AptarGroup, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aptar Group's 2019 third quarter conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Introducing today's conference call is Mr. Matt Della Maria, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Howard, and welcome, everyone. Participating on our call today is are Stephan Tonda, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Bob Kuhn, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary. You can find a copy of our press release as well as the slide presentation that summarizes our results on our website. We will also post a replay of this conference call on our website. Lastly, today's call includes some forward-looking statements. Please refer to our SEC filings to review factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or contained in the forward-looking statements. AFTAR undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking information contained therein. I'd now like to turn the conference call over to Stephan.

Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Yesterday, we reported core sales growth of 4% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 9% for the third quarter. Before I go into the quarterly segment results in more detail, let me start by sharing an update on our most recent acquisition of Noble and the announced segment leadership appointments. Then I will speak to each of the segments before turning it over to Bob for some more details. You can refer to slide four of the presentation that is featured on our website. As we announced in our press release, we have acquired Noble International, a leader in drug delivery training devices, including auto-injectors, pre-filled syringes, on-body and respiratory devices, and patient onboarding programs. Noble's training devices, which mimic the feel, activation forces, and functions of the actual drug delivery device, are designed to reduce error and increase device familiarity. Both are key to ultimately improving healthcare adherence and outcomes, especially in settings where patients self-administer the treatment. This acquisition is another step in our strategy to build out our pharma service business, serving this attractive and rapidly growing market. On next slide five, you can see how we are expanding our offering from drug delivery devices and components to being a full service provider for our customers from product development through the post-launch stage. Our pharma clients increasingly are smaller, innovative companies procure more and more of these services to increase the likelihood of success of their innovations, to shorten the time to launch, and to improve performance in the market post-launch. Now, shifting topics, as shown on slide six, we have announced new segment leadership appointments. Marc Prieur will assume leadership of our beauty and home segment, as Alden Schaefer will be taking on a new leadership role overseeing strategic projects and commercial excellence initiatives. And Hedy clearly will succeed Mark as President of APTA Food and Beverage. Hedy previously led the food and beverage business in Europe, and most recently led the beauty and home segment also in Europe. All new responsibilities take effect December 1st, with a thorough handover activity going well into the new year. The pace of activity in APTA has picked up considerably over the past years, We are investigating several strategic projects that require more executive level attention and oversight that Alden is uniquely suited to provide. We are fortunate to draw upon our deep talent base and Mark's extensive operational leadership experience, combined with his passion for innovative, sustainable solutions, make him an ideal leader to take beauty and home segments to new heights. Hedy has broad international experience, having led our European sales and operations for both food and beverage and beauty and home segments. He has successfully implemented transformation initiatives in both segments, and his knowledge of emerging high-growth markets, including the Middle East and Africa, will be very important for our strategy execution going forward. Now, turning to slide seven, I will share a summary of our pharma segment, which had another outstanding quarter. We continue to benefit from strong sales momentum in the allergic rhinitis and central nervous system categories. The allergy category, which is a significant part of our pharma business, has really outperformed when you look back over the past 12 to 18 months, primarily due to the huge success of the branded treatments being now sold over the counter in significant quantities. We believe we are in the later stages of the tremendous expansion we have seen in this category in the U.S., and we expect growth to normalize in the near term. That being said, we are in the earlier stages of what we believe is the growth trajectory of our central nervous system devices, although this is a smaller part of our pharma segment today. We also saw broad-based increased demand across our other pharma applications, including our consumer healthcare business and the injectables division. I'm also pleased to share that our active blister packaging solution developed by Aphter CSP Technologies for oral solid dose drug delivery was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for an HIV prevention medicine. This represents the first FDA approval for a proprietary active blister system, which protects and contributes to the stability of oral solid dose drugs with a solution that is fully integrated into the blister package. The system can be customized specifically for the drug development, drug developer's formulation, offers a broad spectrum of protection, including moisture absorption, oxygen, and or odor scavenging. In other pharma news, we have also entered into an agreement with Bryn Pharma, a privately held pharma company, for the development of a nasal spray version of epinephrine using our BiDOS nasal device. Bryn is currently conducting clinical trial in its epinephrine nasal spray. using a portable device capable of delivering two therapeutic doses of epinephrine, replacing the need to carry two epinephrine autoinjectors. I want to stress that this has not yet been approved by the FDA, but BRIN has announced our partnership, and we see this as yet another key example of converting the delivery of existing medicines to the nasal drug delivery route. Now turning to our beauty and home segment and to slide eight, As we saw in the previous quarter, this segment faced considerable challenges from weaker demand from the personal care market. At the same time, sales to the beauty and home care markets grew nicely with strong demand from prestige fragrance and skin care customers and broad-based increased demand in the home care market. Our transformation progress, however, was offset by underabsorbed fixed costs and underutilized facilities due to the weak demand in personal care. Looking at the column to the right, as previously announced, we have taken an important step in our strategy to gain scale in the fast-growing Chinese beauty market. We have signed an agreement to acquire 49% equity interest in BTY, a leading Chinese manufacturer of high-quality decorative metal components, metal plastic sub-assemblies, and complete color cosmetic packaging solutions for the beauty industry. This transaction meets our disciplined investment approach of partnering with leading recognize players with innovative technology and know-how, and includes an option to raise our stake in future years. I'm also excited about an interesting product innovation in China, the first launch of our facial skin care dual dispenser that features a separate airless booster cartridge. Our device, called Neomix, is featured on a dual serum facial skin care product for the fast-growing local premium brand Shando by JALA. On the topic of sustainable solutions, as shown on the far right, our colored closure, which is made from 100% post-consumer recycled resin, is featured on a line of haircut products for love, beauty, and planet. Moving now to slide nine, our food and beverage segment grew core sales as increased demand for our dispensing closures for food products overcame weaker demand for beverage closures, which is reflecting some general seasonality. and additional reductions in our beverage sales in China. We also are passing through lower resin costs to our customers, creating an additional headwind on food and beverage top line. This segment continues to benefit from conversion opportunities, especially in condiments, where you'll see several products moving from the traditional formants to inverted pouches with our dispensing system. One example is the newly launched squeezed guacamole by Yucatan, which features our custom pouch fitment with pull ring and our flip-flip closure with simply squeezed valve for cleaner, more precise application in an inverted pouch format. The same closure and valve combination is also featured on the new inverted pouch of Chico Honey. Both products can now be found here in the U.S., and we are very optimistic that this trend towards squeezable pouches will open up even more opportunities for food products that were not previously dispensed in this format. In summary, we have had a good quarter overall with top-line gains in pharma and food and beverage, offsetting some softness in beauty and home. We are also pleased that we announced new product conversion stories, new strategic partnerships, and the first FDA approval for our active blister packaging solution. With that, I will now turn it over to Bob, who is going to walk through some of the financial details that impacted the quarter.