million, an increase of approximately $99 million from the $38 million in the prior year quarter. Reported net income for the second quarter was approximately $97 million, or $5.72 net income per diluted share, compared to net income of $23 million, or $1.41 net income per diluted share in the prior year quarter. After adjusting for a net operating and non-operating non-run rate pre-tax benefit of $4 million, adjusted net income for the second quarter of 2026 was $94 million, or $5.53 adjusted net income for diluted share. This compares to adjusted net income of $20 million, or $1.21 adjusted net income for diluted share in a prior year period. Our effective tax rate for the second quarter was 23 percent compared to 22 percent in the second quarter of 2025. For the full year 2026, we continue to expect our effective tax rate before discrete items to be in a mid-20 percent range. Additionally, we now anticipate that 2026 cash tax payments for federal, state, and foreign taxes will increase to be in the $14 million to $18 million range due to our improved financial performance. Now turning to slide 12, adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was approximately $166 million, up $99 million from the prior year period. The year-over-year improvement includes $41 million of higher pricing, increased shipments, and improved mix. The remaining net $58 million improvement primarily reflects combined favorable metal tailwinds driven by unprecedented metal price market dynamics. These combined tailwinds reflect lower inventory consumption costs relative to our hedge costs of alloyed metal pass-through to customers, as well as higher than normal scrap spreads, improved scrapulization, and a metal lag gain of approximately $13 million as compared to prior year quarter. The total metal lag gain for the second quarter of 2026 was $27 million. Our performance was partially offset by certain higher manufacturing costs, including increased shipping rates from elevated fuel prices and higher employee-related costs tied to increased incentive compensation. It is important to note that as we exited the second quarter 2026, Our weighted average cost in metal inventory was approximately in line with the forward aluminum Midwest transaction price curve of $2.45 per pound. As such, we do not expect a continuation of the metal lag tailwinds and are assuming a more normalized scrap spread and utilization environment in the back half of the year. As Keith noted, we expect strong demand across key end markets, continued transition to high-value coded products and packaging end market, and favorable pricing to be the key drivers of our operational results going forward. We remain focused on improving operational efficiencies and leveraging our recent capital investments to support continued margin expansion. Now turning to slide 13 for a discussion of our balance sheet and cash flow. We continue to generate solid free cash flow, which we calculate as operating cash flow less capex, of $35 million in the second quarter, despite higher working capital requirements on elevated aluminum pricing. For the full year of 2026, we now expect free cash flow to be in range of $150 million to $175 million, subject to metal price movement and its impact on working capital. Our capital expenditures total $24 million in the second quarter of 2026, and for the full year, we continue to expect capital expenditures being a range of $120 million to $130 million. Our strong cash position resulted in total cash of approximately $59 million and approximately $570 million in borrowing availability on our revolving credit facility, strengthening our liquidity position of $628 million as of June 30, 2026. As a reminder, our senior notes interest costs are fixed at $54 million annually, and we have no debt maturing until 2030. Given our strong last 12-month EBITDA performance and cash position at the end of the second quarter of 2026, our net debt leverage ratio improved ahead of our expectations to 2.1 times from 3.4 times at year end, and now in line with our targeted range of two to two and a half times. Finally, on July 13th, we announced that our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of 77 cents per comment and share, signaling continued confidence in our long-term strategy to drive profitable growth and advance stockholder value. And now I'll turn the call back over to Keith to discuss our outlook.

Thanks, Neil. Now turning to slide 15. Taking all of this together, we continue to believe Kaiser is exceptionally well positioned. The investments we've made over the last several years were designed to capture exactly the type of market environment we're experiencing today, and we're increasingly seeing the benefits reflected across the portfolio. Demand continues to strengthen across most of our key end markets. Customer activity remains robust, and bookings now extend well into 2027 in several areas of our business. Importantly, this is not being driven by any single market. Aerospace continues to recover and grow. Packaging is delivering the benefits of our transformation at Warwick. General engineering is increasingly benefiting from solid structural demand drivers along with restocking at service centers, and automotive demand and subsequent investments will provide future growth in our targeted applications. While we expect the second half to include a more typical contribution for metal-related items, along with higher spending and seasonal factors, the underlying business is performing better than we anticipated entering the year. As a result, we now expect conversion revenue growth to finish near the high end of our previously communicated range of 10% to 15%, while EBITDA is now expected to increase between 45% and 55% year over year. Our confidence in the long-term earnings power of Kaiser has never been stronger. We remain the premier North American supplier in all of the markets we serve, particularly aerospace and high-strength applications, and today we are seeing multiple growth drivers strengthening simultaneously across the portfolio. The investments are working, demand is building, and we believe the opportunities in front of us extend well beyond 2026. With that, we're happy to take your questions.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. And for participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Bill Peterson with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed.

Good morning, Keith and Neil. Nice job on the quarterly execution, and thanks for all the information. Considering the second quarter, you know, I think it's a pretty large beat relative to the expectations. Maybe excluding metal lag, can you provide some additional color on what was significantly better than expected in the quarter? It feels broad-based, but if you can stack rank what happened in the quarter that was better than expectations, that would be helpful.

Sure. Good morning, Bill, and thanks for the questions. Listen, it was very broad-based, as we stated in a lot of our comments, Bill. We saw a lot of throughput through the operations. I called out that we went to no expense to try to meet that demand through the quarter. You know, we plowed a lot of resources to meeting the demand across the board. General engineering was a little surprise for us, stronger, although, you know, we've talked for several quarters in a row how we've seen like nine-year lows in the inventory levels, especially at service centers. Well, they began to kick in and in spades. And as we predicted and as we've seen multiple times, they were not only buying for the demand, but they were also trying to refill their coffers, their inventories, to meet that rising demand. And when you couple that with the aerospace coming back in and all this, the only way we can react to that is increase the throughput but move lead times out. So as I stated in there, the surprise to us was how quick the recovery came to us in that demand and how fast we had to move lead times because, you know, we're going to keep paramount focus on customer satisfaction during this period. You know, the packaging numbers speak volumes, if you will. We're seeing really strong demand continue. I'm sure it was driven by World Cup and, you know, the typical summer growth that happens in our markets. But, wow, we saw very strong demand. And, again, you know, we're still going through qualifications and so forth on our Roll Coat 4, but we're adding significant volume on the higher value-added side of the business as expected. So we had a really strong quarter out of that. Now, moving into the balance of the year for that, we still have a very strong expectation and continued performance upgrades, but we also have qualifications and some more bugs to work out of the line. That's why we're focused on that 80% for the year. and and you know then finally i would say our automotive uh we while we thought automotive would be flat and while we have limited our capacities there we are seeing demand pick up especially on trucks and suvs and we're working with our customers to try to manage through the work that we've got to do and satisfy that growth so it's one of those times that we've gone through that we're seeing the strong demand across every market we have, almost every product line we have, and we're just ramping as fast as we can to meet those needs.

Yeah, thanks for that, Culler. And then considering the second half outlook, and I guess with the context that the unit, you know, VAR was better for all segments, if we back into the shipment guidance, it would imply unit VAR should trend down for the year. I guess trying to reconcile that, you know, relative to seasonality, Is there some mixed impact and planned downtime? And then on the profitability on the EBITDA guidance, it does imply margin pressure as well moving ahead. And so, you know, if you do X lag margins, you know, the margins are strong at over 30%. So trying to just reconcile the second half guidance, both from sort of a unit bar as well as EBITDA guidance.

Yeah, so the way we tried to explain that in some of the numbers in that we put forward here was that assumption that that tailwind we've been having for the last three or so quarters, three or four quarters, we're assuming that we finally become at par with where the market is. And we put that number out there because we really don't know if metal is going to continue to rise or if it will drop farther. You know, the big headwind that we talked about with metal actually occurred in June for us, Bill. You know, metal moved down roughly 30 cents a pound very quickly, which actually took some of the air out of the cell for second quarter. So we're not assuming that moving forward. You know, we typically will have probably 55 to 60 percent of our total sales in the first half of the year normally compared to the second half of the year. So we're bringing that into place. We did pause on some on some major maintenance in the quarter, which we expect will be heavier in the second half. We have to keep these assets in good condition to meet this rising demand. So we're rolling that into our outlook. VAR, we're going to have less shipping days in the second half. So we really don't expect a daily demand or actually a demand decrease through the period. It's just the amount of shipping days we have to participate and then rolling in planned outages and expected major maintenance, which we typically do in the second half. So that's taking that all into account. So we've got the first half of deliverables we've done. We've taken the second half of what that expected, all those points that I made, and that's what's driving the outlook for the year.

Is there anything to call out on a profitability deceleration? I appreciate you taking the questions.

Well, just the fact of removing some of those metal tailwinds. I really don't see necessarily a per-unit decrease taking place. It's going to basically be the metal component and the additional cost associated with some of the maintenance and the outages that we have in place, and it's less shipping days. Otherwise, the demand is strong. As I mentioned, we're in the Q1 of 2027 on a number of our items, mainly related to plate products and aerospace and high-strength-related products at this point. So that outlook continues to be robust, continues to be higher than we expected. And, you know, as you could imagine, what we're doing right now is looking at how we can continue to excel. The expectation is we're resetting contracts for potentially better margin improvement beginning in the first part of the year. We have expected demand continue to rise on GE, which always gives us an opportunity for margin growth. And we have the ability to shift between whether it's aero, whether it's GE, whether it's specific in GE semiconductor. We retain that opportunity to really shift and pivot our business to where those margins are best attained. So other than the metal outlook, which we're putting the red flag in the ground at, and with those planned higher spending in the second half, nothing's changed from what we've been seeing the first part of the year.

I appreciate all that color there. I'll pass it on. Thank you.

Thanks, Bill.

As a reminder, to star one on your telephone keypad, if you would like to ask a question, our next question is Samuel McKinley with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Hey, good morning, guys, and congrats on a great quarter.

Thank you very much.

Hey, last quarter you discussed the high-quality standards to which you all hold yourselves at Warwick, and the presentation mentioned the quality coming off our roll coat line number four is improving. What got better during the second quarter, and where do you still need to get better?

Sure. Thank you. Well, what got better is the throughput is increasing, okay, especially on the new roll coat line. But all of our additional roll coat lines performed very well in the quarter. So we had great output in the second quarter. We continued qualifications, qualifications across the board with new customers, with new coatings that we've needed to qualify. So we've made great strides in that area. I mean, we still have some bugs that we're working with on the equipment and some of the design that we'll be working out. And that's what we expected for the year. I can tell you that it's very slow from my perspective. You know, I want to be at over 90% delivery performance, but we're starting to see some creep up in our delivery performance. We had some weeks that were in excess of 70% improving, and my goal is 90%. And so we're on our way back to attaining those levels. And so we're meeting those needs of our customers and the new contracts, which we meant for this business. So I'm really pleased. I mean, Sam, we talked about this in 2024. People were asking, what do we see the changes that we're making in this business? And what potentials do they provide us? We gave an outlook of about, we expected when we started to initiate, actually we stated when we were fully implementing our strategy there, we would see a 300 to 400 basis points for the entire entity improvement from this strategy movement that we're making at Warwick. I can tell you we have achieved the bottom part of that range in where we currently are today. and we still are working toward the full utilization of that mill. So I believe we're actually going to exceed that outlook just from that strategy alone. So I think what I feel much more resolve about is that the strategy is working, that demand is only increasing, and we're really well positioned to take advantage of what we started out when we made the acquisition of work in 2021.

All right thanks Keith that's helpful and then within I'll stick in packaging you know first half conversion revenue was up almost 30 percent year over year in packaging and as you guys continue to increase that richer value coded mix and improve product quality on the roll coat line should there be any reason not to expect packaging conversion revenue to keep improving in the back half versus the number you posted in the second quarter?

No. No reason to think that it's not going to continue to improve.

Okay. Yep. Thank you.

Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Keith Harvey for closing remarks.

Thank you, Sherry. Well, thank you all for your time and interest in Kaiser Aluminum today. The men and women of this storied company work very hard to successfully execute what's been a long, consistent, and a winning strategy for our company. And for that, I'm extremely grateful. We look forward to discussing our continued progress in October when we review our third quarter results. Have a good day.

Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect at this time, and thank you for your participation.