Bunge Global SA

Good morning and welcome to the Bungie Limited first quarter 2021 earnings release and conference call. All participants will be in listen early mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the start key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Ruth Ann Wisner. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jason, and thank you for joining us this morning for our first 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 bungee.com under events and 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 Bungee'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. Good morning, everyone. Turning to slide three, you'll see the agenda for today's call. I'll start with some highlights of the first quarter before handing it over to John, who will go into more detail on our performance. I'll then share some closing thoughts on how we're thinking about the remainder of the year before opening the line for your questions. Let's start with an overview of the quarter, turning to slide four. Thanks to the outstanding execution by our global team working seamlessly across our value chains, we're off to a great start for 2021. We brought positive momentum into the quarter and we continue to capture the opportunities in front of us, delivering our sixth consecutive quarter of increased earnings. Operationally, our team did a fantastic job maximizing our assets. We reached a new high watermark for crush capacity utilization and we continued to reduce unplanned downtime. We also executed well in the marketplace through outstanding customer service, innovation, agility, and partnership. Our strong results over the past few quarters reflect the value of working as a unified global company, and the benefits of our integrated model delivers to our customers on both ends of the value chain, from farmers to customers to consumers. We're committed to continuous improvement and managing risk effectively, because while we're incredibly proud of what we have achieved, we recognize there's always more we can do, especially in an industry that doesn't always offer a straight line path from quarter to quarter. The dramatic swings in consumer and customer behavior during the COVID pandemic are case in point. COVID is still very much a factor in most parts of the world, especially in Brazil and India, and our thoughts are with all of those still in the center of the battle with this pandemic. In regions where restrictions are easing, we're seeing increased demand and pricing across a range of products as people begin to get back to regular life patterns. And regardless of those more encouraging trends, our top priority continues to be the safety of our team, their families, and communities. Turning now to our segment performance, as you saw last week, we changed our reporting to better align with our new value chain operating structure. John will go into more detail on that later in the call, but our new segments more closely reflect the way we manage our business. In the first quarter, we delivered especially strong results in agribusiness. Earnings were driven primarily by oilseed processing, particularly in soft seeds, and our merchandising value chains. Refined and specialty orders, oils, had a record quarter. benefiting from tightening global supplies, improved demand, particularly in North America, and our continued focus on customers and innovation. And before handing the call over to John, you'll note that with our strong first quarter results and favorable outlook across a number of our markets, we raised our full year adjusted EPS forecast to approximately $7.50. I'll share some additional thoughts on the remainder of 2021 before opening the call for Q&A. And additionally, we announced this morning that our Board of Directors approved a 5% increase to our quarterly common dividend, reflecting our positive momentum and favorable market trends. I'll now turn the call over to John to walk through our financial results in more detail.