Berry Global Group, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the BERI Global Group Q1 2024 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 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dustin Stilwell, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you to everyone for joining Barry's first fiscal quarter 2024 earnings call. As you can see on slide two, joining me this morning, I have Barry's Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Kowalinski, Barry's Chief Financial Officer, Mark Miles, and Barry's HHNS president, Kurt Begley. Following our 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 with a brief follow-up and then fall back into the queue for any additional questions. A few things to note before handing the call over. On our website at barryglobal.com, you can find today's press release and earnings call presentation under our investor relations section. As referenced on slide three, during this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. These measures are reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings press release and presentation, which were made public earlier this morning. Additionally, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results or outcomes may differ materially from those that may be expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. Some factors that could cause the results or outcomes to differ are in the company's latest 10-K, our other SEC filings, and our news releases. I will now turn the call over to Barry's CEO, Kevin Kowalinski.

Thank you, Dustin, and thank you to everyone for joining us today to discuss Barry's first quarter results for fiscal 2024. and our recent announcement regarding the combination of our health, hygiene, and specialty global nonwovens and films business with Glatfelter. Reflecting on my first quarter as the CEO of Barrie, I am even more excited about the opportunity to create value for all stakeholders. Having visited many of our global operations and engaged with strategic partners, including customers, suppliers, and investors, I am confident in our ability to meet our objectives. Our dedicated team will continue working diligently to enhance our execution on organic growth, productivity, and portfolio enhancements. Moving to our key takeaways for the quarter on slide six. Despite a challenging macro demand environment and soft consumer demand, we delivered solid first quarter results in line with our expectations. Additionally, we are reaffirming our guidance today for fiscal 2024. Our expectations of a stronger second half of the fiscal year have not changed, and we continue to expect to be within our adjusted EPS and free cash flow ranges. As a reminder, there are several reasons why we expect a stronger second half, including ongoing price and cost actions, continued benefits from structural cost initiatives, capital investment scale-ups, and favorable comparisons to the prior year's volume performance. Moreover, our focus remains on debt repayment, opportunistic share repurchases, and quarterly dividend payments in fiscal 24. We expect our year-end leverage to be 3.5 times or lower, aligning with our target. We believe our long-term growth and value creation strategy, our market positions, stable portfolio of businesses, and capital allocation form a compelling investment thesis for Barry. Our teams have proactively taken actions to address inflation, increasing pricing, and driving productivity benefits through structural plant closures, labor management, and asset optimization. simultaneously strategic investments in high growth markets like food service health and beauty dispensing and pharmaceuticals with a strong sustainability focus will contribute to our success building upon a solid core we have made substantial progress in this first 100 days on two key areas of priority customer focused organic growth through superior service and product performance, and world-class continuous improvement delivered through lean transformation. To this end, we pivoted our service and quality review process to be less internal focused and more driven by the voice of our customers, and we began adding a net promoter score integrated process to ensure closed-loop feedback that our customers are seeing real improvement. We also extended the duration of these reviews and increased the scrutiny to ensure we are seeing improvement in the identification of true root causes and their subsequent elimination. Closing out calendar year 2023, I hosted a meeting of who my team identified as the top 20 lean continuous improvement experts in the company, regardless of what current role they happen to be tasked with. It was fantastic interaction, and it became clear to me that with the right vision, organizational structure, vision, and executive oversight, we have the beginnings of a true world-class lean operating system. I've launched a search process to include both internal and external candidates to take the role of lean transformation leader. Lean transformation is a key priority for 2024, and will become a core component of our culture going forward. And lastly, we were pleased to report that we identified an exciting value creation opportunity as part of our strategic review of our health hygiene and specialty segment announced in September. We have entered into an agreement to spin off our global nonwovens and films businesses and merge with Glatzfelter Corporation, creating a scaled, global franchise with an industry-leading solution set serving attractive, growing specialty materials markets. We will discuss more detail on the new announcement later in our prepared remarks. Furthermore, in conjunction with today's announcement, Barrie will change the name of its engineering materials segment to Flexibles to showcase the continued evolution of this segment towards high-value products and solutions. We will continue to prioritize our focus on increasing our presence in stable, non-cyclical, fast-moving consumer goods. Next, on slide seven, I want to continue to emphasize our substantial levers to drive consistent, dependable, and sustainable organic growth. Various scale advantages drive cost leadership and innovation capabilities that provide us confidence that we will consistently deliver solid earnings growth from our stable portfolio of businesses. Our strategic investments, particularly in key end markets like healthcare, personal care and beauty, and food service, allow very greater differentiation, leading to long-term sustainable growth. These markets also offer higher growth and higher margins, providing positive mixed benefits for our overall portfolio. These drivers have not changed and collectively give us confidence in our ability to deliver future growth and support our long-term target of increasing our presence in stable, non-cyclical, fast-moving consumer goods from 70% of our portfolio to our goal of over 80%. And before handing over to Mark, I want to discuss slide eight and some of our specific focused investments for growth, emphasizing our commitment to innovation and sustainability. Investing in markets and product categories that drive long-term organic growth complements our efforts to build a resilient product portfolio. With a focus on sustainable packaging solutions and a strong competitive advantage in recycled resins, Barry is positioned for higher growth opportunities and long-term value creation. Now I will turn the call over to Mark, who will review Barry's financial results. Mark?