Berry Global Group, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the BERI 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 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 our speaker today, Mr. Dustin Stilwell. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to BERI's first fiscal quarter 2022 earnings call. Throughout this call, we will refer to the first fiscal quarter as the December 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 at 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 you to limit yourself to one question 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 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, 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 would like to turn the call over to Barry's CEO, Tom Sammons.

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, we are reaffirming our full-year fiscal 2022 outlook, despite the impacts of ongoing, unprecedented inflation and supply chain challenges across the world. The convergence of these continuing issues and the new Omicron variant negatively impacted earnings in the quarter, with the strongest effects felt in the month of December. Overall demand finished in line with our expectation, but could have been stronger had we seen improvements in supply chains. We have focused our efforts on meeting customer demands while actively combating rising costs and investing for future growth in this dynamic macro environment. As we manage these disruptions, we are continuing to work alongside our customers to provide the innovative and sustainability-focused products they require. I will highlight a few of these projects in my closing remarks as they play a pivotal role in maintaining our growth momentum in fiscal 22 and beyond. We are confident in our demand outlook and even more confident in our long-term strategy, our people, and strong leadership position in the market. Next, delivering value to our customers and shareholders remains a top priority. We've been committed to a flexible and disciplined capital allocation strategy that balances returning capital to our shareholders and investing in our business for long-term growth through both organic and inorganic opportunities. Our financial performance and balance sheet have strengthened considerably over the past several years. We are now in a solid position to return capital to shareholders while still maintaining financial flexibility to execute our strategic plan, further strengthen our balance sheet, and invest in future growth. As a result, As we announced earlier today, the company's board of directors has approved a $1 billion share repurchase authorization program, which replaces the existing authorization. We anticipate fully utilizing this new program over the next two to three years and expect to repurchase at least $350 million of shares of outstanding common stock in fiscal 2022, including the $50 million we repurchased in the first fiscal quarter. This authorization demonstrates the board and management's confidence in the company's future and its ability to generate consistent and dependable free cash flow. As we've stated on previous calls, we are committed to a balanced capital allocation strategy to maximize shareholder value, which is supported by our strong free cash flow and will thoughtfully include continued investment to grow our business organically, growth through strategic acquisitions that will enhance our ability to grow organically, returning capital to shareholders, and debt reduction. We are highly confident in our ability to generate significant shareholder value based on our historic track record and future growth prospects. Backed by a very strong order backlog and active pipeline of opportunities and a number of planned organic growth initiatives, we are optimistic and committed to our long-term organic growth strategies. Next, let me turn to our number one core value on slide five, and that is safety, keeping all of our teammates healthy and safe. We have an ongoing commitment to identifying, managing, and minimizing safety risk. During the past few years, the pandemic presented many challenges across our global footprint. Our GlobalBerry team stepped up and took on the challenge by implementing and maintaining new protocols, all while keeping each other safe. And in spite of these added challenges in operating during the pandemic, our safety performance has continued to show improvement. And we are very proud of our industry leadership delivering an ocean incident rate below one for fiscal 2021, significantly better than the industry average of 3.7. Our team's emphasis on working safely and servicing our customers in a challenging environment has made us a stronger and better company giving us great optimism on the company's future success. Additionally, as you can see on the slide, we have a strong commitment to ensure that we are providing better opportunities and bringing innovation to provide multiple lives to natural resources while heading many initiatives with industry and external partners to improve circularity and our carbon footprint. Now I'll turn the call over to Mark who will review Barry's financial results.