Bunge Global SA

Good day and welcome to Bungee First Quarter 2024 Earnings Release and Conference Call. All participants will be in a 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 a touchtone phone. 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 Ruth Ann Wisner. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, 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 at the Investor Center on our website at bungie.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 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. I want to start by thanking the team for delivering another quarter of strong results, which reflect continued focus and great execution. We're off to a good start in 2024 amid a more balanced market environment than we've experienced over the past few years. Our team's capabilities and our global platform again demonstrated we can navigate shifts in supply and demand with agility and speed. Our focus remains on delivering great value to all stakeholders while investing to strengthen our business so that we can provide customers with solutions not only today, but over the longer term. We are making excellent progress on integration planning for our announced combination with Viterra. We're very pleased with how well the teams are working together, and our confidence in our ability to hit the ground running on day one has only strengthened as we've moved through the planning process. We still expect the transaction to close mid-year, and we continue to engage with the relevant regulatory authorities as we work toward gaining the remaining approvals. We progressed on other growth projects that will improve our ability to supply the renewable fuels market. We announced a strategic partnership with Repsol, a global multi-energy company in Spain, and we broke ground on our previously announced oilseed processing switch plant in Destrehan, Louisiana, with our joint venture partner Chevron. We also successfully commissioned our state-of-the-art edible oil refinery in India. enabling us to more efficiently serve our food customers in a growing region. Turning to our results, we delivered another solid quarter, driven by strong performance across our core businesses. We also saw good results in our non-core sugar joint venture. In addition, since we reported the fourth quarter, we repurchased $400 million of Bungie shares, making meaningful progress against the repurchase plan we outlined following the announcement of the VITERA transaction. Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, our visibility into the back half of the year remains limited, and many of the dynamics we discussed last quarter remain in place. We're continuing to manage the evolving supply-demand environment in markets around the world, demonstrating the benefit of the work we've done to strengthen our business. Based on what we see in the markets and the forward curves today, we are maintaining our guidance for full-year adjusted EPS of approximately $9. I'll now hand the call over to John to walk through our financial results and outlook in more detail, and then we'll close with some additional thoughts. John?