Minerals Technologies, Inc. Aktie

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Minerals Technologies 2026 Investor Day. We're broadcasting today from our Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is the center for R&D for Crystal Engineering Technology and also our corporate offices.

Please note that some of the statements may be forward-looking even in the meaning of federal securities laws. There is a cautionary statement that you can find on this page in the presentation. Also, some of the numbers on the -- in the presentation might be non-GAAP. There is a reconciliation to GAAP financials at the appendix of this presentation at the end of this presentation, that's also available online.

Today's agenda, we will start with company overview presented by Doug Dietrich, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, followed by a presentation about our financial targets and our performance and our strategy going forward, presented by Erik Aldag, our Chief Financial Officer. And then 2 of our product line leaders will present our growth strategies as well as innovative pipeline for Specialty Additives and Crystal Engineering as well as High-Temperature Technologies focusing on steelmaking and metallization. Followed their presentation, we'll have time for Q&A. For those who are online, you can type in your question and I will read it. We'll try to answer as many as possible. Once we conclude the webcast presentation, we will have an in-person R&D tour of our labs where our leaders of our R&D for crystal engineering and steelmaking metallization will have a special presentation.

Now I'll take it -- I'll introduce Doug, please.

Thank you, Lydia. Thanks, Lydia. And thanks really for everyone joining today, and it's really good for those that have joined online as well. We're really excited actually to do this here today. I know we did a couple of years ago at our Hoffman Estates laboratories. We showed you a couple of our product lines and our bentonite-based businesses. This will be a little bit different. This is the other side of the company. This is our High-Temperature Technologies, refractories portion. We're going to take you through some of those technologies and pipelines today and also our Crystal Engineering, which is associated with our Specialty Additives product line.

Bethlehem, a little bit about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This is, we have 4 buildings on this campus. This one you're in is our research and development campus or research and development building. It's about 120 people reside here. No manufacturing, but R&D. We have our back offices, some of our business unit leaders, as you see here, commercial, marketing and some of the shared services and accounting are here. So about 120 people. It's been a long-standing place, one of the largest centers of people for Minerals Technologies in the U.S.

Let's get started. One thing I wanted to -- I know many of you are familiar with the company and those online might not be, but I want to take you through just a quick overview of the company before I hand it over to the product line managers.

First couple of things, key differentiators for MTI. We talk about this all the time, but it's our balanced portfolio of consumer and industrial businesses and leading market positions that we have, driven by the value we provide by some of the technologies you're going to see today that give us these leading positions in our markets, right? I'm going to take you more into why that balance of consumer industrial matters to our long growth. But it's also founded on our vertical integration of our natural resources. We have mines throughout the world. These are world-class mines, and that provides that stability to be able to provide local content, local solutions to customers, which actually is becoming more important these days with supply chain disruptions, but we're able to operate around the world with these technologies, giving us these leading positions in the markets we serve.

Minerals Technologies. Technologies has always been in our name. We are very focused on innovation and new product development. You're going to see some of that today. But being able to apply these core technologies that we call them to these mineral reserves to provide valuable solutions in multiple markets, and I'll take you through that. But another key differentiator of us, so not just vertically integrated, balanced portfolio, leading positions in our markets, we're very financially stable. We throw -- we generate a lot of cash flow, a significant cash flow, about 6%, 7% of our revenue goes to free cash flow every year, that enables us to fund the organic growth, fund returns to shareholders, fund inorganic growth as well. So a lot of optionality to the company. And it's that growth that we're going to show you today, the profit margin improvement, that cash flow that provides the resources for the company to continue this and continue to drive value through that cash flow.

Okay. Let me just take you probably you don't realize that every day from the time you get up to the time you go to bed, you're probably coming across one of our products. I mean, throughout your day, whether you're actually consuming it -- we have some products over here. You're consuming it in a calcium-fortified beverage or candy or food or some sort of pharmaceutical. You might be consuming it if you have a cat as a cat litter product, cat on the shelf, but it might also be in something that you're consuming every day. And we take our -- but it all starts with these unique global resources. We have, as I mentioned, resources around the world. But it's really only 2 main minerals that we supply. We have global bentonite reserves. We're the largest bentonite producer in the world. Sodium bentonite is a very unique form of that bentonite and calcium carbonate.

Now there's limestone everywhere, but to have a global, kind of, a world-class mine is very different because having these unique resources, you have to have the right type of mineral. You have to have the right size and particle shape. You have to have the right chemistry and many types of the right color. And so to be able to apply these minerals to these diverse end markets, they have to be world-class in nature, and we have many, many years of supply of them.

So it starts with really unique global resources. But more than that, you have to apply technologies to make them applicable and valuable in what they go into for our customers. And we have 4 core technologies. We're going to talk deeper about 2 of them today. Those core technologies are Functional Additives, Crystal Engineering, Engineered Blends and Particle Surface Modification. We can go deeper into all of them today. But when we apply those kind of core capabilities to our global mineral reserves, it enables us to be valuable in many different products. And so at home, when you wake up, your toothpaste, a lot of the articles in your house, your cat litter, as I mentioned, your household products, maybe your fabric care products, building materials all throughout your house, personal care, your boxes, the box that comes decorated or the Amazon box that you come, that top surface is something that we probably participated in as well.

We're outside. We're in your agriculture. We're in agriculture material or products that are helping with crop enhancement. We're in livestock in terms of taking toxins out of livestock stomach with feed additives, water purification, as you know, with our PFAS remediation, treatment remediation, landfill lining systems. We're in printing and paper, commercial buildings, cars and trucks, foundry, steel, you name it, but you're probably coming across something directly we've produced or using something that we've helped our customer manufacture every day.

Just a quick framework of the company. Many of you know this, $2.1 billion in sales. There's the balance between consumer, about 50% consumer-oriented, 50% industrial. These are our main markets that we serve, largest being kind of consumer applications, as I mentioned, 18% into paper and more so into packaging, steel production, construction, that's residential and commercial construction. Automotive and transportation, this comes in the form of also steel, but foundry products. So the cars you drive and the heavy trucks that are delivering your products are coming with cast parts made from our green sand bonds.

Largely United States-based or North America-based, 56% here, 24%, our second largest region, EMEA, and a growing 17% in Asia, Asia defined as China, Southeast Asia, India. I want to mention -- I'll go back, but I want to mention one, 4,000 employees, again, global company, 34 countries. And as we mentioned, innovation is key to us. So 12 R&D centers. This being one of them. You visited one in Chicago last year, 2 years ago, and we have about 10 miles down the road in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Here's the balance -- here's how we report ourselves in terms of structure with the 2 segments, Consumer & Specialties and Engineered Solutions, both about $1 billion of the company in terms of revenue. Four product lines, the Household & Personal Care and Specialty Additives, that's in Consumer & Specialties. And why do we put them this way? Well, these are -- in the Consumer & Specialties side, these are functional components in a variety of consumer and industrial goods, meaning these are things that you're either consuming directly or they're in something that you're using, a product you're using. On the other side, the Engineered Solutions is not something you're necessarily consuming directly that we make. We're making something that helps our customers manufacture something. So think of steel, think of a lining system for environmental or wastewater treatment, horizontal directional drilling, foundry products that you're using in your car.

So engineered solutions for manufacturing, consumer products or additives that you're consuming in your day. On the -- we're going to go through 2 of these today. First, I'm going to take you to our growth strategy. I'm going to describe these product lines in a little more detail. So the way we grow the company, it's a pretty basic strategy, but it has some depth in how we go about that. And the first thing was we look to grow the company in a balanced way through these engineered solutions and consumer products and into higher-growth markets. And the consumer piece is one of those.

So we purposely put ourselves into higher-growth consumer markets about 5 years ago, acquisition of pet litter companies, combining to be the largest private label pet litter company to move ourselves into higher-growth markets. We've also innovated in natural ingredients for personal care, again, higher-growth consumer market, putting ourselves in higher-growth geographies in Asia cat litter, innovating around renewable fuels. We'll talk a lot about. We've talked a lot about sustainable aviation fuel and then also putting ourselves in Asia for metal casting, which is an under-penetrated region for our supply or our product. And so these are higher-growth markets either themselves or in geographies that we've put ourselves into to drive growth higher in the company.

The second piece of this, though, is deepening positions in our core markets, okay? We are leading positions around the world in many of our markets, but we can do more to gain share in those markets, and we've done that by moving ourselves into packaging. We're going to talk about that today, into steelmaking. We talk -- we're going to show you how we've done that today with refractory formulations and automation and intelligent systems. We've deepened our positions in North America metal casting with new formulations for our customers here and also developing and deepening in environmental solutions as that market continues to grow for need for solutions that we provide.

But underpinning all of this, our new solutions and innovative products. And so we're seeing these markets, and we're seeing these opportunities, and we're seeing opportunities to create products that are higher margin and putting ourselves deeper into these 2 geographies or into growth markets. And we've done that with -- you'll see today with electric arc furnaces and steelmaking in PFAS remediation, repurposing waste stream for -- in the paper market. We're going to talk a lot about NewYield and how we're looking at extending that technology into other markets and other revenue streams. And then I mentioned with sustainable aviation fuel, which is a very quickly growing market, and our product operates very well in that solution.

So let's talk about innovation a bit. What is our strategy? We've really changed the nature of how we innovate at MTI over the past 5, 6 years. I mentioned this a lot about 6 years, 7 years ago, about 10% of our products, our revenue was generated from new products. That's now almost 20%. So we've doubled the impact on our top line from new product development. How do you do that? And it used to take us about 4 years to develop a new product, and that's down to 14 months. And so what we're doing is we're really speeding up the engine of innovation in the company. We're moving quickly through the process, making sure if it's going to work, it's going to -- we're going to focus on it. If it's not going to work, let's stop working on it.

So we've really cranked up the innovation engine. Our pipeline right now, and this is a representation of our 4 product lines. It's about $1.4 billion in potential value. And how do we get there? We work closely with our customers. Certainly, we do not want to be working on something that our customers don't want to buy. And so we focus heavily on our voice of the customer activities to make sure that we're innovating something that they want or they need and they're willing to buy.

So it's close collaboration, but we're also looking for next generation. We're also looking for ways to apply our core technologies in new ways to solve solutions. And so we're looking for that next generation of core solutions. And we're going to describe 2 of them today that are in this pipeline, and we're going to show you how we've done that more recently and what's going to be continuing to drive growth for this company over the next coming years.

But we're also focusing on, as I mentioned earlier, moving ourselves into high-growth markets and also into higher-margin products. And so Erik is going to show you how that's driving our growth further and also lifting the margins of the company to make a more valuable company. Just like I mentioned, a couple of stats, 19% of our sales in 2025 were from new products created over the past 5 years. We've launched and commercialized over 300 products over that period in 5 years. We've got the pipeline and there it is 80% of our projects are developed with input from customers. And what they're asking for in many cases is sustainable solutions. So 67% of what's in that pipeline is something that's helping us save energy, our customers' energy, recycling, some sort of renewable sustainable benefit. And so that is becoming a very big piece of what we develop and how we innovate in the company.

Okay. With that, that's a quick overview what you're going to see today. I'm going to pass it over to Erik to take you through a couple of financials and then we'll move on with some technologies. Erik?

Doug, good afternoon, everybody. Great to be here with you today in Bethlehem. So first, I want to remind everybody of the targets that we set for ourselves in 2023. That's organic sales growth of 5%, on average through the cycle, operating margin of 15%, free cash flow at 7% of sales, a strong balance sheet with flexibility for M&A. And all of this should result in an ROIC of 12%.

And today, we're reiterating these targets for you. The company is set up well to deliver on all of these targets. Over the next few slides, I'm going to share performance against these targets over the last 5 years and also what gives us confidence that we're set up well with these targets over the next 5 years.

So first, on revenue performance. This bridge is first looking back over the last 5 years. You can see we've delivered a net top line CAGR of around 4%. And that's in a relatively challenging macro environment, I would say. That really speaks to the resilience of the portfolio and the durability of our products. You can see that our organic growth strategy has delivered $540 million or about 5% CAGR over that time period. And as Doug mentioned, the growth strategy has really been to expand in higher-growth markets like the consumer-oriented markets, deepening our positions in core markets and geographies and in commercializing new products and solutions.

And inorganic growth over this time period delivered $100 million. That's added about 1% to the CAGR over that time period. Just to remind you, this was the full-year impact of Normerica that was a cat litter acquisition. This was a small specialty PCC acquisition in the U.S., and this was Concept Pet, another cat litter acquisition, relatively smaller cat litter acquisition.

We have had a few of our end markets cycle lower over this time period, and we've talked a lot about these impacts. But namely, this has been the residential construction market, commercial construction, agricultural equipment and heavy truck end markets. So on a net basis, with the 4% CAGR, that brings us to around $2.2 billion this year, made up of the 5% organic growth, 1% from inorganic, offset by 3% from market headwinds.

So going forward, we do see that organic growth strategy playing out similarly, continuing at 5% growth. It's really a continuation of the same strategy. We've also got some new exciting opportunities. We're going to be talking to you about a few of them here today. So this all gives us a lot confidence about a few of them here today. So this all gives us a lot of confidence that we can deliver this mid-single-digit top line growth through the cycle, and that would take us from approximately $2.2 billion in revenue to $2.8 billion plus in 5 years.

So next, I want to share where we are on margin and where we're going. So we're at 13% for the first half of 2026. And like a lot of other companies, we've experienced higher energy-linked costs starting in the first quarter of this year. And we've talked about how in a portion of our business, we've got a pricing lag of around 90 to 100 days, mainly in the Consumer & Specialties segment, but we do expect to recover this margin as soon as costs plane over.

I do want to take a minute here just to comment on our shorter-term outlook. So in the third quarter, probably comes as no surprise, we're experiencing higher energy-linked costs than we expected in our guidance for the quarter, given where diesel and natural gas prices have trended. So right now, we're expecting about a $5 million higher cost than we included in our guidance at the beginning of the quarter.

That being said, we're continuing to adjust pricing, and we're confident that when these costs plane over, we'll recover this 75 to 100 basis points of margin that you see on the screen here. This is the same thing that we went through from '22 to '24, I should say, 2022 to 2024. And on the back end of that, we expanded our margins. So we're in a pretty similar situation again today. I do want to highlight that the price/cost dynamic on this slide, that piece of the margin bridge, that's more transitory, but the next 2 margin levers here are more structural. And so these next 2 levers are driving structurally higher margins for the customer -- for the company.

So just moving on to this volume leverage lever. As we continue to grow sales in the mid-single digits, we expect that volume leverage to improve margins by 75 to 100 basis points. This is because our incremental margins are at 30% and higher for some products, and we've got a very efficient fixed cost base to leverage those higher volumes and higher operating margin. So as we continue to grow, we expect the growth to be margin accretive.

And then lastly, the third lever here, the new products in our pipeline that we're going to be talking about today and really all the products that we've been commercializing over the last 5 years are higher margin on average. And also the fastest-growing product lines that we have are higher-margin product lines. So we're expecting this continued margin uplift. We have about 50 basis points on the screen here as we continue to commercialize higher-margin products and as our mix continues to shift toward higher-margin products.

The only other thing I'll mention here on this slide is that 15% is not a ceiling for the company. You can see that clearly from the fact that the Engineered Solutions segment is at 17% right now. They're already delivering a 17% operating margin. So as we continue to grow and innovate and as we catch up on this temporary price/cost impact in Consumer & Specialties, we see 16% for the total company as a realistic long-term target.

Okay. So on the balance sheet and cash flow, the company has always been a strong cash flow generator. We target free cash flow in the 7% of sales range. And you can see on the slide here on the top left, we've averaged free cash flow at 6% over the last 5 years. That's despite some challenging market conditions and some temporary margin pressures. We typically target returning approximately 50% of our free cash flow to shareholders when we're at or below 2x net leverage. And so you can see over this time period, we've returned 56% of our free cash flow to shareholders, right on target with what we've stated. In the meantime, we've also increased our dividend by 2.4x over the last few years. Our balance sheet remains strong with net leverage around 1.6x and liquidity over $700 million.

So just to summarize here, we've delivered around 4% growth over the last 5 years, and that 5% target is well within reach. We delivered on our 15% target on operating margin back in 2024, and we've got a clear line of sight to return to that level and higher. We expect to generate free cash flow at a similarly strong rate, delivering a significant amount of cash flow over the next 5 years. And delivering on all these metrics will result in an ROIC of approximately 12%. On the slide here, we're showing 9% as an average of the last few years. Just to note, we were over 10% in 2024. A combination of top line growth, margin improvement, continued disciplined capital deployment will all contribute to this 12% ROIC.

So with that, I'm going to hand it back over to Doug to talk about the technologies and capabilities that we're going to be focusing on today.

Okay. Thanks, Erik. Let's go through -- I show these icons a lot. Again, we mentioned them. Crystal Engineering is what we're going to go through today. In a nutshell, this is our basic capability to grow crystals. We're able to form them from primarily calcium carbonate and fit for purpose, and they are value-added elements in their shape. I'm going to show you how we do that today in our laboratories. Engineered Blends, we're also going to go through today. This is in our High-Temperature Technologies, but this, we're going to talk more about how we apply it in our refractories and steelmaking.

Particle Surface Modification is where we take a particle or a mineral that we have and we modify the surface of it for functional use. Think of our FLUORO-SORB product and PFAS remediation, that's where we apply this type of technology. And Functional Additives, just the minerals themselves and the combination of the minerals and how we treat them can be functional as they go into a product. And so we have knowledge of how to apply the minerals, the shape, the color, the chemistry so that they become a very functional part of a consumer product or of an engineered solution, okay?

These 4 technologies map with the way we've organized the company and product lines. So functional additives are mostly used in our Household & Personal Care business, Crystal Engineering and how we apply this to calcium carbonate in our Specialty Additives product line. I just mentioned Engineered Blends and is the primary core technology for our High-Temperature Technologies and particle surface modification in our Environmental & Infrastructure business.

Today, we're going to take you through 2 of those product lines, the Specialty Additives and High-Temperature Technologies. I'm going to let the 2 gentlemen that come up next take you more in more depth. But you can see how these are -- some of the products and how they apply. We're going to take you through our laboratories and show you how we apply them and how we generate these things and get you a little bit deeper into the process. But let's start with Specialty Additives. I'm going to introduce you to Jim Wright. He's the President of our Specialty Additives business. He's going to take you through a couple of interesting new innovations as well. Jim?

I'm Jim Wright. It was great to meet several of you at lunch, and welcome to our facility here in Bethlehem. I'm the President of the Specialty Additives product line. I've been with MTI for about 6 years, primarily leading the paper and packaging focused business through that tenure with the company.

Today, I'm going to take a deep dive into our Crystal Engineering core capability, and I'm going to describe how our teams tailor particles to a diverse range of applications and end-use markets. Historically, this business has developed the capability for calcium-based products, including ground calcium carbonate and precipitated calcium carbonate or GCC and PCC. We have traditionally operated with 2 business models. One is a satellite-based model where we co-locate plants at paper mills around the world, and we sell slurry PCC or GCC to those customers for use as a filler or a coating additive in the papermaking process.

We also operate a merchant-based business where we locate our plants at a mine or a mineral reserve, and we make a diverse range of end market applications or end-use products, both in the PCC and GCC space using our Crystal Engineering core capabilities. In the satellite PCC business, we operate at 56 plants around the world, supplying slurry PCC and GCC products used in coating and filling applications for both printing and writing and packaging applications.

In the merchant PCC business, we produce what is called SPCC or specialty precipitated calcium carbonate, which includes a range of crystal morphologies, surface chemistry and particle size distributions. Our capability to produce this broad range of characteristic lies within our core Crystal Engineering capability. Looking at the capability more broadly, what we do is we take inorganic compounds, and we use proprietary technologies and processing techniques to deliver specific performance attributes in our end products.

On the right-hand side, you can see an example of how we do this in our calcium carbonate-based businesses. In the blue box, you can see a natural limestone particle or what we would refer to as a ground calcium carbonate, GCC. You can see there's a varying size and shape of the different particles that are shown in the microscopic image. We can also take that same resource and we can turn it into a precipitated calcium carbonate, which you can see on the further right-hand side images. Scalenohedral on the top -- on the right-hand side would be a particle that is engineered for use in a filler application in a paper sheet. It provides bulk and it takes up more space than the fiber takes up in the sheet.

On the top right is the Acicular morphology, and that's designed to lay flat and align on a coating formulation to give good printability and gloss in -- if you take, as an example, a box of pasta that would be on the shelf in a grocery store. On the bottom left, there's a Rhombohedral morphology, which is used in a range of applications, including caulks and sealants. The Rhombohedral are little tiny squares, and you'll see later on in the lab, a better image of what those look like. That gives viscosity characteristics that allow the caulks or sealants to flow and to extrude through their processes and gives the producers of those an ability to make the right product characteristics for use in applications such as a sealant in a car or caulks that goes around a window.

And then also on the bottom right is a spherical particle. This is more for new markets for us, but this provides a flowability and a bulk that takes up more space in the matrix in which it's incorporated.

Before we dive deeper into the Crystal Engineering core capability, I'd like to review our growth strategy and talk about the drivers that we committed in our 2023 Investor Day. I'm going to provide you with some perspective as well on how we've done against these growth drivers. You can see on the left-hand side, we laid out our strategy as geographic expansion into Asia, expansion into packaging markets and new product innovation delivering 3% to 5% compounded annual sales growth. This -- you can see on the right-hand side, the growth that we've achieved during this period of approximately 5% is a result of new satellite PCC and GCC plants in Asia, which included 5 new packaging agreements and expansion of our NewYield technology as a platform for growth in the Asian markets. It also includes a small acquisition that Erik mentioned earlier during his review.

We have not been without our challenges in this space as well. You can see on the next bar, there was a decline in the residential construction markets that primarily impacted our merchant precipitated calcium carbonate and ground calcium carbonate businesses. And we also had 5 paper mill closures, which impacted satellite operations, which we previously operated.

Next, I want to talk about our continued growth. We feel very strongly that we can continue the trend of delivering 5% organic growth in this business by continuing with the same strategy. We're focused on new packaging opportunities, further penetration of the NewYield platform and innovation with a pipeline that was shown earlier, which includes about $400 million of opportunity in the Specialty Additives space. We also anticipate that residential construction markets will inflect and will begin to improve at some point before the end of 2027.

All right. Next, I'd like to give an example of our core crystal engineering capability and talk about the NewYield platform, which you've likely heard about through many of our investor conversations. And then I'd like to relate that to an extension of the capability to talk about how we can drive growth using that core capability. So you've -- I'm sure you've heard of NewYield, which on the left-hand side is a schematic showing the general process. We take a waste stream that comes from our paper customers' pulping operation. In this case, it's lime mud. It contains calcium, but it's not in a form that's usable by the customers to be put back into their products. We have proprietary technologies, which allow us to refine, purify and change the morphology of that product, which turns it back into a filler that then can be sold back to the paper mill for use as a filler in their packaging and printing and writing paper applications.

Using the same type of capability, we can expand beyond the traditional calcium carbonate markets that we have historically focused on. On the right-hand side, I'm describing an opportunity where we deploy this into a new market. I think we're all very familiar with the current supply or need for current supply of critical minerals in the United States, especially to support new infrastructure, battery investments, electronic vehicles, aerospace applications and defense.

We've identified that steel slag contains many of these valuable minerals and streams, and they're not currently being extracted due to a lack of technology that allows you to separate the steel slag into its component compounds. There's approximately 3 million tons of steel slag that's landfilled in the United States alone. And beyond the United States, there's even more steel slag that goes to landfill.

Applying the same type of technology that I discussed with NewYield, we're able to separate that steel slag into its component streams, and you'll see later today that we can generate several different products of higher purity and custom-tailored morphologies that are of high value in many different downstream applications. We use our world-class R&D capabilities with that core Crystal Engineering technology in order to process this and to work with our downstream customers to make sure that we're tailoring these particles for their specific applications.

All right. And finally, I want to provide a little bit more of context on that specific opportunity and talk about how that capability can be applied even more broadly. So for those joining us on the tour later today, you're going to see in one of the labs a demonstration where our R&D team is going to take the components of a steel slag and they're going to show you how we can separate that into different streams and extract these valuable downstream products through our proprietary processes.

With this specific opportunity, we're able to create streams that include critical minerals, including magnesium and manganese that would go into batteries, defense applications, alloys and automotive. There's calcium-based products where we have a broad range of applications depending on how we treat that calcium-based product and which processing techniques we deploy. Iron oxide is a product that is returned to the steel mill for use in their steelmaking process. And finally, there's a Cement Pozzolan stream that is used as an additive in low-carbon concrete mixtures.

Our current status on this is that we have a lab scale pilot at our facility just down the road in Eastern Pennsylvania, where we're able to make representative products that would come from this production process. We're targeting a larger scale pilot operation to be co-located near one of these sources of steel slag in the United States that would generate about $5 million of annual revenue. We see this total opportunity for just the steel slag processing to be in the range of $250 million annually.

What I'm most excited about here, though, is the application of our capabilities and being able to expand in markets beyond just the steel slag or the lime mud that we get from a pulp mill. Our R&D teams have proven a capability where they can take proprietary knowledge of how to process or inorganic materials and turn them into valuable downstream products based on their ability to manipulate those products and engineer different morphologies that allow our customers to use those in ways that they have currently been unable to do.

With that, I'm going to turn over to my colleague, Chad Trent, and he's going to take you through our High-Temperature Technologies capabilities. Chad?

Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Chad Trent, I'm the President of High Temperature Technologies, which encompasses our 2 business Metalcastings and Refractories business. I've been with MTI for 24 years now, and I've spent much of my time in the refractory business in various commercial roles with that business.

That being said, I'd like to highlight our refractory business today. I'll mainly be focusing on that business for MTI. Two product lines make up this business, mainly Refractories and another business we have, a product line we have, called Solid Core Calcium Wire. With these businesses, we hold 2 market-leading positions. One is advanced monolithic refractories here in North America, and then we hold a #1 position for laser measurement technology on a global basis. We have a #1 market position with that.

On our advanced Refractories business, we provide products and solutions for virtually every steelmaking process that there is from blast furnace steelmaking process to the basic oxygen furnace making process, electric arc furnaces, casting machines and also steel ladles. So we are pretty penetrated in the market. Our -- not only do we provide products for those markets, we also are embedded heavily in the steel industry with our application technology equipment. We have a massive footprint in our customer sites, and we also have service teams that are local there. Because we're so embedded in these operations, we have a very close ear to the voice of the customer. Virtually 100% of what we develop within the business is directly getting from feedback from our customers.

Speaking of voice of the customer, you may have heard this term mentioned on some of the analyst calls, MINSCAN LSC. I know that Doug has mentioned it, Brett has mentioned it as well. That particular technology was derived from voice of the customer that we received. As you may know, there's a major push for -- to lower CO2 emissions in the steel industry, not only in the U.S. but around the world. And that's converting production from the blast furnace type steelmaking and BOF type steelmaking to electric furnace type steelmaking.

The MINSCAN LSC serves exclusively the EAF steel market. What that does is we are combining our laser technologies with our robotic gunning maintenance technologies, and we've created a fully automated refractory system, which is really the only one in the world. Not only do we have that technology that we work with and that we lease and/or sell to the customer, but we also provide our refractory materials along with it. And because we have that full package deal that we can offer our customers, we're able to enter into supply contracts for over 5 years and really beyond because once you establish a footprint in a customer site, it's very difficult for us to be removed from that site. So a major, major win for us, all based upon the voice of the customer that we've received.

Looking at our second core business within the Refractories business, we're looking at Solid Core Calcium Wire. We've been producing calcium wire at our Canaan, Connecticut, facility for over 40 years. We've been producing calcium metal at that facility for over 50 years. I will say this, we are the only producers of calcium metal in the Western Hemisphere. The other producers are located in China and Russia. But when you look at Calcium Core Wire, really the criticality of it to the steel industry is mainly tied to inclusion control. What I mean by inclusion control? Well, calcium wire when it's injected in steel ties up with aluminum oxide, and it removes that aluminum oxide and changes the shape of it so that steel can be casted through the thin slab casting machines. There's over 30 million tons of thin slab casting in the United States, and you cannot -- they cannot cast steel through a thin slab caster without our calcium core wire, which is another leading market position that we have.

Just like Jim, I'm going to give you kind of an overview of our growth momentum within the product line itself, both refractories and metal castings. Over the past 5 years, this product line has contributed over 3% of CAGR over the last 5 years, mainly driven by our core strategies, which is essentially expansion in our core markets, particularly with the refractory businesses. Innovation has been huge for both businesses relative to new products that we've developed for the EAF market within the Refractories business, but also our green sand bond technologies that we've been able to be -- have a lot of success here in North America with, but have taken that to Asia and have grown that business roughly 8% to 10% over the last several years.

We continue to see growth within this business relative to expansion through automation to that I've already mentioned with the MINSCAN LSC, which has contributed to the 6% CAGR in our -- with our growth strategy over the last 5 years. We've had some headwinds, though, with this business despite the fact that we've grown so much with our growth strategy within the foundry business, which is what metal castings is tied to, the agriculture business has been depressed for the last several years because commodity prices have been low and inventory levels of farm machinery have been high and inflation rates continue to be high. The automotive market, which is a big market for the metal castings business has been rather stagnant over the last several years. Heavy truck market has been stagnant as well, although we are seeing some turnaround in the heavy truck market in the last half of this year and possibly moving into the first half of next year.

Relative to the refractory business, a lot of headwinds we've seen in Europe. Geopolitical events have affected that business significantly with the Ukraine war and now with the Iran conflict. That business continues to be a little stagnant despite the fact that there's been even some safeguards put in on the business, and we're hoping to see that business start to pick up in 2027 and hopefully, for sure, by 2028.

But looking forward, a lot of exciting things for the overall product line. We're looking to grow this business anywhere from 3% to 6% CAGR, continue to build on the foundation of the MINSCAN LSC. There's a lot of runway with that particular business as Europe begins to transition into the electric furnace market. A lot of our products for the EAF are just now being developed, and we'll continue to have a lot of runway with those products too as well. And then we'll continue to see green sand bond growth in Asia. Right now, we consider our penetration there to be only 25%. So again, I'm going to use that word again, a lot of runway in Asia for that business. But the main driver for High-Temperature Technologies is going to be innovation over the next 5 years where we see roughly $400 million -- or excuse me, $280 million worth of growth over the next 5 years.

And with that being said, I've got something that I would like to share with you that we're all excited about regarding innovation. Some of you may have read, and I'm sure that you've read that and seen that the government is making a big push to onshore the production of critical minerals that are tied to national security. And this includes rare earth materials that's been in the news a lot lately. I know that the government -- the U.S. government has issued significant funding to several potential producers to establish rare earth mining, processing and metallization, particularly of rare earth magnets in the United States. The bulk of the rare earth magnets are made with neodymium and iron and boron, but there are some rare earth magnets that undergo high-temperature applications, and these rare earths are alloyed with dysprosium and terbium. These type of rare earth magnets are used in defense, aerospace, electric vehicles, energy renewables, some of the big offshore wind turbines have quite a bit of rare earth magnets in them, also lots of electronics and robotics and then also the medical field as well.

In addition to dysprosium and terbium, there's also yttrium. Yttrium is not used in rare earth magnets, but it's used in a lot of defense applications, particularly with thermal barrier coatings and also in semiconductor manufacturing equipment. So why am I bringing this up? Why are we interested in high rare earth elements? Well, in order to produce heavy rare earth metal, it requires calcium metal to do that with to be able to refine it. And I've mentioned earlier in the previous slides that we are the only producers of calcium metal here in the United States.

And so heavy rare earths cannot be refined without calcium metal. So we are -- as a company, we are going to be able to offer this industry 2 things. Number one, a product that meets the industry specifications in order to be -- in order for them to be able to refine heavy rare earth metal. And number two, we offer a domestically produced product that meets their mandate for national security purposes.

Just looking at the process in and of itself. Heavy rare earths are generally -- the process that's associated with this is you mine your heavy rare earth ore. The ore is processed into oxide and then the oxides are metallized, which is done primarily with high-purity calcium metal. You make the heavy rare earth metal and then that heavy rare earth metal is then translated into heavy rare earth based magnets. You cannot produce heavy rare earth metal without high-purity calcium metal. It's the only practical way to do it. And so from our standpoint and where we're at with this process and engaging with our customer -- the potential customer base, we have completed our lab development for the high-purity calcium that we now will be producing at our Canaan, Connecticut facility.

Our pilot plant is -- construction is underway for this process. Our customer base, and I can tell you this right now, that the bottleneck to onshoring all of rare earth production here in the United States is in the metallization piece of this because there's already mining going on in the U.S. for heavy rare earth ore and the processing of the oxides, but the metallization piece is the bottleneck. And that development is undergoing right now for the potential customer base for this market. We are providing our customers with product already for their development process. Our product has been proven to refine yttrium. It has been proven to refine dysprosium. It has been proven to refine terbium. You'll actually see some dysprosium that was refined with our calcium in the lab here later on in the tour.

So what's the value of this market? Right now, we're estimating the market value to be around $100-plus million in the near term, and that's primarily starting off the business or the market with refining of dysprosium, terbium and yttrium. There are other rare earths that may be refined that's still yet to be determined, okay? Doug, I think it's yours.

Thanks, Chad. And so just to add to Chad, we are our Canaan facility -- our Canaan facility has been making -- as Chad mentioned, has been making calcium metal for 50 years or 40 years. We're going to be looking to expand that facility to meet the demand that we're seeing from these customers that are developing here in the United States for this metallization process.

One thing I do want to add to all of this is -- so I think what we tried to do today, at least in the short presentation is to show you the company's capability to grow through its organic growth strategy. So putting ourselves into growth markets, deepening our positions in some of our core markets and our core product lines then also innovating, right? And we've been able to grow the company at that 4%, 5% range net. Yes, we have some market challenges that will continue to cycle. But that's where the balance of the company comes in. As we have these higher-growth markets and some of our industrial markets will cycle, we see that, that combination of that balanced portfolio will continue to drive, kind of, through-the-cycle growth, sometimes higher, sometimes lower than that 5% number, but on average, the 5% growth.

We continue to do that. We continue to innovate. We continue to put ourselves in these markets. We continue to do things like put ourselves in the rare earth market and look at how we open up the aperture using our NewYield technology to different types of waste streams. And we think we can continue not just with the FLUORO-SORB that's coming out now, not just with sustainable aviation fuel purification that's out now. These are things that will continue to add growth and value to the company over many, many, many years.

Just keeping with that kind of growth rate from where we are today, we see another $600 million of revenue. But that doesn't count, I mean, we do have an acquisitions have always been part of our growth strategy as a company. I just put up some balance sheet statistics there that Erik gave you. We've got a very strong balance sheet right now that gives us a lot of options, 1.6x leverage. We've got $730 million of liquidity. We think that very easily, we could probably add $1 billion to $1.5 billion of revenue, another $200 million plus of EBITDA to the company. And when you add all of that up, you're looking at a company that's well over $600 million, $700 million of EBITDA, okay? And that can happen with that balance sheet and with some of the products that we've shown you today over the next 5 years, okay?

You're probably going to ask me at some point, what are you looking at when you're looking at acquisitions? And it follows along the lines of accelerating our organic growth strategy. It is extending our positions geographically in some of these higher-growth markets. There are opportunities to do that. It accelerates our expansion into higher-growth markets like pet care and consumer products, and we did that. We executed that acquisition strategy to build the private label cat litter business that we have today. But we also, as you can see, I think getting to $3 billion to $4 billion as a company, it increases the scale of the company. And I think that scale comes with the resources. We're always looking to maintain that cash flow generation profile of the company. And I think that just generates more value for you as shareholders.

What do we look at? Well, we're looking at things that are the same minerals, but they could give us -- bring us into new markets. And we could look at new minerals, but likely they're probably going to be in similar markets or markets that we know. I don't think we'll go so far afield as looking at new minerals in completely new markets. But there are a lot of opportunities in that kind of 2x2 I just gave you. But they're small. There's some bolt-ons, but I also think there's some transformational acquisitions that we could acquire to really change the scale of the company and the nature of the company.

So before we move to Q&A, what did I want you to take away today? We gave you 2 examples of products that are in that pipeline. But those are just 2. There's hundreds of products in that pipeline that make up $1.4 billion of potential. These 2 that we put out today to show you, they're quite exciting, and I think they're relatively near term, and I think they could be big for the company. But there's others in there. And we won't commercialize all $1.4 billion, but we've shown you that 20% of our revenue consistently can come from new products. We commercialized 300 of them just in the past 5 years. So we can keep this engine going through innovation. We can keep this growth going through putting ourselves in these markets. And as Erik said, we can start to drive our margins higher with some of the products like the 2 today that we showed you to continue to drive more value for the company.

So what I want you to take away is we're pretty confident that we can hit or maintain our 5% average growth target going forward. We want to show you how we apply these capabilities and these technologies differently. It's not just going to be with calcium carbonate. It's not only going to be in refractory products. That calcium metal is valuable in a totally new market that's been developed here in the United States. And that new yield kind of technology and processing is capable not only in calcium carbonate paper and packaging, but now somewhere else into critical minerals as well.

Again, we think we can drive higher value through that, through our margin expansion. And I think maintaining the financial strength to fund all of that growth, we can do all at the same time, fund the growth, returns to shareholders and acquisitions. And that is a financial capability that I think defines Minerals Technologies and value generation for you. Okay? Those are the things I wanted you to take away.

For those of you here in the room, we'll do some Q&A. And then after that, we're going to show you some dysprosium in a little bit. We're going to show you some calcium metal. We're going to show you some iron ore that's precipitated out of steel slag. So I hope you're excited to see that. We're going to take you through our laboratories.

But before we do that, we're going to start with some Q&A. I will say if you have a question, we're going to have to give you a microphone so those on the webcast can hear you. We'll start in the room, and I think we probably have some, hopefully, that came in from online.

For those who are online, you can type in your question and I will read here so we can address it. You can do it right under the webcast.

Pete Osterland, Truist Securities. I wanted to start with the Specialty Additives business. So as you grow internationally, particularly in Asia, what's your most significant competitive advantage? I'm just thinking about the quality of the PCC, the ability to operate the satellites most efficiently or other products like NewYield. What differentiates you the most? And how close are regional competitors to offering a similar value proposition?

Yes. I think it's a number of factors. I think it is the technologies that we provide those customers, whether it be core kind of paper manufacturers or packaging manufacturers. And what does that mean? Well, it first comes with the capability of 24/7 being able to deliver this pigment. I mean, without fail. So you have to be there every day. You have to know the precursor materials. You have to be able to create that morphology and deliver it 24/7, 365. That's number one.

But when they're picking somebody to do that with, you have to be very cost competitive. You have to be capital efficient. You have to be efficient with the energy that's provided to you on site. And so we'll win that business being able to just be a core good provider. But another thing that comes into that decision from a customer is, well, do I go with -- I see that there's 2 capable ones, but who's going to live with me for -- I mean the satellites -- average age of satellite is probably 20-some years, right? So when they're there, they're there for a long time.

I don't think we've ever lost a satellite except for the paper mill closures. We've lost some of those. But when you're there, you want to be able to go with a partner, the customer is going with a partner that can bring new technologies to them. So we're bringing NewYield to them. We're bringing high-filler technologies to them. So things that help them save money. So there's a portfolio of capability that comes with your choice of who you're going to live with for 25 years, right? And that's how we compete, and that's how we win.

Very helpful. And then I just wanted to ask a follow-up on the long-term margin target. So where within your portfolio do you see the most room for margin improvement from current levels? And overall, do you view that target as achievable through self-help, whether it's productivity or continued product innovation? Or does that target require some incremental help from an improved macro environment?

He's looking at you, you want to answer that. So you might chime in.

Yes. So I mean, it's largely in the Consumer & Specialties segment and particularly in the Household & Personal Care product line. And it's temporary. It's painful as we're going through this period. The main driver of that is -- in the last quarter, we've seen diesel go up $1 per gallon. And we've seen natural gas in Europe go up 50% from what we were expecting starting out the quarter. And so there's this temporary lag in terms of passing that through that impacts that business in particular, because there's so much trucking, there's so much freight involved, logistics costs involved with moving the minerals from the mine to our processing facilities and delivering to our customers' shelves. But it really is just a matter of being on top of it with the pricing. We continue to adjust pricing almost on a daily basis right now. And as soon as the costs plane over, we don't need to see necessarily a reduction in costs. But as soon as the increases sort of decelerate, we'll be able to pass that through, recover that margin. And as I said earlier, we've shown historically that on the back end of a period like that, we can expand margins by hanging on to some of that pricing.

So we're confident we're going to get through it, a little bit of a challenging period temporarily here, and it's really confined to a portion of the Consumer & Specialties segment.

I would say, Peter, that's probably the biggest near-term catalyst to margin improvement. We're 90 to 100 days out of that. But I will say the structural pieces of it. I mean we're talking about new products that are out there that are much higher contribution margins and one that Chad just shared with you today. I mean the average contribution margin of our products today are probably 30%, 35% across the company. These are well above that. And I think you're seeing that with sustainable aviation fuel products. I think you're seeing that with some of our new innovations, the PFAS, although our FLUORO-SORB, though it's still kind of on its trajectory upward. These are very high-margin products. And I think that structurally, so yes, we're going to have price cost challenges as we go through the next 5 years. There will probably be another one that hits us.

We'll survive that as transitory. But what's really changing the nature of the company is putting out these innovations that are going to drive structurally that number higher. And that's why 16% -- one of our businesses already did 17.5% last quarter. We get the price cost right and the other one. I think you're at 15%. I think with some of these new products, you can get higher than that.

Dan Moore with CJS. I wanted to drill down a little bit more on a couple of the opportunities that you laid out today. First, rare earths, high-purity calcium metals. Without getting too specific, you mentioned $100 million in near-term revenue opportunity. So that's a very specific number. Talk about the range of outcomes. Maybe I don't know how high you want to think about, but what that could look like? And then what near term looks really -- what does that mean? Is that within a 5-year window and just your visibility into that building and any CapEx that might be associated with it?

Yes. I have to say we struggled a little bit with what number to put on the screen for you, right? We landed on $100 million, but then we put a plus symbol next to it, right? So look, I think that's probably a 3-year out number. We're going to be working on expanding our facility. We have the capability right now to produce high-purity calcium. I think we have the capability to produce what we see as demand in the next year plus. We're going to be expanding to meet that demand over the next 3 years.

So I'd probably put that number as a 3-year number and then the plus is on out. What is a little bit hard to see past that is exactly how much rare earth will be produced here, which ones they will be. Chad mentioned that there could be others that are onshore, how fast these companies ramp up. But I will also add to that, that it's not just U.S. domestic rare earth companies. There are other rare earth manufacturers that require a more domestic or U.S.-based source, right? So we're not just supplying in North America. We're also supplying elsewhere that would like to diversify away from China and Russia.

And then maybe contrast that with on the slide that related to steel slag, a $250 million TAM, just kind of described a little bit differently. So again, time frame, is that similar? Is that a TAM or a revenue target? And maybe just sort of break out? I think you mentioned critical minerals first. Is that the biggest piece of that? And then CapEx again.

Yes, I'm going to probably cast that one probably a little bit further out only because it will -- we're going to be building -- we've proven the technology. We know that this is a capability that we have. As Jim mentioned, we're going to be building a pilot facility that's probably going to take us about 9 months to get rolling and then once operational, and we're going to be working through the offtake streams, right? So there's a couple of very valuable ones in there, magnesium, manganese, but then also the calcium carbonate and our ability to synthesize that calcium carbonate through that reaction and finding its valuable purpose on the way out. And so that's going to be doing that.

And then we'll scale year 2 and then 3 for a larger scale. I think the next one could be worth in the $25 million, $30 million range. But as we get through those hurdles, again, that provides -- we think that this market just for those offtake products could be worth $250 million. So that's probably an outside number. But as we ramp up and as we prove this, I think you're looking at the $5 million to $25 million range in the next 2 to 3 years. Probably bigger than that, I'm sorry, probably in the $75 million in the next 3 years, but it's going to ramp up probably in the next 2.

And between these 2 and then you add PFAS remediation into the mix, are there any capital and/or managerial constraints to sort of go after all of these opportunities?

No, I think they fit very well within our 4 product lines. I think the management, the capability within those product lines are able to deal with these. You've seen them, they're already kind of launched already, and so they're capable. I don't see from a capital standpoint, we'll have to see the steel slag where that capital comes in that will depend on after that pilot plant. But I don't think any of these opportunities, the 2 that I've given you or anything in that pipeline creates some sort of outsized capital requirement beyond our normal kind of $100 million per year. That might cycle $10 million up or down. But we've shown in the past that we're capable of funding pretty large growth capital through this kind of routine $100 million a year. And so I think this fits right into that.

Wayne Pinsent with Gabelli Funds. So just in terms of transformational acquisition opportunities, would that fall more into new minerals in kind of markets you're in right now or minerals that you have in adjacent markets? And just in terms of minerals that you have right now, is that looking for new reserves that have different characteristics? Or is it new technologies? And then just your thoughts on the pipeline and valuations that you're seeing now?

Yes. I was trying to kind of show how we think about things. I think there's opportunities in the current minerals that we work with. And we do have more than just 2. Those are the primary minerals that we have, but we're familiar with others and other minerals that are like bentonite and calcium carbonate. But I would say we'd be looking to grow in those 2 minerals in particular, and that could take us into -- deeper into a consumer market or a different market that we're not in. It could take us into a new geography. But we're very familiar with that mineral. And so being able to move it into a new market or even a new geography is not going to be -- we operate around the world.

We would look at new minerals to the portfolio. I think we operate with a number of minerals in the portfolio that we don't currently own. We're familiar with them in our engineered blends. We're familiar with them in our products that we manufacture in metal casting, et cetera. And so we could go into a new mineral, but it's probably going to be something that we know very well and how to use it in the market that it's in. I would say it's not likely that we go completely new mineral in some new market that we know nothing about, right? I'm not going to say there's an absolute. We might surprise you and do something like that, but it's probably going to be something that's really tied to a core technology that we know, a market that we understand or a mineral that we already have, if I can give you that.

From a valuation standpoint, I think from where we were 5 years ago, I think valuations were very high. I think over the past 2 to 3 years, they've come in a bit, multiples have come in a bit. And I think that's largely you've seen some of the slowdown in activity. And I think expectations for what people are willing to sell for and buy for have come in line. So I think there's some opportunities out there for us. And -- but we're patient, and we've been looking at some things for a while. And yes, hopefully, we'll get that -- some of those done over the next few years.

Janet Lewis from Royce Investment Partners. So for these processes that you develop for things like extracting minerals from steel slag, are they patent protected? Or are these processes that, therefore, you create a moat that others can't replicate?

We are. We're looking to create that moat. And others have -- I will say that this is not the only time somebody has tried to take steel slag and process it into its constituent parts. But I think what we've come up with is probably the most cost-effective way of doing it, the most efficient way of doing it. And you'd say, well, Doug, why don't you just stay in your lane? Why would you get out of calcium carbonate and go into steel slag?

Well, we have -- we're pretty much resident on every integrated mill, steel mill in the country. So that's our position in refractories, number one. Number two, we operate with that customer and many of the offtakes of that process would go back to the customers we know. And three, one of the pieces of the offtake is calcium carbonate, which we know very well. So we're well rounded in, and I think that's unique for our position in that refining and separation technology. Others might be able to do it, but they're not quite versed in how to get the morphology of the offtake minerals in the right shape to make them valuable. That's where we come in. We're able to do that with our core technologies.

And so like I said, this is the start. We've proven that we can do it. We have a partner. We're going to start building it out a pilot. We think that will be successful. And if that is, we're going to be moving very quickly to scale. But there is a lot of free material out there that I think we have a capability of separating into things that are valuable.

And then just more generally, in your R&D processes, do you go after -- I mean, do you go after patents for most of these things that you're developing?

We do. Somebody help me on R&D, how many patents does MTI have or in the thousands, I don't know. But we do patent protect them. There are some things that we -- just let you know there's a strategy around our IP protection. There are things that we will protect through know-how. There are some things that we might do because they're so well at doing it that we don't want written up. But for the most part, if it's patentable and it's -- we can protect it, we'll pursue IP on that, yes.

David Silver with Freedom Capital Markets. I had a question about PCC and kind of the next wave of innovation there. So I mean, over a couple of decade period, I mean, you've moved from pills to paper to white top packaging. I think you are currently making some initial steps in a bigger market like coatings. So if we're meeting 5 years from now, I mean, what types or what segments of the coatings market might your products or your current innovation or R&D strategies be working toward -- where might we see PCC showing up in the broader coatings market?

This is a perfect opportunity to put my business unit President right on the spot and give it to him to let him do.

Thank you. So we're very excited about the coating capabilities we have in the PCC business or the Specialty Additives segment. And as I talked about with the Acicular morphology, we can do some things in a coating formulation that economically cannot be achieved with other pigments. And so namely, you're going to see in our labs today some boxes that are coated. It's a pasta box, just a recycled paperboard box, where those PCC molecules are engineered to lay flat on the surface to give a high gloss, a great printability.

One of the advantages that we have in that space is the capability in several regions right now in 3 regions to make those products and to be able to take the water out of them and ship them to many different mills in the region, so serving those products through a merchant model where they create a lot of value in the end-use application.

So we're constantly working here in this building and in our labs elsewhere in the world to develop new innovations within coating formulations where we can displace higher-cost ingredients if you take titanium dioxide or kaolin clays. And that's the power of the Crystal Engineering capability within the Specialty Additives Group.

Okay. And then maybe just -- you've been asked, Doug, a lot about does CapEx have to meaningfully increase to achieve your next several year targeted growth rate? I'd just ask you about R&D in the same respect. So you've achieved a certain amount of innovation over the last 5 years. And I believe you have not increased your R&D spend as a percentage of revenues. Will the next 5 years be different? Can you achieve the next stage of broad-based innovation with a similar R&D spend? Or does it have to ramp up?

I'll answer it this way. We do not hold back on R&D spending for any good ideas. We just follow a very rigorous process for how we're going to develop things. And as I mentioned that earlier, that starts with sitting down with customers and making sure we get road maps with them of what they're looking for over the next 5 years. And so ideas just don't come in, you develop them over time with close relationships with the customers and being able to take our technologies and see what's happening with them, their needs over time and applying our capabilities. So that's how the pipeline kind of comes in. Yes, we invent some things here on our own without our customer input that we think could be valuable.

But then we set a very rigorous process of how we're going to develop it through a stage gate, many companies use that. But -- and I hate to use the word fail fast, but it's a kind of cliches. But yes, we do. We try to make sure that if it's not going to work, we stop working on it immediately, and we focus our attention on something that will. That -- so only focusing on things our customers want to buy, making sure you actually can do it, including manufacturing processes early in the process of development so that when it gets out, it doesn't get stuck, it moves straight into manufacturing.

I think we have a really good engine. We have a really efficient engine. It's probably about 2% of our sales go into R&D, but that's not a limit. We'll spend as much as possible on anything. But we've been able to, I think, hit these kind of potential numbers of pipeline value, develop 300 new products, 19% of our sales constantly through freshness of refreshing our product lines. And I think we're really efficient with that spend. If I thought it would go faster further and more, I'd put more money to it, but I think it's a pretty good pace right now, and I think we can continue it. I hope that answers your question.

Can I just the -- I don't know, I don't want to say it, but one of your Specialty Additives used to be talc. So could we just get an update on where you see that process working out?

Well, the bankruptcy process is currently abated, and that is now moved to District Court in the Southern District of Texas. I've had a couple of administrative hearings where we're looking to build and have the judge rule on kind of budget and rule on timing. We just had a hearing a week or 2 ago where the court would like to schedule biweekly meetings. That -- the first one of those has not happened, but I think it's scheduled towards the end of the month. And that District Court is taking up the charge of ruling on whether the -- sorry, the talc that we sold -- BMI sold has sufficient quantities of asbestos to cause disease.

So we've always maintained that BMI's talc is safe. We've always maintained that, that's not the case. It did not contain asbestos, and we're excited to prove that in court. So that process has just now started. I don't have a timing for you in terms of it playing out. Idea would be they want to move it along expeditiously, but I don't have anything more of when that will start to occur.

Anybody else in the room? Okay. We have a couple of questions from online, Mike Harrison. MINSCAN has been a great success in the U.S., but it's still in early stages in Europe. Can you give an update on how you expect that offering to grow in Europe over the next few years?

Chad, do you want to take that one?

We are already working on expanding MINSCAN LSC into Europe. As everyone knows that, that market has been depressed over the last several years because of, as I mentioned before, geopolitical situations affecting the market in that country. So capital has been very low there as far as expenditure goes in that market. But as the push to transition into EAF grows, the opportunities are going to grow for us to bid on certain projects. We're already doing that right now. So we're expecting to see the growth in the MINSCAN LSC market in Europe moving forward over the next several years as that market continues to improve.

Another question from Mike. You walked through your M&A criteria, but what does the pipeline look like? Are you seeing that the environment is currently favorable in terms of valuations or opportunities that are coming available and you might be able to execute on in the next year or so?

Mike, I don't want to comment on exactly what's in the pipeline. I try to keep it general and things that we'd be looking for. Do I think we're closer to an acquisition now than before? I think that really depends on the seller and the buyer. I think we've kept the balance sheet in really good shape to be able to execute on something. We've kept -- we have a team in the company that is capable of analyzing and integrating. That team is still intact. We have the muscle memory to be able to integrate and capture synergies from what we buy. I'd like to think that something is imminent, but these are hard to predict.

What I can give you is that we're ready. We're going to be patient, and we're going to keep our eye on the things that we think the company should own and we can generate more value for our investors. And so other than that, I'm just going to keep saying the same thing, Mike.

Anything else online? Anybody in here? Other questions?

Okay. Thank you very much for attending this today. I appreciate the patience and listening in for an hour and 20 minutes. We're going to conclude this presentation online, and then we're going to have the folks in the room. Hopefully, we're excited to take you through our laboratories and show you some things in more detail. Anyway, thank you very much for joining today. Appreciate that.

Good day, and welcome to the Minerals Technologies Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Lydia Kopylova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Dave. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Dietrich; and Chief Financial Officer, Erik Aldag. Following Doug and Erik's prepared remarks, we'll open it up to questions.

As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and on this slide. Our SEC filings disclose certain risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

Please also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release in the appendix of this presentation, which are posted on our website. Now I'll turn it over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks, Lydia. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today. I'm going to kick us off with a review of our second quarter financials. Erik will then take you through the numbers in more detail and provide our outlook. And at the end of our presentation, I'll briefly share some of the highlights from our sustainability report, which we just published and provide a preview of our upcoming Investor Day on September 22. After that, we'll open the call to questions.

First, a quick overview of the quarter results. Sales were $548 million, up 4% over last year, with operating income of $75 million. Earnings per share were $1.60, up 3% from last year. We continue to be a strong cash generator with cash flow improving over last year, and our balance sheet is in great shape with our net leverage reducing to 1.6x EBITDA. Our top line momentum has continued with sales growing 7% for the first half of the year.

I'll highlight that this has been quality revenue growth, driven by higher volumes from our new growth projects and from stronger end market conditions. Another highlight is that our Engineered Solutions segment delivered a particularly impressive performance this quarter, generating a record margin of 17.8% and a record quarterly income of $49 million. Both segments continue to be positioned for solid growth this year with our strategic projects in each segment remaining on track. As a result, we have a clear line of sight to hitting our mid-single-digit growth guidance for the company for the full year.

In our Consumer and Specialty segment, our cat litter sales have grown 9% through the first half of the year, driven by the introduction of new products, and this business remains on track for a mid- to high single-digit growth year. We're also excited about our Rafinol bleaching earth expansion, which is now ramping up, and we can begin working through a very strong order book from sustainable aviation fuel customers.

Our new Fabric Care product production is also ramping up, and we expect sales to strengthen early in the fourth quarter. Paper and Packaging sales were also strong, up 7% so far this year, and our 3 new satellite facility launches are all progressing. In our Engineered Solutions segment, High-Temperature Technologies is having a strong sales year, driven by our Refractories business, where sales were up 14%, driven by MINSCAN installations and the corresponding contractual refractory volumes as well as from higher foundry sales in Asia, which were up 11%.

We also saw strong sales in Environmental & Infrastructure, where sales were up 19% this year, driven by higher volumes of environmental lining products, building materials and drilling products as well as from strong demand for our offshore energy services business. Our main challenge this year has been dealing with the higher level and persistent inflation.

As we mentioned would happen this quarter, we absorbed quite a bit of higher energy, transportation and raw material costs, the majority of which hit our Consumer & Specialties segment. We've adjusted pricing across all product lines, but due to contractual price increased timing to many customers in the Consumer & Specialties segment, the majority of the positive pricing impact is only now beginning to take effect.

Margins in the quarter for the Consumer & Specialties segment were impacted as a result. Erik will outline all of the price/cost dynamics for you in detail, but we continue to make contractual price adjustments and expect to recover segment margins as we move through the second half of the year. A few other items I'd like to touch on before handing the call over to Erik.

First, I want to mention that we've made organizational changes that I believe will result in even closer collaboration and greater efficiency across our 4 product lines. We've elevated 4 experienced leaders to oversee each product line, leveraging their deep knowledge of our markets, operations and technologies. This change will more closely align the people, products, facilities and core technologies that serve similar markets and strengthen execution across the organization.

We believe these changes -- we expect these changes to drive efficiencies, further accelerate innovation and speed to market for new products and accelerate best practice sharing and adoption across our business. Second, as we previously announced, this past quarter, we also filed a plan of reorganization in the Chapter 11 cases of our subsidiaries, BMI OldCo, formerly known as Barrett's Minerals and its affiliated debtors to comply with the court deadline.

Concurrently with the filing of the plan, we recorded a charge of $290 million to increase our reserve for funding the proposed potential trust and for estimated costs related to this matter. More recently, the judge has abated the bankruptcy court cases in order to await the outcome of a district court proceeding on the underlying talc causation issue.

We continue to maintain that all talc sold by BMI OldCo has always been safe and remain committed to a fair and final resolution for the company and all stakeholders. Lastly, I'm pleased to announce that we published our 18th annual sustainability report earlier this week. It's packed with information about the company and our journey over the past several years, and I'm going to take a moment at the end of our presentation to run you through some of the highlights. Now let me hand the call over to Erik, who will take you through our second quarter financials in more detail. Erik?

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by providing a summary of our financial results, followed by a review of our segments, and I'll wrap up with our outlook for the third quarter. Following my remarks, I'll turn the call back over to Doug. Now let's review our results. Second quarter sales were $548 million, up 4% versus last year, driven by strength in High-Temperature Technologies and Environmental & Infrastructure.

After a strong first quarter, second quarter sales in Consumer & Specialties were down slightly from last year, primarily due to some volume that shifted into the second half in Household and Personal Care. Second quarter operating income was $75 million. You can see from the bridge on the lower left that volume contributed $4 million and pricing contributed $8 million to income.

However, overall cost increases totaled $16 million in the quarter as we experienced higher freight, energy and energy-linked costs such as mining. The cost environment remains dynamic and further price adjustments will be necessary until costs stabilize and we fully offset these increases. Moving to the top right side of the slide. Sales have grown 7% in the first half over last year, with 5% growth in Consumer & Specialties and 10% growth in Engineered Solutions.

We'll show year-to-date figures in a few places today to highlight the growth so far this year and to highlight the magnitude of the cost impact that we expect to fully recover once these higher costs plan over. The first half operating bridge on the bottom right shows that volume delivered $13 million of additional income and higher pricing contributed $14 million. The biggest challenge this year has been the higher costs I just mentioned, which ramped up significantly in the second quarter.

Earnings per share, excluding special items, grew 3% in the second quarter and are up 11% year-to-date. I'd also like to note that EBITDA is up 5% year-to-date. Now let's turn to a review of our segments, beginning with Consumer & Specialties. Second quarter sales in the Consumer & Specialties segment were $275 million. Sales in our Household and Personal Care product line were $123 million.

Following a very strong first quarter, cat litter sales moderated in the second quarter. Q2 is typically a slower seasonal period for cat litter and customer orders also eased off following the new item fill in Q1. It's worth noting that cat litter sales have increased 9% in the first half versus prior year, and our outlook for this business remains solid.

Our edible oil and renewable fuel expansion hit target production levels at the end of the second quarter. Our order book is solid, and we expect sales to ramp up steadily through the third quarter. Lastly, in Personal Care, we had a large customer campaign in the second quarter of last year, and this year, a similar campaign has moved to the second half.

Second quarter sales in Specialty Additives were up 1% from prior year and are 3% higher year-to-date. Global sales to paper and packaging customers are up 7% year-to-date, driven by higher volumes from our newest satellites in Asia, and this growth is helping to offset slower demand for residential construction products.

Segment operating income was $29 million in the quarter and $62 million year-to-date. I'm showing you a first half operating income bridge on the bottom left to highlight the price versus cost lag in this segment. In the second quarter, we saw a significant increase in freight and energy costs. As we mentioned on the last call, this segment and the Household and Personal Care product line, in particular, is bearing the majority of the cost increases, and it's also the segment with the majority of the contractual lag on pricing.

Due to the nature of our contracts in this business, we typically have a lag between cost decreases and price increases. You may recall that several years ago, it used to take us 3 quarters on average to catch up from a price versus cost perspective. Since then, we've shortened that time to around 3 to 4 months on average by making changes to our contracts to better line up our cost price timing, and we continue to drive improvement in this area.

However, until cost pressures plane over, we're still about 90 days away from fully catching up in this segment. Looking ahead to the third quarter, we expect segment sales to increase in the 3% to 5% range versus prior year, driven primarily by growth in the Household and Personal Care product line.

Now let's turn to the Engineered Solutions segment. Second quarter sales in the Engineered Solutions segment increased 9% from prior year to $274 million, extending the growth momentum we saw at the start of the year. In total, segment sales are up 10% through the first half of the year. In High-Temperature Technologies, sales of $190 million were up 7% for the quarter and sales are also up 7% year-to-date for this product line.

Sales to steel customers in North America remained strong, and we've started to see signs of improved demand in Europe as well. Sales growth to foundry customers in Asia was very strong with second quarter sales up 14% versus prior year. Environmental & Infrastructure sales were $84 million in the second quarter, representing a 15% increase from prior year, and year-to-date sales are up 19%.

Demand for our building materials products was strong this quarter with sales up 41% versus prior year, driven by some large projects in the quarter. Growth in drilling products also remained strong with sales up 20% versus prior year. And sales for environmental lining Solutions were up 18% in the second quarter, driven by higher project activity levels, particularly in the mining sector. Operating income for the quarter was $49 million and totaled $88 million year-to-date.

You can see in the year-to-date operating income bridge that sales growth is translating well to operating income, which is up 13% versus last year, and price adjustments are keeping pace with the cost increases we're seeing. Operating income represented 17.8% of sales in the second quarter, a record for the segment.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, we're expecting sales growth of 3% to 5% versus prior year for the segment. Now let me turn to a summary of our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. We had another strong cash flow performance in the second quarter, bringing year-to-date cash from operations to $95 million, up $37 million from last year.

Capital expenditure was $27 million in the second quarter, and we continue to expect full year CapEx in the $90 million to $100 million range. Year-to-date free cash flow of $45 million is up significantly versus prior year. Cash flow is expected to continue to build through the second half, and we expect full year free cash flow to be in the range of 6% to 7% of sales.

Our balance sheet remains solid with our net leverage ratio at 1.6x EBITDA. Now I'll summarize our outlook for the third quarter. Overall, we expect a similar performance sequentially with third quarter sales of approximately $550 million, representing an increase of around 4% from prior year. In the Consumer & Specialties segment, we expect sales to grow 3% to 5% versus prior year, driven primarily by the Household and Personal Care product line. We're seeing stronger sales for cat litter early in the quarter, and we expect this will continue. And with our natural oil purification expansion running at target rates, we're expecting a solid quarter growth for this business.

The only area where we're not seeing improvement for this segment is the residential construction market, which remains soft relative to last year. In the Engineered Solutions segment, we also anticipate third quarter growth in the 3% to 5% range versus prior year. And overall, we expect similar market conditions sequentially for this segment. We're expecting growth in High-Temperature Technologies to be driven by another quarter of steady demand from steel customers. And in Environmental & Infrastructure, we expect year-over-year demand improvement to continue into the third quarter.

Overall, for MTI, we expect similar operating income sequentially of around $75 million and earnings per share of between $1.55 and $1.60. We expect to fully leverage these higher levels of sales into income as soon as our price/cost dynamics take hold in Consumer & Specialties. We expect overall operating margin to recover in the fourth quarter to slightly above prior year levels with the normal seasonality moving from Q3 to Q4.

We remain confident in our growth trajectory, and we continue to expect full year sales growth in the mid-single-digit range. And with several growth initiatives ramping up in the second half of this year, we expect this growth rate to continue into next year. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Doug.

Thanks, Erik. A couple of other items I'd like to touch on before we finish. This month, we're proud to publish our 18th annual sustainability report. Sustainability has always been a part of the DNA of our company, not only because it's one of our core values, but also because we believe it supports our continued growth as well as our customers' growth.

You can download the full report on the sustainability page of our website at mineralstech.com, but let me take you through some of the highlights. In 2025, we achieved a company best and world-class safety performance, reflecting our continuous improvement culture tied to our deep commitment to keeping all employees safe. 2025 was also the target year for achieving the 12 of the environmental goals we set for ourselves back in 2018 and are pleased to report that most of our results exceeded our expectations.

Let me give you some highlights of what we accomplished. First, we reduced our CO2 emissions by approximately 40%. We also eliminated the use of coal at all but one of our facilities, reducing consumption by 70% and converted 34% of our fuel oil usage to renewable alternatives. We reduced landfill waste by 44% and now divert approximately 56,000 tons of waste annually through beneficial reuse. We reduced water consumption by over 30% and water discharge by almost 60%, which equates to over 660 million gallons of water saved each year.

That's enough water to supply a midsized American town annually. In this year's report, we also announced our new 10-year targets through 2035, which build on the successful achievement of the previous targets we established in 2018. We are aiming to reduce our environmental impact by another 20% on an absolute basis and 30% on a per ton basis. Sustainability continues to be a meaningful driver of MTI's long-term growth strategy.

Over the last 5 years, 67% of the products commercialized by MTI have had a sustainable profile. Many of these products like Rafinol for sustainable aviation fuel, FLUORO-SORB for PFAS remediation and our NewYield line of products are examples of how we have tied together our minerals and our technologies to create sustainable solutions. These efforts are impressive by any measure and were achieved by the employees at MTI who are dedicated to continuous improvement in all that we do. I'd like to thank all of our employees for their support.

Lastly, a plug for our upcoming Investor Day, which will be held on September 22 at our R&D facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At our last Investor Day, we showcased the innovation and technical capabilities that support our bentonite-based businesses at our R&D facility in Hoffman Estates near Chicago.

This time in Bethlehem, we'll focus on innovations related to our crystal engineering technology in the calcium carbonate side of our business as well as the engineered blends technologies used in our High-Temperature products for steel and other metal industries.

We're excited to take you through these innovation pipelines and introduce some exciting new strategic projects that we see driving growth over the next 5 years. If you'd like to attend in person, please reach out to Lydia Kopylova, our Head of Investor Relations, and I hope to see many of you there. With that, let me open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.

Start with the... Obviously, year-to-date, still really good strength in Consumer & Specialties and cat litter, personal and household products. Just if you could dive a little bit deeper into the kind of timing of trends in Q2, particularly on the cat litter side and then talk to your confidence about like getting back to kind of mid-single-digit growth trajectory in Q3 and the back half.

Yes, sure. So I think you're talking more about the sales in HPC. I think it was really driven in the first quarter by cat litter. As you remember, I think sales were up like 19% in cat litter in the first quarter. A lot of that, we think, was due -- we saw was due to the channel fill distribution centers of all of our new products really came in strong.

As Erik mentioned, I think over the second quarter, with those distribution full, I think some of the order patterns slowed down a bit, but we're seeing that picking up again to a regular pace here in the third quarter, and we still have a really strong outlook for that business for this year. DJ, do you want to add any color to some of the new products, things that are going on?

Yes. Thanks, Doug. So Dan, just to bring into it a little bit. The new products that we're launching, we're pretty excited about them. And right now, as we're going into the third quarter, we're getting some good traction on that. But as I look back, I'm pretty happy with the top line growth with pet care.

I mean it's at that 9%, it's double what the ongoing markets are in North America and Europe, the same thing. We're well above what the market rates are, and that's been mostly driven by these new products and just lining up with some major retailers. So we see that continuing strong for the second half of the year. And in the meantime, working, as Erik was talking about on getting pricing up to offset some of the persistent inflationary increases that we're seeing.

The only other thing I'd add to that, you were talking about timing and some of that Erik mentioned in his comments was our bleaching earth or the oil purification business. Strong order book. As Erik mentioned, that facility, our expansion is now fully ramped up. It came online -- fully online at the end of the second quarter.

We thought some of that -- some of those new sales would come into the second quarter, but it looks like with that ramp-up late in the second, those are going to be ramping up through the third. So the timing should be some growth in HPC, not only from pet litter, but the sustainable aviation fuel orders that we have on the books for the back half of the year.

Helpful. On the cost side, -- you've been clearly demonstrated the ability to take pricing to offset inflation over the last several years. This environment, clearly unusual.

If costs level off to some degree, should we be able to get back to that, say, 14% plus operating margin next year? And again, that's assuming that not necessarily flat, but a more normal environment. Just kind of talk to where you think the business should be as things normalize over time.

Yes. Thanks, Dan. This is Erik. So yes, I mean we do think that. So right now, year-to-date, we're at around 13% operating margin. We're guiding to about 13.5% for the third quarter. The fourth is going to be between 13% and 13.5%. So this year, we're looking at between 13% and 13.5% for the full year operating margin.

That's going to depend a little bit on how costs play out for the rest of the year. The reason that we haven't caught up on the cost increases yet is because costs are still increasing for us. We had increases from Q1 to Q2, and we're actually seeing increases from Q2 to Q3 as well.

So the pricing that we have going into place in Q3, which is meant to cover the cost increases from Q2, it's catching us up, but we're still going to be upside down from a price versus cost perspective in the third quarter by something like $5 million to $6 million.

That being said, when costs do plane over, we do expect to make up that price versus cost gap. And I think we've shown historically that on the back end of that, we actually expand margins. So I think we're going to be exiting this year, assuming our current outlook on costs, exiting this year in a much better position to get back to our target margin level.

Assuming we're at 13.5% in the fourth quarter, that's not a bad place to be for a full year run rate of 15%. You'd want to be closer to 14%, perhaps, but we do have that typical seasonality in Q4 and Q1 every year.

Yes. Very helpful. One more, I'll jump out. Maybe just a little bit more color on the sort of update on the BMI case. How did we come to the determination of the funding the trust and the $290 million charge?

And I know it's not apples-to-apples, but obviously, J&J just came to an agreement. How does that sort of impact your confidence about the ability to get this settled and put it behind you? Any color or commentary there would be helpful, if possible.

Yes. Thanks. So maybe I'll answer the second part first. We saw the news on other J&J and their settlement. That really doesn't -- it's a different talc. It doesn't have much bearing. It's probably some positive news for them to get through that or at least come to some final, but that it really doesn't have a bearing on ours, our cases.

What I will say is, yes, we determined to increase our reserve for the potential -- for the funding of a potential plan that we filed to meet that court deadline. We were in mediation for many weeks before that. We wanted to put in a plan that we felt provided finality to the company and that we felt was a fair settlement. And through that mediation and those discussions, we determined that, that was a very rich offer to be able to put that out and get finality for the company.

Since then, I think you might have seen that the bankruptcy has been abated and the gating causation issue has been moved into District Court, and that's where we sit now. Right now, we're just in the scheduling. So there's not much to talk about there, but we're in the scheduling aspects of that trial and that resolving that issue. So that's where we are. That's how we came to that determination. We wanted some finality for the company and get this behind us, and we'll see where we go from here.

The next question comes from Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

I was hoping that we could get just maybe a little bit more color on what's going on in the PC and H business. Just really surprised that you guys were guiding to a high single-digit growth number, and I believe it was a 3-ish percent decline. I understand there were some pieces that didn't play out relative to your expectations. But I guess what were some of the key drivers of that meaningful shortfall? And I guess, what gives you confidence that you're going to see momentum pick back up in Q3?

Yes, Mike, I guess let me start just with kind of bridging the shortfall to our expectations. I mean, it was really 3 things: the easing off of the cat litter orders from the strong Q1. We probably overestimated where we were going to be just based on how strong the first quarter was. But like DJ said, I think we're pretty happy with the year-to-date 9% growth and then seeing the orders pick back up into the third quarter.

No real concerns there, but it was a difference from where our expectations were. The other piece was the bleaching earth expansion. Doug already mentioned, fully ramped up at the end of the second quarter, but we had assumed some sales in the second quarter for that expansion. The only other piece I would mention is the personal care campaign that was in the second quarter last year. We're expecting it earlier in the year this year. That's moved to the second half as well. So we had a few things shift, I would say, from the second quarter to the second half. But we're still feeling confident about the growth rates for those businesses going forward.

Yes, Mike, I would just add to that, that -- so Erik summarizes well the -- our interpretation of what we are thinking going into the second quarter. I'm telling you what I'm seeing as we're going into the third is pretty strong pull that supports some promotional activity with some key retailers that we've got.

That is a combination of new products with them and some new SKUs of old products, repackaging of old products. And so right now, that pull looks very strong on the pet side. We've got some increased momentum really across the U.S. on pet. On the bleaching earth, we're very bullish about that. We some minor delays in getting the project up and running, but we're also impeded by some shipping challenges that were associated with some geopolitical issues.

We've worked through that. We've got the strong supply chain going forward, supplying the sustainable aviation fuels that also got a good base of edible oils underneath it. So we're feeling really good about bleaching earth supporting that pet care growth. And again, the personal care item was just a shift from the second quarter into the third versus -- on that. And so that still looks like it's going to take off. So we feel very good about this quarter coming up.

All right. And while we're on the topic, I believe last quarter, you referenced a new laundry innovation or new product that a customer was going to be launching. Any update on the timing of any benefits coming from that laundry business?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Mike. Glad to address that. We have done a -- the team has done a great job on our end on getting our portion of that lined up. It is in dry laundry. It is supporting some innovations out there in the market.

So everything on our end is good. Everything is qualified. Supply chain is set and ready to go. And now we just -- our success will be dependent on how that new product responds in the market. So we feel good about that. I don't know that it's so much in the third quarter as the fourth, but it's entirely dependent on the success of our partner and how the market is embracing that.

All right. And then over on the refractory side, you noted some improved pull from European steel customers I assume that's MINSCAN that's driving that, but I guess any additional detail on what you're seeing and whether you think that momentum could continue?

Go ahead, Brett.

Yes, this is Brett. Mike, look, the European market is -- it's still soft, but it has improved over the prior quarter. There's been some carbon regulation safeguards that have finally been put into place, and that's really helped the threat of imports and it's improved production.

We're seeing really a lot of that production in Germany that is improving. But overall, we're starting to see some improvements. The U.K. just nationalized one of their major steel mills that's going to be positive. It's been a plant that we've had business with for many, many years. So when that -- they're going to actually expand and put a third blast furnace into that production.

Of course, we're seeing some -- our Middle East business, which is part of the European growth. We're doing pretty well despite the Iran conflict. But of course, the lanes and the logistics have been -- caused a little bit of commotion.

But overall, we haven't lost any business. We continue to sell, and we are seeing a little bit bigger uptick in the steel production. So we -- that's a good sign. As far as the MINSCAN in Europe, we have 4 units now outside of the U.S., and we installed one in Europe this year. So there's more to come, and we see more opportunities in Europe as the electric furnace steel production expands.

And the next question comes from Pete Osterland with Truist Securities.

So I wanted to start just by digging in a little more specifically on the C&S margins. You mentioned that higher costs haven't yet been fully recovered due to some contractual timing. Just what percentage of your sales within C&S are still awaiting contract resets?

I guess, if that's the right way to think about it? And should we be thinking about maybe a 200 basis point or higher margin snapback specifically in the third quarter? Or will this more likely be a multi-quarter recovery trajectory?

Yes. Pete, this is Erik. Thanks for the question. So look, yes, in terms of getting the Consumer & Specialties margins back to target, the biggest thing right now is the price-cost catch-up.

And the fact that costs are continuing to rise means that, that's going to be pushed out to the fourth quarter. So we're not expecting a major improvement Q2 to Q3. I would say the other things we have going for us longer term is just the growth of higher-margin, these consumer specialties that we talk about.

That's going to help the mix overall. And just higher volumes in general just will help with fixed cost leverage. But in terms of your specific questions around the percent of contracts with the delay, a lot of that sits in the Household and Personal Care product line within Consumer & Specialties.

Historically, we've had more of a pricing lag within Specialty Additives, for example, in the Paper and Packaging business. We've done a lot of work there in terms of tightening up those lags and less so of an impact these days in that product line.

Got it. Very helpful. And then also just on the record margins within Engineered Solutions, was there any degree of the second quarter margin performance that you view as over-earning as opposed to permanent operational efficiency improvements? I guess, is it fair for us to be thinking about 17% plus as the structural floor for this segment going forward?

Yes. Those margins are solid. The segment is performing very well. I wouldn't call anything out as special or unusual for the second quarter.

I would say if you're looking sequentially Q2 to Q3, you do have some typical seasonality in terms of customer and maintenance shutdowns in Europe for some of the more industrial businesses. But I think we're setting a new baseline for this business from a margin perspective.

Peter, I think the only thing I'd add to that is we kind of signaled that there was some pent-up profitability in this business, right?

So the High-Temperature Technologies business operating really well, new products, MINSCANS, contractual volumes coming through. Steel markets in Europe are improving. North America has been strong for the past year or so. But we've had almost 2 years of kind of a lull in our Environmental Products business, and that's starting to turn a little bit.

We've had 5 quarters of growth in that business, in that product line. And we said as that starts to turn, that's a lot of contribution that comes through. It's project-based, a little bit lumpy still. But at the same time, we're starting to see our offshore oil grew 22% in the first half of the year.

Drilling products and infrastructure for infrastructure drilling has been really doing well. Building products is starting to turn and our environmental products and water products and FLUORO-SORB is in there, too. So we still see there's more growth potential.

So that business, as you start to see these volumes of one of these product lines start to move, really drops to the bottom line and good contribution. And that's what you're seeing, and we think that's stable. Now the other side of the business, still good growth, right?

We've got, as Erik mentioned, that lag that we're going to move ourselves through and those costs park there, a lot of transportation, energy. We'll get that pushed through, but that growth is there. We start to leverage that growth to the bottom line.

I think that's -- yes, we got some work to do in the Household and Personal Care business and cost. But once we get that work done, I think we got to both sides of the business kind of moving along. That's where we see that margin improvement with the 17% on one side and moving the other side up to 14%, you start to see that 15%, 16% as we push through.

Now a lot of things have to line up. It's got some work to do, but I think we're setting up for that margin improvement. It's unfortunate we have this delay still, but we'll move through it, and we'll deliver that profitability.

And the next question comes from David Silver with Freedom Capital Markets.

I apologize in advance. I had a little trouble joining the call at the beginning. So apologies if I make you repeat yourself. I wanted to drill down, I guess, with DJ on a couple of the expansion projects that are underway. And in particular, I guess there was a series of 3 PCC satellites that were due to turn on this year. Just wondering where we are on that and what the contribution might have been in the second quarter?

And then just on the edible oil, you did explain the timing. It's complete. The order book is full, but revenues will probably start in the third quarter. With a full order book and the project complete, I'm just wondering about next steps there.

Like what might be the cadence for the next incremental expansion, assuming the SAF market continues to progress, which I think is a pretty sure thing myself personally. And then is the expansion program, one where the incremental additions are more of a modular nature. In other words, they can be added relatively quickly?

Or is this more of a discrete project with its own separate, I don't know, off-sites or supporting utilities? Just what might be the cadence that we should think about for growth in your capacity on the edible oil side, edible oil purification side?

So David, I'm going to try and unpack that a little bit. Let me deal with the first part of the question on the PCC. I would say, as Erik had indicated and Doug had indicated, all 3 of those are up, running, contributed in the second quarter, and they look like they're going to be good business for us moving forward.

There's another one that we have mentioned in the past that comes online in '27. So we're building another satellite right now. It's a pretty substantial satellite that supports packaging growth in Asia. And so that's -- so we had the 3 that came up running in the second quarter and contributing in the second quarter, another one still to come that will be early in '27.

So paper is looking solid. And then I would say that the nature of that pipeline still remains healthy, 20-plus projects in the pipeline, a blend of packaging and NewYield and PCC and the new products we've introduced. So we feel pretty good on that side of things. Shifting gears now to the bleaching earth question.

So we just put in that expansion. It's reasonable for you to think of that one as a modular expansion, pretty efficient in getting it up and running and designing the product specifically for these customers, getting them qualified with the customer. And so we're up and running, and that will be -- you'll start seeing that pretty much running full out in this third quarter.

We are looking further at expansions. The next one probably is a bigger magnitude one, but we still got to line up some volumes on that. I would tell you, though, that from what we've been able to do with both the quality of the ore and the reserves that we've got, especially in Turkey, plus the scientists that we've got working at Hoffman Estates, we feel very good about that product line and what it's able to contribute differently in the market, especially in sustainable aviation fuel.

So we're happy with this last expansion. We're happy with the qualifications that we've been able to do and the pace in which we've been able to bring them in and we'll get ready to expand further, but nothing to announce on that just yet.

Okay. Great. And I hope you'll indulge me here, but I wanted to go back to the $290 million charge that was taken. And I just want to make sure I have things lined up.

But back in -- so there's a total funding of the 524(g) trust of $450 million. And I believe in first quarter of 2025, you allocated, I believe, $185 million of your total charge then for the trust.

Is it correct to say that of the $290 million, I guess, the $265 million or the balance to get to $450 million, so $265 million of the $290 million goes to the trust and the balance of $25 million or so is for estimated other costs. Is that correct? Or...

Dave, this is Erik. So you're close. There's a portion in there that's to fund the ongoing process. And so right now, there's about $450 million in terms of potential 529(g) (sic) [524(g)] funding and about $35 million in terms of ongoing process funding. And that's made up of the charge we just took and the one from 2025.

Okay. Great. And then I don't know if you can answer this or not, but -- so you have set up a trust that you believe is acceptable to settle all the ultimate claims. However, the bankruptcy judge, as you pointed out, has abated his process in favor of letting the District Court work on the issue of causation.

Doug, I guess this is how determined or how do you feel about letting that district court process run its course versus maybe pursuing something sooner, but that may ultimately prove to be a little more expensive for your company. How do you kind of weigh the pros and cons of settling sooner versus letting the district court process run its course?

Yes, David, I'm not going to answer that question. I don't -- we're right in the midst of the beginning of litigation. And so I don't want to speculate on outcomes in district courts or the ramifications of that right now. I think where we are is we filed a plan that we feel is fair and provides finality to the company -- for the company.

We've always maintained that BMI's -- Barrett's Minerals BMI OldCo's talc has been safe. And so the District Court taking on that issue, we see that as a positive because we've always maintained this to be the case. But we're right in the beginning of that, and we're going to be going through the process of scheduling and seeing how that goes. And I just don't want to speculate on where we'll land at the moment right now, given where we are.

Fair enough. I appreciate that. And then last thing for me. I did just want to get a PFAS update. I believe last quarter, the plan was to have 10 commercial projects start up through 2026. And then I am curious, but I did watch the EPA panel discussion where your company was one of just a handful featured.

And I'm just wondering if that presentation and that opportunity for interested parties has resulted in an acceleration of trial and data testing. So just an update on progress with commercializing PFAS and then your take on what has happened since the -- your participation in the EPA panel.

David, it's Brett. Let me just give you a quick update on where we stand with FLUORO-SORB, and hopefully, I can answer your questions. FLUORO-SORB really continues to gain traction. And we do have the 10 full-scale municipal drinking water plants up and running.

The good news is we now have 18 municipal systems specified for upcoming installations. Most of those will start -- they're all -- most of them are under construction.

Several of them will start in '26 and others will start in '27. So that we're gaining traction. We also expect to see more of the pilot projects for the small groundwater treatment plants move into full scale. So a lot of that will start to move over the next several months. We do as you know, we also use the FLUORO-SORB in situ remediation. And we're working with the Department of War and other aviation-related fields.

Based on the success we've seen with the Department of War, we're expanding that project. And we have -- actually, we have 2 big projects that will happen in the third quarter, and both are airports and one is a military site. So that is working. And it's really based on the absorption technology of the FLUORO-SORB.

So it's working very well. The other update I'll give you is we also continue our discussions with the U.S. EPA Office of Water and Office of Land Emergency Management. Both are really committed to the PFAS remediation and disposal research. So we're working with them to wrap this up. And the CRADA agreement -- and I think once that is finalized, then the research will expand much more rapidly. But it's -- things are moving well, and we expect to see additional municipalities taking on the FLUORO-SORB.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Doug Dietrich for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. I appreciate everyone joining the call today. If you have any follow-up questions, we'd be happy to answer them after the call, but we'll talk to you in about 3 months. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to the Minerals Technologies First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Lydia Kopelova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Dietrich; and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Aldag. Following Doug and Eric's prepared remarks, we'll open it up to questions.

As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and on the slides. Our SEC filings disclose certain risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

We also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix of this presentation, which are posted on our website.

Now I'll open it up to Doug. Doug?

Thanks, Lydia. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. Today, as usual, I'll provide a quick review of our first quarter financials. Then I'll give an update on our outlook for the remainder of 2026, including an overview of the impact that current events are having on our business, and the progress we've been making on our growth projects. Eric will then take you through the detailed financials and provide our outlook. After that, we'll open up the call to questions.

Before I get into the details, let me start with the headline. We delivered a strong first quarter with broad-based double-digit growth, and we're seeing early proof that our strategic growth investments are paying off. First quarter sales came in at $547 million, up 11% from prior year. Sales growth was broad-based and from both of our segments. We saw an 11% year-over-year increase in our Consumer and Specialty segment, driven by Household and Personal Care, which grew 16% and and Specialty Additives, which grew 6%.

Our Engineered Solutions segment sales increased 12% over last year, with high temperature technologies up 8% and and environmental and infrastructure of 24%. A portion of this growth is tied to the specific investments we made last year in support of our strategic growth initiatives to expand into higher-margin consumer markets and into higher growth geographies.

If you recall, we projected that these initiatives would drive $100 million in annualized revenue beginning this year and this quarter, we delivered the first portion of that growth. From a market perspective, we saw small improvements in demand at the start of the year, which then trended stronger in March. The stronger trend has continued here in the second quarter.

Operating income was $68 million, excluding special items, up 7% from last year. Earnings per share were $1.38, up 21% and and both operating and free cash flows improved significantly compared to last year. Like most companies, we felt the impact this quarter from the rapidly changing environment caused by the recent geopolitical events, and I'll talk about that more on the next slide.

Let's start on the left side of this slide with some points about the impact current events of -- in the Middle East. Overall, we've avoided any material impact on sales or operations to date. Where we have seen an impact is with higher energy and freight costs, which we are addressing through pricing actions and temporary surcharges.

In terms of our operating and sales footprint, we only have a small presence in the region, primarily consisting of refractory sales to Middle East steel producers and a long-standing joint venture in our Energy Services business. We did encounter some challenges with shipments that were in the Persian Gulf when the conflict started, but we managed to redirect those shipments to ensure delivery to our customers.

Our team responded quickly to the changing environment, much as we did last year with tariffs, and I want to thank our employees for their agility and creativity in identifying solutions for our customers. Our biggest current challenges are higher energy prices at our facilities, increased fuel cost for our heavy equipment and higher transportation and freight costs.

Once these impacts became apparent, we implemented price actions some of which could be implemented quickly and others which will take effect over the next 90 days due to contractual terms. We are, of course, closely monitoring the evolving conditions and are prepared to implement further actions as needed.

We've had minimal supply disruptions as a result of the conflict, and I'd like to point out that from a broader supply chain and logistics standpoint, we benefit from the geographically diverse structure of our business and the localization of our operations.

We typically produce our products within the same region or country where we sell them. I believe that this operating structure is one of MTI's key differentiators as it limits the impact that global supply chain disruptions have on us. This structure will further demonstrate the value as the trend for locally produced minerals and mineral-based products increases.

Now let me turn to the right side of the slide to update you on our growth projects. The progress we're making and the associated timing of the expected sales as well as the market updates. There are a number of positive elements here, all contributing to what we see as strong sales momentum this year.

I'll start with our Consumer and Specialty segment, in our household and personal care product line, we've been upgrading and expanding several of our facilities. The Cat litter facility expansions that we completed late last year in North America are fully online. We've been ramping up the new business we've secured for them from customers in the U.S. and Canada. In fact, this was a record sales quarter for Cat Litter, which grew 19% over last year. Our new cat litter facility in China also continues to ramp up and should be fully functional by the second half of the year with new business orders already secured.

Last year, we announced a capacity expansion for our natural oil purification facility. We expect to have this fully online late in the second quarter, enabling us to meet the rapidly growing demand we are seeing for renewable fuels specifically sustainable aviation fuel. Our high-performing products are uniquely capable of meeting the challenging specification for these applications. In this quarter, sales of these products grew 14% over last year and we expect the pace -- this pace to accelerate once the expansion is fully operational.

Elsewhere in our Specialties business, our Animal Health business is trending nicely with sales up 9% over last year. and we're anticipating strong volume growth in Fabric Care starting in the second half with the introduction of a new technology.

In our Specialty Additives product line, we previously announced the ramp-up of several new satellites in our paper and packaging business as well as capacity expansions at others, all of which remain on track for the second half of this year. One area where we've not seen much improvement is in the North America residential construction market, which remains relatively slow.

Turning to our Engineered Solutions segment in the high-temperature Technologies product line, the min scan installations we previously announced all remain on track. We are seeing higher refractory product demand from stronger steel markets in North America as well as from the share gains we've captured as a result of our MINSCAN installations. Europe steel production, on the other hand, remains soft.

Our Metalcasting business remained stable with no major inflections. We're seeing some strength in municipal foundry applications. the North America heavy truck market is showing signs of potential recovery that we continue to see slow demand from the agricultural equipment market. Foundry markets in Asia remained stable, and demand for our engineered foundry blends continues to expand with sales growing 9% in the first quarter of last year.

In environmental and infrastructure, we're seeing the potential beginnings of demand improvement, mainly through environmental lining project activity, which has increased of late. We're also on track for 10 or possibly more new water utility implementations for our FLUORO-SORB remediation product in the second half and demand for our infrastructure drilling products remains robust in both North America and Europe.

Let me summarize all this for you. First, I'm pleased with how our growth investments are performing, and we're on track to deliver $100 million of incremental sales. We're off to a strong start to the year, and we still have several new growth projects ramping up over the next 2 quarters.

In addition, we're seeing improving trends in many of our end markets. At the same time, we're mindful of continued macro uncertainty, particularly around energy costs. But even with that backdrop, the momentum we've established from these well-timed investments and the positions we've established in durable and growing end markets puts us on track for a solid growth year.

Our current projection is for mid-single-digit sales growth in 2026, and this could inflect higher if the market strength we are currently seeing continues.

Now let me turn the call over to Eric, who can take you through our financials and provide more details. Eric?

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by providing an overview of our first quarter results. followed by a review of the performance of our segments, and I'll wrap up with our outlook for the second quarter. Following my remarks, I'll turn the call over for questions.

Now let's review our first quarter results. We had a strong start to the year. Q1 sales were $547 million, up 5% sequentially and up 11% from prior year with solid growth across all product lines. In the sequential sales bridge on the upper left, you can see that sales in the Consumer and Specialty segment grew $22 million from the prior quarter or 8%, driven by strong growth in both Household and Personal Care and Specialty Additives.

Sales in the Engineered Solutions segment were up $5 million from the prior quarter, driven by high temperature technologies. Operating income was $68 million in the first quarter, up $1 million from the fourth quarter, driven by higher volumes and improved productivity in the Consumer and Specialty segment.

Turning to the year-over-year bridges. You can see that sales were well above prior year in all 4 of our product lines. Excluding favorable foreign exchange, our sales grew 8%, driven by higher volumes in several of our businesses. We also benefited from a few extra days in the quarter relative to last year. We estimate that underlying growth, excluding FX and the few extra days was 5% to 6%.

In Consumer & Specialties, sales in Household and Personal Care were up $19 million or 16%, and Specialty Additives sales increased $9 million or 6% from prior year. In Engineered Solutions, sales in high-temperature Technologies grew $14 million or 8% versus prior year, and Environmental and Infrastructure sales grew $13 million or 24%.

Operating income improved 7% from prior year, with increases from the segments totaling $8 million. Operating income and margin would have been stronger if not for the rapid shift in freight and energy costs we experienced during the quarter as well as higher corporate expense due to the change in stock price during the quarter and the resulting mark-to-market impact on stock-based compensation.

Recall that our guidance for the first quarter assumed $2 million to $3 million of higher energy and mining costs. We actually incurred about $5 million of higher costs in the quarter. While we do hedge a large portion of the energy we consume at our plants, the increases we experienced in the quarter were mostly in the form of higher freight expenses due to the increase in fuel costs.

We expect to fully offset these higher input costs through pricing and other actions as we move through the year. However, we are anticipating a timing lag of up to 90 days in some cases based on contractual pricing arrangements. All in all, it was a good start to the year with solid growth above our initial expectations.

We are managing through some new cost challenges, and we are working diligently and quickly to overcome them, just as we've done in previous inflationary periods. Despite these higher costs, our earnings per share, excluding special items, grew 21% from last year, setting us up for a strong year in 2026.

Now let's turn to a review of our segments, beginning with Consumer & Specialties. First quarter sales in the Consumer and Specialty segment were $297 million, up 11% from prior year. In Household and Personal Care, sales of $142 million or 16% -- were up 16% year-over-year. Cat Litter sales continued to build on the momentum we saw in the second half of last year.

The new business we secured ramped up ahead of schedule in the first quarter, which helped drive Cat litter sales up 19%. Sales of bleaching earth for edible oil and renewable fuel purification remains on a solid growth track, up 14% from prior year, and commissioning is underway with our capacity expansion for this product line to serve our expanding order book.

Our capacity investments are also progressing well for animal health and fabric care, which grew 9% and 13%, respectively, in the first quarter. And we expect sales from these investments to ramp up beginning in the second half.

Sales in Specialty Additives grew 6% from prior year to $154 million. Our volume to paper and packaging customers in Asia was up 21%. And including the ramp-up of our newest satellite there. This growth was partly offset by slower sales into residential construction.

We did see an improvement in residential construction volumes from the fourth quarter as expected. However, this end market remains soft compared to prior years. Operating income for the segment increased by 8% from last year to $33 million.

Operating margin improved by 40 basis points sequentially despite the rapid increases in freight and energy costs we saw in the first quarter, and we expect operating margins to continue to build throughout the year as we work with our customers to pass through these incremental costs and as we gain leverage from our growth initiatives.

Looking ahead to the second quarter, we expect segment sales to be similar sequentially and up 4% to 5% from prior year. Sales in Household and Personal Care are expected to remain strong up mid- to high single digits from prior year, driven by continued growth in cat litter and bleaching earth for renewable fuel purification.

We expect sales in Specialty Additives to be similar, both sequentially and year-over-year. We expect a seasonal uptick in residential construction, albeit below last year's level to offset seasonal maintenance outages for paper and packaging customers and a paper machine conversion from paper to brown packaging in North America.

Now let's turn to the Engineered Solutions segment. First quarter sales in the Engineered Solutions segment were $250 million, up 12% from prior year. In our high-temperature Technologies product line, sales of $183 million were 8% higher on continued strength in the steel market in the U.S. And despite ongoing softness in the agricultural equipment and heavy truck markets, sales to GLOBALFOUNDRY customers were flat to prior year, supported by continued growth in Asia, where sales were up 9%.

Sales in our environmental and infrastructure product line were $67 million, up 24% from prior year. We continue to see strong pull for our infrastructure drilling solutions. -- with sales up 46% over prior year. Also contributing to the growth for this product line were stronger starts for large-scale project activity and offshore water treatment relative to last year. Overall, the segment delivered another solid operating performance.

Operating income increased by 14% versus prior year to $39 million, representing 15.7% of sales. Sequentially, margin for the segment was impacted by fewer equipment sales and seasonally higher mining costs as we expected, in addition to the higher freight costs. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we're expecting sales for the segment to increase by high single digits, both sequentially and year-over-year.

In high-temperature Technologies, we're expecting a sales increase following the Lunar New Year holiday outages in Asia in the first quarter and demand from steel customers in North America is expected to remain strong. Sales in environmental and infrastructure are expected to increase by around 20% sequentially as we enter the seasonally stronger period for large-scale project activity. And this would equate to around a 10% growth over last year for this product line.

Now let me turn to a summary of our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our first quarter cash flow improved significantly versus the prior year. First quarter cash from operations was $32 million, up $37 million from prior year. The first quarter is typically our lowest cash flow quarter. And as usual, we expect free cash flow to build as we move through the year.

Capital expenditures in the first quarter were $23 million an increase of $5 million from prior year as we continue to make investments to support our growth initiatives and our operations. We continue to expect full year capital expenditure in the $90 million to $100 million range with the potential for slightly higher spending depending on the pace of certain investments.

Free cash flow also improved significantly over last year, and we continue to expect to finish the year with free cash flow in the 6% to 7% of sales range. The balance sheet remains strong with our net leverage ratio at 1.7x EBITDA.

Now I'll summarize our outlook for the second quarter. Overall, we expect second quarter sales to be approximately $560 million, up around 6% from prior year, driven by growth in both segments.

In Consumer & Specialties, our guidance reflects growth from our new cat litter business that began in the first quarter as well as the ramp-up of our expansion for edible oil and renewable fuel purification. Overall, for the segment, we expect 4% to 5% sales growth over last year despite residential construction markets remaining soft.

In Engineered Solutions, we expect continued growth in North America refractories, Asia foundry and improved environmental and infrastructure project activity. Overall for the segment, we expect year-over-year growth of around 7% to 8%. Altogether, we expect operating income for the quarter of approximately $80 million and earnings per share of between $1.60 and $1.65.

I want to highlight that our outlook for the second quarter includes $12 million of higher inflationary costs on a year-over-year basis. This is up from the $5 million we experienced in the first quarter. Given the rapid pace of these cost increases and the contractual pricing lag for certain customers, we are expecting around a $3 million temporary impact on our operating income in the second quarter, and this is included in our guidance.

However, even with the new cost challenges we've been navigating in the first half, we're still expecting 2026 to be a strong year for us. As Doug mentioned, we're well on track for mid-single-digit growth in sales this year. We could certainly exceed this mid-single-digit growth level if our end markets remain relatively constructive, but we feel this is a balanced and appropriately cautious outlook for the year given the current macro uncertainty.

And based on our current outlook for energy costs, pricing and end market dynamics, we're currently tracking to about a 14% operating margin for the full year. This means we're expecting margins to improve by more than 100 basis points from the first half to the second half, approaching our 15% run rate target in the second half, driven by our pricing actions and volume leverage from our growth initiatives. Of course, should energy costs moderate this year, our margin could move higher.

Before we turn to questions, I'd like to highlight that we're hosting an Investor Day on September 22 at our R&D facility in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. The event will include a webcast program updating investors on our 5-year targets as well as an in-person R&D walk-through, showcasing some of the technical and innovation capabilities that are driving our growth today and into the future. We'll be sending invitations in the coming weeks, and we look forward to seeing many of you there.

With that, I'll turn the call over for questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question is from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.

Eric. I appreciate all the color. Congrats on obviously nice quarter. Impressive momentum from a top line perspective. I think if we backed out FX and some of the extra days, 6% plus, so well ahead of the mid-single digits or at least tracking well. How much of that growth was price versus volume? And I just kind of -- I know you have a lot of different end markets, but how would you describe your growth relative to overall end market growth, just trying to tease out the impact of some of those strategic investments and initiatives that you've been making?

Yes. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for the question. So pricing was relatively minimal in the first quarter. We expect that to be a little higher as we move forward as we've obviously had to implement some price increases to cover the higher costs. But around 1% pricing in the first quarter versus last year. And yes, as far as the growth, I think when we gave the guidance at the beginning of the quarter, we expected a bit of a ramp-up as we move through the quarter. But we had pretty broad-based improvement in the pace of sales into March.

I talked about the new Cat litter business that we have coming in a little early. I think we're certainly outpacing the market growth as it pertains to the Cat litter market with the new business that we've secured here in North America. These are new items that we're launching with retail partners, new stores that we're in. So certainly outpacing market growth there.

And the other sort of highlight was in the environmental and infrastructure product line -- it's just -- it's been great to see that product line show a few consecutive quarters of growth after a pretty long period of stagnant or a subdued market for the product line.

So as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, things like infrastructure drilling, the environmental lining systems, just getting stronger pull, and we're starting to see early signs of a pretty positive market for that product line.

Really helpful. And actually, just kind of stole the answer to my second question because certainly, Enviraland infrastructure is clearly turned owner appears to be turning it. I guess, just talk about your visibility, project-based work. So what are you seeing in terms of RFQs and opportunities looking beyond the next quarter or 2 in that business?

Yes, Dan, let me hand that one over to Brett Argirakis to give us some color on the mining market.

Dan, thanks for the question. Yes, as Eric said, really, in the last 4 quarters, it showed a little bit of improvement. And this quarter, it was pleasant outcome. So overall, the growth drivers in the first quarter were primarily a result of increased activity in the mining sector in both North America and Europe.

The sector actually has shown global improvement versus last year and really is pointing to continued improvement in the second quarter and into the third. We're seeing -- also seeing North American municipal landfill projects improving. And it's providing us additional opportunities -- we are getting more RFQs, as you pointed out. And so we are feeling pretty good about the rest of this quarter into the third.

So our pipeline really has increased and we've been specified into several projects for this year in both our North America and European production schedules are pretty healthy, really into the third quarter. So we feel pretty good about the next couple of quarters.

Very good. I guess, last for me, and I can jump back in queue with follow-ups. But you're demonstrating certainly not just this year, but in the last couple of years, more speed and agility in terms of pricing reacting to the spike in energy and other input costs. Obviously, it's a little bit of a lag. So we saw some margin compression.

I'm just wondering how much of the year-over-year margin contraction was kind of lags in energy input costs versus mix or any other factors?

Yes. So Dan, in the first quarter in terms of the price cost lag, it was probably about a $2 million impact for us on margins, mostly freight and that picked up really in March, obviously, the other thing kind of weighing on our margins in the first quarter that I alluded to, was the higher corporate cost, but that was $2 million to $3 million higher depending on the comparison period that you're using and that was really just based on the change in the stock price during the quarter. It's a mark-to-market impact on stock-based compensation.

So if not for those kind of 2 items, the freight cost increases and the corporate costs, operating income would have been well over $70 million. We probably would have been above last year's margin. So yes, we have some -- we've got to pass through the higher cost in pricing. We've got the surcharges in place. We've got pricing actions implemented. We do just have some contractual limitations that results in a lag of up to 90 days in some cases before we can pass that through. So about a $2 million impact from the inflationary point in the first quarter. probably about a $3 million impact in the second quarter just because of the full load of higher freight costs. And then that should taper down in the third, certainly, probably closer to $1 million in the third and then catching up in the third quarter.

Yes. Dan, the only thing I'll add is that, yes, we've gotten more agile with this. But at the same time, look, we -- we price our products on value, not cost, right? But there are times where like this and some unprecedented times. And if you remember in 2022, we were able to pass through over $200 million of inflationary costs.

So we do have that pricing power. We do work with our customers. We understand there's temporary fluctuations. So when we see something like this, we need to move and we use different methods. We use general regular pricing increases, but also surcharges to make sure that we're only pricing for when these impacts happen. So we move very quickly to put those in place. And as I mentioned in my remarks, we will we will make sure that we monitor the situation if we need to take further action, we'll do that, too.

That's helpful. And then I think you said, Eric, 14% kind of trending to 14% operating margin for the year. If we did level set or sort of circle those charges already probably closer to 15%. So if I have any follow-ups, I will circle back.

The next question is from Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

Congrats on a nice start to the year. I wanted to just clarify, you mentioned the 1% price mix. Can you break out what the FX contribution was that was part of that 11% growth and did I hear correctly -- did I hear you correctly that you had a number of extra days that contributed to the strong revenue number?

Yes, that's right, Mike. So the FX impact was about 3% on a year-over-year basis. That's going to come down as we move through the year. It's just based on where the dollar euro basically was this year versus last year and that sort of levels out as we move through the year.

So on a full year basis, probably looking at where currency rates stand today, probably looking at more of a 1% to 2% FX impact. But for the first quarter, it was about 3% impact. And yes, so we did have a couple of extra days in the quarter just based on how our fiscal quarter fell.

The extra days went into the Easter holiday. So we estimate that the extra days contributed to about 2% to 3% of the growth on a year-over-year basis.

All right. Very helpful. And then I just wanted to kind of revisit the -- just the margin performance. I understand that there was some headwind related to the freight costs you mentioned as well as the corporate higher corporate expense. But I'm just a little bit surprised that with 11% revenue growth number that we didn't see more leverage to the bottom line. So maybe just talk a little bit more about price mix or any other costs or efficiency issues that may have impacted your margins?

Yes. We started off the year. I'm going to hand this back over to Eric, but just to kind of chime in on your commentary of disappointed to see it follow the bottom line. Look, we were set up for a great quarter.

I think things were starting to trend north, we had new products coming in, margin contributions were right on target where we wanted. Look, higher stock price, the mark-to-market is something we're -- it's going to happen. But we are set up for a good quarter. So yes, we do think that this will ultimately fall to the bottom line. But then when the energy prices hit, we had to take that on. You know we have some lag in pricing. So that was unexpected in the quarter.

But we do think that as this moves through and as our pricing actions fall in, that margin is going to come back. So this is a temporary thing, Mike. But it really had to do with energy and freight. So Eric, do you want to -- I think we bridge to just...

Maybe a couple of things. From a mix perspective, Mike, we talked about residential construction being soft. So Q1 is a seasonally soft period for residential construction and the market is relatively soft. And I think we've mentioned before that those are relatively high contribution margin products. So that does generally have an unfavorable mix impact. And I would also say that for the cost impacts that we are experiencing, probably 2/3 of that cost impact is impacting the Consumer & Specialties segment.

And that's where we have some contractual limitations as well in terms of the timing of passing things through. And so we do expect those margins, in particular in that segment to improve as we move through the year.

All right. Then I just wanted to talk a little bit about this $3 million price cost lag that you expect in Q2. Any thoughts on what could drive that to be better or worse in terms of things you can control and your ability to get higher pricing or find some improved procurement or things like that.

Obviously, if the war ended today, that would probably be favorable. But then my other -- the other piece of this question is, do we expect that $3 million price cost lag to be neutral by the time we get to Q3 and then at a certain point, is your expectation that, that would turn favorable to earnings or margin contribution?

Go ahead, Eric.

Yes. So it's going to depend a lot on energy costs generally. And our energy spend isn't directly linked to oil prices but there's a correlation there into freight, some of the energy-linked raw material packaging that we buy, the energy spend that we have on the plant.

I would say, yes, we're planning to be caught up on that in the third quarter. We may have about $1 million of lingering impact in the third quarter. But as we move through this as long as energy costs stabilize, we plan to more than offset and maintain our margins at least. I think Doug mentioned the prior inflationary time period. I would say that between 2022 and 2024, we took on over $200 million in costs. And over that same time frame, we also improved our margins.

And so I think we've shown historically that we can pass things through. I think we've gotten faster over time as an organization. We're seeing $3 million in the second quarter that's going to come down to something closer to $1 million in the third, assuming energy costs stay relatively close to where they are today.

Yes. I mean things that can improve it, Mike. Obviously, energy costs dropped rapidly and stay there for a while. I don't think we're projecting that right now. I think we're looking at this probably being through the year at higher energy costs. It's going to take a while given what's going on, I think, to have that happen. It could change. That could be one upside for us. But again, we're going to take care of our customers.

We're going to make sure that we price appropriately for the value we deliver and pass through some of these costs with them. So yes, there are some things that can improve upon that. But we're giving you our best projection in a volatile environment right now.

Right. And then last question I had is just on the metal casting and foundry business. I guess, first of all, it sounds like you continue to pick up additional market share with the custom green sand blended product in Asia. So that's great to hear. But I was just curious, you mentioned in North America heavy truck, I think that's a headwind now, but I think the assumption or what the forecasts are saying is that because of some regulatory changes, heavy truck could pick up as we get into the second half.

And I'm just curious if your expectation is that North America foundry should see some improvement in the second half, either just based on heavy truck or because we're kind of getting into some easier comps here?

Yes. Heavy truck has been kind of a headwind for a while. So is the heavy ag off-highway ag business for a couple of years. So -- and that has been, at least in heavy truck due to some pending regulation that I think we're getting some clarity on. I think the comments I put in were relatively stable markets in North America, but we are seeing potentially some -- the order book for heavy trucks starting to build.

And I think, as you said, that could be towards the second half of the year. So early signs that folks are going to move forward with buying these trucks, and that will certainly flow into kind of our heavy truck business. ag, we have not seen that yet. That's the 1 area that still seems to be flat. So yes, we could see some improvement, and I think we might be starting to see the beginnings of that early this year, Mike.

The next question is from Pete Osterland with Truist Securities.

So just wanted to start on your recent growth investments. So you noted the $100 million aggregate sales target is still on track. Are there any of these investments specifically where you're seeing more or less traction than you originally expected? And on a related note, just in terms of the cost impact, given what appears to be a more inflationary environment, I guess any incremental costs or delays that you're expecting with fully ramping your growth investments relative to what you originally expected?

No, we're not seeing that right now. I think let me characterize this. First, we are seeing a little bit of stronger pull or at least earlier pool in the pet litter business, the Cat Litter business. We brought those facilities online late last year, 2 in North America, 1 in China, which is still ramping up, but we started up last year and have begun to fill them up with this business that we projected to be about $25 million plus this year, and that actually started a little bit sooner than we had expected. So that's one positive area.

We do have more investments, these investments that are coming online associated with this growth. I mentioned the bleaching earth associated with the oil purification and sustainable aviation fuel, that's going to be coming online in the -- late in the second quarter. And that's supporting very strong demand we're seeing for that product. I mentioned year-over-year first quarter, that product grew 14%. We see that accelerating potentially going through the year. We've already booked -- almost booked out that facility through the rest of the year, just given the strong demand. So that could accelerate.

We have 2 paper and packaging satellites coming on late in the year. We've got MINSCAN, we've got FLUORO-SORB installations. So there's a lot building this year that you haven't yet seen. I'm also going to highlight that the markets I just mentioned to you are kind of what we're going to call, not immune, but a bit more durable to what's going on with energy.

As I mentioned, the cat litter is pulling and the sustainable aviation fuel is not necessarily driven by cost driven by regulation. And so as the regulations have changed, for the amount of sustainable aviation fuel, that's what's driving this demand, and we see that being very durable this year. Same with the MINSCAN installations, those are contracted. Those will be installed, and we'll start to see the pull in the revenue from those as they get installed. And the paper PCC satellites are contracted.

And as they ramp up, we'll start to see the pull there. So I don't see -- outside of that, there could be some market demand fluctuation. We're seeing the strength. Energy costs could change those markets a little bit this year. But the investments we've made, we see are being put into durable and growing markets that we think just alone, that's going to drive at least the mid-single digits growth. And as I mentioned, if these markets hold in like they are, could be better this year. I hope that helps.

Yes, very helpful. And you kind of touched on what my follow-up was going to be. So I guess just thinking about the disruptions in global energy prices and logistics related to the Middle East situation. where within your core portfolio, do you see the greatest potential for derivative impacts on demand here? I guess, where regionally or by end market is demand potentially most vulnerable for you -- are there any markets that could benefit? I guess what are the potential demand impacts that you're focused on right now if the situation has prolonged?

Yes. Look, I don't want to ignore the fact that higher energy prices may not have settled in fully to the global economy, and we'll have to see where they go and how long they are elevated.

I think our concerns are most outside the United States in terms of Asia and Europe. We've been seeing some improvement in some of our European products -- and that could be an area. I think in Asia, parts of Asia, I think most of our business, more of our businesses in China, I think that's a little bit more immune, but we could see some slower demand associated with higher energy costs that could dampen with the strength that we're currently seeing.

But that's what I'm saying, even if those kind of balance each other, I think the durability of the products and the growth investments we currently made are going to at least post on track for a floor of about mid-single digits, 5% growth this year.

The next question is from David Silver with Freedom Capital.

So I have a scatter of questions here. First 1 is just on pet litter, and I apologize, I probably just wished on it when you discussed it earlier. But the 19% growth, would it be possible for you just to break that out by factor? In other words, I'm certain there's a currency benefit there, maybe but price. But I'm just wondering how much was organic volume growth and how much of that might have been related to the ramp-up in China?

Yes. Thanks, Dave. I mean I'm going to tell you, it was mostly volume. And we did have the favorable currency across the company of about 3% to 4%. But in terms of the vast majority of that 19% increase, it was mostly volume.

Okay. And then I did want to touch on the FLUORO-SORB comments you made in the opening remarks. And in particular, I wanted to hone in on the word implementation. So 10 implementations scheduled for the second half. Just a couple of questions. When you say implementations, I mean how much -- how many of those are I guess, full commercial developments as opposed to maybe an important, I don't know, beta tests or sampling kind of thing?

And then, you did mention last quarter that at least 1 of these newer projects was targeted for Europe. And I'm just wondering, in the 10% for the second half, how many might be outside the United States.

Yes. Let me start, and I'll pass it off to Brett. David, we probably have 250 -- now it's some sort of 350 Brett, 350 trials going on around the world. And so these 10 are full installations, right? I think we had 7 last year. We have 10 scheduled for this year. And as I mentioned, that could be higher. But Brett, I want to give some color on kind of what the trial activity is like, where it's going on?

Sure. David, that's right. FLUORO-SORB is now operating in 10. These are full-scale municipal drinking water plants that are treating the PFOS impact water. And we continue to receive pilot requests in not only the U.S. but EU, U.K., Japan and now Hong Kong. So we are doing trialing activity now in all of those countries. There's another 10 municipal systems that FLUORO-SORB has been specified for in -- for upcoming installations.

Most of those are under construction now and expected later this year and into 2027. We're seeing a strong progression from early pilots in small ground water treatment plants to additional full-scale implementation. So those smaller scales are now we anticipate them moving into large scale like the 10 we're doing now. But over the last 6 to 8 months, our request to pilot FLUORO-SORB in the large surface water facilities has doubled. That's signaling an expansion to us in more higher value segments.

So this would be those -- like the large project we did in the Eastern U.S. that takes on a lot of FLUORO-SORB we're getting more of those requests. So that's also positive. The other thing we're seeing is the in-situ remediation activity increasing. And we've secured several Department of War and aviation-related field pilots to demonstrate our PFAS absorption using our FLUORO-SORB. So some examples would be like on and off base drinking water treatment, in situ stabilization for contaminated groundwater plooms storm water treatment, which is getting even more attention. There's a lot of activity there. And that's really due to the risk of PFOS migration into sensitive receptors.

So all in all, David, we're seeing continued interest. It's a -- it feels like a slow progression, but we're moving very fast and it is global right now.

Okay. And I'm just going to follow up. But a couple of things. Just to clarify, so 10 implementations or I'll use installations in the second half of '26. And then, Brett, I believe you said there's another 10 that are -- the work is progressing maybe for first half of 27 or full year -- is that -- did I quote you correctly or?

Let me clarify. So yes, so there's 10 full-scale active. There -- we anticipate 10 more that will go for the second half of the year, correct? And that some of those may trickle into early '27, but we continue to look for more. There could be more, as Doug pointed out in his comments.

Is that clear, David, so we have 7 installed -- 10 installed thereabouts. We have 10 more coming this year. We expect that there will be more installations coming. We haven't announced those yet, but we expect that more installations will be coming in as this builds between '27 and '28, which is regulation will start to go in in '29. So yes, we're seeing that momentum. We're seeing the trial activity. We're seeing the pool for trial activity. We're seeing extended trials, which means they're really working with the product.

We've seen only positive results from those trials. And we're starting to see more and more conversions. So we expect this will continue as we get closer and accelerate as we get closer to the regulation deadlines.

And I hope you don't mind, I'm just going to follow up with one more. So out of the 10 installations, Brett, would you characterize them as using FLUORO-SORB alone, FLUORO-SORB in conjunction with granular activated carbon or -- just what is the standard? What seems to be the approach that your customers are most interested in and when they want to incorporate FLUORO-SORB into, let's say, a drinking water project?

I would characterize them as some of both. I think we are seeing stand-alone floors or installations. We're seeing it used very effectively in conjunction with others. Could be on the front end or the back end of the other media, but we're seeing some of both, I would say. So -- which I think is a good thing. I think that allows the broad-based use of utility that's currently using a certain media to be able to add FLUORO-SORB. So that opens -- it says that all uses are being valuable. And it really depends on the utility, their type of system. And the PFOS that they have in the drinking water. So it's some of both. That's how we're characterized for you.

Okay. I'd like to swing over to PCC satellite activity. And in particular, you did discuss the 3 ramp-ups that are underway and adding to results. But I was wondering if DJ or whoever might be able to just characterize the next wave of projects that you might be bidding on?

In other words, maybe the quantity relative to -- is it higher or in line with kind of typical like bidding activity or bidding opportunities? And then more to the point, are we kind of at a phase in that business where there's kind of a shift maybe more than 50% of the opportunities relate to packaging as opposed to uncoated free sheet.

Just what is the status of kind of the new project or the potential project funnel for PCC satellites.

David, I'll field that one. Thanks for the question. So let's -- just on clarifying those investments that are part of that $100 million deliverable that we were speaking about to which we spoke earlier. There were 4 of those are paper and packaging investments.

And I think the mixture of those informs how this portfolio is currently looking -- so if I look at those 4, 2 of them were packaging, 2 of them are printing and writing and the mix of technologies. One was standard PCC on GCC and a couple of new yield. And so as I've spoken in the past about the pipeline, I think I've been saying it's just under 2 dozen active pursuits and even though we've closed on these 4 deals, I look at the pipeline today, and it's it's another 2 dozen opportunities that we're working on.

So the pipeline remains flush full. The interest remains high. But now what we're seeing is a shift in -- you had said 50% packaging. I would say the number has been in the past 10-plus percent, and now it's been migrating more towards 25%, 30% is packaging, and that's kind of holding steady -- but what we're seeing in the mix of technologies, I would say 50% or so are in standard PCC and then the other 50% is New Yield and GCC.

And so that's the mix that's been happening for us. The other shift that we saw is that the -- all these new investments have been Asia, India and China, we are seeing a fair amount of pull from around the world on this. So a little bit of Europe, a little bit of America and different parts of Southeast Asia. In addition to the traditional pull from India and China. So that's how I would describe the portfolio.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Doug Dietrich for any closing remarks.

Well, I appreciate everyone joining today. Thank you for the questions. We look forward to chatting with you in 3 months. So thanks for attending.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Thank you for joining us today. My name is Elle Boyd and I work with Aaron Rosenthal in the high-yield chemicals team here at JPMorgan. It's my pleasure to introduce Minerals Technologies.

Presenting today, we have Doug Dietrich, Chairman and CEO. And with that, I'll turn the podium over to Mr. Dietrich.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Yes, I'm Doug Dietrich. I'm the Chairman and CEO of Minerals Technologies. I'd like to take you through a presentation quickly and then hopefully, for some Q&A at the end. Obviously, some cautionary remarks, forward-looking statements. So please take note of those.

Okay. So who is Minerals Technologies and what do we do? We're a global specialty minerals company, about a little over $2 billion in sales, 4,000 employees. We operate globally. We operate in 34 different countries. We have 146 locations. So quite a lot of scale to the company in terms of breadth around the world. We also are high technology focus. I'll talk about those in a moment, where we have 12 R&D centers. We're in main -- 2 main minerals, bentonite. We're the largest global bentonite producer. We both mine, process and sell in various forms. I'll get to those in a moment but also in calcium carbonate and also forms of ground calcium carbonate. And also we engineer crystals called precipitated calcium carbonate. So I'll talk about that in a moment as well.

We have #1 positions across most -- all of our product lines. We create value for customers by taking these very versatile and unique raw materials, these minerals and adapting them, in many cases, adding some technology to them, whether we're changing their surface or we're blending them with other things or we're -- because of their uniqueness, where they're adding a functional capability to our customers' products. And so both on the consumer side and the industrial side. So I'll take you through both of those 2 segments for the company. And we have a number of different solutions. A lot of our growth is being driven by sustainable solutions. Now we're getting pulled into natural ingredients and raw materials and that has been a part of our growth driver. But what do we do? I mean, like trying to encapsulate what Minerals Technologies is, it's -- you probably come across us in your life, from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep, where we take these technologies, they actually become an essential part of your life.

We're in your home. We're in your paints and coatings, your floors, your roofing tiles, all your construction materials. We're in your water, not exactly in your water but we help clean your water. We're removing PFAS chemicals out of your water. We're remediating groundwater. We're protecting river beds that have been contaminated and we'll clean that up. So we're helping with your water. We're in your food. We're in your toothpaste. We're probably in your nondairy beverage, so calcium fortification through very small particles of pure calcium carbonate, which go into food and beverage. And we're helping your pets. We're the largest private label cat litter provider. It's a sodium bentonite clumping cat litter. We're the largest packager globally for the private label markets and that's a big growing -- that's a growing business for us.

Also in transportation, a lot of our foundry products and steel products, automotive is an end market for us, off-highway, heavy truck and agricultural equipment. So a lot of transportation products and also in infrastructure. Bentonite is used, a lot of steel and infrastructure. We help the steel manufacturers make steel but a lot of bentonite is used in drilling products, so tunnel drilling, subway systems, underground projects, horizontal directional drilling for hardening of the grid, geothermal drilling. These are all applications for our bentonite products. So in your home, in your water, in your food, your pets, your transportation and in your infrastructure, you're probably seeing either purchasing something we make directly off the shelf or we're helping something that you're consuming be made in the first place.

Okay. Take a little deeper into that. Just a quick look at our portfolio across the markets and regions. We have 2 segments. We call it a balanced portfolio because half of the company is consumer-based, consumer-oriented. These are things that either go into something you consume like on the shelf, like pet litter or a pharmaceutical or food and beverage, as I mentioned, or it's in something that you're consuming, like a box, boxboard, paper, things that go into your automotive sealants, things like that, construction sealants. The other side is the Engineered Solutions, about 47% of the company. These are more industrial applications. It's not something you would consume.

We're actually helping that product be produced. We provide refractory solutions for steelmaking, in the linings of the inside of those high-temperature furnaces. We provide bond systems to make brake rotors. These are the molds that foundry parts are made in. So that is our system that we've designed that helps foundries make those. Or we're, as I mentioned, cleaning up water, we're remediating groundwater or we're in building and construction products, waterproofing of subgrade products with bentonite.

So one side, you're consuming it. The other side, we're helping things being made much more industrial. Balance of the company, you can see through the different end markets. And about 56% of the company sales are in North America, 24% EMEA, 17% in Asia as well. We operate in 2 segments. I mentioned them, one is Consumer & Specialties. The other is Engineered Solutions. Again, one more consumer-oriented consumption, the other one is more engineered, helps things being made. We operate in 4 product lines. The first is household and personal care. This is mineral -- I mentioned many of these, these are mineral to market products that serve consumer markets like cat litter and health and beauty, skin creams, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. Those are part of our product line in Household & Personal Care. In Specialty Additives, these are things that go into something you consume, paper and packaging. These are where we -- we call it crystal engineering. We are able to take a calcium substrate and grow a crystal into whatever shape becomes functional.

And then sometimes in paper and packaging, that shape is very big because it displaces wood pulp. And sometimes it's very small because it needs to be a rheology modifier for things like sealants. And when their robot is laying a sealant on a automotive car, it has to come out very quickly but it has to stay there. And that's the technology we to many different industries. So that's crystal engineering, the Household & Personal Care. These are just clumping -- bentonite is clumping cat litter. It swells when it's in the box, it's a functional additive. And we'll go into that more in a moment. On the Engineered Solutions side, High-Temperature Technologies, this is foundry and steel. We're providing mineral blends. We take bentonite or we'll take other minerals that we own, we'll combine them into maybe 9 different blended parts into a blended product that becomes a very functional additive in making steel or foundry product.

And then I mentioned Environmental & Infrastructure. It's the smallest product line but growing quickly. This is where we'll take a particle of usually bentonite and we'll modify the surface to do something functional. In many cases, it's for water remediation. One of our growing businesses right now is in PFAS remediation. I'll answer some questions around that but we've modify the surface to attract specific PFAS chemicals. We're currently in 7 different water utilities in the United States. We'll probably be in 10 more by the end of this year. And as the regulations continue, we'll probably be in hundreds of them as they develop throughout the United States. So Consumer & Specialties, Engineered Solutions and 4 product lines for the company.

So what do we do? We take these, what we call core technologies, crystal engineering, being able to understand our particles that we mine that are functional in nature into whatever they go into, engineered blends and particle surface modification. We take those and apply them to deep mineral reserves. We own reserves around the world. We have 50, 70 years of reserves and we continue to find more. Around the world, we -- so we're really mine-to-market. We have large reserves in most of the regions that we operate. We don't ship things around the world. We can operate locally. But we have these technologies globally. And so we take these technologies, apply them to our mineral reserves and we apply them to our customers. So it's that deep understanding of our customer and the industry needs. It's global research through those 12 R&D centers in these core technologies and we try to accelerate new products to customers.

I'll give you an example. By taking these core technologies on these minerals, 10 years ago, maybe 10% of the company's revenue was new products. It took us 4 years to develop something, decided that was way too slow. Today, 20% of our products -- 20% of our revenue is generated from new products commercialized over the last 5 years. And we're able to innovate by taking these technologies on these minerals and get them to customers in 14 months. So we've cut the time -- 4x the time to get them to market and we've more than doubled the impact from that. And we continue to speed up that clock. We're really aligned with customers. So it's that deep understanding of our customers' needs, whether it's packaging or mold or steelmaking or drilling products or new sustainable issues that they may have or need and very quickly be able to apply these technologies to our vertical reserves and get them a new product. And that's why -- that's how the company has been growing over the past couple of years.

That formula of taking those core technologies, applying it to those mineral reserves and the fact that we've positioned ourselves in growing markets like consumer markets that tend to grow, while maintaining our #1 positions in these industrial markets, that combination has yielded about a 4% to 7%. We see a long-term growth rate for the company in the 4% to 7%. Past couple of years, markets have been cycling down last year. So it's on the lower end of that range but we see that reverting back as markets continue to rebound, residential construction, transportation markets as they grow and they continue to strengthen, we will revert back up to the higher end of that range. But it's that expansion in these higher-growth consumer markets is the #1 tenet of our strategy, deepening our positions in our core markets through added value through that innovation engine and developing new products quickly is what's behind. Those are the 3 prongs of our strategy to drive that 4% to 7% kind of long-term growth rate.

So where is that really going in specific? So that growth is really driven by pet care growth. So in that Household & Personal Care, we've built a pet litter business. 5 or 6 years ago, it was about a $70 million business. It's now over a $400 million business. Pet care markets around the world grow at about 4%, 5%, largely driven by growth in Asia, up on the high end, around 8% or 9%. But they are -- they're stable growth businesses and we have a large position in that. And so we are growing with that market that's -- at that 4% to 5%. Private label is growing faster than branded products. And so we see us being at the higher end of that range. That's one big driver. So as we grow and we facilitate new products for private label retailers, we're going to grow. And as we grow into Asia, that will be one of the higher growth drivers for the company.

Market share growth in specialty products. We're the only specialty PCC, precipitated calcium carbonate producer in North America. We're one of the largest in the world in that specialty. And so as we innovate around specialty products, as we innovate around packaging, in particular, as we're adding value to boxboard, white boxboard, even brown boxboard, those markets grow. And as we continue to penetrate in those markets with new technologies, that's a driver for those growth. Another area in our specialty products is bleaching earth. I don't know if you've -- we've talked about this. We use a bentonite-like product to remove -- we filter edible oils.

So if you have a corn oil or soybean oil or other vegetable oil, that was how we started in the business. We operate this mostly out of Europe. But recently, aviation fuel and biofuels have grown very quickly. So now almost half of our business is geared towards sustainable aviation fuel and biofuels. It's growing very quickly. It's growing about 15% per year, this business. And so as we've been innovating and being able to develop new products that help that growing industry, that's been a large growth driver.

So Household & Personal Care, big growth area, consumer base but also specialty products that are going into high-growth markets. I mentioned some of the specialty additives in paper and packaging, growing share there. In high-temperature technologies, you would think that these are not super high-growth markets, foundry and steel. But recently, we've been growing very quickly in them with new innovations around moving from conventional steelmaking furnaces to electric arc furnaces. We've got some new semi-autonomous equipment that sits on top of that. We call it a MINSCAN LSC. It combines a laser measurement system to scan the inside of furnaces. We've had that technology. But marries that scan every 15 minutes of what's happening in that furnace with an automated system to patch the furnace. So we've removed every person from anywhere near that furnace but that's a piece of equipment that our customers will buy. And then with that comes a contract to use the -- consume the refractories that we put through it.

So it's a very good business for us. It's become a very high-margin business for us and it's become a large driver of growth in that product line, so that high temperature. So new innovations across the board. I'm giving you examples of a few in high temperature and paper and pet care. In Environmental & Infrastructure, I mentioned this again earlier, growth driver here is really around water. We waterproof things. We remediate ground water but water and drinking water in particular and remediation of groundwater largely through PFAS is what's driving quite a bit of growth in this business. We also have some offshore oil and gas technologies. Again, we call them environmental because what we're doing is, we're cleaning up the water that comes through flowbacks and offshore oil and gas rigs and also providing other services while we're there. Also a very high-margin business and one that uses our technology for water. So it's drinking water, whether it's flowback water or whether it's groundwater, we have technologies that we've had in developing every day to grow that business in the future.

A quick financial profile. Company is in a good liquidity position, about $724 million of liquidity. That's through both cash and available revolver. Maturities are at the bottom with our bond coming due in 2028 to Term Loan B that's out in 2031. Net leverage is about 1.7x at the moment. So the balance sheet is in good shape. The company has always generated free cash flow, good healthy free cash flows. We've been in that 6% to 7% average range for most of our history. So 6% to 7% of sales, we convert to free cash flow. And we steer that free cash flow about $150 million on average a year. We steer it when we're below our 2x leverage targets, kind of notional target. Balance sheet is in that shape, we steer 50% of that back to shareholders usually through share repurchases, some dividends and the other 50% we keep on the balance sheet for inorganic growth. We can toggle that back and forth.

If we see inorganic growth opportunities, we'll pull back on that returns to shareholders and steer that to what we think might be a higher value inorganic opportunity. And if they wane, we can steer more back to shareholders. But that's generally the capital deployment policy and strategy of the company. 2026, well, we'll see how it goes after Saturday. But right now, we're predicting pretty stable markets. We've had some challenges globally. Markets have been softer last year. We don't see them getting much stronger through the first half. We expected them to get stronger a bit in the second half. We'll see if that plays out. A lot of the strength that we had predicted coming in the back half of the year were more residential construction growth, commercial construction growth with lower interest rates, some of our interest rate-sensitive businesses.

That may still happen but going through another period of volatility here. But in North America and Europe, our 2 main markets, we didn't see much growth in our business or much rebound at least for the first half. But what's really going to drive our business this year are some of the investments we made last year, what I think are some really well-timed investments. And that is along those growth strategies that I mentioned, where we have been developing, investing to expand our cat litter business in North America. We've upgraded and expanded 2 facilities here. We opened a new facility in China to support the high growth that we're seeing in cat litter consumption in China.

We've expanded our -- that edible oil purification, that bleaching earth facility in Europe. We expanded that, that's [indiscernible] our third expansion of that facility. And so we did that last year in anticipation of some growth in sustainable aviation fuel. We're investing in those MINSCANs. We're installing another 5 or 6 MINSCANs on top of electric arc furnaces to drive growth in our high-temperature business. And so we've made a lot -- we put about $50 million of investments in last year that generate about $100 million of annualized revenue. And that will start to come in here in the end of the first quarter and through the second and third quarter, we're going to see probably about $50 million to $60 million of that growth this year. And so even if markets stay relatively stable where they are from late last year, we see a significant -- a lot of this growth coming through this year.

We're targeting probably about mid-single digits growth this year with stable markets. I don't know if our markets will continue to go down but I think automotive and a lot of our big markets will probably stay relatively stable this year. We'll see. But should they stay where they are, we see a pretty strong year just from the investments we made last year in some of our high-growth businesses. We had some 5-year targets. As I mentioned, that kind of mid-single-digit growth rate, margin improvement to 15% by 2025. We achieved that. Operating income growth of 10%, free cash flow of 7% of sales and then maintaining that strong balance sheet. And I think the company is set up right now for 15% operating income margins. We did that last year. We had some volume challenges last year with some of our markets but we should be on track to hit that. And I think with some of these high-growth businesses, high-margin businesses, we should start to exceed that 15% by next year, again, market-driven.

Organic sales growth of 5%, little bit lower. We're probably going to be a little bit about a year behind that target, maybe 18 months, given what happened with markets recently, especially through 2025. But the company is structured to generate that mid-single digits growth. And with that 15% operating income, that should generate 10% CAGR in our income margin. That's probably been about 5% on average, over 5% to 6% over the past 4 years. We're already at that 7% of free cash flow generation. And as I mentioned, the balance sheet is in great shape right now, which is a good place to be, a strong cash flow generation. So that gives you where we are. I think we're still on target to hit some of these. They might be a year later than we thought given some of the cyclicality we've seen in our market. But the company is built for this and it's probably built for stronger margins going forward as some of these high-margin businesses that are growing quickly continue to grow and become a more substantial part of the company's top line.

That's what I have, left about half the time for questions or so, or less. Anybody have any questions?

Yes. You have a lot of products. As an outsider, it's really hard to see which ones matter the most. Could you just sort of list the biggest products in terms of sales and operating income, the 4 or 5 products that move the needle the most?

Sure. We'll talk about all the children. I'm not going to give you a favorite. But the largest product lines are our pet litter business and our paper and packaging business and our refractories business. Those are the 3 largest in the steel. Right behind that would be our foundry business, would be the -- #4 in line. And then -- but from an important standpoint -- and they're all very important, they're all very good cash flow businesses. They're good margin businesses, some of them higher than others. All of those have contribution rates, incremental contribution in the 30s. And so they all deliver strong margin with volume growth, they deliver strong margin contribution. Importance, though, I would say, some of the smaller businesses are also equally important because they're growing very quickly. So in that specialties business with -- that bleaching earth business is growing at 15% per year. These are contribution rates up in the 40s or 50s percent range. So very high margin, very high growth.

Smaller parts of the portfolio but they're growing very quickly with that margin. And those are important because they start to rebalance the company more into this kind of growth, these consumer-oriented growth and they bring really strong margins with them. Animal Health. So the trend toward more natural ingredients, when I talk about animal health, we put feed additives into animal feed to remove toxins in their stomach because of the absorptive qualities of our product. As we move from chemical-based fillers to more natural-based fillers, that is growing very quickly and that also has very strong margins to it. And so that's been growing almost 20% -- I think it grew last year at 20%. So these smaller businesses that are kind of attached to trends like sustainable aviation fuel, it was a 0.5% additive rate requirement in Europe that's moved to 2%.

So you're talking about a quadrupling of the regulation and that's driving tremendous growth across the industry and our product, in particular, because we're very strong at that challenging application. So big businesses, big anchor businesses in the company but smaller ones like this water remediation and FLUORO-SORB, our FLUORO-SORB product for PFAS remediation, small today but you can imagine the challenge that PFAS has in drinking water and we're only just getting started with that product line in terms of putting it out in utilities that is a change because it's a media that's going to get changed out continuously as you get to regulation of taking it to 0 or non-detect levels of PFAS. So these big anchor businesses, they're great. We're pushing them and driving them deeper into the markets they serve. But these smaller ones that are from the new technology engine are really high margin, really high growth and they're going to become substantial parts of the company as they continue to grow.

[indiscernible]

Our specialties business right now is about -- so pet litter is $400 million in our specialties, that -- the bleaching earth and those animal health, it's about $200 million but it's growing at about 10%, right? So yes, I think in 4, 5 years, you're going to see that being a $300 million, $400 million business as it compounds. And so -- but it has the addressable market to get there. And same with that water remediation business. It's participating in a huge addressable market, both in remediation cleanups and in drinking water that's going to continue to grow. And so I think they are the next big anchor businesses of the company. And I think they supplement the ones we already have.

And that's -- so that's how -- why -- that's why we're confident that this company over time grows in that kind of mid-single-digit range. We don't think 15% is a cap for our margins. We think that, that can drive -- as these get bigger, that drives up to 16%. But I think we've maintained a portfolio through steel and paper and pet litter and these growth businesses that generates that cash, right? So we're generating -- even though we're directing capital to those high-growth businesses, the company is still throwing off 6% to 7% free cash flow sales. And that's what I -- I like that. So it gives the company a lot of options. Yes.

Can I just ask a question about, I guess, the ability to ship and transport these products. It's been a while since I looked at the company and you've made a enormous amount of progress. But -- so PCC, I've always thought is like aggregates, like probably doesn't really ship very far. That might not be right. But as you buy your technology and increase the value to weight effectively, I'm imagining that some of your finished products can be shipped. I know you said it's sort of a local regional business. But could you just give us some color on to what extent you do face competition from any overseas jurisdictions? Is capacity or anyone behaving sort of irrationally? Yes, just can we think of this as a truly regional business from raw materials to finished products? Or is there something more I'm missing there?

Yes. We ship very little around the world. We do move some of our minerals. I mean, Wyoming bentonite is unique globally. There are customers that demand that high quality and we will ship it to Asia. We'll ship it around the world. But we're also able to find and identify -- one of the capabilities of the company is to be able to characterize and identify minerals locally and so we've kind of built the company around having local vertical integration. So even though some -- minerals are different everywhere, we're able to satisfy the end market with our knowledge and our technologies locally. And so we have local mines, local processing, local sales.

And so tariffs aren't a big thing for us. We will move and import some things. We'll pay tariffs on but it's -- I think it was $5 million last year. So it's not a big -- and we can pass that through. We have a lot of pricing power. So it's -- we're not a tariff driven. We don't see big disruptions in shipping and logistics, aren't -- we don't get affected unless it's regionally. We operate in a regional place. PCC is a great example of that. We -- the PCC model, precipitated calcium carbonate model is a completely localized model. We have 56 of these PCC for paper and packaging around the world. We enter into a contract and we build a facility fit for purpose on that packaging site or that paper mill. We enter into a 15-year or a 10- or 15-year agreement. And so we'll put in the capital in exchange for a 10- or 15-year agreement. It's priced at a return.

We're targeting sometimes 15% IRRs on that over that period and then it just operates. And so it's not only local, it's there on-site It's our facility but it's on-site We have 56 and that's a great business because once you're on-site it's like that MINSCAN. Once it's on top of that furnace and once you have that PCC site on-site, it's really hard to displace you, right? You don't just -- you have a contract, you can renegotiate that contract. I think we've only lost 2 or 3 PCC sites ever unless the mill closes because they do repeat and you just renew the contract. And so it's a great annuity kind of structure. And that's part of that cash flow story for the company.

Maybe just one more, excuse me. So despite having a lot of sort of consumer defensive end markets, you still do have like quite a lot [ to ] steel and housing, in areas that have been depressed. So how should we think about that if there is any sort of material recovery in volumes in your ability to service? Is there operating leverage? Or is this more of a specialty business where we shouldn't really look and think of that?

Yes. I think we're almost completely specialty. These are not commodity minerals whatsoever and we make them more specialty by taking that specialty mineral and making it even more functional, doing something to it. So -- but we used to be -- 6 years ago, the company was almost completely industrial. I mean it would -- not completely, had some consumer -- small consumer businesses. But part of the strategy at the time was to invest in technologies and also in acquisitions to build out that consumer space because we saw that we had these small businesses but they weren't being developed. And so we decided to acquire and to invest capital and now they're 30% of the company's revenue. So we've kind of positioned the company.

I like that industrial business because the industrial businesses are very -- they're very big. They're very -- #1 positions, really good cash flow and margins but they would cycle, as you probably remember. And so we've added this piece of consumer -- I call them consumer. It's just more stable growing businesses, right? They're higher value and we've built that out. And so now we have this component that, like I said, there's probably -- pieces of it are growing at 15%, 20% per year. Others are growing at 4% but they're stable growth business and good margin and they provide that balance for the company. And so like I -- this year, we're not really counting on a lot of cyclical reversion from some of those businesses. But if that does happen, I think it takes us to the top end of that kind of growth range for the year.

We see some rebound in residential construction. If automotive hangs in there, commercial construction continues its kind of rebound. We're starting to see some of that move forward, at least in our products. It's going to -- it could be a great year for us. We'll see what happens with interest rates now. We'll see what happens with home buying. We'll see what happens with risk. But again, we've already sold out a lot of our investments that we made last year. So if well timed, I think that's going to serve the company's top line pretty well this year regardless.

For your 2026 outlook, I know on the 4Q call, you mentioned implementing price increases or trying to. How should we think about the volume and pricing assumptions making up your organic sales outlook?

Yes. This year, I think -- we're usually net positive price. It's not going to be the major driver. It's -- our year is going to be -- we usually cover our costs and pricing and then some to maintain our margins. So there will be pricing that goes where we have strong pricing. This year will be much more volume driven. Again, volumes that could come through some market improvements. But even without that, the organic volume growth we have through the investments and the secured contracts, we have to fill up those investments. So it's going to be more of a volume story this year but there always is -- we always pass through pricing, cover our costs and maintain our margins.

Anything else? Sure.

[indiscernible] organic growth opportunities that you talked about, is there anything that stands out that you're looking at?

There's a couple of things that stand out. I mean, I think the pace of some of this sustainable aviation fuel and biofuels is growing rapidly. I think we're only scratching the surface. It's becoming a much bigger piece of a large kind of oil -- natural oil filtration market. I think we've -- our product has kind of been tested to be a workhorse. These are some challenging applications to go into aviation fuel and our product is really good at doing that. And so I think we're seeing a lot of demand. We've just actually signed up our first -- one of the largest refineries in the world in Singapore is a big customer of ours. So I think that's going to grow and I think that's really exciting. I think our PFAS remediation, trying to temper expectations a little bit because regulations in North America don't go into effect until '29. But we are testing in over 250 utilities in North America and now into Europe as well.

We're converting, we'll probably be in 17, 18 utilities by the end of this year that are using our product. It's going to be used in conjunction with other technologies, either in the beginning or by itself but it's proven to be a very potent removal of PFAS. And that's because it's engineered to target specifically that molecule and capture it chemically and not let it go, meaning -- so it's a very, very potent. And I think as we get closer to some of these deadlines, I think that will start to accelerate. I think that's a big market and we have a good position. So those are 2 that I think, back to the earlier question, those are 2 things that are bentonite-based, right? And we're vertically integrated around the world that are applied through our technologies to these challenging applications in growing -- fast-growing markets and high margin at that. So those are 2 that are really exciting. They're small today but I think they're going to get bigger and they're going to become much more of the anchor businesses in the future.

Thanks for the questions. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate the time today.

Good morning, and welcome to the Minerals Technologies Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Lydia Kopylova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's call will be led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Dietrich; and Chief Financial Officer, Erik Aldag. Following Doug and Erik's prepared remarks, we'll open it up to questions.

As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Please note, the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and on the slides. Our SEC filings disclose certain risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Please also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix of this presentation, which are posted on our website.

Now I'll turn it over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks, Lydia. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today. I'll start today's call by giving you a high-level overview of our performance for 2025, and then Erik will walk you through our fourth quarter and full year financial summary and -- as well as give you a first quarter outlook. I'll then take a couple of moments toward the end to give you an overview of how we see 2026 shaping up in terms of our end markets and the sales growth we expect to see over the year in each product line. After that, we'll open it up to questions.

2025 was a more challenging year for us, especially compared to the record year we had in 2024. Like other companies, we experienced the impact of a dynamic and at times volatile operating environment, including geopolitical uncertainty, changing tariffs and softer market demand. The ability to make the ongoing adjustments to these changing conditions, while at the same time, remaining focused on delivering the key drivers of our long-term strategy is a testament to the strength of our team.

I'd first like to highlight that in 2025, the employees at MTI achieved a world-class safety performance and one that was the best ever in MTI's history. The health and safety of our people, partners and communities are our top priorities. And that we continue to reduce the number of injuries that occur at MTI, we still haven't reached our goal of eliminating them altogether. But the progress we made as a team this year is a positive step towards that achievement.

Moving to our financial results. Full year sales came in at $2.1 billion, a similar level to last year. Full year operating income was $287 million and earnings per share was $5.52. Many of our key end markets either remained flat or weakened throughout the year. Our teams moved quickly to adjust to these conditions in our facilities by maintaining control of costs and managing inventories, while at the same time, navigating changing tariffs and remaining focused on quality, customers and safety.

We also took proactive steps to improve our cost structure, including a company-wide cost savings program that we announced in the first half, which we will see the full year impact from this year. Despite the market and operating distractions, we meaningfully advanced the 3 pillars of our organic growth strategy in both of our segments, including expanding into higher-growth consumer-oriented markets, positioning ourselves in faster-growing geographies and introducing innovative higher-margin products.

We outlined for you a few examples of the investments we've recently made to support this strategy, including upgrades to our pet litter facilities in the U.S., Canada and China, expanding our natural oil purification operations in Turkey, building several paper and packaging satellite plants in Asia and expanding our production of FLUORO-SORB. Each of these investments has led to significant new sales growth in 2026, and I'll give you details on this later in the presentation.

It was also a strong year on the technology and new product development front. Sales of our newest products accounted for 19% of our total sales, which is the highest level we've achieved and points to both the strength of our innovation engine and ability to continue to bring new value to our customers through the application of our core technologies.

Further, we remain strong stewards of our capital, returning $73 million to our investors through dividends and share repurchases while also maintaining a strong balance sheet that is well positioned to support both our organic and inorganic growth initiatives.

With that, let me have Erik take you through our financials in more detail.

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by providing a summary of our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, followed by a review of our segments, and I'll wrap up with our outlook for the first quarter. Following my remarks, I'll turn the call back over to Doug for additional perspective on 2026.

Now let's turn to review our results. The fourth quarter played out largely as we expected. Sales, operating income and EPS were all roughly in the middle of the ranges we provided on our third quarter earnings call. Sales were $520 million, up slightly from prior year as 2% growth in Engineered Solutions offset a 2% decline in Consumer & Specialties. Operating income was $67 million and operating margin was 12.8% of sales. Operating margin for the quarter was impacted by lower residential construction and foundry volumes in the U.S. as well as lower productivity and fixed cost absorption at our plants serving those markets.

Turning to the full year. Sales were $2.1 billion and operating income was $287 million. You can see in the sales bridge on the upper right that sales were 2% lower than prior year, driven by $74 million of unfavorable volume and mix impacts, which was partly offset with $21 million of selling price increases and an $8 million benefit from foreign exchange. You can see in the bridge on the bottom right that unfavorable volume and mix impacted operating income by approximately $27 million from the prior year.

Our selling price increases completely offset inflationary impacts, including the impact from tariffs. However, we also experienced unfavorable productivity and fixed cost absorption, primarily due to volume challenges in the first and fourth quarters. And as we mentioned, we had some temporarily higher logistics costs associated with our cat litter plant upgrades.

Operating margin was 13.9% of sales versus 14.9% in the prior year. Lower volume was the biggest driver of the change and was worth about 80 basis points. We see this margin reverting back towards 15% as volume improves, and we won't have these onetime cost impacts I just mentioned. Earnings per share, excluding special items, was $1.27 in the fourth quarter and $5.52 for the full year. Now let's turn to a review of our segments, beginning with Consumer & Specialties. Fourth quarter sales in the Consumer & Specialties segment were $274 million. Sales in our Household & Personal Care product line increased 2% sequentially to $133 million and were 1% below prior year. Momentum continued to build for our cat litter business with sales up 8% sequentially and up slightly from prior year. We also saw continued growth in edible oil and renewable fuel purification as well as animal feed additives.

However, this growth was offset by lower Fabric Care sales as customers reduced their inventories in the fourth quarter. In our Specialty Additives product line, sales of $142 million, were 2% below prior year as higher sales to paper and packaging customers were offset by a pronounced slowdown in residential construction, which resulted in several customers taking unusually long downtime in December. These customers resumed ordering in January, but we are not expecting this market to improve significantly from the fourth quarter to the first quarter. Operating income for the quarter was $29 million, $9 million lower than prior year, driven by unfavorable volume and the associated impact on fixed cost absorption at our plants, particularly those serving residential construction.

Turning to the full year. Consumer & Specialty sales were $1.1 billion. Household & Personal Care sales of $513 million were down 3% from prior year overall, but improved by 5% in the second half of the year compared with the first half. The improvement in the second half was driven by a positive trend in cat litter sales, which were 7% higher in the second half as we worked with our retail partners to drive higher volumes. We also continue to make solid progress on some of our key growth initiatives, with full year sales into edible oil and renewable fuel purification up 17% and sales of animal feed additives up 12%.

Sales in Specialty Additives were $585 million, 4% below prior year. As I mentioned, one of the bigger macro challenges we faced in 2025 was a slowdown in residential construction, which impacted sales for this product line in both the third and fourth quarters. Overall volumes to paper and packaging customers were also lower than the prior year as our new satellites in Asia were offset by declines in North America and Europe, including 2 paper machine shutdowns that occurred over the past year in the U.S. Despite these market challenges, our sales to paper and packaging customers picked up in the second half of this year, increasing by 3% compared with the first half of the year as some of our newest satellites continue to ramp up and volumes in Europe and Latin America also ticked higher.

As I mentioned, overall sales to paper and packaging customers returned to year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. And with the capacity that has come out of the market in North America, operating rates at our customers are very healthy in the 90% range, which is positive for our volumes. Full year operating income for the segment was $134 million compared to $166 million last year, driven by unfavorable volume and mix and the associated unfavorable cost productivity as well as temporary cost increases related to our facility upgrades.

Now let's turn to a review of our Engineered Solutions segment. Fourth quarter sales in the Engineered Solutions segment grew 2% from prior year to $245 million. Sales in High Temperature Technologies of $178 million, were up 1% from the prior year as higher sales to steel customers offset lower foundry sales in North America. As we expected, foundry customers in North America took extended seasonal outages toward the end of the fourth quarter. In the Environmental & Infrastructure product line, sales of $67 million were 7% higher than prior year. Sales growth was driven by infrastructure drilling, offshore services and environmental lining systems. This growth was partially offset by lower sales of waterproofing materials for the commercial construction market.

Fourth quarter operating income was $40 million, representing another strong performance by the segment despite mixed market conditions. Turning to the full year. Segment sales were $975 million. Sales in High-Temperature Technologies were $705 million, representing a 1% decrease from prior year. We continue to see growth in our Asia foundry business, which helped to offset slower demand from foundries serving the agricultural equipment and heavy truck markets in North America. Sales to steel customers were relatively flat overall as growth in North America was offset by softness in Europe.

Full year sales in the Environmental & Infrastructure product line were $270 million, up 2% from prior year, primarily driven by higher demand for infrastructure drilling products, environmental lining systems and offshore water treatment. The segment navigated mixed market conditions and tariff impacts to deliver record operating income of $163 million and record operating margin of 16.7% of sales.

Now let me turn to a summary of our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Fourth quarter cash from operations was $64 million, bringing the full year total to $194 million. We deployed $107 million of capital expenditure, which was a bit higher than the prior year, driven by the higher number of growth investments we've made. Overall free cash flow was $87 million for the year. After a slow start to the year, our free cash flow averaged 7% of sales from Q2 to Q4. And for 2026, we're expecting full year free cash flow in this more typical range of 6% to 7% of sales.

We returned a total of $73 million to shareholders last year in keeping with our balanced approach to capital deployment. Our balance sheet remains solid, finishing the year with more than $700 million in liquidity and a net leverage ratio of 1.7x EBITDA. Now I'll summarize our outlook for the first quarter. Overall, we expect first quarter sales and operating income to be similar to the fourth quarter, which would represent approximately 5% growth over the prior year.

In the Consumer & Specialties segment, we expect sales to be up mid-single digits versus prior year. In Household & Personal Care, we're building on the momentum we've generated in cat litter and other consumer-oriented products, and we expect this product line to be up mid- to high single digits year-over-year in the first quarter. We've also seen an uptick in Fabric Care orders after a slow fourth quarter. In Specialty Additives, we're expecting growth in Paper and Packaging to offset continued softness in residential construction.

In Engineered Solutions, we're also expecting mid-single-digit growth in the first quarter. In High-Temperature Technologies, we see continued growth in Asia foundry and continued strong sales to steel customers in North America, which we expect to offset the softness we are seeing in North America foundry. Our North America foundry customers continue to be impacted by sluggish agricultural equipment and heavy truck volumes and a few permanent foundry closures have been announced for the first quarter. We expect most of the volume from these foundries to be absorbed by other foundries in the U.S. However, it will take some time for that volume to transition.

In Environmental & Infrastructure, we're expecting continued growth in infrastructure drilling products as well as offshore water treatment. For the total company, we're facing $2 million to $3 million higher energy and mining costs in the first quarter versus the fourth quarter, which will have a temporary impact on our margins. We expect to offset these higher costs through pricing and improved productivity as we move through the quarter, and the margin impact should be limited to the first quarter. We expect overall sales and margins to improve as we move through the year, particularly as some exciting new growth opportunities begin to ramp up in the second quarter.

With that, let me turn the call back over to Doug for some additional detail on these opportunities and some perspective on the year ahead. Doug?

Thanks, Erik. Every first quarter, I'd like to give you a general perspective on our end market conditions for the year. And as Erik just mentioned, we're not currently seeing any significant changes in our end markets and expect them to largely remain stable at current levels through the first half. Several factors could change this outlook, such as lower interest rates, increased consumer confidence in home buying and remodeling and improvements in on- and off-highway vehicle builds.

These factors could take hold this year, but the timing of the resulting inflections is hard to determine at this point. But independent of exactly how our markets play out, the growth investments we made last year were well timed, and we have captured significant sales growth for 2026 as a result. Let me take you through each product line and give you some examples. In Household & Personal Care, we're set up for what we expect to be a strong year. The result of the investments we made into the U.S. Our U.S. Canadian and Chinese cat litter facilities is that we've secured significant new business this year with major retailers, which will begin to ramp up at the beginning of the second quarter. We're also completing the expansion of our Bleaching Earth facility in Turkey to support the rapid growth of our edible oil and renewable fuel purification business.

Regulatory changes driving increased use of sustainable aviation fuels worldwide are creating significant demand for our best-in-class bleaching earth products. We've also recently qualified our products at a large refinery in Asia, which opens this large market to us. Over the past 5 years, this business has grown at an average of 15% per year. And this year, we expect that growth rate to accelerate further.

Lastly, we're expanding capacity for our animal health and fabric care products with new partnerships and products in development, and we expect to share more on these initiatives over the next 2 quarters. In Specialty Additives, we have 3 new paper and packaging satellite plants coming online this year in Asia, which will drive solid volume growth.

We've recently shared details in a press release about our multiyear expansion in the region, which continues to provide a solid pipeline of opportunities for us and that will yield additional contracts and volume growth going forward. The main uncertainty this year in this product line is the residential construction market and the question of when it will begin to strengthen from its current condition. When it does, this will have a positive impact on our GCC and Specialty PCC volumes.

Moving to the Engineered Solutions segment. Our High-Temperature Technologies product line is positioned for a solid year. Steel production in the U.S. remains stable, and we've seen some recent improvement in Europe. We're commissioning 6 additional MINSCAN units this year and continue to see strong pull for our latest high-performance refractory formulations. Foundry output in the U.S., however, remains relatively slow due to flat auto builds and weaker heavy truck and agricultural equipment demand. Asia presents a large addressable market for us, and we continue to see opportunities to expand our business there.

The China foundry market proved to be resilient last year, and we expect to see continued strong volume growth there again this year. In the Environmental & Infrastructure product line, our commercial construction and large environmental lighting markets are beginning to trend in a positive direction. FLUORO-SORB continues its qualification track with hundreds of trials taking place at water utilities across the U.S. and in Europe. We have 10 new FLUORO-SORB water utility installations scheduled for this year, which will more than double our current footprint. We're also seeing continued strong demand for our infrastructure drilling products and expect this strength to continue throughout the year.

In summary, the specific actions we took last year in support of our long-term strategy have put us in a position to deliver a strong 2026. With relatively stable markets, we see growth returning to the mid-single-digit range. Should the U.S. construction and foundry end markets improve this year, 2026 will turn out to be an even stronger year for MTI.

Before I wrap up, I also want to let you know that we're planning another investor event this year, where we will highlight many of our newest technologies and update you on our progress against our 5-year targets. We also have some exciting new projects in our innovation pipeline that we hope to share with you.

These projects are targeted at opportunities created by the regulatory and tariff-related policy changes around the world that are driving the increased importance of and demand for local mineral supply. We feel we are uniquely positioned with some of our technologies to turn these opportunities into significant new revenue streams for MTI. More to come on this, so stay tuned for details. Again, thank you for joining today, and thank you to everyone at MTI for your ongoing focus on safety.

With that, let's open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question today is from Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

I wanted to start out with Consumer & Specialties segment. The operating margin performance there was the worst you've had in a few years. And I know you went through some of the fixed cost absorption issues there as well as maybe some of the inefficiencies associated with some of the work you're doing in pet care.

But I was just curious, was the performance there worse than you expected? Or was it in line? And I guess maybe as we start to think about what margin could look like in that segment for 2026? Can you maybe give us some guidelines or puts and takes in terms of how we should think about that margin performance next year -- this year, I guess?

Yes. Mike, this is Erik. Thanks for the question. So as far as -- and I'm assuming you're talking about the fourth quarter margins, so I'll start there. As far as that, I would say it was in line with what we were expecting apart from the softness. The softer-than-expected residential construction demand that we saw later in the quarter. And that had kind of a twofold impact on the margins in that segment. First, the residential construction products that we sell are relatively high contribution margin products. So there's an unfavorable mix impact that happens when that volume falls off.

And then secondly, as I mentioned, the fixed cost absorption impact of a sharp drop off in volumes at these facilities. It's just hard to pull out the fixed and semi-variable costs from those facilities when you see a volume shift like that. So those were the main impacts in the fourth quarter. You mentioned the temporary impacts associated with the plant upgrades that we did. Most of that, I would say, was in the second and the third quarter, although we did -- we were starting to ramp up this facility that we just upgraded in the fourth quarter. So we didn't really see the full benefit of that upgrade yet in the fourth quarter. I would say going forward, the biggest thing that's going to drive margins up in that segment is volume.

I showed you the MTI operating bridge and volume and mix is the biggest driver of the change in margin that we saw from '24 to '25. And a lot of that was in the Consumer & Specialties segment. I can say we've got -- we're feeling confident about the volume growth that we've got ahead for Consumer & Specialties, and that's going to drive the majority of the margin improvement in addition to not having those kind of onetime costs that we had last year.

All right. Very helpful. And then I wanted to just dig in a little bit on the press release you put out recently talking about your paper PCC business. Some of the new satellites that have come on and are still to come on during 2026. I was hoping you could just give a little more color on how you're seeing the market? Presumably, North America still is maybe a little bit soft, but you would expect to see some growth in Asia. Maybe also talk about the pipeline of opportunities for future satellites as you see it right now.

Yes. This is Doug. I'll start and then maybe I'll pass it to DJ to give you a little bit more color. We see that Asia presents and continues to present a good growth opportunity for us. It's a large market. Paper production relatively stable there. But what we're seeing is more -- we've always talked about what we call penetration. So PCC is the pigment being used in that market. That's -- we're probably about only 50% penetrated. We're in Europe and North America, it's pretty much 100% penetrated with the use of PCC in paper and packaging or paper in particular.

And so we see a large opportunity to continue to drive our base PCC business in Asia. And that's going to occur through consolidation of smaller paper mills into larger mills and newer machines. And when you're doing that, you're going to continue. That's been going on now for a decade. So we see that continuing. But more so, it presents a great pipeline for us in other opportunities. And those opportunities like our new technologies like NewYield where we're repurposing some waste streams and movement into packaging, okay? So large and the packaging market is growing. It's growing in Asia. And so as we adapt our technologies and our products from kind of base printing and writing paper into packaging and into these new technologies, it presents an even bigger opportunity for us. So maybe I'll let DJ talk about that and then back to North America and what it looks like this year.

Glad to. So let's just expand on to what Doug was referring. So the announcements that we had, we talked about the 4 that came online in 2025. And then Doug in this presentation was highlighting 3 more that are coming on in '26. All Asia growth, a couple of those -- one of those, in particular, was an expansion in growth. So that's mostly China and India, and we see that continuing. And the pull that we're getting, so I'm going to shift a little bit to the pipeline.

The pull that we're getting is we've got a little less than 2 dozen opportunities in the pipeline that I would call are very real. They are mostly in Asia, although there's a couple of other spots in what I'll consider the further developed regions. Big pull for NewYield that has taken -- has a lot of traction.

And NewYield has evolved since we first chatted about it. It started off as a very singular product with a conversion of a waste stream. And now there's -- it's really more of a platform. There's quite a lot of adoptions we can do for the specific application, which is opening up further packaging applications for us. So before we were targeting printing and writing grades, and now we're finding opportunities to go in recycled packaging in Asia, in particular. And then augmenting that, we're also offering satellite ground calcium carbonate that has gotten a lot of pull from some packaging customers as well.

So we see the pipeline remaining strong. I would say if I were hedging where the next 2 or 3 in addition to what Doug had highlighted, they are probably broader Southeast Asia opportunities, and that continues strong. On the base market, Erik highlighted really good operating rates. So we don't see much degradation. This is a rough year as some big volume came out. North America operating at 90% seems pretty sustainable for the future. Europe is slightly less than that, and the European market is dealing with penetration from Asia. But the customers that we are dealing with are pretty well situated within that market. So they're leaders in that area, in that region. And so I think that they'll be fine for the foreseeable future as well. So overall, bullish on continued expansion of the paper group with particular emphasis on growth in Asia, and that's primarily due to market penetration.

All right. Last question I had is just kind of on capital deployment going forward. The balance sheet is still very strong. You guys have a good track record of free cash flow generation, and it sounds like maybe some further recovery in free cash flow in '26. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about spending cash during 2026 as you look at your M&A pipeline as well as I forget what you have left on the share repurchase authorization. But what should investors be expecting this year?

Yes, Mike, I think we have -- we continue to call it kind of our balanced deployment of capital where we -- at these debt levels, we like to steer 50% of our free cash flow back to shareholders and keep some on the balance sheet for further opportunities. And that's after we support our organic growth. I think we have about $140 million left on our share repurchase program. So we intend to continue that at pace this year. And there's no time line on that. So we can -- we'll look for opportunities to make sure we maximize the use of that cash. But we do keep about 50% of that cash on the balance sheet for inorganic opportunities, and we think that there's a nice pipeline of things that we would be targeting and that we think that could help accelerate our growth strategy.

They could be things that kind of are bolt-ons in different geographies to help move more into consumer products. And there could be some larger things out there that we feel we should own that could give the company some scale. So I think we've got the balance sheet in good spot. I think we continue to watch the market and make sure we're prepared for if something comes our way. I think we have the team in place that's able to do it, and we're just patient with it. So we'll see what happens. Hard to time some of these things, but we're going to continue to be active and look out there to see if there's some things that we should pick up. But short of that, we're going to continue with our balanced approach, and that's going to continue with that share repurchase and dividend structure, again, keeping with that kind of 50% of our free cash flow.

The next question is from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.

So just maybe clarification or drill down on a couple of specific products or end markets. Fabric Care, you called out customers managing inventories late in the year, not a shock. But is that largely behind you and talk about your visibility into Q1?

Yes, we think so. I mean we've had -- it's been kind of a lumpy year from Fabric Care. Some of our larger customers has happened in the first quarter, they moved some orders from the first to the second. A little bit hard to forecast some of this. And then that happened late in the fourth quarter as well where they've kind of moved some things around from the fourth and we think the first.

So as Erik mentioned, those orders have picked up. We think that, that volume is still there, but it does shift around from quarter-to-quarter from times. But more to the point, we think we have some good volumes ahead of us. I mentioned that we have some new technologies, some new things that we're working on. We hope to shed some light on that through the rest of this year that we think could be some new products that get developed and out there in the marketplace that can drive our Fabric Care business bigger. So I don't think there's really anything behind it other than some moving orders, at least in our current Fabric Care business, but we've got some things in our pipeline that we're hoping to get out this year that could grow that a little bit faster.

Got it. And then shifting to Pet Care. You gave the outlook. Just maybe take a step back. Obviously, early '25 was challenging in terms of market dynamics of discounting by branded players. How would you describe market conditions, both U.S. and Europe as we enter '26 and kind of underpinning that growth expectation?

Yes. This year was a bit of a -- let's just start with the overall market. The markets were relatively flat this year for pet litter. I think they grew maybe 1% to 2% in total. And yes, we did see that discounting activity this year that we had to make some adjustments with our customers to deal with. We did that. We made those through the second quarter. And that's why I think Erik highlighted, we worked with them on promotions on making sure the value that private label brings on the shelf was seen and in kind of comparison to that discounted price from the branded customers.

We made those adjustments, and we saw those volumes return. I think our -- as Erik mentioned, our second half kind of sales in pet care were -- pet litter were 7% higher than the first half. So we think those took hold. I do think that, that discounting is going to continue, but I think we've made those this year, that discounting is going to continue, but I think we've made those this year, and that's really North America type Phenomenon.

But I think we've made those adjustments, and I think we're going to continue to see that base volume growth. I think on top of that, we've secured some significant business. We took some time. We took some cost, as you noted, this year to upgrade those facilities and start one up in China. Those are largely running right now and running as expected. And we did that to increase the capacity and the capability of those plants. So not only the throughput, variable cost structure improvements, but also the type of products they can make and the type of packaging configurations that they can deliver.

And that has enabled us to secure some significant business. I think on our last call, we told you that was around $25 million, $30 million of business. And that's part of what Erik was talking about in terms of -- or what I was talking about in terms of return to high single-digit growth in that business. So that should start up in the second quarter. It looks good. We've gained some new business with retailers, and that should flow through this year, bringing that business back up into that high single-digit kind of growth rate. So we think it's a very strong year ahead for pet litter. We made the adjustments last year. That volume has returned to us, and now we've got some new business to start driving the growth rates back up.

Great. Very helpful. One or two more, I'll turn it over. Q1, 5% revenue growth, quite healthy. And I know you called out the higher mining and energy costs. So that's a chunk of it, but just wondering why we wouldn't expect to see maybe a little more operating leverage on that type of top line growth.

Yes, Dan, this is Erik. Just -- so a couple of other things going on there. You mentioned the higher energy and mining costs. That's about $2 million to $3 million on a sequential basis. The mix impact that I mentioned in response to Mike's question, the softer residential construction that we're seeing in the first quarter versus last year, in particular, is having an impact on our margins.

This is a relatively high contribution margin product and the market is just softer right now. Q4 and Q1 are usually soft for that market, but we're seeing it a little softer than last year so far at least. I'd say, the only other thing affecting margins in Q1 is lower equipment sales. We've got these equipment sales in high-temperature technologies. We had some in the fourth quarter, and we had some in the first quarter last year, and we don't have any in the first quarter this year. So that's affecting the margin as well.

That really helps. Last one for me. mid-single-digit growth this year, if I listened appropriately or heard correctly, which is a very healthy outlook. Obviously, 15% operating margin has been a goal for some time. You made great progress toward it. What would it take to get there from here in terms of organic top line growth? Is that achievable in '26? And what type of time frame should we be thinking about, if not? And I appreciate the color.

Yes. So I think on the growth side, we do feel more confident about the growth this year. We've talked a lot about these growth investments that we've made that support about $100 million of new revenue. Right now, we're estimating about $50 million of that will come through in 2026, that's everything we've mentioned, the cat litter, the new cat litter business, new SKUs on the shelf, new distribution centers that we haven't served before. It's the bleaching earth expansion.

It's the new satellites, it's new Min scans. That's about $50 million that we think is going to come through this year. And on top of that, we've got $20 million of pricing. So $70 million right there of things that we can tally up, and we feel very confident about. That's before we even start talking about things like the Asia foundry growth that we expect to continue, the refractory business, they've got new products. We expect those to continue to grow.

Animal Health, FLUORO-SORB, the whole environmental and infrastructure product line has been on a pretty good trend recently. So look, markets could get weaker from here. But right now, we're not expecting markets to change very significantly. So that's why from where we sit today, we feel confident that we're going to have a strong year. If we get some help from the markets, particularly like construction, ag equipment, heavy truck, that's why we think we could have a really strong year this year.

And Dan, I'll just add that, look, the base -- I think the company is built around a 15% margin. I know that Erik is giving you some of the temporary cost issues and some of the mix and volume declines that took about a percentage away. So last year, we were around that 14.9 around that 15% target. This year, 80 basis points came out just from the volumes.

But I think with that growth, with at least the $70-plus or $100 million growth that we see coming through that single digits, it's going to take care of that absorption, that volume. And again, some of these are higher-margin products. And so I think that reverts this company. It might not happen in the first quarter, but on a run rate basis, I think we start getting back to that 15% this year as that revenue flows through and that volume flows through. That said, you've got half of the company right now at 16.7% margins, albeit a record, they had a good quarter, but that still doesn't even have the foundry in there. So I think there's room to grow on that side.

And I think getting the consumer with this new higher-margin products starting to grow faster like bleaching, animal health, Fabric Care and the pet litter business, I think that reverts back up to 14%. Then I think you start seeing us getting over 15% margins, okay? So hard to time whether that market is going to help us this year, but I do think that this company, with what we have in the tank, with the investments we've made is going to start pushing that margin higher. Probably later this year, maybe into next, but I think it's above 15% right now is a structural kind of level for us.

And certainly progress toward it this year is what I'm hearing.

That's right.

The next question is from Pete Osterland with Truist Securities.

First, just wanted to ask in Specialty Additives with sales being up year-over-year in the Paper and Packaging business during the fourth quarter. I was just wondering if you could break out that sales growth by region. And I was also wondering, is there a meaningful geographic mix impact on margins for sales into North America and Europe versus sales into Asia in that business?

Yes. Thanks, Pete. So definitely, the growth is coming from Asia, and that's offsetting the softer volumes in North America. We mentioned a couple of shutdowns we have to overcome. But the growth in Asia did start to overcome that in the fourth quarter. And so that's the dynamic that you see. As far as margins go, on an operating income basis, yes. So we're bringing on new capital with these investments in Asia, and they've got a higher depreciation load than the assets in North America and Europe.

And so on an operating income basis, there's a lower operating margin in Asia for the new satellites coming on than for some of the volume declines that we've seen in North America. On a cash flow return basis, we look at these investments on an IRR basis. We're getting the same level of returns that we expect around the world in Asia. And so as those assets depreciate, the operating margins will go up, but that's basically how the math works.

Got it. And then just a clarification, I apologize if I missed it, but you talked about plans to implement pricing and productivity as offsets for some of the margin pressure you're seeing. Just given the breadth of end markets and businesses you have, where within your portfolio do you have relatively strong pricing power to implement increases?

Yes. I think we have strong pricing power pretty much across the portfolio. in softer markets, that becomes a little bit more of a challenge. But I think as you saw back in kind of '23, '24 time frames, the company moved almost $250 million of price through across the board. So our ability to price is there. We work closely with our customers. We make sure that we generate the value from -- that our products deserve from our customers, and we're also conscious of the competitive environment that they're in sometimes.

I think this year, there's some standard base price increases that go across the Specialty Additives business. I think in our high-temperature technologies, there's a lot of pricing power. We've managed to move largely last year through on tariffs, had to push that through. And so I think there's -- it's going to be kind of across the board. I think Erik mentioned about $20 million.

I think it's coming -- I don't know if there's one product line more than the other, but I think it's pretty well spread across the business in terms of being able to keep up -- we also note that making sure that our pricing has to more than take care of our input costs to make sure we maintain our margins. So we're conscious of that as well, Pete. So no specific area, but we do have capability to push to move price as needed across the board.

Very helpful. And then lastly, I just wanted to ask, you called out that you're expecting to have at least 10 installations of FLUORO-SORB later this year. I was just wondering what's the approximate revenue potential associated with those installations? And how long does that take to ramp?

Yes. Maybe I'll start, and I'll let Brett talk a bit more about FLUORO-SORB, in general. These are probably smaller installations still. These are smaller utilities that are coming in place. They are I guess, we call tank renewals. So we're putting in the media into tank systems that will get renewed maybe a couple of times, 3 times per year. So those change-outs aren't super high revenue. But as we get them put in place, that kind of feeds more opportunities because they get more use and they get more storytelling around their capabilities.

And so it's more of an indication of more of the acceleration of use of FLUORO-SORB. I think the revenue this year will probably grow a couple of million dollars from those installations. But I think more importantly is that the number of installations and trials that's going on right now, we're talking a couple of hundred, I believe, trials across the United States and into Europe. That really bodes well for as this accelerates towards some of the regulation changes. more quickly more installations and take-up of FLUORO-SORB over the coming years.

So Brett, do you want to give any more color than that and what's going on specifically in the U.S.?

Sure, sure. Thanks, Pete. Yes, when we look at FLUORO-SORB right now, as Doug pointed out, we -- the progress continues to go pretty well for us. It's really despite the regulatory delays that we've seen. Full year growth of sales was around 20% year-over-year last year. We have 8 full-scale drinking water projects underway. And as Doug mentioned, we have a pipeline of 10 more wins that FLUORO-SORB has been selected for the absorptive media this year.

So interest is not only in the U.S., Doug just mentioned, Europe is really picking up interest. What we're seeing now is in Germany, Sweden and the U.K. are actively piloting the FLUORO-SORB, and we're working with the German EPA to gain approval of the FLUORO-SORB for drinking water applications. France just recently added a full-scale drinking water pilot in Belgium and Sweden. They continue to pilot in situ PFAS remediation projects with our FLUORO-SORB.

So we remain really confident in our product and its performance. And really, we fully expect it to continue to commercialize the FLUORO-SORB programs to remove the PFAS. So we're still really excited about it, and we anticipate a continual growth in this product line.

The next question is from David Silver with Freedom Capital.

I'm going to follow up on a couple of areas first. But I did want to touch -- go back and just touch on your comments about pet litter. So I think for 2025 as a whole, maybe revenues were up, I don't know, low single digits, I'm guessing, slanted towards the back half of the year, as you pointed out. But in there, I guess there's a volume component and a price component. And as I recall, earlier in 2025, you did make some adjustments to support on price to support your customers there. So I was just wondering, firstly, could you just break down the pet litter growth in terms of delta on volume versus price? And then secondly, if you could make a comment about the pricing outlook for '26. In other words, is that customer support kind of still in place? Or are there prospects for recouping some of those reductions?

Sure. Yes. The pricing was actually relatively minimal, the pricing impact. We did, in some instances, give on some pricing, but that would be in exchange for volumes. And so from a margin perspective, it's actually accretive to margins because getting more volume flowing through those plants can be very beneficial for us. So I would say some targeted pricing adjustments in some areas, but certainly not across the board. That's -- I guess the other part of the question was on volumes.

Mostly volume.

Yes. The challenge of the revenue this year was mostly volume, and it was due to kind of competitive -- the collapse of the delta between brand as they discounted in private label. And so we've made those adjustments. Like Erik said, some of that was price, but the majority of that we regained through promotions and packaging and working with our customers. Again, they are the retailers and making their product that we supply them more valuable on the shelf.

And so mostly volume, David, a little bit of price. As we go forward, though, that -- what I referred to about $25 million, $30 million is pretty much all volume. That's coming through at average prices, I think, with these major retailers, but it's coming through all volume and different regions. And as Erik mentioned, hitting some new distribution centers that we hadn't had before.

So we've secured that business. And yes, the customer has to buy it still, but we're pretty confident that, that volume is coming through. And that should solve some of the absorption challenges, the productivity challenges and start to fill up these plants that we just built. So we're excited about that.

Okay. Great. Second topic would be on the refractory side. I did take note that you had the 6 new MINSCAN to be commissioned. Just to focus on that, should I assume that, that 6 to be commissioned in 2026. And then secondly, there was a certain size on average of the previous batch of, I think, 5 MINSCAN commissioned, maybe $100 million of total revenue for. Are these -- is this batch of 6, is that similarly sized? Or how should we think about that?

Well, let me take you through. I think the $100 million was kind of the addressable universe of what we think we -- there's -- I don't know, Brett, there's 130 different electric arc furnaces in North America and Europe that we're targeting. So there's a large addressable market for this. It's going to take some time, obviously, for customers to want to adopt this technology. It's largely been here in the United States and driven by safety concerns, being able to put the device in the plant on the furnace being able to remove anybody from near that furnace for safety concerns, but then being able to scan, measure and very efficiently deploy our refractory material through the machine.

So we see a large market for it. We have -- each of these come with about a 5-year contract. I think we've secured over the 5-year period for these, it would be about $100 million. But -- so you're talking about 20 -- $17 million, $20 million a year from what's been installed. So it's a good business model, long-term contracts, there's a large addressable market. It's using our higher-performing refractory products, and I'm probably taking stuff that Brett should be talking about, so I'm going to pass it to him.

Thanks, Doug. David, I think Doug covered a lot of it. But as Doug mentioned, look, the program really was designed for safety and improved operations. I mean it's really customized application technology that has really grasped the industry. And it's for the electric furnace steelmakers. Over the past few years, we've signed 18 agreements and the value is probably, as Doug said, actually, it's $150 million over the life of the agreement. And the positive thing about this program is we're keeping the refractory business that's a daily program for 5 years at a minimum.

So we do see a lot of runway in this technology. When you look at just Europe and the United States, which are our 2 largest markets. We see at least, as Doug mentioned, probably 130 targeted projects. And we have a pipeline in hand that continues. So we feel really good about it. You asked the question about installation.

Yes, there are 6 additional units to be commissioned this year. Those units are going to go throughout the year. We have probably half of them going in, in the first quarter or first half of the year and then sometimes they move out a little bit. But yes, 6 will be commissioned. And one of those is in Europe. So 5 of those in the U.S., 1 in Europe. So again, our pipeline remains really strong. We feel really good about it. And we're bringing in products that adapt to it.

I had mentioned before about banks and bottoms, these materials that don't -- aren't a gunning product. They actually go to the bottom where it's beneath the molten steel. These products were launched last year, early first half. By the second half, our momentum really -- the trajectory just skyrocketed it. So we doubled our growth business in the refractory group, and we expect to do that again this year. And it's because of these new products, not only in the furnaces, but also in the steel ladles, which carry the molten steel to the continuous caster. So we're really excited about this business, and it's doing very well. I hope that answers your question.

Yes. No, I appreciate all the color. And while I have you, Brett, I did want to maybe ask a follow-up question on FLUORO-SORB. Let's see. Earlier in 2025, I guess the EPA went and extended the time lines for drinking water authorities to make -- to pick a remediation plan and then another 2 years in effect to actually install it. And I'm just wondering how you are thinking about maybe the adoption curve in the wake of those extended time lines.

So in other words, should we just push -- I assume there would be a certain rate of adoption that would start to spike as the deadlines approached. Is that still the right way to think about it, push out the growth maybe a couple of years? Or is this the case where you think there might be more early adopters since the number of potential customers have already been trialing it, thinking that there was a shorter time line. So in other words, should we just push out the growth curve for FLUORO-SORB 2 years? Or is there a reason to think that adoption might occur a little more quickly despite the lengthier time lines that the EPA established?

Yes. Great question, David. Look, the current U.S. EPA drinking water limits are set for 2029, and there has been some discussions about a reset to 2031. The timing could determine an inflection point for the takeoff of this product line. But to be honest with you, we've seen a lot of drinking water utilities -- although they've delayed major projects, the amount of trial activity and opportunities and inquiries has significantly increased.

So I think what's happening is we're starting to see extra trial activity because of the extra time. So it could be benefiting us, although we'd like to see the sales take off immediately, it is allowing us to prove this product really well. So that's why I think we're starting to see more and more activity. But keep in mind, I mentioned earlier about the European activity, and that's starting to take off and there are different regulations there.

So we're working with the German EPA. We're working with all these other countries just to continue to drive this product. So we're not slowing down regardless of the regulations. Maybe a trajectory point will be determined by when it is drawn in stone, but we're going to continue to blow forward and drive the sales.

And I think as Brett mentioned, David, that the extra -- there could be an extra year delay, but that extra time is being used to really solidify FLUORO-SORB in these facilities. And so it's been a good thing from a trial activity. We think that, that's going to make it a really solid solution here in the United States as that inflects. And in the meantime, we're also working -- I'm just repeating, Brett, other countries.

So we do think that the revenue trajectory with the breadth of the regions that we're addressing might actually be the same as what we thought 2 years ago. So even with the delay.

Okay. Great. And then last one for me would be on free cash flow. So when I look at the fourth quarter result there and full year 2025, I mean, I think free cash flow came in a little bit below what I was anticipating maybe early in '25 and middle of '25. I'm just -- we don't get a look at your cash flow statement just yet, but I'm just wondering if you could maybe highlight where you think compared to where you were a year ago, where you think the differences in your free cash flow generation were maybe working capital or CapEx above earlier projections. And should we think that there might be a little bit of drag extending into 2026 on that metric? Or will things rebound closer to your long-term targets?

Yes. Thanks, Dave. So I think the biggest driver this year was just the income. If you look relative to expectations we had earlier in the year, the income was lower, and that had an impact on our cash flow. Working capital was, I would say, a little bit elevated at the end of the year.

A lot of that was FX driven. And so with the weakness in the U.S. dollar that we saw, especially right at the end of the year, you saw an elevated impact on our working capital balances, but we'll realize the benefit of that as we collect that cash that was on our balance sheet at the end of the year in the receivables and as we sell that inventory that was on our balance sheet at the end of the year.

So going forward, as I mentioned in the presentation, expecting free cash flow in that 6% to 7% of sales range for the full year. I guess the only other thing I'd mention for the full year last year is we got off to a pretty slow start. We're expecting this Q1 to be better than last Q1 from a free cash flow perspective. But as I mentioned, Q2, Q3 and Q4 last year were all at that 7% of sales range. So company -- nothing has changed in terms of the company's ability to generate free cash flow.

The next question is a follow-up from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.

I appreciate all the color and almost got away without asking -- without the question coming up. But any update on talc litigation? And we still feel like the reserves we've taken thus far are sufficient at this stage? Greatly appreciated.

Yes, still sufficient, Dan. And look, I think we're making constructive progress. As you know, we're working toward establishing a 524G trust. And we're going to continue to work really hard at that. We're trying to work as expeditiously as possible, but -- and we're committed to the process. But I will say that we want to make sure that what we create is a fair outcome for everybody and also that it provides finality for the company.

And so we're going to continue working until we feel that those 2 objectives have been met. And like I said, we're committed to the process, and we're working at it as fast as possible. But we're making constructive process. That's what I can give you.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Doug Dietrich for any closing remarks.

I just want to say thank you for everyone joining today. I also want to again reiterate to those at MTI. I really appreciate your work in this past year, more to do, and thank you very much on the safety front. Again, more work to do, but thank you very much for the efforts, and we'll talk to you in another 3 months. Thanks. Bye.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to the Minerals Technologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Lydia Kopylova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings conference call.

Today's call will be led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Dietrich; and Chief Financial Officer, Erik Aldag. Following Doug and Erik's prepared remarks, we'll open it up to questions.

As a reminder, some of the statements made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our earnings release and on this slide. Our SEC filings disclose certain risks and uncertainties, which may cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

Please also note that some of our comments today refer to non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release and in an appendix of this presentation, which are posted on our website.

Now I'll turn it over to Doug. Doug?

Thanks, Lydia. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today.

I'll start today's call with a review of our third quarter, followed by an update on what we're seeing across our key end markets. I figure it would be helpful to provide some perspective on how our markets have changed over the past year and how they continue to move within the global economic context. I then want to highlight some of the recent investments we've made to support the long-term growth we are seeing across several of our product lines. Erik will then take you through the detailed financials and share our outlook for the fourth quarter, and then we'll open it up to questions.

Let me start with our Q3 numbers. We had strong execution across our business. delivering solid financial results despite facing mixed market conditions, which I'll get into a bit later. Our sales increased 1%, both sequentially and over last year to $532 million. Operating income came in at $78 million and earnings per share were $1.55, a company record for the third quarter.

Cash flow was strong and was up 24% year-over-year. We continue to strengthen our balance sheet, providing us with a financial foundation from which we can evaluate different investments and opportunities to drive growth. We also returned $20 million to our shareholders in the quarter and last week announced a 9% increase to our regular quarterly dividend, making this the third consecutive year that MTI has had a dividend increase.

We recognize our sales growth has been sluggish this year due largely to the softer market conditions we've been experiencing in residential and commercial construction, heavy truck and agricultural equipment markets and in Europe in general. These softer market conditions have largely offset the growth we are seeing in many of our other product lines where we are executing on opportunities in markets that are structurally expanding and where we have built a distinct competitive advantage.

I'll highlight some of these specific investments and opportunities in a moment and outline how they will set us up for meaningful expansion across several product lines, both in the near and long term. But first, let me provide an update on our current market conditions. As a general overview, after the first quarter, most of our end markets have been and remain relatively stable. A few continue to be weaker than last year, and we expect them to remain so through the fourth quarter.

Let's start with our Household & Personal Care product line. Pet litter market conditions in North America and Europe have remained stable and at similar levels compared to last year. We continue to see discounting activities from branded producers in North America, and in response, we've worked with our customers to make promotional adjustments to the products we supply them. These activities have had a positive impact on our sales volumes and profits.

The pet litter market in Asia, and more specifically, China, continued to show strong growth. Our volumes are momentum there, and we are making investments to support this long-term growth. In our other consumer these markets, demand for our natural oil purification and animal health products has been strong, with our sales this year up 18% and 12%, respectively, and we see this trend continuing.

In Specialty Additives, we're facing mixed market conditions in paper and packaging. Asia continues to be a market with good opportunities for us to expand our base business and introduce new technologies. However, this year, North America demand has been weaker. Elsewhere in this product line, demand in the residential construction market has been relatively flat all year. We did see some signs of further softening late in the third quarter, which may make it a slower end of the year.

For our high-temperature technologies product line, conditions have remained relatively stable for steel production in the U.S. with utilization rates remaining in the mid to upper 70% range. It is not the highest level we've seen over the past 2 years, but healthy enough for stable volumes. Europe continues to be more of a challenge with steel utilization rates dropping below 60% this year.

The U.S. foundry market has also remained relatively steady for most of the year, buoyed by stable auto production. Two areas that have been soft for this business all year are the agricultural equipment market and heavy truck markets. When these markets begin to rebound, they will provide good eye for foundry demand.

The China foundry market has remained relatively strong this year despite the impact of tariffs and ongoing trade disputes. In fact, we've seen strong volume across our metalcasting business there with year-to-date volumes up over 10% from last year. In environmental and infrastructure, commercial construction remains slow compared to historical levels, and these similar conditions exist for the environmental lining and remediation markets. We expect to see some improvement in project activity as interest rates ease and projects are financed.

We are already specified on several large commercial and environmental projects and expect an inflection in this product line sales when these projects commence. Elsewhere, we've seen strong pull for our infrastructure drilling products this year, increased geothermal drilling and fiber optic cable installation has been driving the increased demand.

As you can see, we continue to experience mixed conditions across our end markets. But despite the impact these conditions are having on our top line this year, our team has navigated these conditions to maintain margins, profits and cash flow.

At the same time, we've not deviated from our focus on investments in technologies and markets where we see the biggest growth opportunities, which I'll go into more detail on the next slide.

We've spoken about our strategy to build positions in higher growth markets. Markets with economic or macro trends where we can deploy new technologies or expand our existing technologies to drive higher levels of growth and balance the more cyclical portions of our company. We've been executing on these opportunities, expanding our pet care business, investing in technology serving a variety of consumer-driven end markets, and deploying new technology in some of our more traditional businesses like refractories and paper and packaging to expand our value proposition globally.

As you've likely seen, we announced a few recent investments made in support of these strategies, and I want to highlight a few of them to remind you of the opportunity we continue to see. Let's start with a few opportunities in our Consumer and Specialty segment. In our pet care business, we remain confident in the long-term growth trends of this market and in the private label portion in particular.

We expect the North America pet litter market to continue to grow by 3% to 4% and in the Asia market to grow by 6% to 8% per year over the long term. Over the past 5 years, our pet litter business has grown organically at a 9% compound rate. Adjusted for the 2 acquisitions we've made over this period. To support this continued growth, we recently made investments at our plants in Dyersburg, Tennessee; Branford, Ontario, and Chaoyang City in China.

We've broadened these plant manufacturing capabilities to increase throughput, lower cost and offer greater packaging flexibility to meet customer demand. Dyersburg and Branford are both strategically located and well connected to large portions of the North America market. These recent investments to expand capacity upgrade capability at these sites enabled us to secure some significant contracts beginning in 2026.

In China, we've outgrown our existing facility and are bringing online a completely new one to meet the demand that we are seeing from this rapidly growing pet litter market. The upgrades across these 3 plants are expected to be completed by the end of 2025 and will fortify our position as the largest high-quality private label cat litter supplier to customers around the world.

In our natural oil purification product line, we announced an investment at our plant in Turkey to support the significant growth we are seeing in this market. Since 2018, our Bleaching Earth business has grown at a compound rate of 20%, and this is our third expansion since we opened the facility to support this level of revenue growth.

Our facility in Turkey at both mines the raw materials and manufactures absorbents and Bleaching Earth products sold under the brand name Rafinol , which are used for the purification of edible oils and renewable fuels. Including biodiesel, renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel.

The market opportunity here is significant. The global natural oil purification market size was $1.1 billion in 2024. The renewable fuels portion accounts for over 12% of this market and is the fastest-growing segment. Demand for sustainable aviation fuel, in particular, is growing rapidly and is being bolstered by supportive regulatory changes in the U.S. and Europe.

Our Rafinol product line is differentiated in the market with its high-performing absorptive properties that succeed in the most challenging applications like sustainable aviation fuel. Also worth mentioning, we've made other investments to meet the increased demand for our natural animal health products, and also for our higher tech Fabric Care solutions for dry laundry detergent. In our Paper and Packaging business, we continue to secure new contracts in Asia and in the next 6 months, we expect to commission 4 new satellites in the region.

There continues to be a significant unpenetrated addressable market in Asia for our technologies. We've been driving the deployment of engineered calcium carbonate and the introduction of renewable technologies to the paper and white packaging industry as producers expand and look to upgrade their product quality.

Since 2022, our volumes there have grown by 20%, including the doubling of our sales to the white packaging industry. We've always been the leader in the region and are well positioned to continue to grow by delivering the best calcium carbonate solutions including innovative technologies like NewYield.

On the Engineered Solutions side, our MINSCAN installations and our Refractories business continue to go strong. We just signed our 18th MINSCAN contract and we'll be installing 6 new units this coming year. There's a large addressable market with over 130 electric arc furnaces in the U.S. and Europe capable of using MINSCAN, providing us with a significant runway to grow over the next several years.

In summary, we expect these investments to generate $100 million in incremental revenue over the next 12 to 18 months as they ramp up. And these are just a few examples of the investments that we've recently made to support the growth opportunities for which we have strategically positioned ourselves.

I want to be clear that these are just a subset of the initiatives that we are pursuing. Other areas like PFAS remediation, natural skin care additives, geothermal drilling products and further penetration of our greensand bond technologies into Asia are all progressing nicely as well.

Together, they provide several significant pathways for us to drive sales higher going forward. And when our weaker markets begin to rebound, we see that providing additional upside to our top line growth.

With that, let's have Erik take you through more detail on our third quarter financials and our fourth quarter outlook. Erik?

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. I'll start by providing an overview of our third quarter results followed by a review of the performance of our segments, and I'll wrap up with our outlook for the fourth quarter. Following my remarks, I'll turn the call over for questions.

Now let's review our third quarter results. Overall, our team delivered another solid performance while continuing to navigate mixed market conditions. Third quarter sales were $532 million, up 1% sequentially and 1% higher than the prior year.

You can see in the sequential sales bridge on the top right, that sales increased in 3 of our 4 product lines. In Consumer & Specialties, our Household & Personal Care product line was up 2% sequentially and driven by increases in cat litter and other consumer specialties.

In Specialty Additives, sales were 2% lower sequentially as we moved into the seasonally lower period for residential construction applications. In Engineered Solutions, sales in high-temperature technologies increased slightly from the second quarter as higher sales to steel customers were partly offset by lower sales to foundry customers in North America.

And we saw a 5% sequential increase in our environmental and infrastructure product line, driven by increased demand for offshore services as well as infrastructure drilling products. To summarize, conditions played out mostly as we anticipated, and I'll take you through more of the details when I cover the segments in a moment.

Operating income for the quarter was $78 million, down 1% sequentially and versus the prior year, and operating margin was 14.7% of sales. In the operating income bridge on the bottom right of the slide, you can see that unfavorable volume and mix primarily in the Consumer & Specialty segment impacted income directly by $1 million.

And lower volume also contributed to temporarily higher operating costs at a few of our facilities in the quarter. Higher pricing of $1 million offset inflationary input costs, including higher tariff costs in the third quarter. EBITDA was $100 million, up 1% from prior quarter and prior year and EBITDA margin was 18.8%.

I'd like to point out that versus the third quarter last year, we've done well to offset $10 million of higher costs, including tariff costs raw material increases, energy and temporary increases like higher logistics costs associated with our U.S. cat litter plant upgrade. We offset these cost increases with a combination of productivity improvements, supply chain actions, price increases and our cost savings program.

And I would also highlight as we move through the temporary cost increases, we should see margin improvement from these actions going forward. Earnings per share, excluding special items, was $1.55 , the same level as the second quarter and up 3% from last year, representing a record third quarter for the company. We recorded special items of $7.5 million in the quarter related to litigation expenses.

Now let's turn to a review of our segments, beginning with Consumer & Specialties. Third quarter sales in the Consumer & Specialty segment were $277 million, flat sequentially and down 1% from last year. In Household & Personal Care, sales improved by 2% from prior quarter to $130 million, driven by improving volumes in our cat litter business and continued progress on growth initiatives in consumer specialty applications.

Most notably in edible oil and renewable fuel purification, where sales grew 18% with last year. In Specialty Additives, sales were $148 million, 2% lower sequentially. The Global Paper and Packaging volumes were flat compared with the second quarter as volume increases in Asia offset lower volumes in North America. Meanwhile, demand for residential construction products was incrementally softer in the quarter, which pulled volumes lower for the product line.

Despite the volume pressure in Specialty Additives, the segment continued to build on the operating performance gains we saw in the second quarter, delivering a modest improvement to operating margin sequentially. Operating income in the quarter was $37 million, representing a 13.5% of sales. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, in Household & Personal Care, we expect continued sequential growth in cat litter, edible oil and renewable fuel purification.

And in Specialty Additives, we're expecting lower sales sequentially, primarily driven by typical seasonality for residential construction products. We do expect softer-than-normal residential construction volumes in the fourth quarter as some customers are indicating they have efficient inventory levels heading into the winter months. and they are planning to adjust production schedules accordingly.

Overall, for the segment, we expect sales to be flat or slightly lower sequentially. Now let's turn to the Engineered Solutions segment. Third quarter sales in the Engineered Solutions segment increased by 2% sequentially and grew 4% from prior year to $255 million. In the high temperature technologies product line, sales of $179 million were similar to prior quarter and up 2% year-over-year.

Sales to steel customers in North America continued strong more than offsetting continued weakness in the Europe and Middle East steel market. Sales to foundry customers were mixed with North America volumes impacted by continued softness in the heavy truck and agricultural equipment markets, in addition to the typical third quarter customer maintenance outages.

On the positive side, we saw continued strong demand across a with foundry volumes up 5% sequentially and up 17% versus prior year. In Environmental & Infrastructure, sales led by 5% sequentially and were up 9% from prior year driven by a for offshore services and strong pull for infrastructure drilling products.

The segment did a nice job of mitigating tariff impacts and turned in another strong operating performance. Operating income was $45 million, and operating margin improved by 20 basis points sequentially to 17.6% of sales, a record level for the segment.

Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we expect environmental and infrastructure sales to be 10% to 15% lower sequentially and due to typical seasonality for large project activity. And in high-temperature technologies, we expect sales to be slightly lower sequentially as several of our foundry customers in North America have communicated longer than towards the end of the year.

This is due to the continued softness seen in the agricultural equipment in markets and in anticipation of some acute automotive production disruptions. While these plans could change, our current outlook assumes a reduced number of foundry working days in December, along with the temporary margin impact of the associated lower productivity at our plant sites. Overall, we expect segment sales to be lower by around 5% sequentially.

Now let me turn to a summary of our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. We delivered another solid cash flow performance in the third quarter. with free cash flow of $44 million. Capital expenditures totaled $27 million in the third quarter, and we remain on pace for approximately $100 million of capital investments for the full year.

Some of the key investments that Doug outlined earlier will be commissioned during the fourth quarter with revenue ramping up in the beginning of 2026. And we expect that sort of cadence to continue into next year with additional start-ups expected throughout the first half.

In total, we returned $20 million to shareholders in the third quarter through share repurchases and dividends in keeping with our stated balanced approach to capital deployment. Our balance sheet remains strong, and our net leverage ratio remains at 1.7x EBITDA. Below our target of 2x EBITDA.

Now I'll summarize our outlook for the fourth quarter. Overall, we expect fourth quarter sales to be approximately 2% to 4% lower sequentially and primarily driven by seasonal patterns in a few of our end markets. Operating income for the quarter is expected to be between $65 million and $70 million, with earnings per share between $1.20 and $1.30.

Our sales range of $510 million to $525 million considers a number of factors. On the positive side, we expect continued traction with our growth initiatives in Household & Personal Care. The cat litter business is gaining sales momentum and the fourth quarter is typically a strong one for cat litter. In addition, we expect continued growth in edible oil and renewable fuel purification.

As I noted earlier, some of our customers serving the residential construction and foundry markets in the U.S. are signaling the potential for slower order patterns and extended outages around the holiday. Which would impact volumes of some relatively high incremental margin products in both our Specialty Additives and high-temperature technologies product lines.

We are also watching for potential volatility in order patterns due to uncertainty around tariff policy. As we've communicated, we don't have a significant direct exposure to tariffs. However, we're mindful of potential near-term impacts on our customers. Our guidance takes all of these to accounts and where we land in the range depends on how they play out.

In summary, we have positive momentum across a number of product lines as we head into the fourth quarter, and we are focused on delivering the growth initiatives that will carry this momentum into next year.

With that, I'll turn the call over for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Daniel Moore with CJS Securities.

Pet Care. It looks like you saw an uptick in catlier volumes in Q3. How should we think about -- you described the market dynamics, how do we think about those and the potential to get your pet care business back to that kind of term mid-single-digit plus growth rate cadence, not necessarily 2026 guide, but over the next 12 to 24 months.

Yes. I appreciate that. Look, Dan, as I mentioned, let me start. I'll hand it over to DJ for some details. There's been a challenging pet term market for us. But this is one year we -- I tried to make some comments to highlight, if you take a longer-term view on the market and our performance in it, we've grown organically.

I mean, we pieced the business together through some acquisitions. But even adjusting for some of those over the past 2 years, the business has grown by 9% compound. This year, a little bit flatter, we've seen some dynamics in the market that haven't been seen before in terms of something.

We've made those adjustments. We have to work with our customers to make those adjustments. We've done that. We've seen those the volume improve as a result. And I think that carries through the fourth quarter and into next year.

The biggest thing is, I think this is a good business for us, vertically integrated. We're global, obviously the largest with the technology, and we're confident in that long-term growth rate of it, that I mentioned, 3% to 4% North America, 6% to 8% in Asia. And we're making investments to be able to support the growth that we see and what's going to be coming forward and short term next year. I'll let D.J. talk about that. But these are good investments to make this business is going to revert to that growth rate.

I never said it's going to be a straight line, but we will have that business growing next year. And I'll pass it over to DJ to let's give you some details on what we're securing with some of these upgrades.

Yes. Thanks, Dan. We kind of close out some of the market dynamics and then just give you a sense of the return back to that upper single-digit growth rate. On the North American market, what we did see early on, and we had mentioned in previous calls, these battles among the brands and is the only way I would describe the significant discounting that went on the brands, that caused some pretty big market share shifts within the brands, but it also had an effect on private label.

Most pronounced at some specialty pet stores and grocery stores. We want to adjust with our private label partners and come up with a promotional schemes that still keep their private label relevant. That includes price discounts, changes in packaging, changes on shelf allocation. And so we feel that, that part of the market has stabilized pretty well.

Doug had mentioned some pretty significant investments that reposition us for some future growth and coming pretty quickly, Doug had mentioned some contracts. So what you'll be seeing is of some $30 million plus of growth that will be going into next year as those contracts come online, that's towards the end of the first quarter.

So we feel really good about that. There's some further growth that's capable or enabled by these investments in North America, especially with the product flexibility and packaging flexibility. The other thing Doug mentioned that we're very excited about is the reinvestment or the establishment of a new facility in Asia. We outgrew our old facility. We've got a lot of pull from a wide range in the market on how to take advantage of that growing region.

And the difference for Asia with us is that it's a much broader and more profound mix of branded customers, global brands that want to grow in Asia, and we're well positioned to manufacture and co-pack for them, but also supporting the regional private labels as well as an emerging e-commerce business there. So this investment does that for us. So that would be additional growth.

So I think the market has stabilized. We've made some adjustments with our branded partners, and we're very well positioned to get that back on track as projected in 2026.

Really helpful. And just pulling on that string. With all of those investments you're making, how do we think about just the overall increase in capacity as we exit '25.

Well, some of them in North America, so the overall increase in capacity. So we're looking at that 6% to 8%. I'll start with China. We've made this investment. It's a new facility. We've put in capacity to probably sustain it for the next 3, 4 years. It's a big enough facility that we can add additional packaging capacity to meet that growth over a longer period of time.

So that one, we're starting with modular kind of growth to meet the incremental investments over the next 10 years. In North America, the investments we've made in Canada and here in the U.S. and these 2 we talked about were a lot of quality upgrades handling upgrades.

Again, these are 2 acquired facilities. So these were planned a long time ago. We needed to find the right time to be able to shift production around keeping our customers supplied while we made these changes. That's a lot of the cost increase you've seen and some of the margin -- a bit of the margin deterioration you saw this year.

But that's -- we're through that. And we've made upgrades to material handling, quality packaging, packaging flexibility, throughput, all of which have reduced cost as well and should accrue to profitability going forward. So it's a number of different things, but we've got plenty of capacity in these facilities to grow at those rates for I'd say the next 5 to 10 years.

But again, we can also have space in them to add modular packaging capacity if we need to keep up with the market. So I think we're in good position, Dan. These investments, they're not significant huge investments for us, but they did put us in a position to be able to secure higher quality contracts. And as DJ mentioned, we see about $30 million of that coming in starting in the second quarter next year.

Very helpful. Switching gears, Environmental and infrastructure, little pockets of strength there at least this quarter. I know maybe a more difficult seasonally slower period that we're going into, but just talk about momentum as we kind of think about -- or to think about turning the page towards '26.

We saw some momentum. Actually, this quarter was in our offshore water treatment business, which has been doing really well. I guess I'll start with just construction and environmental remediation, relatively flat.

We've seen some projects come I mentioned were specific projects. We thought that business would probably turn this year. It still hasn't Commercial construction, large building is still relatively flat. I think when -- it's interest rate sensitive. I do think when interest rates start to move down, we will see more of that on the shelf activity come into play, and that will be positive for us.

But this quarter a lot of water filtration stemming from our capability around PFAS remediation, our ability to take complex things out of water. And that was some new projects we secured offshore, and that really came through in the quarter, and we think that's sustainable through the fourth and into next year.

Very helpful. Just in terms of the Q4 guide, revenue down 3-ish percent sequentially at midpoint, op income down more like low teens. So a little bit of a higher decremental margin. I appreciate the color on boundaries, which is high margin.

Are there other corporate incentive comp, any other expenses, which you might call out in Q4 that could pinch margins more than might be typical given the volume decline?

Yes. Thanks, Dan. This is Erik. No, nothing unusual from a corporate expense standpoint in the fourth quarter. The main drivers are really the ones that I called out in the prepared remarks in terms of the mix. I mean, the markets that are down seasonally for us, Q3 to Q4 and then the foundry and some of the residential construction products that we have, those are higher incremental margin products for us.

And so we do have a mix impact that goes against us in terms of the decremental margins that we're seeing Q3 to Q4. The only other thing I would highlight is we had some strong margins in the third quarter in the Engineered Solutions segment. That was continued strong performance from the team's offsetting tariffs, continued strong productivity, variable conversion cost control.

We did have a couple of the equipment sales in the high-temperature technologies product line that helped margins in the third quarter, and we don't have any of those equipment sales forecasted for the fourth quarter. But as Doug mentioned, we've got about 6 to come next year in terms of those MINSCAN installations.

The next question is from Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

I was hoping we could talk a little bit about the margin performance in Consumer & Specialties. I think it was relatively close to where you were expecting, but you are kind of tracking like 150 to 200 basis points lower than you were last year.

I was hoping that we could maybe break down or help kind of bridge some of those key factors that have driven that weaker margin performance. Maybe just talk about how you see the discounting or promotional activity in pet care. Maybe mix, maybe the volume declines in Specialty Additives and on that resi high-margin stuff as well as the temporary cost from pet care expansions like -- can you help us understand what's going on there? And then maybe just directionally help us understand what that -- as we start to think about consumer and specialty margin into next year, how some of those items should trend?

Yes. Thanks, Mike. This is Erik. So I think you hit on a lot of the key themes there. And actually, for the third quarter, the margins were right where we expected them to be for the segment. The largest driver there is some of these temporary cost impacts we have. I mean we have a significant upgrade going on at one of our U.S. cat litter plants.

And we've had to move around production across our footprint in North America, and there's been an increase in logistics costs as a result. So that's the primary driver of the margin pressure, I'd say, from Q2 to Q3 -- in Q2 as well as in Q3. That facility is going to be ramping up here in the fourth quarter. And so we're moving through that more temporary impact.

You mentioned discounting. We're not seeing a negative margin impact because we've been helping our retail partners with discounting. And the reason for that is we've had some incremental pricing discounts on our products but it's helped with our volumes. And so as we get more volumes running through these plants, there is significant fixed cost leverage benefit that we get.

And so we haven't seen margin donation from any of the discounting that we've been participating with our retail partner. As far as where this is going, the segment is set up well for 15%. We were very close to 15% last year, and we're going to get there again as we move through some of these more temporary issues. But that's our target. This segment should be delivering 15% operating margin.

Michael, the only thing I'll add, and I'll put that same as echo what Erik just said. We'll get back to and probably exceed last year's margins in the segment. And that's going to come from a couple of things. A, the ending of the temporary logistics expense, number one, and some of the other ancillary expenses that came across as we made these investments in these facilities. Two, we have seen some lower volumes due to this discounting, which we've adjusted. And as Erik just mentioned, those volumes are coming back. That is helping profitability. And three, the additional volume that we're going to be putting through these plants next year, starting in the second quarter, is going to be very accretive to those margins. And so I think, as Erik said, we're set up to get back to last year's margins next year and probably see them with some of this additional volume.

All right. That's very helpful. And then maybe just on the investments that you're making in Turkey with the Bleaching Earth for renewable fuel. .

Can you help us understand what the dollar amount of that investment looks like? How much is your capacity expanding? And I guess, should we think about the investments as mostly mine expansion or is there something that you're doing on the, I guess, refining or processing side that's helping to improve your capabilities as well.

Sure. I want to be careful about giving some information out there and how much capacity we're putting into the market. So I won't give you a ton give you a percentage. -- again, we built the facility 8 years ago. We built it with enough room to expand it. At the time, we want -- we were looking more at the edible oil market, which grows at about 3%, 4% kind of GDP business and we had a great product for that application.

Since that time, we saw the development of the market for renewable fuels. And we started supplying that market probably 4 years ago, 5 years ago, and then more recently, the development of sustainable aviation fuel through regulation changes in Europe, in particular, now U.S. has really started to pull that product much harder.

And so this expansion, $9 million, $10 million type expansion. We've expanded the plant by about 30% and in terms of capacity to be able to meet the growing demand. Like I said, we've been growing at about 20% per year for the past 8 years. But a large portion of what's happening is what started as a 100% edible oil kind of application and product sales has now moved probably 34% of our business is now in sustainable aviation fuel and renewable fuels.

And that's growing very quickly. And so this expansion was -- it's going to supply both, but it will probably be consumed very quickly with some of the renewable fuels. We have sufficient reserves in the region for decades. And we will look probably to expand the facility again over the next 5, 6 years, depending on how the market goes. But this one is an incremental step within the current footprint. The next one might be a whole new footprint if we continue to grow at this pace.

All right. Very helpful. And then last question I have is just on the cash flow and maybe some of the working capital dynamics. You mentioned the higher logistics costs, but I assume you're carrying some additional inventory in the pet care business as you work through these expansions.

And then is there anywhere else that maybe inventory is a little bit elevated right now? I'm thinking, in particular, maybe MGO as you're trying to navigate or mitigate some of the tariff impacts. Just trying to think about how working title trends in Q4 and how we should think about it as we're starting to look at next year?

Yes. Thanks, Mike. So in terms of working capital, AR, AP, both in good shape. We watch those metrics closely and no major changes there. We are holding on to a little more inventory, and you touched on it to a few of the spots there. a little higher inventory in pet care, but some strategic positions, I would say, in the high temperature business.

MGO being one of them, every couple of years, there's a river closure in the middle of the U.S. that we have to work around and we build up some inventories to manage around those. We're going to be working through a lot of those inventory positions in the fourth quarter.

And so we should be ending the year sort of at a more typical level in terms of the inventories. We'll still have some of those strategic positions in place, but more of a typical level from an inventory perspective. From a cash flow standpoint, we're expecting a strong fourth quarter as usual for the company, strong cash from ops, the free cash flow number is going to depend a little bit on the pace of some of these growth capital investments that we've talked about. We've got a number of them ramping up in the fourth quarter. And so the capital number that ends up happening in the fourth quarter could depend a little bit on the timing of how those come through. But overall, expecting a strong cash flow quarter in the fourth.

The next question is from Pete Osterland with Truth Securities.

I wanted to start just by following up on the recent investments across pet care and Bleaching Earth, so you've talked about an aggregate targeting $50 million of growth investments supporting $100 million of additional revenue -- just in aggregate, how much of those targets are represented by what you've already in a currently in progress. And to the extent that there's more to come, we're across your portfolio are you still targeting for additional organic growth investments?

So if I understand -- Pete, this is Erik. If I understand the question correctly, the $50 million of CapEx and the $100 million of revenue that we've talked about, those are the investments that Doug laid out today in terms of the highlight on growth capital projects that we have. But importantly, that is just a subset of the growth opportunities that we have much of the opportunity we have is supported by existing capacity, and so it isn't requiring necessarily growth capital to support it. Those are just investments that we wanted to highlight supporting the growth opportunity.

Yes. I guess I'll add, Pete, this is just -- when I look at -- when you look at those markets, and so the North America pet litter market, the Asia pet litter market, the bleaching earth market of $1.1 billion and the renewable fuels growing as the fastest segment. And then also with paper and packaging and our MI scans. -- just these investments are $100 million over the next 12 to 18 months, right? But that trend continues.

That's not just the opportunity in those markets alone, right? I think just the MI scans, if you do the math on the MI scans, each MINSCAN is probably worth to us $1 million -- $1 million to $2 million depending on the size of the vessel that is going on, et cetera. So you're looking at just the 18 that we've installed are probably worth about $20-plus million of reoccurring revenue every year. And there's a whole runway of those to go. Not that we'll get 130 million of them, 100% of them, we might. But that market, that's a $0.25 billion market for us just in that product line, right?

Look at the bleaching earth market with renewable fuels. We're targeting $75 million of growing this business to $75 million over the next 2 years. Pet care, we're a $400 million business. We think that business grows with some of the investments we're making to $500 million, and that's been our target for 2027. And I think we're on target for that. Given this year, it might be another 6 months, 9 months, but we're still seeing that, that business is another $100 million to grow. And these investments that we've made will support that.

So all the way down the list, you're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunity that we positioned ourselves for -- these investments are the first step in tapping into them, but we've been making these investments over the past 5 years. This is our third bleaching earth expansion. We've upgraded these other facilities in pet care. Now we're upgrading these 2 or 3 key ones. And so these are investments that we've made before, we've delivered on. We're making them again, and they're setting us up for that continued growth. So I think you're going to see that. So I took your question a little bit further, but these are big opportunities, but we've positioned ourselves in these markets for these opportunities, and now we're taking advantage of.

No, that's very helpful. And just kind of following up on the pet care investment specifically that you're expecting to finish by the end of '25. I guess what's the time frame to realize that run rate of incremental revenue that you discussed? I mean, is it kind of a gradual ramp throughout the course of '26, so you kind of expect that to continue driving growth into '27? Or how should we think about that?

For pet care, in particular, as DJ mentioned, these investments will set us up for longer-term growth. But in particular, we've secured about $25 million, $30 million of contracts on an annual basis that should start to ramp up through the first, but be full run rate by the second. So I think if you snap the chalk line at the end of March and ran 12 months, we think that's $20 million, $25 million of revenue right there. So next year, probably expecting $20 million, $18 million of that $25 million to hit in pet care alone, and that's going to continue. And we've got capacity -- further capacity in China for that market that continues to grow. So we think we're getting this thing back on track. These investments position ourselves with high-quality operations, low-cost operations and strategically located to deliver on the business. And so I think you'll start to see that growth rate revert in the second quarter.

Very helpful. And then just lastly, I wanted to ask for any update on Talc. It looks like litigation expenses have trended higher each quarter during this year. Just was wondering if you have any update to share on the time frame or expected cost to resolve? And would you expect that until it's resolved, with the $7.5 million of litigation expenses you saw in the third quarter, would that be the run rate of what to expect going forward?

This quarter was a little bit higher in terms of activity. I think our average has been more $3 million to $4 million per quarter. We think it probably reverts back to that. I will say that we're continuing very diligently to work on establishing a 524G trust. There's not a lot significant in terms of updates to report this quarter.

We're waiting to hear back from the Southern District of Texas District Court on a number of motions to figure out which lane we'll be in, whether it will be in the District Court or back in the bankruptcy court. And as I mentioned, we're continuing to work to establish that 524. We are wide open to getting this done and getting it done quickly. But the court systems, they take their time and they schedule themselves, and we have limited ability to kind of impact that portion of it.

But -- so not a lot of progress, but rest assured, we are working to get this behind us as fairly and as finally and as quickly as possible. With regard to costs, the reserve that we have on our balance sheet, we see that as sufficient for the ongoing both establishment of the trust and the cost it's going to take to get there. So no change to what we see in terms of the reserve.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Doug Dietrich for any closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone, for joining this quarter. We appreciate the questions. We appreciate the attention and interest in Minerals Technologies, and we'll chat with you again at the end of January. Thank you very much.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.