Bunge Global SA

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Bungie third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, you may see a conference specialist by pressing star and zero on your telephone keypads. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one. To withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Ms. Ruthann Wisner, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ma'am, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you for joining us this morning for our third quarter earnings call. Before we get started, I want to let you know that we have slides to accompany our discussion. These can be found in the Investor section of our website at bungie.com under Investor Presentations. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure are posted on our website as well. I'd like to direct you to slide two and remind you that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements that reflect Bungie's current view with respect to future events, financial performance, and industry conditions. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Bungie has provided additional information in its reports on file with the SEC concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in this presentation, and we encourage you to review these factors. On the call this morning are Greg Heckman, Bungie's Chief Executive Officer, and John Neffel, Chief Financial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Greg.

Thank you, Ruthann, and good morning, everyone. Let's start things off on slide three with the agenda for today's call. Today I'll provide a high-level overview of our quarterly results. and then cover the progress we're making against our key priorities, which, as expected, resulted in a bit of noise in our reported results. I'll then give you an overview of our outlook for the rest of the year before handing it over to John, who will give you more detail around the financials. We'll then open up the line for your questions. Let's turn to slide four. Excluding notable items, which were largely the accounting charges related to portfolio restructuring, and our headquarters move, our core business performed ahead of our expectations for the quarter despite the uncertain and deteriorating market conditions impacting our industry. In agribusiness, crush margins declined during the quarter, especially near the end of the period, and our grain business was impacted by ongoing trade issues and a delayed U.S. harvest. Nevertheless, our team did a great job in mitigating those challenges and our results were positively impacted by our risk management actions. Results in edible oils were strong, reflecting favorable industry dynamics and good execution. As I noted, a lot of the noise in our results this quarter was connected to the strategic actions we are taking. In July, we announced our agreement with BP to contribute our Brazilian sugar and bioenergy business to a new 50-50 joint venture. As a result of this, we've reclassified that business as held for sale and taken the expected $1.6 billion charge we discussed on our last call. We remain very excited about the transaction and our new partnership with BP. It checks the boxes across all of our strategic criteria, reducing our exposure to Brazilian sugar and bioenergy, allowing us to strengthen our balance sheet, and importantly, enabling us to increase our focus on our core businesses. We're on track to close the transaction before year end as planned. Also in the third quarter, we took a big step forward in our work to streamline our global business structure with the announcement that we're moving our global headquarters to St. Louis, where our North American headquarters is already located. This move will allow us to better align with our commercial teams and drive additional efficiencies with cost reductions as an additional output. Although we were happy with our execution in the third quarter, underlying market conditions and forward curves have continued to be very challenging, and we expect the fourth quarter to reflect those weaker conditions. Consistent with how we've been talking about flat earnings year over year, which excludes notable items, the impact of our investment in Beyond Meat, and the benefit of approximately $70 million of lower sugar depreciation. We now expect a gap versus 2018 of between 15 and 20 cents a share. The markets are being driven largely by the macro factors that we've discussed on our past calls. Abrogant swine fever continues to impact demand for soy meal, and along with the U.S.-China trade situation, Both typical trade flows and producer marketing patterns have been and continue to be distorted. We'll continue to monitor these factors, and as we did in our third quarter, utilize our global footprint to navigate the environment in the best possible manner while also implementing our internal changes. I'll now turn the call over to John to go through the numbers in greater detail.