Berry Global Group, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the very global earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this time, you will need to press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I'd like to turn it over to Mr. Dustin Stilwell. You may begin the conference, sir.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Barry's first fiscal quarter 2021 earnings call. Throughout this call, we will refer to the first fiscal quarter as the December 2020 quarter. Before we begin our call, I would like to mention that on our website, we have provided a slide presentation to help guide our discussion this morning. After today's call, a replay will also be available on our website at barryglobal.com under our investor relations section. Joining me from the company, I have Barry's Chief Executive Officer, Tom Salmon, and Chief Financial Officer, Mark Miles. Following Tom and Mark's comments today, we will have a question and answer session. In order to allow everyone the opportunity to participate, we do ask that you limit yourself to one question at a time with a brief follow-up and then fall back into the queue for any additional questions. As referenced on slide two during this call, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures. The most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of the differences between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and investor presentation on our website. And finally, a reminder that certain statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements are made based upon management's expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks, including but not limited to that those described in our earnings release, annual report on Form 10-K, and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company could differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. And now I will turn the call over to Barry's CEO, Tom Salmon.

Thank you, Dustin. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. First, let me start with our number one core value on slide three, and that is safety. We fully understand that what we do here at Berry is a valuable part of the supply chain, making and supplying products that are protecting each other, our friends, our families, and our neighbors and communities around the globe. Our number one priority is the health and safety of our team members. We believe safety doesn't happen by accident, and everything we do at Berry starts with safety. Our employees' commitment to show up and perform their work in a safe and professional manner makes me incredibly proud. but it doesn't end when they walk out of the plant or their office. The safety and health outside of work is just as important. They have demonstrated respect for their colleagues and their communities in this aspect as well. As you can see on the slide, we have an ongoing commitment to identifying, managing, and eliminating risk, and are very proud of our safety record with an OSHA incident rate significantly better than the industry average. Our team's emphasis on working safely and servicing our customers has ensured an uninterrupted supply of the essential products we produce. This work has resulted in our strong start to the fiscal year and the numbers speak for themselves. First quarter results for revenue, organic volumes, EBITDA and earnings per share all came in significantly better than we anticipated with strong demand across every division. Strong momentum we've created over the past several years delivered again record first quarter results on the top line, bottom line, and free cash flow. Once again, we are proving our resilience across various economic cycles. The diversity of our portfolio across various end markets and regions continues to provide the consistency and dependability we've demonstrated for decades. On slide four, we said coming into the year that the key focus for the company was to grow organic volumes and improve our balance sheet. We're off to an exceptional start to deliver on those promises. Organic volume growth came in at an outstanding quarterly record of 7%, with all four segments delivering volume growth. Stay-at-home food, health and wellness, along with personal protective products, continue to see solid growth in the quarter. Industrial, automotive, distribution and building and construction end markets, while still facing some softness related to COVID-19, improved moderately. resulting in smaller headwinds to our respective segment volumes. Additionally, our strong results on earnings and cash flow allowed us to reduce our leverage by two-tenths, ending the period at 4.1 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA. We are well on our way to meeting our objective of getting our leverage below four times. After we have achieved this target, we anticipate operating our company while maintaining our leverage in a range of three 3.9 times on a go-forward basis. To be very clear, we believe our top two drivers now in delivering significant shareholder value is consistently growing our business organically and strengthening our balance sheet. And lastly, as most of you are aware, we've seen significant cost increases in our primary raw material, that being resin. along with some modest inflation and other raw materials and other costs over the past several months, including anticipated February increases. With a strong volume growth momentum in the business, along with our efforts to improve the timing lag of the pass-through of inflation in our customer contracts, we are active and fully intend on passing these transitory increases through. Our updated guidance includes an incremental timing lag of $50 million over the next three-quarters related to this incremental inflation. Despite this timing headwind, and with the exceptional start to the year, we are raising our fiscal year operating EBITDA guidance range by $25 million and increasing our organic volume growth assumption from the original 2% to now 4% for the full year. We began fiscal 2021 with enthusiasm and confidence in our ability to grow organically, as we've demonstrated over the past year. And I believe we are well-positioned to continue to see long-term, predictable, and sustainable growth with customer-linked capital investments that target continued expansion into both faster-growing segments and emerging markets. Now I'll turn the call to Mark, who will review Barry's financial results in more detail. Mark?