Welcome to the Ferroglobe's First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex Rotonen, Ferroglobe's Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thanks, Nadia, good morning everyone, and thank you for joining Ferroglobe's first quarter 2025 conference call. Joining me today are Marco Levi, our Chief Executive Officer and Beatriz García-Cos, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started with some prepared remarks, I'm going to read a brief statement. Please turn to slide 2 at this time, statements made by management during this conference call that are forward looking are based on current expectations, factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward looking statements can be found in Ferroglobe's most recent SEC filings and exhibits to those filings, which are available on our website@ferroglobe.com. In addition, this discussion includes references to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted gross debt, adjusted net debt and adjusted diluted earnings per share, among other IFRS measures. Reconciliation of non IFRS measures may be found in our most recent SEC filings. Before I turn the call over to Marco, our Chief Executive Officer, I want to announce that we'll be participating in the B Riley Securities Conference in California on May 21st and 22nd. We hope to see you there. Marco?

Thank you, Alex, and thank you all for joining us today. We really appreciate your continued interest in Ferroglobe. As we noted during our fourth quarter call, market conditions have remained challenging, significantly impacting our first quarter results, we saw continued declines in realized prices and weak demand across key segments. In particular, silicon metal, our largest segment, experienced a 27% drop in volume. Additionally, the US silicon metal index pricing as of March 31st was 9% quarter over quarter, and 22% from the third quarter. This was the primary driver of our first quarter, negative adjusted EBITDA of $27 million. That said we believe that we are at or near the bottom of the current cycle. Looking ahead, we anticipate a strong adjusted divide in the second quarter, followed by continued momentum in Q3. We expect to deliver positive adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter. Accordingly, we are maintaining our full year 2025 guidance. Several regulatory trade measures are currently being introduced to curb the influx of low priced imports that have been disrupting market dynamics and suppressing prices negatively impacting our volumes. We expect these developments to stabilize the market and create a more constructive environment in the quarters ahead. Let me walk you through some of the key trade measures, in the US, the Department of Commerce announced its final determination in the anti-damping and countervailing duty investigation of all pharmaceutical imports from Russia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Brazil. Cheating on fair pricing practices and subsidies that have armed domestic producers. The newly imposed final duties are substantial, including the basic 10% tariff imposed on all countries. Russia's combined anti-dumping and countervailing duty are 1042%, Kazakhstan range from 33% to 281%, Brazil had from 14% to 73% and Malaysia from 17% to 51% all effective as of March…

Thank you, Beatriz. Moving to the key takeaways on slide 16, we are maintaining our adjusted EBITDA guidance of $100 million - $170 million for the year, with the first quarter in line with our budget. We expect meaningful improvement in the second quarter and further strengthening in the second half of the year. With the U.S. silicon case now finalized and the EU state decision nearing, we are confident that the trade measures will positively impact our business going forward, the silicon metal case petition was just fired in the US, so it is too early to speculate how it plays out. However, we are optimistic about that case as well. Given this development, we believe our performance would be much improved for the remainder of the year. Importantly, we continue to maintain a strong balance sheet with a positive net cash position, demonstrating our resilience and allowing us to manage the business effectively in the current environment. Operator, we are ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Now we're going to take our first question and it comes from the line of Nick Giles from B. Riley Securities.

Marco, you reiterated guidance, even though -- just I should have mentioned this is [indiscernible] on behalf of Nick Giles. Marco, you reiterated guidance, even though one queue is negative. So how we should think about this of cadence, of improvement in in 2Q, 3Q, 4Q, in 2025, if you could add some color and volumes and costs and the price as well, it would be helpful. Okay,

Thank you for the question. Well, the first of all, the negative results were expected by us, like we underlined they are in line with our budget for this year, we have kept our wide guidance so $100 million - $170 million that basically where we try to account for various scenarios that might develop Q2, Q3, Q4 of this year. We believe that the trade case will bring a little bit more balance in the market and will favor local producers like Ferroglobe in the Americas and in Europe. On top, we have the evidence that when strong measures are applied, like in the case of ferrosilicon in the U.S., in spite of the rather weak demand, we see a positive reaction in both in terms of index pricing, as mentioned and volumes. And we are waiting, of course, for a confirmation of the safeguards in Europe, but they are nearing, and we expect, as of July, also more clarity on now the new anti-dumping and under convention [ph] case on silicon metal is going to set in the market. So these five points make us feel confident that our performance is definitely going to improve in the rest of the year, and this is why we have decided to keep the same guidance.

Thank you. And if I could expand on this one a little bit follow up. Want to touch on end markets where you have seen the most trends and weakness in Europe or U.S. and maybe Asia. So can we get a kind of update on the outlook for the Asian polysilicon market? If you can, would be very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you for the question. Yeah, I can start from Asia. I think the -- of course, there are these measures on imports from South East Asian countries that that are being implemented that block the I think they block due to their size. They block the export from these countries, but some other countries, like Indonesia or India are going to see their business increasing as they will be allowed to export sales and modules to the U.S. How these changes are going to play, in terms of opportunities to supply silicon metal from Europe to polysilicon players to produce cells in Indonesia, we will probably will have to be validated in the coming weeks. The decision is, it's rather fresh. Concerning demand in of steel, which is another key indicator for us. The indication from this year is that steel is going to be rather flat. We see clearly that India keeps on having a positive increase of production of steel, while the other key areas in particularly Europe and U.S., don't register any major, significant change. In aluminum we expect definitely improved in demand in the U.S. due to measures that are going to incentivize the production of aluminum in the U.S. In Europe, aluminum price is going up, and it is our understanding that the aluminum producers are looking for protection, similar to what we are asking for in terms of safeguards. So we have to see how this situation develops. Overall to summarize, we see a rather stable situation of demand for our alloys business while we wait for trade measures before seeing a significant improvement on silicon metal demand.

I appreciate all this color marker, and if you allow me to squeeze one more, it's nice to see share purchases, but my questions like, what would you need to see to step up magnitude in shareholders returns? Thank you.

Let me start, then I allow Beatriz to like to elaborate, but like we say, we you know, we are running the company under a very difficult and hostile environment still generating cash. We expect to generate more cash in the coming quarters, and we expect to continue our opportunistic repurchase policy and the amounts of repurchase we really depend on the cash available. As you know, our priority is always to have enough cash around the company, and we will run our assets in the coming quarters. We need to spend the minimum level of CapEx we have indicated 50 million for this year, and then we will have the opportunity to repurchase share during the rest of the year. Beatriz, anything? Beatriz García-Cos: Yeah, maybe just a couple of data points. So far we have been we purchased 720,000 shares in the first quarter of 2025 at an average price of a $3.75, from Q3, 2024 through Q1, 2025 we bought a 1.3 million shares for a total of 5.1 million, right. And then your question is, if we plan to ramp up the food chain, and it is our view that we will assess our cash position together with the forecast market, as Marco was describing, which are currently, unfortunately, a mix, right. And we believe our share price is at the value at the at the moment, and our ultimate goal is to maximize the low term shareholder value for sure. On the other side, it took us some time to achieve a strong balance sheet. Now that we are net cash positive we want to keep -- we do not plan that we put it like that, to leverage our balance sheet to execute the bypass, and just finally, as we have demonstrated over the past few years, and we have proven on how we use our cash, and our first priority was to reduce the leverage of the company, which we have accomplished, and we follow this success with a modest dividend that we have been increasing this year, and of course, share buybacks. Hopefully this answer your question.

[Operator Instructions]. Dear speakers, there are no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the conference over to the speaker Marco Levi for any closing remarks.

Thank you all again for your participation. We look forward to updating you on the next call in August. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a nice day.