Bunge Global SA

Good morning and welcome to the Bungie Limited fourth quarter 2019 earnings release and conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ruthann Weisner, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you for joining us this morning for our fourth 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 Investors section of our website at bungie.com under Investor Presentations. Reconciliations of non-gap measures to the most direct 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 condition. 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 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. We're happy to be joining the call from our new headquarters in St. Louis this morning. Let's get started. On slide three, you can see the agenda for today's call. I'll start with some thoughts on our 2019 through the lens of our key priorities. And then I'll provide an overview of the fourth quarter before handing it over to John, who will go into more depth on our performance. I'll conclude with our outlook for 2020, and then we'll open up the line for your questions. With that, let's turn to slide four. In 2019, the team did an excellent job executing in the face of great complexity in many moving parts, both internally and externally. We effectively managed the things under our control and made substantial progress against our key priorities. We drove improved operational performance, we took action to optimize the portfolio, and we increased our financial discipline and rigor, especially around capital allocation. On operational performance, our total oil seed crush volume and capacity utilization rates were the highest in the past five years. Our soy and sun seed crushing operations achieved the lowest industrial unit costs in that same time frame. These improvements helped us weather the difficult markets in 2019 and allowed us to capture more margin when we had the opportunity. We moved from a regional structure to a global operating model, simplifying how we operate and aligning incentives to the whole rather than the part. We've received positive internal feedback about our headquarters move, with clear evidence of improved efficiency, collaboration, and shared insights as a result. We'll be fully moved into St. Louis by the end of Q2. Our new operating model allows us to focus on what's most important, our business relationships on both ends of the value chain with farmers and customers, while facing fewer internal distractions. In short, we're working as one team, better able to focus on driving results and operating the business with better visibility and more accountability. Moving to slide five, while we've made substantial improvements to our portfolio, we continue to execute against other identified opportunities with the goal to be substantially finished by the end of the second quarter. We completed our sugar and bioenergy 50-50 and announced an agreement to also sell our margin of mayonnaise assets in Brazil. Recently, Sire, a US ethanol producer, repurchased our stake in that business. We also completed several smaller transactions, selling several idle grain facilities in Eastern Europe and two idle wheat milling sites in Brazil, while also optimizing our South American grain footprint to improve capacity utilization by closing seven other grain facilities. continuing our work to identify and capture cost savings opportunities. In 2019, we achieved approximately $50 million in savings from our previously established global competitiveness program and are driving additional savings opportunities from our more recent efforts. Combined with the operational and portfolio actions we took in 2019, Bungie is getting more streamlined, We also changed our approach to risk management with a focus on taking risk appropriate for the earnings power of Bungie and the environment we're operating within. This approach allows us to better capture the earnings power available in the physical and financial flows provided by our global asset base. This is especially true when market conditions change as they did during the fourth quarter. We're committed to pursuing a Capital deployment decisions will be the result of the deliberate process anchored by high-quality analysis and stress testing on the front end, as well as performing post-project reviews. Moving to the next slide. Because we're managing risk better while running our assets harder, when margins in certain markets improved in Q4, we delivered better earnings than we had earlier anticipated. Looking ahead to 2020, We feel good about our transformation and our ability to adapt to what we expect to remain a challenging and volatile environment. We have a lot of momentum coming out of Q4 that will help us move ahead. And taking into account the current margin environment and lack of visibility into the back half of the year, we expect 2020 EPS to be broadly in line with what we earned in 2019 when excluding notable items, our gain on Beyond Meat, and the depreciation benefit of the sugar and bioenergy segment. With that, I'll hand it over to John to walk us through our financial results and the 2020 outlook in greater detail.