Ashland Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ashland Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Seth Morozek. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Victor. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Ashland's third quarter fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call and webcast. My name is Seth Morozek, Director, Ashland Investors. Joining me on the call today are Guillermo Novo, Ashland Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Willis, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We release results for the quarter ended June 30th, 2023 at approximately 5 p.m. Eastern time yesterday, July 5th. The news release issued last night was furnished to the SEC in a form 8K. During today's call, we will reference slides that are currently being webcast on our website Ashland.com under the investor relations section. 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 2023. 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 an explanation of those risks and uncertainties and the limits applicable to forward-looking statements. You can also review our most recent Form 10-K under Item 1A for a comprehensive discussion of the risk factors impacting our business. 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 those measures as adjusted and present them 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 an overview of Ashland's performance and results in the third quarter. Kevin will then provide a more detailed review of financial results in the quarter. Guillermo will then provide additional commentary related to Ashland's financial outlook for fiscal year 2025, then open the line for your questions. Now, please turn to slide five, and I'd like to turn the call over to Guillermo for his opening comment. Guillermo?

Thank you, Seth, and hello, everyone. Thank you for your interest in Ashland and for your participation today. Results in the June quarter were consistent with the pre-announcement that we issued in late June. Total sales for the quarter declined 15% compared to the prior year. Our pharma business continued to perform well, and the inflation recovery actions taken last year and early this year continue to benefit overall results. However, the unprecedented reset impact from customer destocking actions across many supply chains continues to materially impact many of the markets we serve. As we stated in late June, our previous expectations that destocking would conclude during the fiscal third quarter proved to be optimistic. There's still significant uncertainty as to when these dynamics will end. Until the inventory control actions taken by our customers have subsided, it will remain difficult for us to gauge the true end market demand. Based on information from our customers, sales volumes, as well as global retailers of consumer products, we do not believe current customer order dynamics are representative of the underlying consumer demand for the high-value products in which our ingredients are used. While this uncertain environment presents near-term challenges, It does not change our longer-term opportunities or priorities. I will discuss these in more detail at the end of the call. Please turn to slide six. As you can see in the chart on the left, sales declined in each of our segments due to the factors I referenced earlier. As a consequence, we pursued our own internal actions to control inventories. These actions impacted our margins during the quarter and are continuing into the current quarter. Kevin will discuss how these actions impacted each of our segments in a few moments. On the positive side, it is good to see that consumer demand remains resilient for the core markets we serve. Unfortunately, it's also clear that these stocking dynamics will continue to persist for longer across the supply chains of the industries we serve. While there are many global uncertainties on the horizon, the Ashen team is performing well and executing on the actions that are within our control, while not losing focus on the longer-term opportunities for innovation and profitable growth. Let me turn over the call to Kevin to review our Q3 results in more detail, and then I'll be back. Kevin?