Berry Global Group, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Barrie Global Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After this week's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that time, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker for today, Dustin Stilwell. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to BERI's second fiscal quarter 2022 earnings call. Throughout this call, we will refer to the second fiscal quarter as the March 2022 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 Barrie'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, 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 on 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. 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. I'd like to refer everyone to slide four to the quarterly presentation materials. First, I'm pleased to report that we exceeded our adjusted earnings per share expectation for the quarter and delivered record net sales of $3.8 billion with organic volumes, EBITDA, and free cash flow finishing in line with our expectations despite additional inflationary pressure and macroeconomic challenges. We are reaffirming both our adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow ranges for the full fiscal year. Additionally, we increased our cash return to shareholders as we repurchased $300 million of shares, or 4% of our outstanding total shares in the quarter. As we stated on our last call, we are committed to repurchasing at least $350 million in fiscal 22, and we've already achieved that threshold during the first two quarters. Given our top priority of driving shareholder value, we were fortunate to be able to repurchase our shares in and take advantage of the attractive return opportunity at prevailing prices. If current valuations persist, we would expect to continue to repurchase shares at a similar pace in the back half of the fiscal year. We have approximately $700 million remaining on our recent authorized $1 billion share repurchase program, with the majority of our cash flow generated in our fiscal second half. Next, we've seen continued inflation since our last earnings call we are taking aggressive price action to offset these costs across our businesses. While we continue to navigate through this dynamic operating environment, our teams are executing exceptionally well. We continue to prioritize our customers and our scale and operational agility have enabled us to service our customer demand and continue to focus on growth while also recovering higher input costs at the same time. And finally, Our portfolio offering is unlike any other in our industry. Our ability to provide a one-stop shop for our customers on a global basis is unique and differentiated. We are investing for the long-term growth with a focus on faster-growing product categories, growth-oriented geographies, and innovations that drive growth along with sustainability-led opportunities for additional growth and value creation. We've made great strides towards our sustainability goals, and we will continue to be ambitious with our commitments, which are being driven and led by the needs and demands of our extensive global customer base. Next, let me turn to our number one core value on slide five, and that is safety. Keeping all of our 47,000 teammates healthy and safe is our highest priority. We have an ongoing commitment to identifying, managing, and minimizing safety risks. Our teams have continued to make great progress on safety despite a challenging environment. Our safety performance speaks for itself, and as you can see, has continued to improve. We are very proud of our industry leadership delivering an OSHA incident rate below one for fiscal 2021, which is significantly better than the industry average of 3.7. Our entire global team's emphasis on working safely and servicing our customers in a challenging environment has made us a stronger and better company today, giving us great optimism on the company's future success. As you can see on the slide, we have a strong commitment to ensuring 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. And lastly, I'd be remiss not to mention how extremely proud I am of our company and employees who continue to generously assist refugees from Ukraine during this extremely volatile and challenging period, providing both shelter and financial support. Now, I'll turn the call to Mark, who will review Barry's financial results. Mark?