Archer-Daniels-Midland Company

Good morning and welcome to the ADM fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode to prevent background noise. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Megan Britt, Vice President, Investor Relations for ADM. Ms. Britt, you may begin.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to the fourth quarter earnings webcast for ADM. Starting tomorrow, a replay of this webcast will be available on our investor relations website. Please turn to slide two, which says that some of our comments and materials constitute forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views and estimates of future economic circumstances, industry conditions, company performance, and financial results. These statements and materials are based on many assumptions and factors that are subject to risk and uncertainties. ADM has provided additional information in its reports on file with the SEC concerning assumptions and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the presentation. To the extent permitted under applicable law, ADM assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events. On today's webcast, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Juan Luciano, will discuss our full-year accomplishments and share detail on our priorities for 2023. Our chief financial officer, Vikram Luther, will review the drivers of our financial performance at the segment level and review our cash generation and capital allocation results. Juan will have closing remarks regarding our planning framework for 2023, and then he and Vikram will take your questions. Please turn to slide three. I'll now turn the call over to Juan.

Thank you, Megan. we reported very strong fourth quarter adjusted earnings per share of $1.93. Adjusted segment operating profit was $1.7 billion. Our full year adjusted EPS of $7.85, adjusted segment operating profit of $6.6 billion, and trailing four-quarter average adjusted ROIC of 13.6%, demonstrate once again the great work of our global team of dedicated colleagues who manage unprecedented market disruptions to deliver an outstanding year. Our full year operating cash flow before working capital was $5.3 billion. This strong cash flow and the disciplined management of our balance sheet allow us to continue to reinvest in our business with $1.3 billion in capital expenditures and return cash to shareholders. In total, we returned $2.3 billion to our shareholders in the forms of dividends and share repurchases in 2022. Next slide, please. With the expectation of continued strong cash flow, today we are announcing a 12.5% increase in our quarterly dividend to 45 cents per share. We're proud of our record of 91 years of uninterrupted dividends and 50 consecutive years of annual dividend increases. I'd like to thank our shareholders for their continued support of ADM. Next slide, please. When I examined 2022, our ability to drive structural growth in earnings and improvement in ROIC was supported by key strategic accomplishments across the enterprise, particularly the progress we made on our productivity and innovation objectives. Our productivity work in 2022 included enhancing our operational resilience, including through stabilizing our plant operations and streamlining our operating systems. In order to meet growing customer demand and drive efficiencies, We delivered multiple projects to enhance our operational footprint, from modernization to improving our scheduled downtime to capacity expansions. We completed our Marshall, Minnesota modernization, opened a new millhouse in Clinton, completed our Quincy refinery expansion, and improved output and yields at our Randonopolis diesel plant in Brazil. we also continued to optimize our North American milling footprint. As you know, we also introduced a new billion-dollar challenge in 2022. There is no clearer demonstration of how our colleagues and culture are driving returns than the fact that thousands of ADM team members from around the globe took the initiative, stepped up, and identified opportunities that unlocked more than $1.6 billion in cash in 2022. On innovation, our accomplishments include a focus on capturing the benefits of organic growth investments and M&A as we continue to get closer to our customers and extend our capabilities to meet growing global demand for our products. Our nutrition business continues to outpace the industry with 18% constant currency revenue growth for the full year. We delivered an impressive 26% in year-over-year revenue growth in bio solutions. The portfolio of acquisitions we made in the prior year continued to deliver OP above our financial projections. And we advanced targeted production capacity expansions to meet growing customer demand. We announced expansions of our alternative protein capabilities in Decatur, Illinois, and starch production in Marshall, Minnesota. We completed our alternative protein expansion in Serbia and are about to launch our expanded probiotic capacity in Valencia, Spain. And we continue to expect our joint venture crash and refining facility in North Dakota to be operational by this year's harvest. Slide six, please. Now let's look ahead. We have a robust plan for driving enduring value creation in 2023 and beyond. In productivity, our work has a common theme, changing the way we work by standardizing, digitizing, and automating our manufacturing plants and our offices alike. I previously mentioned our successful Marshall modernization. That was the blueprint for our wider work to unlock value across our production footprint through enhanced automation, more sophisticated control systems, and the increased use of analytics. We have now approved the scope for the first two years of the program, encompassing 18 manufacturing facilities. We continue to expect double digit returns from this important initiative. and we are continuing to advance 1ADM, which is enabling us to improve our processes and expand capabilities across the value chain. 2022 was an important year for our 1ADM business transformation. We completed several rollouts and we're seeing benefits in areas ranging from indirect procurement to go-to-market strategies to grain merchandising. In 2023, We'll continue to expand the breadth and scope of this work, which is empowering our businesses to deliver profitable revenue growth and higher margins. Next, we're focused on maintaining our structural growth momentum via our innovation work. As you may recall, we've spoken in the past about our strategic growth platforms, sustainability, differentiated grain, alternative proteins, biosolutions, microbial solutions, and microbiome modification. These growth opportunities go through a natural evolution. When new, we launch them at the corporate level. As they mature, they become more embedded in our businesses. Differentiated grain is now firmly part of our ag services and oilseed segments' everyday work. Biosolutions is growing within carbohydrate solutions. Alternative proteins and microbiome are pillars of nutrition. With these efforts maturing in the businesses, we are able to focus on other opportunities. One of the most important is decarbonization, which is a critical component of our sustainability growth platform and is driving the evolution of our carbohydrate solutions business. Our goal is to reduce the carbon intensity of our assets and value chain in order to be the preferred partner in low-carbon-intensity feedstocks for a growing demand base. We have made several announcements to mark milestones toward this goal in recent years, including our regenerative agriculture efforts, which enrolled one million unique acres over the past year, our Strive 35 goals, our initiatives to connect and expand our carbon capture and storage capabilities, and our heat and energy project indicator. We're looking at multiple other pathways to reducing our carbon intensity, like more sustainable energy sources for our facilities. And our efforts aren't just in the U.S. We have plans for other regions as well, including some EMEA projects we hope to speak about in the future. All of these projects contribute to our ability to offer low-carbon-intensity feedstocks, and that is allowing us to continue to advance our work to transition our dry mills to produce sustainable aviation fuel, help scale up, scale food products with new sustainable attributes, like the ingredients we will sell to Pepsi from the regenerative agriculture agreement we announced last year, and propel the expansion of biosolutions with joint ventures like with LG Chem. And even as we advance our decarbonization plan, we're always looking at new ways to help solve our world's challenges for food security, health and well-being, and sustainability. For example, we'll continue to explore opportunities around precision fermentation, which we used to call microbial solutions, in which microbes rapidly grown in fermenters fed by dextrose transform the sugars into a wide variety of products for food, feed, and fiber. That's a longer-term horizon for ADM, but it gives us a hint of the kind of opportunities we see in the years ahead. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Vikram to talk about our business performance. Vikram?