Celanese Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the Selenese second quarter 2022 earnings call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal remarks. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Brandon Ayash, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Daryl. Welcome to the Selenese Corporation Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Brandon Ayash, Vice President of Investor Relations. With me today on the call are Lori Ryerkirk, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, and Scott Richardson, Chief Financial Officer. Selenese Corporation distributed its second quarter earnings release via Business Wire and posted prepared comments about the quarter on our Investor Relations website yesterday afternoon. As a reminder, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures today. You can find definitions of these measures as well as reconciliations to the comparable GAAP measures on our website. Today's presentation will also include forward-looking statements. Please review the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements, which can be found at the end of the press release as well as prepared comments. Form 8K reports containing all of these materials have also been submitted to the SEC. Because we have published our prepared comments yesterday, we'll now turn the call over to Lori for some introductory comments.

Thanks, Brendan, and thanks to everyone joining us on the call today. Given the macro uncertainty of the world right now, I wanted to take a few minutes to set the tone for this call and reemphasize the priorities we have as a company. As we prepared the earning materials we put out yesterday, I tried to emphasize two long-time qualities of Celanese and its employees. And I want to re-emphasize them today. Number one, we are fully committed to our objective. And number two, we are focused on executing on those things that we can control. To these points, we are committed to executing our business models to maximize earnings and cash generation. We are committed to rapidly integrating and synergizing our Santa Preen and M&M acquisitions. And... We are committed to swiftly executing our deleveraging plan after closing the M&M acquisition. Above all else, we remain committed to these objectives, even in the most challenging of environments. Clearly, the recent macro dynamics have done little to help us. This is nothing new. We have not and will not use them as excuses. Over the last few years, our teams have delivered exceptional, even record, performance. while dealing with the global pandemic, severe constraints on raw materials and global logistics, record levels of cost inflation, and now add to that list a rapid rise in interest rates. We know how to respond to external challenges by executing against that which we can control. Our engineered materials and acetyl chain teams each delivered record earnings across the first half of 2022. Their operational excellence and commercial agility has driven record adjusted earnings per share performance across the first half of 2022 and a very strong full-year outlook, even without the benefit of share repurchases this year. Our finance team successfully secured permanent financing for the M&M acquisition in a very challenging market and are taking controllable actions to ensure the resiliency of our deleveraging plan. Our integration teams are rapidly synergizing Santapremes and making significant progress in M&M pre-integration work. We cannot predict what the world will present us with in the future. Right now, we see very little first-hand indications in our order books that warrant the severity of market headlines that we are all reading and the market response we have experienced. But I don't want to spend our time on this call today speculating on the things our team cannot control, whether that's business performance outside of Selenese or uncertain macro conditions in the future. And while we do not expect the worst, I want to be clear that we will be positioned and prepared for it. We are eager to close the M&M acquisition which we are targeting for the fourth quarter of this year. I've had the chance to meet many M&M employees over the last few months. I have been very impressed by their capability, their passion for the business, and their excitement about the new company we are forming. They will be an important part of our success, and I am excited to welcome them to Celanese. We are excited about the opportunity we will have as one team to drive growth and value creation in engineered materials going forward. Above all else, I am confident in the momentum Celanese is building to deliver long-term growth and value for shareholders. With that, I'd like to ask Daryl to go ahead and open up the session for Q&A.