Minerals Technologies Inc. (NYSE:MTX) Q3 2020 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Good day everyone and welcome to the Third Quarter 2020 Minerals Technologies Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded. And at this time, I would like to turn the call over to Erik Aldag, Head of Investor Relations of Minerals Technologies. Please go ahead, Mr. Aldag.

Thanks, Sarah. Good morning everyone and welcome to our third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chief Executive Officer, Doug Dietrich and Chief Financial Officer, Matt Garth. Following our prepared remarks, we will open it up to questions.

I'd like to remind you that beginning on Page 14 of our 2019 10-K, we list the various risk factors and conditions that may affect our future results. And I'll also point out the Safe Harbor disclaimer on this slide. Statements related to future performance by members of our team are subject to these limitations, cautionary remarks and conditions.

I'll now turn the call over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks for the introduction, Erik, and good morning everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to join today's call and I hope you are all staying safe and healthy. Let me outline a brief agenda for the call. I'll begin by taking you through our third quarter highlights, including improving trends in our sales results, strengthened operational and financial profile, and progress made on the business development front. I'll then turn it over to Matt to provide a more detailed look at our third quarter performance by business segment. I'll conclude our prepared remarks by discussing trends in our end markets and highlighting new business that will contribute to our volume growth next year.

First, I want to comment on the 8-K we filed this week related to a ransomware attack we recently experienced which impacted access to some of our company's IT systems. We have procedures and protocols in place for situations like this. Immediately after detecting the incident, we implemented our comprehensive cyber security response plan, including taking steps to isolate and carefully restore our network to resume normal operations as quickly as possible. We've notified law enforcement and have been working with industry-leading cyber security experts to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout this situation, we operated our facilities safely and met our customer commitments.

Before going through the third quarter review, I'd like to note that I'm very pleased with how our global team and businesses have performed in what continues to be a complex and challenging environment. We remain focused on managing our company with an unwavering commitment to keeping our employees safe, operating our plants efficiently and serving our customers with value-added products. Dedication, engagement and resilience of our employees has been nothing short of exemplary during these times. And I want to thank them for the perseverance they've shown over the past several months.

Let me take you through how our third quarter unfolded. As we previewed in July, we anticipated that demand conditions in our end markets would improve with the second quarter having the most acute