Amcor plc

Welcome. My name is Emma, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the AMCOR 2022 Half Year Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remark, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star 1. Thank you. Tracey Whitehead, Head of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to AMCOR's first half earnings call for fiscal 2022. Joining the call today is Ron D'Elia, Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Casamento, Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I'll direct you to our website, amcor.com, under the Investors section, where you'll find our press release and presentation, which will be discussed on the call today. We'll also discuss non-GAAP financial measures and related reconciliations can be found in the press release and presentation on our website. Also a reminder that the call today includes some forward-looking statements which remain subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Please refer to ANCOR's SEC filings including our statements on Form 10-K and 10-Q to review factors that could cause actual results to differ from what we are discussing today. During the question and answer session, once again, we request that participants limit their questions to a maximum of two and then rejoin the queue for any follow-ups. With that, I'll turn over to Ron.

Thanks, Tracey, and thanks, everyone, for joining Michael and myself today to discuss AMCOR's fiscal 2022 first half results. We'll begin with some prepared remarks before opening. We'll start with safety, which is where we start every meeting at AMCOR. It's the first and most important of our values, and keeping every one of our 46,000 employees around the world safe and healthy is our highest priority. In the last six months, we reduced the number of injuries across the company by 10% compared to the prior year, and 58% of our sites have remained injury-free for at least 12 months. Our teams have continued to make good progress on safety despite the complex environment, and we're proud of their focus, dedication, and performance. However, our ultimate goal is no injuries, so there's more for us to do. We have four key messages set out today on slide four for those following along with the webcast. First, we delivered a solid result through the first half, and we can confidently reaffirm our full-year guidance. While we continue to navigate through the challenging and dynamic operating conditions affecting the entire industry, our teams are executing and performing exceptionally well. We continue to prioritize our customers, and our scale and operational agility have enabled us to service demand and drive growth in priority segments while also recovering higher input costs at the same time. We've also increased cash returns to shareholders, which is our second key message. We now expect to return more than $1.3 billion of cash in fiscal 2022 through dividends and share repurchases. Third, we've built a strong foundation over the last several years, and we're focused now on investing for long-term growth with an emphasis on priority segments and geographies and our innovation capabilities. And finally, for many years, we've made great progress against a broad range of sustainability goals, and we're raising our ambitions again with a commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Turning to the financial highlights on slide five, We delivered double-digit net sales growth, which includes approximately $650 million of price increases. We remain incredibly proud of our teams and in the tools and capabilities we've developed over many years that enable us to continue recovering increasing costs in an environment characterized by broader inflation than we've seen for some time. Excluding this pass-through impact, organic sales grew 2% on the back of higher volumes and favorable mix. Both segments and every geographic region contributed to organic sales growth and volume growth accelerated in the second quarter in both our flexible and rigid packaging businesses. The flexible segment had a particularly strong quarter, generating high single-digit earnings growth and margins remained strong. In rigid packaging, our results for the half were in line with our expectations. the business continued to experience a particularly challenging environment in North America, which resulted in operating inefficiencies and higher costs, although we're encouraged by a number of favorable trends we've seen through the half, and earnings improved as we exited the second quarter. EPS increased 9% for the half. Our financial profile remains strong, and cash returns to shareholders are significantly higher. We've repurchased almost $300 million of shares in the first half, and we expect to repurchase a total of $600 million through fiscal 2022, which is $200 million higher than we anticipated last quarter. Combined with dividends, this means we anticipate returning more than $1.3 billion of cash to shareholders for the fiscal 2022 year. With that, I'll hand over to Michael for some further detail on the financial performance.