could it be if that's true?

Yes, that's correct. So, you can just take those incremental tonnes and compare that to our existing tonnes and our existing credit, which we've said should average in the $70 million to $80 million range, and you should get sort of a pro forma amount of additional 45x credit for those additional 50,000 tonnes.

Yes. Katja, I would just add, it's Pete. Obviously, 45x is just the U.S. production. So just look at the U.S. production volume for that.

And I know you mentioned that the manufacturing credit receivable is still at $195 million. I thought some of that around $60 million was expected this quarter. Can you talk about maybe is there any -- are there any delays? Or when could we see some of that credit actually in cash?

Yes. Thanks, Katja. It's Pete again. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we currently continue to expect the FY '23 amount imminently and expect our FY '24 amount over the next 6 to 9 months. So, just to elaborate, we do have some visibility into the tax return, and we have a certain level of engagement with the IRS. And we can see that our return is in the final stages of processing, and that's for the FY '23 amount. We did just file our FY '24 return, and that's why I said we expect that one over the next 6 to 9 months.

And that should be a good time frame going forward as we process 45X credits in the future.

The next question is from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley.

Guys, nice to see the Mt. Holly announcement here. I read in the release that some final details are subject to the definitive agreement with Santee Cooper and then also some economic incentives provided by Berkeley County in South Carolina. Are you able to give us a sense for those incentives or how much they ultimately played into the decision?

Those are not public, Nick, so we can't talk about those at this time and it is obviously helpful and important for the restart and the State of South Carolina has been a very good partner in making sure that those important manufacturing jobs stay in the state. So, we're very thankful to the work they've done. But both the power contract and those incentives, while we have agreements in principle, we'll just need to get nailed down over the coming weeks. Don't anticipate any problems there. And again, I would just like to thank our partners at Santee, who we've been partners with for nearly 50 years now at Mt. Holly.

Got it. Maybe next one. Just was hoping to get an update on Hawesville. How should we think about your appetite to continue to pursue a deal with a developer versus a potential restart?

Yes. That process, as I said, continues, but we are now in final negotiation. So, we do make -- or we are making good progress. And we would expect that we'll finish sort of the entire strategic review process, which includes both those negotiations and also our analysis on restart over the next quarter and be able to really make a decision on go forward for Hawesville at that time. But the process continues to be good and constructive, Nick. We continue to have positive engagement and those negotiations are moving forward well.

Good to hear. Just one more, if I could. Can you remind us just how should we think about milestones with regard to the new smelter. I mean, would site selection be kind of the first announcement? Is that kind of -- could we see something there before year-end? Or should we look to kind of 2026 for that to progress further?

Yes, Nick, the first milestone or the next milestone that you'll see will likely be that site selection, which is tied to coming to an agreement on the energy. So, you'll see those 2 announcements likely at the same time. And while I won't sort of handicap the time frame there, we do continue to work actively on that. As you might imagine, that is one of the more complex parts of developing the project, given the large amount of energy that's needed and given the significant state incentive packages that will also play a role in citing that project. But -- so I'll just say we continue to work hard on it, making positive progress, and we'll come back to you as soon as we can. But that's the next announcement. The next stage would be to do the next phase of engineering work, which will be site specific, which will give you another 6 to 9 months of engineering time. So again, like we said on the last call, you're probably looking in the second half of 2026 before you see any major spending on the project on the capital side.

There are no questions registered at this time. [Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Katja Jensic with BMO.

Maybe just quickly, you mentioned that in 2Q, we're not going to fully see the benefit from the Midwest premium as it stands currently and the LME aluminum price is also at higher levels than what's baked into your 2Q guide. So, if we assume your sensitivities and the current spot prices, is it fair to assume that your EBITDA generation could be in the range of $140 million to $150 million?

Thanks, Katja. Great question. Let me walk you through it. I think you hit it right on the head. But as I mentioned in my remarks, because of the contractual lags, we expect that earnings growth beyond Q3 and into Q4 at these spot levels. So today, spot LME is sitting just above $2,600 a tonne. And if you compare that to our Q3 realized expectation of about $2,500, that's about $100 per tonne increase. So, if we do realize that LME for a full quarter, as you probably already did in the sensitivities, that's about -- it's $46 million for a year for $100 per tonne change or about $11 million, $12 million per quarter. That's just for LME. We also see spot Midwest premium of $0.72 today. That's nearly $1,600 per tonne. And again, if you compare that against our Q3 realized expectation today of $1,450 per tonne, that's approximately $150 per tonne better. So again, looking at the sensitivities, if you took that and compare it against the realized price for a full quarter spot against realized, you should expect to see another $15 million uplift on Midwest premium into Q4 from the Q3 levels. So together, about $12 million of LME and another $15 million of Midwest premium. So, I think that takes you right about into the range that you were quoting.

The next question is from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

With all that's going on in the U.S., I didn't want to leave your Iceland footprint out here. Can you just speak to progress at Grundartangi on the castthouse? I mean, how have operations been going there? And then can you also speak to just kind of value- added premiums in Europe? What are your expectations today? Anything would be helpful there.

Sure, Nick. Yes, castthouse project continues to go well. It's a great brand-new castthouse. A lot of people at the U.S. assets are gelled with that brand-new shining castthouse that we have in Iceland. And as you might imagine, as you start-up a new castthouse, there is a ramp-up period where you're both ramping up production and also sort of dialing in your processes and getting a lot of new people up to speed on what really is a skilled workforce to cast billets. So that process continues to go well. They continue to make progress, and we're really excited to kind of go into the 2026 billet season really running on all cylinders. So, lots of progress there, good things to come. And the market has continued to accept that new billet with open arms. People are liking what they're seeing. And I think the quality has been really good. So all good on that front. More generally, on the market side, Europe has been weaker than what we've seen in the U.S., of course, and that's been persisting for a number of quarters now. We have more recently seen billet premiums firming a bit as the European duty paid premium has gone down on commodity-grade aluminum, the billet premiums have actually expanded a bit to fill in the gap. So that's been a positive development there. Obviously, good for us with the additional volumes we'll be bringing in next year. So, all is looking pretty good there. It is summer in Europe today. So, we'll wait for summer to end and come out ready to go into the fall season and into 2026.

Great to hear. Maybe just one more on Jamalco. Can you remind us of what should we be penciling in for CapEx there in 2026 as it relates to incremental production?

Yes, Nick, it's Pete again. We do break out sustaining and investment capital in our appendix for the whole business. But I can just kind of give you a sense of what sustaining and investment CapEx we expect for Jamalco in '26. It's basically for our 55% interest, about $10 million to $15 million in next year for sustaining, as well as the investment. So as Jesse said earlier, we are continuing our investment program at Jamalco, mainly right now, it's the steam turbine generator, but we have identified some other projects to get the business back to its nameplate capacity and get it back to the second quartile of the cost curve. But for right now, and we'll update this again on the Q4 call like we always do, but I would expect to have that repeat in '26. So again, $10 million to $15 in sustaining as well as $10 million to $15 million in investment at Jamalco next year.

There are currently no questions registered. So, at this time, I'll pass the call back over to our management team for any further remarks.

Okay. Thank you, and thanks to everyone for joining, and we'll talk to you guys again on the Q3 call. Thanks a lot.

Thank you all. That concludes today's conference call. We appreciate your participation. We hope everyone have a wonderful day. And at this time, you may now disconnect your line.