Gerdau S.A. (NYSE:GGB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2023
Renata Oliva Battiferro: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Investor Relations and our Presentation for the Third Quarter of 2023. My name is Renata, Head of Investor Relations. And participating in our video conference today are the CEO of Gerdau, Gustavo Werneck; and the CFO, Rafael Japur. We would like to inform you that this video conference is being recorded and will be available on the company’s IR website, ir.gerdau.com, where the complete material of the earnings release is available. You can also download the presentation using the chat icon. We would like to remind you that the broadcast of this video conference is being done with simultaneous translation through the tool available in the platform. To access the feature, just click on the interpretation button via the globe icon at the bottom of the screen and choose your preferred language, Portuguese or English.
For those of you listening to the video conference in English, there is an option to mute your original audio in Portuguese by clicking on mute original audio. During the company’s presentation, all participants will have their microphones disabled. Following the presentation, we will begin the Q&A session. Analysts and investors can send their questions in advance via chat and can open their camera if they prefer during the Q&A session. We wish to emphasize that the information contained in this presentation and any other statements that may be made during the video conference concerning Gerdau’s business prospects, projections, and operating and financial goals are based on the beliefs and assumptions of the company’s management as well as information currently available.
Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they relate to future events and, therefore, depend on circumstances that may or may not occur. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, market conditions, and other operating factors may differ substantially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. I would now turn the floor to Gustavo Werneck to initiate the presentation. Please, sir, you may proceed.
Gustavo Werneck: Hello, everyone. I hope you are well and thank you very much for the opportunity to meet again during our video conference to announce Gerdau’s results for the third quarter of 2023. I am joined by our CFO, Rafael Japur, and it’s always a pleasure for both of us to talk to you about our performance and also to clarify any points that may arise during our presentation. I will start by talking about the macro business environment, the highlights of the overall results, and then I will detail the performance of our business operations in the quarter. Next, Japur will then share some information about our financial performance. And finally, I will highlight a few points from our ESG agenda. We will make a shorter initial presentation so that at the end, we will have more time to talk to you about the points that you want to elaborate in more detail.
On the second slide, I would like to point out that we ended the first nine months of the year with an accident frequency rate of 0.69. This result is below the rate of 0.76 recorded in the consolidated figures for 2022, which represents the lowest rate ever recorded in our annual historical series. This performance renews our commitment to the health and safety of all of our people. At Gerdau, safety always comes first, since no result is more important than people’s lives. Moving on to the next two slides, I would like to point out that the macro environment in which Gerdau operates impacted our shipments of steel in the third quarter. Issues like global inflation, high interest rates, military conflicts, and weaknesses in the Chinese domestic economy contributed significantly to the slowdown in the level of activity in the markets where we operate.
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