Ball Corporation

Greetings, and welcome to the Ball Corporation third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Brandon Potthoff, Head of Investor Relations, Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone. This is Ball Corporation's conference call regarding the company's third quarter 2024 results. The information provided during this call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results or outcomes may differ materially from those that may be expressed or implied. We assume no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements made today. Some factors that could cause the results or outcomes to differ are described in the company's latest Form 10-K our most recent earnings release, and Form 8K and in other company SEC filings as well as company news releases. If you do not already have our earnings release, it is available on our website at ball.com. Information regarding the use of non-GAAP financial measures may also be found in the notes section of today's earnings release. In addition, the release includes a summary of non-comparable items as well as a reconciliation of comparable net earnings and diluted earnings per share calculations. References to net sales and comparable operating earnings in today's release and call do not include the company's former aerospace business. Year-to-date net earnings attributable to the corporation and comparable net earnings do include the performance of the company's former aerospace business through the sale date of February 16, 2024. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Dan Fisher.

Thank you, Brandon. Today, I'm joined on our call by Howard Yu, EVP and CFO. I will provide some brief introductory remarks. Howard will discuss third quarter financial performance and key metrics for 2024. And then we will finish up with closing comments and Q&A. Before I talk about the third quarter, I want to take a moment to recognize our team in Tampa, Florida, who have shown incredible resiliency while dealing with the impact of two devastating hurricanes. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by these terrible storms. We are fortunate that all of our employees are safe and that our Tampa facility avoided major damage and was back up and running quickly. The Ball Foundation supported critical relief efforts by providing monetary donations to organizations with teams actively supporting impacted cities, and in conjunction with customers, we donated over 250,000 cans and bottles of drinking water. Our thoughts remain with the communities impacted by these terrible storms, and we will continue to support our employees, customers, and communities through our global employee giving program. I would also like to welcome our new colleagues who recently joined Ball following our October 29th acquisition of Alucan Intec, a European extruded aluminum aerosol and bottle technology leader. As the demand for sustainable aluminum packaging continues to grow among customers and consumers, this transaction is a capital-efficient way to add incremental capacity to expand our extruded aluminum aerosol business in Europe, while also allowing us to serve the growing extruded aluminum beverage bottle market and diversify our customer base across the continent. Turning to business performance, we delivered strong third quarter results and year to date have returned approximately 1.4 billion to shareholders via share repurchase and dividends as of today's call. Reflecting further on year to date 2024 performance, aluminum packaging continues to outperform other substrates across the globe. In EMEA, third quarter volumes remained strong, driven by continued investment by our customers in canned filling across the region. In South America, softer-than-anticipated volume performance was driven by our exposure to Argentina and supply-demand tightness in Brazil. In North America, persistent economic pressure on the end consumer and our exposure to U.S. domestic beer led to softer-than-expected volumes. Our regional performance culminated in Ball's global beverage can shipments being essentially flat year-over-year in the third quarter and up 2% year-to-date. For a complete summary of regional shipments for the third quarter, please refer to today's earnings release. Consistent with our previous commentary and given our customer mix and year-to-date regional volume performance, we now anticipate full-year global shipment growth in the low single digits range. Key drivers for our company's performance in 2024 continue to be the benefits of deleveraging, repurchasing shares, improving operational efficiencies, and leveraging our well-capitalized plant assets to grow the use of innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging across channels, categories, and venues. Based on our current demand trends and the previously mentioned drivers, we are positioned to grow full-year comparable diluted EPS mid-single digits plus off 2023 reported comparable diluted EPS of $2.90 per share, generate strong adjusted free cash flow, strengthen our balance sheet, and return a value in excess of $1.6 billion to shareholders via share repurchases and dividends in 2024. With that, I'll turn it over to Howard to discuss the quarter and key metrics.