Ashland Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Ashland Global Holdings Inc. Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participant lines are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Mr. Seth Morozek. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Terri. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Ashland's second quarter fiscal 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. My name is Seth Morozek, Director, Ashland Investor Relations. Joining me on the call today are Guillermo Novo, Ashland's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Willis, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We released preliminary results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, at approximately 5 p.m. Eastern Time yesterday, May 5. The news release issued last night was furnished to the SEC in a Form 8-K. During this morning's call, we will reference slides that are currently being webcast on our website, Ashland.com, under the Investor Relations section. The slides can also be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. We encourage you to follow along with the webcast during the call. Please turn to slide two. As a reminder during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements on several matters, including our outlook for fiscal year 2020. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause future results or events to differ materially from today's projections. We believe any such statements are based on reasonable assumptions, but cannot assure that such expectations will be achieved. Please refer to slide two of the presentation for a more complete explanation of those risks and uncertainties and the limits applicable to forward-looking statements. Please also note that we will be referring to certain actual and projected financial metrics on Ashland on an adjusted basis, which are non-GAAP financial measures. We will refer to these measures as adjusted and present them in order to supplement your understanding and assessment of the financial performance of our ongoing business. Non-GAAP measures should not be considered a substitute for or superior to financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. The most directly comparable GAAP measures as well as reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to those GAAP measures are available on our website and in the appendix of today's slide presentation. Please turn to slide three. Guillermo will begin the call this morning with a review of Ashland's priorities in the current environment and provide an overview of results in the second fiscal quarter. Next, Kevin will provide a more detailed review of financial results for the second fiscal quarter. Guillermo will then discuss the Ashland portfolio and the business unit realignment that was completed during the quarter, in addition to the strategies for each of the business units. Guillermo and Kevin will then review the scenario planning that Ashlyn has implemented in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Guillermo will close with key accomplishments that have been achieved over the past few months, in addition to providing his thoughts on important next steps. We will then open the line for your questions. Now, please turn to slide five, and I will turn the call over to Guillermo for his opening comments. Guillermo?

Thank you, Seth, and good morning to everyone. Before I begin, I'd like to thank everyone for your participation this morning. I hope that everyone is safe and healthy in these unprecedented times. Since the emergence of the coronavirus in China in January, the Ashland team has worked tirelessly to address the impact of the pandemic. First and foremost, this has meant protecting the health and safety of our employees. Second, we have continued to supply our customers and the critical industries we serve. And third, we have worked to ensure that Ashland is well positioned even in the event of prolonged impact from the pandemic. Despite all the challenges presented over the last few months, we have maintained a strong focus on advancing our strategic initiatives to restructure Ashland. We have heightened our sense of urgency in executing our transformation as it is doing more than just positioning us for future growth and performance. It is also helping us navigate better through this COVID-19 environment. We have operationalized our new business unit model, and the teams have worked to improve performance across the portfolio. The teams have also refreshed their respective strategies in order to best serve our customers and profitably grow our businesses. We are continuing to drive our self-help actions to improve Ashland's cost structure, performance, and cash generation. Kevin will provide additional commentary regarding these efforts a bit later in the call. Please turn to slide six. In summary, Q2 results were generally consistent with our expectations as we experienced limited impact on demand from the COVID-19 pandemic. While sales were down year over year, more than half the decline was due to past known issues, which we are continuing to address. And while the global industrial markets were generally weaker during the quarter, our more resilient consumer-focused businesses performed well. This reflects the more defensive nature of our portfolio. But the Q2 results are not only reflective of the customers and markets we serve. The entire Ashland team demonstrated tremendous leadership in helping us navigate through a challenging global environment. Our global incident management team demonstrated rapid engagement and active management to address real-time issues in health and safety protection, production, and supply chain management. They leveraged our COVID-19 learnings from China and applied these best practices across the company in all regions, ensuring our plans operated with minimal disruption and helping implement our work-from-home protocols. We continue to take action to reduce costs, working capital, and capital spending in order to conserve cash and maintain flexibility in this environment. I'm incredibly pleased by the team's response during this time And I'm confident we're well-positioned to weather the current storm and emerge a stronger Ashland in the months to come. Let me now pass the call over to Kevin to review our Q2 results in more detail. Kevin?