Bunge Global SA

Good morning and welcome to the Bungie Limited third quarter 2020 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. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ruthann Weisner. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Alyssa. 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. Turning to slide three, you can see the agenda for today's call. I'll start with an overview of the third quarter, then hand it over to John, who'll go into more details on our performance. I'll then share how we're thinking about the rest of the year in 2021, before opening the line for your questions. So let's start with a quarter, turning to slide four. We had an exceptional quarter, and I couldn't be more proud of our team's outstanding execution. We achieved record crush utilization across our global footprint, and we remained agile, identifying opportunities and moving quickly to capture them as market conditions evolved. These results and our performance over the past few quarters reflect the meaningful changes we've made with a more global integrated operating model, improved portfolio, and increased financial discipline. This is even more impressive considering our COVID protocols and how many members of the team have been working remotely. During the quarter, we continued rewiring the way we do business, and we made further progress on our portfolio initiative with additional announcements expected before the end of the year. With most of the work to the best of our non-core assets behind us, we're now able to look ahead and effectively address our business needs down the road. On an ongoing basis, we'll look for opportunities to continuously improve our portfolio to ensure we're well positioned over the long term. Last quarter, we called out a number of drivers that could change our outlook for the third quarter. In most cases, the movements were positive, and the team did a great job of adjusting as things developed. On crush margin curves, we noted they'd begun to increase. That improvement continued through the quarter in several regions, and margins ended the quarter much higher than the forward curves indicated in July. The tightening of vegetable oil across the complex we noted last quarter continued, particularly in South America and Europe. We've seen the demand aggressively in the US, and we saw continued strong soybean flows to China. which helped to further tighten global supplies. We also saw China start buying corn. The impact of the situation in Argentina on our business is largely unchanged from last quarter. While the current environment does not allow us to fully utilize our Argentine system, we have flexed our global platform to meet customer demands. Finally, we noted that many customers were in the spot market. As we moved through the third quarter, customers began to lock in their needs. And as I said, our ag and food teams did a great job executing as we helped customers at both ends of the value chain manage their risk. Our teams continue to do an excellent job collaborating with our customers to find solutions to their evolving needs related to COVID. We believe this quarter fully demonstrates that we have the right portfolio and the right team focused on the right things. Internally, we're faster, more efficient, and more data-driven than ever. We've internalized our approach to risk management over the past 18 months, and it's become ingrained in the way our teams do their jobs on a day-to-day basis throughout our value chains. Before handing it over to John, I just want to stress that in our view, the team's execution was nearly flawless this quarter. Based on Q3 results and improving market trends, We now expect that we'll end the year with adjusted EPS in the range of $6.25 to $6.75. And while we can't assume everything will always go perfectly, given the inherent volatility in the global ag business, we are confident in our ability to protect our margins on the downside, manage our earnings at risk, and expand on both when the opportunity exists. And with that, I'll hand the call over to John now to walk through the financial results in detail And we'll then close with some additional thoughts on the rest of the year in 2021.