Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Our second half of our first day here at the Wells Fargo Industrials and Materials Conference. We are here with aluminum producer Century Aluminum. I'm Timna Tanners, building materials and metals and mining analyst. And we're going to do a fireside chat, but if you have any questions you want to raise your hand, feel free to do so. Century is a pretty nice, clean story. It's an aluminum producer. It's got U.S. and it's got, of course, Iceland. but I just thought I would kick off by asking Jesse here like what's the unique setup for century in this environment what's what's the alignment of positives here in aluminum just for people who may not be as familiar with this story sure I think there's both is my mic okay yeah I think there's both unique micro setup for century I'll cover that and also overall very strong macro setup for the industry in general I think it's probably worth going into both of those but I'll start with the micro side.

So Century has long been focused on bringing on production and producing in what is the two shortest markets for aluminum in the world. So we are the largest producer of aluminum in the United States and we're one of the largest producers of aluminum in Europe and the nice thing about that is the US is the shortest market for aluminum in the world and Europe is second. And so what that means is as those two markets want to increase their critical minerals production which includes aluminum in both those markets we benefit from protected markets in both of those regions and that's reflected in the Midwest premium in the United States where we have a 50% tariff on primary aluminum and in the European duty paid premium in Europe where there's a 6% tariff on primary aluminum going into Europe so that puts us in a unique position really all the other producers or global producers importing into those two markets we're producing within those two markets and benefit from those regionals to really strong regional premiums we've diversified then into upstream with our Jamalco asset so what we've done is de-risked the cost side of our business by having our own internal bauxite and alumina production and that's really stabilized the cost side so you've seen earning stability over the past several years since we bought Jamalco about three years ago so that's the micro side I can go into the macro side yeah well actually so I think it's important to point out that I've been covering century for I don't know a decade and yet to your point like century had been one of the highest cost and more volatile aluminum producers at least publicly traded and now you've taken out the volatility around alumina with the

Jamalco joint with the acquisition and then also on the hedging side kind of taken out some of the energy cost risk, which is really important. Those two inputs are the key ones for aluminum. But when we met recently, you said, we're coming out of a 15-year bear market for aluminum. And I said, I've only covered aluminum for 15 years. So I'd love for you to expand on that a little bit.

Sure. I've only been in aluminum for 17 years. So that's been a bummer to have 15 years of that be a bear market. But the setup is that that's really the truth. So if you go back and you go to 2000 really 25 years ago now the Chinese decided to build out an aluminum industry and they went over that time period from 5% of the world's production to 65% of the world's production today and what that means is over that time period you were basically an overproduction during that entire time and any other disruption on the supply side that you may have in aluminum was covered over by the fact that you just had more production coming online in china every single year and there were massive subsidies that under under underlied that build out which just pushed their cost structure down and then pushed the whole entire aluminum price down globally but importantly about five six years ago the chinese realized that they had now become self-sufficient in aluminum we're about 38 million tons of the time and they put a production cap on at 45 million tons of which is right about where they are today and strategically that meant that they were basically able to meet their demand side which include both internal demand but also export demand with their existing production and as they looked at their overall economy didn't make sense to go even further into aluminum and especially today when you have data centers if you're the Chinese would you rather allocate an extra electron to another aluminum smelter a data center it's clear strategically it makes more sense for them to go into data centers So they've hit this 45 million ton production cap. And what that's meant globally is that we've seen inventory levels go down significantly. Today, we're breaching six weeks of global inventory for the first time since the global financial crisis. So the market has become increasingly, increasingly tight. And this year, we'll have the largest supply deficit in the history of the aluminum markets after the disruption in the Middle East from the war. so I don't think in my lifetime I've ever seen an aluminum shortage how do you see this playing out in your lifetime maybe definitely not since you've covered aluminum so what it will mean is you'll start to see a supply response from the west and for instance we have a project in Oklahoma to build the first new aluminum smelter in the United States in over 50 years that project will double the size of the U.S. industry. It's about 750,000 tons. That's what the existing U.S. smelter base can produce today. So you will see this incentive for the first time in 25 years for production to come online in the West. And that incentive is then backed by kind of this new strategic view of the world where people are moving to have domestic supply chains rather than global supply chains, especially in critical minerals. So you can just imagine the U.S. as we look to restock from wars in Ukraine and wars in Iran, we need to be sure that we have our own domestic aluminum production in order to build out our national security fleet. That's just the military applications, of course, as commercial aerospace, automotive, all of these other things. As a world gets smaller, to have that domestically is going to become important in the U.S. and in Europe. So it's great to already be there with our existing assets, but we also have opportunities to add production there like we are in Oklahoma. We're also increasing production at our South Carolina facility that increases alone increases U.S. production by 10 percent. So there's a variety of great investment projects for century growth projects for us for the next several years based off of these global macro trends, reshoring industry, shortening supply chains, and the opportunity comes as the Chinese hit that cap that we're able to make these investments, have really great return profiles for those and I think create a great new growth story for Century.

So I want to dive into the some of the smelter details but first I wanted to ask you know how do you think about a normal aluminum price like I get asked that and I struggle with it so I'd love to get your thoughts on the normal aluminum price and maybe even the value that you use to analyze project potential returns.

Sure of course it's important it's impossible to say what a normal aluminum price is but I think what we can definitely say is the aluminum price over the past 15 years has been too low. We can see that through a couple of lenses. One, you have overproduction in China, so that's what causes that price to be too low. And then when you look globally at the supply response, you basically haven't had new smelters built anywhere in the world for the past 15 years. You know, the last Western smelter built was in Iceland in Fjardal over 15 years ago. So when you see that on the supply side, no one willing to invest, you know that the aluminum price is too low. We know what the cause is. It was Chinese overproduction. And as that cause has gone away, you started to see more announcements being announced of new smelters in the West because we're able to get the returns that we need to make those investments. It's important to say these are hard projects to build, so it's not an easy thing to build a new aluminum smelter. Aluminum is extremely energy intensive. You need very large blocks of power. You need to be on a major port or waterway, and you need to have a labor force. So all those things have to come together to have it make sense, and then you need to get a return profile as well. And you need the steady low cost of aluminum competing with data centers in some regions, And equipment costs have gone up, I imagine, as some of that equipment is either tariffed also at least for the US and and also gone up in price yeah I think the one thing I'd correct in that is you compete with data centers everywhere in the world there is no place in the world where you would look to build an aluminum smelter today where where there aren't people also looking to build a data center and so I mean this is a question we get a lot about Oklahoma is are you gonna be able to secure competitive price power my answer that is one just watch us we're gonna do it yeah we'll prove it to you but but to you know the reason why we're able to do that is is the data centers are truly building everywhere we see them everywhere in the world that we go they're looking for power the same way we are it makes the data centers need to be distributed the same way aluminum smelters do and obviously every nation state in the world is very focused on AI and having their own AI industry so that cost pressure in general to the extent it exists and to the extent it will increase power prices over time will increase power prices globally over time and we don't really see that being different in any any given jurisdiction the nice thing about the US is we have a very deep and very secure energy market it's it's we operate in Jamaica so we can contrast the two of those in In Jamaica, you have energy outages throughout the entire island. We had one on Friday even, whereas in the U.S. you don't have power outages. And so that is a key factor. But you're also able to, because of the vast size of the U.S., we're able to find a gigawatt of energy that's uncommitted, like we have in Oklahoma, and negotiate a price that makes sense to build a new aluminum smelter.

Okay, so let's talk about Oklahoma. So you've got a 40% gent venture, 60% with EGA. EGA is well regarded as having, like, some of the best technology for new smelters. they have deep pockets. So when we think about what can go wrong, I think it comes down to the power agreement. But I recently caught some local politics with the Oklahoma AG looking unhappy with it. What's going on there? Can you break it down for us?

I would say overall, the state of Oklahoma has been incredibly welcoming to Century and EGA. Governor Stitt has been a key proponent of this project from the beginning. Representative Hearn, Senator Mark Wade Mullen, we've had really open arms in Oklahoma. There's a lot of politics going on right now. There's a governor's race, there's midterms, all sorts of things going on. So without commenting specifically on this lawsuit, we're still very bullish on Oklahoma. We're very excited to move the project forward. We don't see this as a huge impediment at this time.

Okay, that's helpful. I don't even know if we need to get into local Oklahoma politics, so just trying to get a gauge on that, so that's helpful. Now, so how much is the U.S. government involved in this project? I know the U.S. government really wants to have more smelting capacity, but maybe if you could elaborate on the extent to which the White House has been involved or the Department of Energy, I think, in this one.

Yeah. So a variety of agencies have been involved and very supportive of building out the US aluminum industry. We've benefited in a couple of ways. One, we have a $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, which will go against the capital cost of this smelter. And two, we've been working with the government on a variety of financing programs, which encourage re-industrialization in this country and completion of supply chains in this country. and that that financing will both be low cost easy to work under and also they'll underwrite probably the entire financing package for the for the project okay and when I think about the administration wanting to reshore some of the aluminum does that do you think we'd ever want to go above the amount that the combined North American market can supply or do you think that Canada will still be an important supplier even if they don't want to become our 51st state I think two things one we need to have our own domestic supply chains to supply most if not all of our domestic demand I think when you when you look over longer time periods and you look at some of the stress as a world becomes less global and more local a lot of these supply chains can be stressed even across and within the North American continent or within the European continent. Take Europe, for example. Europe was buying Russian gas for decades, and all of a sudden the Russian gas is no longer available. We saw in the early days of the Canada negotiations after President Trump was re-elected, there was talk of shutting off electricity transmissions to the United States from Canada. And so if we truly want to have security in our critical minerals and national defense applications, we need to have the majority of our aluminum production here in the United States.

Okay, that's helpful. The power agreement. Can you tell us where the stages are there? I know that the local utility mentioned it on their Q4 call, and it seems like things are in the works, but any update there, please?

Yeah, so we're working with PSO, which is a local utility in Oklahoma. It's owned by AAP, and we're making very good progress. Still some work to be done to get that over the line, but both sides, I think, are eager to move the project forward, and we continue to make progress on those negotiations. I mean, these are very large power agreements, 1.2 gigawatts, enough to power, you know, small city so it takes some time to get those done but I would say negotiations continue to move forward and yeah we're excited about it why would a century aluminum smelter or any smelter went out over a data center looking to build there how do they think about that locally well at the local level and Power is local. Having a smelter built as compared to a data center, the types of jobs we offer, the amount of jobs that we offer. So if you take a 1.2 gigawatt data center, maybe you have 100 jobs, and 3 quarters of those are security guards. You have our aluminum smelter. You've got 1,000 jobs. Those 1,000 jobs have a wage and benefit package average of $125,000 a year. And then you see also what we'll have is the industry building around the smelter. There's synergies to having downstream next to the primary production. So you'll have additional investments coming in in the port of Enola, which is where we're building. You'll have economic impact of billions of dollars annually. it's easy to see why the smelter type investment will have a much more beneficial impact locally than a data center would.

Yeah, we hear that, and I think Messina for Alcoa is an example of that as well, where they wanted to have the jobs. But is it hard to attract talent? How are you going to, is EGA bringing over some locals to help with, you know, training? Or how do you think about getting the skills that are necessary in Oklahoma?

Well, that's one great thing about our partnership is we operate smelters here in this country so we know how to attract talent in this country. It's also one of the primary factors we looked at when we were looking at a state to build And Oklahoma has a great workforce. I mean, if you think about it, you know, one of the things I love talking about is, as an American really, is the shale revolution in this country and everything that it's meant. all of the technical jobs all of the skilled trades sort of jobs that have really thrived in America versus some other other markets because of the shale revolution and Oklahoma really sitting right in the heart of that means there's a lot of tradesmen available there's a lot of technical talent available engineers available and so that was one of the things that really drew us to Oklahoma was this great workforce that they have in the whole state but especially in in Tulsa so that was it you're exactly right to raise that and that was

a factor that we looked at when when citing the smelter okay so we were initially not as enthusiastic about the new smelter but then we started seeing the returns at recent aluminum prices and we decided okay this is is very very doable for centuries you can imagine years of you know billion under a billion market cap and now you know the over a billion in free cash flow a year at today's well over today's aluminum prices so how do you think about the how well I guess just broadly how do you think about capital allocation obviously a smelter will be a component but it's being financed but what other uses of cash are you looking at yeah so we're very pleased and you're right we're

we're really operating well in this environment we have significant EBITDA generation today we have significant cash flow generation which will only improve over the next couple of quarters. We've initially allocated most of that free cash flow to our expansion projects we're undergoing now in Mount Holly and in Gründertangi and so we're bringing up you know over a quarter million tons of production over the last several months but those projects will complete at the end of this month in Mount Holly and at the end of June in Iceland so we'll have a lot of that capex coming off. We've got a few smaller projects that we're doing it in Jamaica but as we enter into Q3 and Q4 we are going to see a significant increase of EBITDA cash flow generation so a lot of that will go to build the the new smelter and we will finance a lot of that but there's a significant investment from us and EGA as well on the equity side and then we'll continue to first hunt for more organic growth opportunities those will become more challenging as we we execute them there's only only so much you can do but we'll continuously improve and we'll always look at the M&A markets so I think we've been very successful at century in that regard over over time but most of our M&A activities have generally been at the bottom of the cycle and while we'll always look we have certain return characteristics that we want and we'll be disciplined there and then as we have excess cash over time and it will build and it will build fairly quickly uh if we don't have uses for that cash we'll look to return that okay uh is there a political component of how you think about returning cash shareholders do you want to first see some um progress on the smelter i think we've we've seen some of the defense companies um get uh get criticized for shareholder returns and just curious if that factors into your thinking yeah i think we are very grateful um for what Trump administration has done for what Americans have done to focus on the need for building out aluminum in this country and as the largest US producer we do think that is part of our obligation going forward is to deliver on that and we are and we're investing in Mount Holly and then and then we will have Oklahoma so you know first we're increasing US production by 10 percent and then with Oklahoma we'll double it so we think we are delivering and to the extent we deliver i think everyone wants us to be profitable as well because that creates a healthy environment we'll continue to invest in seabree and mount holly as well the rest of our u.s operations and then to the extent we have excess cash i think everyone recognizes

that we'll act like a public company and we'll do what's right okay gotcha um so one more political question uh how what can you say to investors who are concerned over tariffs that's a common pushback we get is how can you invest in aluminum company when a chunk of the profitability is driven by tariffs and who knows what's going to happen with tariffs what's your comfort level with the administration and beyond this administration yeah I think a lot of times we get that from new investors and the older investors will remember that the section 232 is one in place in 2018 so they've been in place for eight eight years now and people ask us well what if the Democrats were elected I mean number one we we hope the Trump

administration continues and and the people that are part of the trump administration continue as well but remember the 232 stayed in place under the biden administration as well and we worked very well with the biden administration and i think really both parties recognize the importance of reindustrializing this country both parties recognize the types of jobs that we bring to these communities and i think both parties now recognize that you know what happened from you you know, 2000 until 2018. And you had all of these good, high paying, middle class jobs leaving this country now need to come back. So we're quite comfortable. This isn't really a political issue. This is an American issue. And America wants to reindustrialize and bring these types of jobs.

One other aspect I was thinking about is that, yes, all of what you said is true. But if you look at Biden, it was 10, it was, well, first Trump was 10%, then biden what we say swiss cheesed it so made some exceptions then trump went to 25 then trump went to 50. so it's not just the you know will there be tariffs but where will the tariffs be but but one thing i've thought about is the the trouble with um trying to encourage foreign and direct investment is if you are moving the goal posts like that it's it's not good for the country irrespective of who's in office so you know joe manchin at lunch was just saying that um It was great. I don't know if you got to listen to it.

I didn't, but I liked it. Joe was a great man.

Yeah, it was really good except for the part where our debt load is overwhelming and our taxes need to go up.

I didn't like that part.

But he said, if you have every four years executive orders that get undone, that's just not a good message for the world, that we're still part of a broader universe out there.

So I wonder if that's maybe a reason why maybe the tariffs can't go to zero, even if they erode a bit. probably some limitation on how much they can change well I do think it is informative to look back at the effectiveness of the tariffs over this time period so when Trump the President Trump first put the tariffs on in 2018 at 10% with in the beginning no exemptions or no exceptions you saw a wave of investment we invested we brought on production smelter in Missouri came on and brought on production and you saw US production go up by many tens of percents over that time period and then as exceptions were made to the program the program became less effective because as soon as you grant a country an exemption there is fully incentivized to send all their production in through the loophole and that's what happened you had what had been thought of as allies Australia Canada flooding the US with with metal under these unregulated exemptions and I think what you've now seen with President Trump in this latest iteration is they realize that so once you have those exemptions the program becomes less effective once they restore the full full program with no exemptions or exceptions we've seen a lot of investment coming in and for the first time we're going to see this brand new smelter get built which is a multi-billion dollars worth of investment so I think the proof is in the pudding and I think they see that and understand that and you're right we need consistency so I can tell you you know that you our partner is EGA and the new smelter I mean that's part of an overall commitment from the UAE and investments over a trillion dollars of investments the UAE has committed to invest in this country so I think it is part of a broader scheme to drive that real industrialization whether it's coming from US capital or capital outside I forgot to ask one question we've gotten is around the UAE, and obviously they've been ALBA and EGA affected by smelter hits around

the Iran War. But what's your observation about their level of commitment to the smelter?

They've been totally committed. I mean, they can speak for themselves, but our interaction with them has been fantastic. We've known EGA for a long time. They've been completely committed. And I think more than anything, this disruption in the Middle East shows to everyone the importance of having investment within the U.S. This has been a key market for them for a long time, and so I think they're really excited. This isn't their only investment in the U.S. They've also been investing in the secondary side. So in reality, I think, if anything, it's enhanced their commitment. I think they've always been totally committed, but it's just reinforced the investment thesis to invest within the U.S., this disruption we've seen. And I think globally that's one thing that, you know, some of the things we talked about earlier, We had this long period of overproduction, which meant that when disruptions like things in the Middle East or Russian sanctions came online, we didn't see huge price fluctuations because there was just this oversupply coming out of China. But today, with the outage in the Middle East, global inventories coming down towards five weeks of inventory, basically the lowest we've ever seen it, any disruptions going forward are going to have a much bigger impact on the price.

And so we're really, if we're going to avoid that, we need to bring the investment into the U.S. and that's kind of what we're doing okay fantastic let's drill down into century a little bit more so what's the latest with the Icelandic smelter restart and the insurance recovery I think you had said it's just lagging a quarter yeah so that was why first quarter had a lot of and well there's first quarter call you identified a lot of cash yet to materialize and that was one of it but but how's the restart operationally going yeah so you got it exactly right the good news is the restart is all on schedule so we've said it should be basically fully up by the end of July there's a little bit of

amperage increase which will wait till Q4 but this is very small volumes but overall most of that tonnage the vast majority of that tonnage will be online by the end of July all on schedule there and you're right so what you see today is because we're recovering all of our business interruption losses under our insurance policies the cash is lagging so you have cash spending now on the capex and the cash returns which come from the insurance policy in this case are lagging by about a quarter so over the next couple quarters where you're going to see is our capex numbers go down our cash outflows going down in capex and we'll continue to have some insurance recovery so you'll see this even better than normal evidata cash flow conversion because those insurance numbers will come in.

And the 45X dollars also lag a bit as well, right?

Exactly. So 45X, well, we account for it in EBITDA quarterly. The cash actually comes in in one check after we file our tax returns. So it's a rebate, if you will. And that we expect we set on the call hopefully by the end of Q2. We haven't got it yet, but hopefully by the end of Q2 still or early Q3.

So you got two weeks? Yeah.

I'm looking at Pete here. It's the government.

I don't know what you can do.

We got two weeks. It'll come in, you know, when it comes in. I think people know what it is. It'll be $94 million coming in.

Okay. How's the Mount Holly ramp up going? And can you remind us of timing to full capacity?

Yeah. So Mount Holly also fully on schedule. And that schedule is it should be at full capacity by the end of this month. So everything's looking good. Most of that production is already online, the way we bring it up incrementally, and the last ton of it should come on over the balance of the month.

Okay, fantastic. All right, so that's kind of the overview of some of your operations. Like, I think we talked about shareholder returns. I think we talked about Section 232.

The Haasville sale, if you can remind people the structure of that, because I think you guys led the way. there's some others that are trying to also sell power agreements via idled aluminum steel capacity so you were at the forefront I know it took a while we were all talking about it for a year and a half prior but it turned out it seemed like a pretty good deal maybe just remind us what the structure was yeah we were very we were very pleased and so ultimately we sold the site to a company called terrible public company many of you probably cover them great operators and the way we structured in the end was we received a 200 million dollar cash payment up front and then we retained a 6.8 percent interest in the fully completed data center so what that what that means is that terrible will build the data center we don't have to contribute any additional capital to that and once the data centers complete we'll have a 6.8 percent interest in the data center and then we also negotiated just to make sure we had liquidity on an exit in the backside because unfortunately we don't trade at the same multiples as Tara Wolf does we have a put option on the one-year anniversary of energization of that data center so Tara Wolf has said they hope to have a lease agreement signed by the end of Q2 so we'll wait and see there and then to they hope to energize the data center by the in the back half of 2027 which means our put option right would be in the back half of 28 and then at that point we'll have three options one we can sell to a third party our interests so you can think things like infrastructure funds etc that are interested in a cash flow stream from a high quality hyperscalar counterparty we can put that interest to tear wolf at a negotiated price or we can keep the cash flows ourselves um all right happy to take anybody's questions I have one And Jesse, this seems like a pretty good setup.

It's definitely the best I've ever seen in my briefer time covering Century. What could go wrong? What keeps you up at night?

I'm a warrior, so I worry about everything. I think that's part of being in this seat. We think about both the future and also the current. But I agree. I actually, I'm also pleased. I'm sleeping better than ever today. We have a setup that looks really good. I think people are sort of underestimating the durability of this current setup. I mean, we're going to be at five weeks of inventory. To raise inventory levels back to six or seven weeks, you're going to have to find three million tons of surplus from the three million tons of deficit we have today. Surpluses don't come around like that. And so what you really have is you're going to have to have many, many years of surpluses in order to bring inventory back to the previous all-time low level from the all-time low levels that we are today. So I think that's a very durable setup globally in the macro for aluminum, and I think we're just really well situated sitting here in the U.S. and Europe, selling into these critical supply chains that are important to both national governments.

There have been a few talks of restarts, like Slovolco came out lately. That's 175, so not huge. I heard Mag-7 could come back. I don't know how people are in Venezuela talking to those guys. I don't know what state of the aluminum market is down there or smelter capacity. But, I mean, is it still too small to get to that $3 million surplus for sure, but too small to think it can move the needle enough to dent the current dynamic?

I mean, yes. We're talking about a 75 million ton global market. So, you know, Max 7, I think the max they can get to there is about 140. Venezuela is obviously very difficult. There's some operating today, so it's a little bit in the market already today, but very low tonnage. And so really you're going to need to see new builds in order to build what's necessary. And remember, we'll still have global demand growth going over this time period. That's been very durable in the aluminum space. I can tell you my most bullish downstream customers are in the power infrastructure and data center space. So same as everybody, they're calling for more aluminum into those verticals as well. and that's incremental to the kind of the, you know, one to three percent demand growth we've had for decades now in aluminum.

Next slide deck, we need a breakout of that.

Okay, yeah, we'll start to get into that. We've been micro-focused. In aluminum in the data center, we need to see that, yeah. Yeah, I know.

Homework for y'all.

She told me that earlier, so. Yeah, it's big. It's great. We're excited.

Guys, we have time to stop. Oh, we have a question. You want to see if we can squeeze it in?

Yeah, sure. So we haven't come out with a CapEx number yet on that project. We're in the final phases of the engineering work with Bechtel to do that. So to work through the economics, I'm just going to – Tim, maybe you can give me a number. I'll take that.

I heard Bloomberg reported $6 billion.

Okay, let's take $6 billion just as a demonstration. So we've got a $500 million grant, so let's take that off of the $6 billion. So that takes you to 5.5 billion under these government programs, generally you can finance 60 to 80 percent of that at very attractive rates, basically very close to treasuries. So let's just say if you could borrow treasuries, you finance as much as you can. So let's take 80 percent. So then you're down to about 1.5 billion of equity that needs to go into this to this project. You break that out 60, 40 between us and EGA. we're on the 40 side now you're about 600 million dollars of equity that needs to go in most of that capital spending will be in the back half of this of the build so 27 will be largely permitting groundwork 28 29 is when most of that's going to go in so you're looking 300 roughly 300 million dollars a year those two years of centuries equity check we just guided in Q2 to a 315 to 335 million quarterly EBITDA and we said if you mark that to spot that quarter to spot to be about 400 million of run rate EBITDA so you can see it's going to be very easy for us to finance our equity side of that investment yeah thank you thanks a lot