Archer-Daniels-Midland Company

Vice President, Investor Relations for ADM. Ms. Britt, you may begin.

Hello and welcome to ADM's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Our prepared remarks today will be led by Juan Luciano, our Board Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Ismael Roig, our Interim Chief Financial Officer. We have prepared presentation slides to supplement our remarks on the call today, which are posted on the Investor Relations section of the ADM website and through the link to our webcast. Some of our comments and materials may 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 this 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. I'll now turn the call over to Juan.

Thank you, Megan. ADM reported first quarter adjusted earnings per share of $1.46, adjusted segment-operated profits of $1.3 billion, and a trailing four-quarter average adjusted ROIC of 11.2%. Our first quarter operating cash flow before working capital was $900 million. In a year where the buildup of grain and oilseed supply is expected to create pressure on margins, Our teams are proactively taking action to manage through the cycle, driving structural earnings, ROIC, and cash flow generation. Our strong performance and disciplined management of our balance sheet continue to allow us to invest in our business and return cash to shareholders. Next slide, please. Last month, we laid out three priorities for value creation in 2024. managing through the cycle, two, nutrition recovery, and three, enhanced return of cash to shareholders. We made progress on each of these priorities in the first quarter. Our efforts to manage through the cycle highlight ADM's ability to mitigate challenging headwinds while building structurally on enduring global trends such as sustainability. To share a few examples of progress in the first quarter, We have been ramping up production at our Green Bison joint venture with Marathon with increased volumes and utilization in ECHO, and we're expecting to be at sustained full run rates for harvest this fall. We are continuing to evolve the carbohydrate solutions business through decarbonization, driving nearly 10% volume growth in bio solutions in Q1, while managing solid demand across the core business. Driven by increasing demand for sustainable resource feedstocks and solutions, we are announcing today that we not only exceeded our 2023 goal of 2 million acres in our regenerative ag programs, we have also increased our 2025 acreage goal from 4 to 5 million acres. This growth highlights the leadership role ADM is playing across the regenerative ag landscape, which is built upon the longstanding relationships we have with our more than 200,000 farmers partners. The Drive for Excellence program is focused on uncovering efficiency and effectiveness opportunities across ADM, taking action to improve outcomes and deliver cost savings. To date, we have generated a pipeline of nearly 1,200 validated proposals. Many of these are already delivering results. For example, Colleagues in Thailand had developed chatbot to automate processing of thousands of logistic transactions previously done with a manual process, reducing errors and dramatically improving operating performance. Colleagues in Spain have released capacity in our Valencia extract facility by more than 35% by adjusting the extraction time. This project and more like this will support us in achieving our aggressive cost savings objective of $500 million over the next two years. Moving to nutrition, the team is focused on actions across all areas of planned recovery, and we've seen expected sequential improvement coming out of the fourth quarter. The impact of these actions will accelerate in the back half of the year, consistent with what we mentioned in the last earnings call. Let me provide a few examples of progress we're making across the targeted areas. Our focus on operations and supply chain has helped us to bottleneck some of our demand fulfillment challenges, particularly in EMEA flavors, where the team has rallied to adjust our fulfillment processes following the go-live of one ADM and improve volumes delivered sequentially. We're leveraging our improved M&A playbook to support the integration of our most recent flavor acquisitions and now forecast better results than the initial deal model estimates. To increase speed, agility, and responsiveness to customer needs while delivering more wins across each market segment, we have fine-tuned our go-to-market and COE organizations to best align to demand. Looking to our capital allocation efforts, we have maintained our balanced capital allocation approach while leveraging excess cash flow for enhanced returns to shareholders. We returned a significant amount of cash to shareholders to date as we repurchased more than 20 million shares. As mentioned last month, our focus for excess capital deployment will remain centered on the shareholders. In summary, We are making measurable progress across each of our three major priority areas in 2024, which is setting us up well to navigate the market headwinds we are facing this year and deliver in line with our expectations. I would like to turn the call over to Ismael for more detail on the first quarter financial results. Ismael?