AptarGroup, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aptar's 2020 fourth 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 in Best Relations and Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. I'd like to welcome everyone joining us on the call today and everyone listening to the webcast. Joining me on today's call are Stephan Tanda, President and CEO, and Bob Kuhn, Executive Vice President and CFO. Our press release and accompanying slide deck have been posted to our website. If you are following along on the website, you can advance the slides by hovering over the presentation screen and clicking on the arrows on the right and on the left. As always, we will post a replay of this call on the website. 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 what we are discussing today. I would now like to turn the Canvas call over to Stephan. Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everyone.

We appreciate you joining us today. I hope that you and your families are staying healthy and safe. Before we turn the page on 2020, I would like to take a moment to speak to Slide 3 and recognize our people for their tremendous commitment to deliver on the promises we made to our customers, patients, consumers, and business partners. I want to thank our teams for facing the challenges presented throughout the year with unwavering strength and resilience, and for living up to our purpose and responsibility to society. namely to ensure that our innovative solutions are readily available to dispense critical medicines and consumer products to millions of people each day. At AFSAR, we are focused on transforming ideas into products that improve everyday lives, and we are proud of the company's vital role in society. We are well positioned to continue to invest and grow in 2021. Turning now to slide four, AFSAR has a steady, long-term, compounding growth story and that is how we manage the business for growth over the next 5 to 10 years and well beyond. In 2020, we continued our strong total shareholder return journey, and our shareholders achieved 102% total shareholder return, or TSR, over the past five years. Our diversified business proved to be resilient to the significant economic and pandemic challenges and helped us overcome temporary weaknesses in certain markets, mainly the beauty market. We also made strategic investments during the year that will add critical capacity to key areas such as lotion pumps and components for injected medicines. And we were active on the M&A front, acquiring Fusion PKG to bolster our go-to-market turnkey capabilities. In addition, we invested in selected partners such as Sunmo with developing connected healthcare solutions to further strengthen our portfolio. Looking at our performance for the year, our reported sales increased 2%, and on a comparative basis, core sales were in line with the prior year. I am pleased that we achieved record cash flow from operations and record free cash flow through the combination of the strong performance of our farmer segment, contributions from recent cash accretive acquisitions, cost containment efforts, and working capital improvements. Further, our balance sheet remains in excellent condition, and we are well positioned to continue to pursue strategic M&A opportunities. Another key element of our compounding growth story is our dividend program, and I'm happy to report that in 2020, we returned $93 million to shareholders. This was our 27th consecutive year of paying an increased dividend. I will brief a comment on our Q4 results as shown in slide five. Before turning it over to Bob, we will go into a bit more detail. Our team delivered a strong finish to the year with fourth quarter core sales growth of 5% and recent acquisitions adding 3% on top of that. Broad-based demand for our industry-leading drug delivery devices and for our food dispensing closures drove double-digit core sales increases in our pharma and food and beverage segments. In our pharma segment, I'm pleased with the diverse growth across our pharma divisions as we continue to supply critical devices for everyday medicines while we further engage with customers with more urgent needs related to fighting the pandemic. In our food and beverage segment, steady strong demand for food closures and some restocking by certain beverage customers helped in the quarter. Our beauty and home segment continued to make top-line progress and would have posted positive core sales growth had it not been for lower-costing tooling sales compared to the prior year. We achieved double-digit core growth in our personal care and home care applications on strong demand for our dispensing systems used with sanitizers and cleaners. We also saw gradual improvement in the beauty fragrance market, though sales were still considerably behind the prior year. The decline in the fragrance business was partially offset by increased sales of dispensers for facial skincare products. We have successfully implemented the vast majority of our plant initiatives related to our transformation over the past three years, including implementing new commercial strategies, reducing costs and adding capabilities in Asia, and in fast-growing application fields that we believe will position the segment for future growth and expanded profitability. However, the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic has caused several initiatives that were expected to be completed by the end of the year to be somewhat delayed. including the planned closure of two facilities in the U.S., and resulted in a significant decline in our beauty business. While our beauty and home segment continues to be profitable, the disruption caused by the pandemic, including high operating costs, has more than offset any expected growth in earnings from our transformation. We remain committed to completing our remaining transformation initiatives and expect the return to growth to be gradual and nonlinear. as this market is highly correlated to the return of post-pandemic normal consumer behavior, including travel, which today has proven to be sporadic and uncertain. We continue to invest in research and development efforts that support our growing patent portfolio of over 5,000 active patents. Our examples of recent technology and innovation solutions are found on slide 6, and I would like to highlight just a few of them. In pharma, we announced this week that our three-phase active film technology was chosen to protect a new SARS rapid antigen test for COVID-19 that recently received emergency use authorization from the U.S. FDA. The QuickView SARS antigen test is a point-of-care rapid antigen test developed by Cridel Corporation that delivers test results in 10 minutes. The visually webbed test requires no supplemental instrumentation and offers expanded access to affordable and accurate COVID-19 testing that will help meet the urgent testing needs in those in-school systems and rural areas. In the injectables market, we have a supply position on several of the leading COVID-19 vaccines and treatments in selected parts of the world. In the consumer healthcare market, we have P&G, with our natal spray device that delivers an ultra-fine mist for their new VapoCool sinus congestion and pressure relief product. In beauty at home, we have helped a company called Lighting Derm in France to launch a home-use skincare device with infrared regenerative light with photoactive pack serums to provide skin rejuvenation and regeneration. After providing the airless piston system and reloadable recyclable capsules. Our airline technology is also featured on L'Oreal's Kiehl brand hydropumping hydrating serum and was customized for an eye cream in China by their brand Infinitus. This technology comes in a wide range of sizes that are a great solution for dispensing serums, for facial skin care, and this is the same technology used in our pharma business for dermal products. Finally, our Fusion PKG team is focused on turnkey beauty solutions, and recently provided 13 packaging items for a new line of nourishing facial oil by the Indy brand, Bad Habit. In food and beverage, our revolutionary seamless-squeeze elastomeric valve design is one that customers turn to for its wide range of applications and for precise and accurate flow control, and is used in applications within beauty and home and pharma as well. This technology is featured on a new coconut face in an inverted pouch in India. Additionally, Sievert Squeeze is bringing convenience to flexible packaging, allowing products that have historically been marketed in jars or tubs to be moved to a pouch. The new Diff Squeezy Cream Peanut Butter and Natural Squeeze Cream Peanut Butter Spread by Smuckers are great examples of this ongoing conversion of the category. Using the sand cap pouch solution with after-closure simply squeeze valve and fitment, the package eliminates the need for a knife and brings convenience and ease of use. During the quarter, we also provided a new custom closure for cappuccino powder in Latin America using our VAS technology, which stands for After-Bonded Aluminum to Plastic Patent Solution, often used in the food and beverage markets. where a secure seal is needed and an equal opening feature added to it for consumers. The same VAF technology is used by major infant formula brands in North America and is a key technology for the success of Tropicana's Orange Juice Carafe package and for Valvoline's Automotive Oil package. We continue to be very successful at sharing resources and innovation across our segments, enabling significant economies of scale and a more efficient pathway to market it in growth. The technology that might start in pharma is often used in our union home and food and beverage segments as well. We also see many opportunities to leverage our active packaging and material science technology in drug delivery and consumer packaging. Our technical expertise, along with the product, manufacturing, and customer synergies we have across our business have been, after highly successful in the past, business model as we look to the future. Before I turn the call over to Bob, I would like to share a few additional highlights as shown in slide 7. As we close out 2020, our steady progress on environmental and social responsibility topics resulted in after achieving the prestigious CDP A-list status for our climate change assessment and after being named a supplier engagement leader. AFTA was also named in this top 100 of America's most responsible companies by Newsweek and ranked in the top 100 of Barron's most sustainable companies, both for 2021. We were also recognized with prime status by ISS-ESG, one of the world's leading rating agencies for sustainable investments. AFTA has published new policies around human rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and community engagement and global giving on our website. the environment, and the communities in which we operate. Finally, we announced earlier this week that we have partnered with CARE, a remarkable organization that works around the globe to save lives, defeat poverty, and achieve social justice. Through our global partnership, APA will support CARE's education programming, women's economic empowerment efforts, and CARE's crisis response campaign, including the Fox and Fair COVID-19 Vaccine Response Campaign. With that, I will now turn it over to Bob, who will provide additional comments on our results.