Berry Global Group, Inc.

Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Berry Global Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dustin Stilwell. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Barry's third fiscal quarter 2022 earnings call. Throughout this call, we will refer to the third fiscal quarter as the June 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 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 and then fall back into the queue for any additional questions. 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 a reconciliation of the differences between the GAAP and non-GAAP 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 and financial conditions 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. And safety is our top priority and most important value. Let me start on slide four. Keeping all of our teammates healthy and safe is our highest priority. We're very proud of our industry leadership on safety performance. And as you can see, we delivered an OSHA incident rate below one for fiscal 2021 and expect fiscal 22 to deliver another year of improvement with an expected rate of 0.8, 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 what has been a challenging environment has made us a stronger, better, and safer company. Turning to our key messages for the quarter on slide five. First, our business delivered solid quarterly results including record revenues for any June quarter and record adjusted earnings per share for any quarter in our history. Secondly, Throughout the last two years, we've seen significant inflation and have taken aggressive pricing action and invested in cost reduction projects across our businesses. Our team has done an exceptional job and continues to make additional progress on both fronts. Third, our ability to provide a one-stop shop for our customers on a global basis with local supply chain is unique and differentiated. We're investing for long-term growth with a focus on faster-growing product categories and geographies, along with innovation and 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. And finally... We continue to return cash to shareholders as we repurchase $285 million, representing another 4% of our total shares outstanding in the quarter. This puts our total at nearly 11 million shares, or approximately 8% of our total shares outstanding through the first three quarters of fiscal 2022, returning almost $640 million of capital to shareholders. As we stated in our last earnings call, we anticipate repurchasing at least $700 million of shares in fiscal 2022 with a plan to use the remaining cash towards debt reduction. Given our top priority of driving shareholder value, we were fortunate to repurchase our shares and take advantage of the attractive return opportunity at prevailing prices. Turning now to the financial highlights on slide six, Our June quarterly performance was in line with our expectations, including improvement in our price-cost relationship, offset by modest softening demand and the stronger U.S. dollar. For the quarter, we delivered June quarter record net sales of $3.7 billion, which is a 6% improvement versus the prior year on a comparable basis, adjusted for foreign exchange and recent divested businesses. On a two-year basis, organic volumes were up 3% and in line with our normal volume expectation, as we reported strong organic volume growth of 5% a year ago compared to a 2% decline in this quarter. From an earnings perspective, operating EBITDA was up 2% for the prior year quarter on a comparable basis, in line with our expectations, including a favorable price-cost recovery of $41 million when excluding the prior year COVID mixed benefits. As we've demonstrated historically and during this most recent quarter, we remain committed to passing through cost increases and believe we are well-positioned, given our scale, along with our ability to service our customers from our facilities in close proximity to their locations, which provides both cost and sustainability advantages. We continue to work collaboratively with our customers to pass through inflation. As our selling prices were over $300 million higher than the prior year quarter, and up a substantial $2.3 billion over the last four quarters, the highest ever recorded in our company's history. To put it into context, our average selling price inflation since our IPO was 3% contrasted to our recent LTM change of 16%. We've nearly offset all of this unprecedented inflation while still expecting to deliver significant free cash flow for our full year. Finally, adjusted EPS increased 10% on a comparable basis versus the prior year driven by solid earnings and opportunistic share repurchases. Before I hand over to Mark, I want to cover two slides, 7 and 8, which touch on some of our investment growth opportunities as well as our resiliency during a softening recessionary economy. Barry has a top two market position in over 75% of our product categories, which collectively generates over $10 billion of annual sales. Our business model is very resilient through any economic cycle and includes the broadest portfolio of packaging solutions with strong, dependable, and stable free cash flows, as you can see on slide 7. In addition, we have consistently driven top-tier results in nearly all key financial metrics generating strong compound annual growth rates for revenue, earnings, and free cash flow. and have grown our adjusted earnings per share every year as a publicly traded company. Through past recessions, our volumes were modestly negatively impacted, given that demand for our products are primarily non-discretionary and stable. While both earnings and free cash flow increased, as raw material costs historically dropped, given that cyclical markets, which use similar materials, typically fall sharply. And finally, on slide eight, We continue to invest in each of our businesses to build and maintain our world-class, low-cost manufacturing base with an emphasis on key end markets which offer greater potential for differentiation and growth, such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Additionally, we will continue to invest and expand our emerging market position in support of our commitment to global growth. We believe that by increasing our presence in faster-growing end markets, along with continuing to invest into emerging market regions, we will further enhance our ability to provide consistent, dependable, and sustainable long-term growth. Longer term, we believe our emerging market presence can be 25% or more of our total revenues. And lastly, innovation and sustainability are increasingly embedded in everything we do. We continue to believe this represents a great opportunity for growth and differentiation. By making these deliberate choices on these higher-value growth markets and regions over time, They will represent a larger portion of our sales mix and become an increasingly more relevant driver of both earnings and volume growth. Now, I'll turn the call to Mark who will review various financial results. Mark?