Berry Global Group, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Berry Global Earnings Conference 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 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Dustin Stilwell. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Barry's third fiscal quarter 2021 earnings call. Throughout this call, we refer to the third fiscal quarter as the June 2021 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'll 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 and then fall back into the queue for any additional follow-ups. As referenced on slide two, during this call, we'll be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures. The most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and the 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 those described in our earnings release our annual report on Form 10-K, and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Barry's CEO, Tom Salmon.

Thank you, Dustin. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. Let's begin this morning on slide four, where we've laid out our key takeaways for today. First, Our fiscal third quarter results came in strong, right in line with our expectations, with continued organic volume growth of 5%, including all four segments. Again, delivering organic volume growth on top of very strong results from one year ago. Our teams have worked diligently to offset inflation and supply chain challenges through much of the year, demonstrating an exceptional ability to remain focused on driving long-term sustainable growth and delivering these results you see today. Barry's resilience is a continued reminder of the diverse and robust global portfolio we have built. The second key takeaway is our commitment to improve our strong balance sheet and drive our leverage lower. I'm proud to say that as a result of our strong and stable earnings and cash flow, we've been able to reduce our leverage by four-tenths since the beginning of the fiscal year, ending the period at 3.9 times net debt to adjust the EBITDA. Getting below four times is a key milestone for us, as we previously stated, and we anticipate operating our company in a leveraged range of 3 to 3.9 times. We believe here in the near term that continued execution of our organic volume growth strategy and strengthening our balance sheet will deliver significant shareholder value. And lastly, as most of you are aware, throughout fiscal 2021, we have seen significant cost increases in our primary raw material, that being resins. Additionally, we've experienced inflation in other raw material and other costs, such as corrugate and freight. With the strong volume growth momentum in the businesses, along with our efforts to improve the timing lag of the pass-through of this inflation in our customer contracts, we've seen solid progress towards this objective and continue to actively pass these costs through. Although there is a timing lag in passing through some of these inflationary costs, we remain committed to passing through all cost inflation, just as we've demonstrated historically. As we stand today, with only two months remaining in the fiscal year, and despite the persistent inflationary environment during the year, we are increasing our operating EBITDA target to $2.26 billion and reaffirming our organic volume growth assumption of 5% for fiscal 2021. We began fiscal 2021 with confidence in our ability to grow organically, as we've demonstrated over the past several years. 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. Next, let me turn to our number one core value on slide five, and that's safety. Everything we do at Barry starts with safety in mind. As you can see on the slide, we have an ongoing commitment to identifying, managing, and eliminating safety risk. We are proud of our industry leadership and safety by keeping our team members safe as evidenced by our OSHA incident rate of one at the end of 2020, significantly better than the industry average of just below four. During the past year and a half, the pandemic presented many challenges across our global footprint. Our GlobalBerry team stepped up, took on the challenge, implemented and maintained new protocols while keeping each other safe. Our team's emphasis on working safely and servicing our customers has ensured an uninterrupted supply of the essential products we produce. This has made us stronger and a better company, giving us great optimism on the company's future success. We have a strong commitment to caring not only for the communities where we have operations, but to ensure that we are providing better opportunities and bringing innovations to provide multiple lives to the natural resources we use. Earlier, we announced science-based targets reinforcing our commitment to a circular economy in alignment with the worldwide goal of a net zero economy by 2050. In June, we announced our investment in renewable energy through a long-term virtual solar power repurchase program for our Spanish operations. This is one example of the many steps we are taking to lower the carbon emissions of our operations. We are continually working toward our goal of 100% of our fast-moving consumer packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025, and I'm happy to report that we are ahead of plan. Our teams have been heading many initiatives with industry and external partners to expedite the sorting and recycling rates to support the supply needs of recycled content. Now I'll turn the call to Mark. We'll review various financial results in more detail. Mark? Thank you, Tom.