Darling Ingredients Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the Darling Ingredients Inc. conference call to discuss the company's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 results. After the speaker's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer period, and instructions to ask a question will be given at that time. Today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Jim Starks. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Alicia. Welcome to the Darling Ingredients Q4 and fiscal year-end earnings call. Participants on the call this morning are Mr. Randall C. Stewie, our chairman and chief executive officer, Mr. Brad Phillips, our chief financial officer, and Mr. John Bullock, our chief strategy officer. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find that presentation on the investor page under the events and presentations link on our corporate website. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in yesterday's press release and the comments made during this conference call. And in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K, PINQ and other reported filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Randy.

Thanks, Jim. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us. 2020 was a year with many facets. We started the year confident that the commodity price headwinds faced over the past several years would ultimately transform into tailwinds. Then a pandemic hit, and basically turned all of our worlds upside down. Like most other public companies have started in the earnings cycle, navigating the choppy waters of 2020 was truly a challenge. Our priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be protecting the health and safety of our employees while continuing to provide our essential services to the industries and communities we serve. We implemented significant changes in safety protocols across our global operations to protect our employees, serve our customers, and ensure business continuity. We did incur direct costs of about $7.5 million related to these actions to protect our employees from COVID. This doesn't include the plant disruptions, production slowdowns, or customer order delays. The result of our efforts allowed us to continue our operations through our own fiscal 2020 with minimal disruption. So a big thank you to all our employees for going above and beyond last year. Your hard work made 2020 one of our best years in Darling's long history. Okay, we finished the year strong with a combined EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA of $214.5 million in fourth quarter. All of our segments in the global ingredients platform put up solid results as 146.3 million of EBITDA in the base business was the best quarterly performance of 2020 and reflected the growing momentum of an improved pricing cycle. The feed segment ended the year with a solid performance of 90.2 million of EBITDA driven by the higher raw material volumes and better prices in both proteins and fats for the quarter. The commodity price momentum has certainly carried into 2021 as prices are close to their 10-year mean reversion average. We believe that 2021 results for the feed segment should increase significantly over the previous year. I'll dive into that a little later in the call. Our food segment continued to show strength, finishing 2020 with its best quarterly performance in our history. Our collagen peptide sales drove better results, posting approximately 50 million of EBITDA for fourth quarter. With our three new Pepton facilities online last year, we anticipate solid growth in this segment for 2021. Now, as we'd indicated on our third quarter call, Diamond Green Diesel had its turnaround in early fourth quarter, which led to DGD selling approximately 57 million gallons of renewable diesel at $2.40 per gallon or contributing 68.2 million of EBITDA to Darling during fourth quarter. For the year, DGD certainly met our expectations, selling 288 million gallons of renewable diesel at an average of $2.34 per gallon. Darling's share of EBITDA from DGD for 2020 was 337.3 million. Our European bioenergy business reported another solid quarter, which we believe will be steady through 2021. As we stated in our earnings release yesterday, Darling has shut down its two biodiesel facilities located in Montreal, Quebec, and Butler, Kentucky. This decision was based on the go-forward, unfavorable industry economics for biodiesel. Our action does free up valuable low-carbon feedstocks that can be sold to DGD and also helps us focus our energy on making DGD the best low-cost renewable diesel producer in the world. Brad will cover the particulars of the asset impairment charge related to these shutdowns a little later in the call. Our current take on the economic recovery is bullish. Ag commodity markets are experiencing a very favorable pricing environment. The energy market also is stronger than a year ago, with ULSD trading above where it was at the end of February 2020. These two together make for a strong operating environment for Darling and DGD. We believe as the U.S. and world economies reopen later this summer, demand for eating out, taking road trips will help us to maintain a good percentage of the improved commodity price environment we are experiencing today. So with that, now I'd like to call over to Brad to take us through some financial highlights, and I'll come back to you and talk about the outlook and guidance we're willing to give for 2021. Brad? Okay.