Greif, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Grice second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. For the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bill D'Onofrio, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good day, everyone. Welcome to Grice Fiscal Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. During the call today, our Chief Executive Officer, Oli Roskar, will provide you with an update on our second quarter results, driven by our Build to Last strategy, as well as current business trends. Our Chief Financial Officer, Larry Hilsheimer, will provide an overview of our financial results and our fiscal full-year guidance. In accordance with regulation fair disclosure, please ask questions regarding topics you consider important because we are prohibited from discussing material, non-public information with you on an individual basis. Please turn to slide two. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements involving plans, expectations, and beliefs related to future events. Actual results could differ materially from those discussed. Additionally, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics that could be found in the appendix of today's presentation. I'll now turn the presentation over to Olli on slide three.

Thanks, Bill. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are excited to discuss another successful quarter for Greif underpinned by solid execution across the business through the Greif Business System. Before we dive into our results, I would like to widen our lens and discuss key updates on our Build to Last strategy, specifically touching on each of our four missions for value creation. This will help contextualize our continued solid performance despite the persistence and varied headwinds our business has recently faced. as well as why we believe Greif is positioned for near and long-term outperformance. First, I will discuss our creating thriving communities and delivering legendary customer service pillars through the principles of the service profit chain. I will then touch on how we protect our future for our customers and our communities. Larry will discuss our quarter results and how we ensure financial strength through strategic capital allocation. As a reminder to all, our vision is to be the best performing customer service company in the world. We consider our primary customers to be our end product customers, our supply chain partners, our colleagues and our financial stakeholders. Everything we do focuses on improving our service to these customers through dedication to the principles of the service profit chain, which I'll now discuss on slide four. Our service profit chain has created a competitive advantage for Greif through investing in our people. This creates a flywheel for value creation as colleagues are engaged and dedicated to providing legendary customer service. Customers recognize the value Greif delivers from a differentiated product and service standpoint. This culminates in improved customer loyalty and increased share of wallets over time. Due to our steadfast conviction in the power of this value creation model, we monitor engagement of our colleagues and customers very closely. Net promoter score measure a customer's willingness to actively promote on our behalf, not simply a passive satisfaction in our product. Our net promoter score continues to consistently improve with each survey. Our most recent score of 68 completed this April is well above the average across the manufacturing sector of 49, which reflects that our customers advocate strongly on our behalf. We likewise measure colleague engagement through an independent survey conducted by Gallup. This score likewise has continuously improved and the most recent results of the 85th percentile puts Greif in the top tier of engagement among all manufacturing companies. We are proud to have been awarded the 2024 Exceptional Workplace Award by Gallup in recognition of our people first culture. This award follows from last quarter when we were named for the second year in a row among Newsweek's top 100 global most loved workplaces. These statistics are meaningful as they demonstrate our people are with us on our built to last journey and alongside our great business system are the enablers which drive our performance each quarter and are fundamentally changing how we operate and deliver results as a company. Let's now discuss protecting our future on slide five. At Greif, sustainability is ingrained in our culture, our processes, systems and relationships with our customers and suppliers. It's our belief that in order to provide legendary customer service, we must understand the needs of our customers and create solutions alongside them. This both continuously improves our own sustainability journey and also improves customer loyalty and share wallet over time. This quarter, we released our 15th annual sustainability report, which provides a comprehensive overview of our 2030 targets, as well as recent milestones and progress. Sustainability is another way in which Greif differentiates through the service-profit chain and has bolstered our profitable growth over time. We encourage all our stakeholders to read our latest sustainability report, which is available at greif.com. forward slash sustainability. Please turn to slide six. This dedication to the service profit chain and its resulting value creation flywheel has enabled us to accelerate our growth and transform our portfolio for the future. As we announced at our 2022 investor day and have discussed often since, we are pursuing an acquisition strategy to become a global leader in high-performance, high-margin, small plastic containers and jerry cans. This product group has an addressable market of over 3 billion and is favorably exposed to secular growth markets such as flavors and fragrances, food and beverage, pharma, and ag chem. In March, we completed our acquisition of IPAC Chem and in doing so, have now solidified the global platform that we committed to growing within the high performance portion of that 3 billion addressable markets. Integration into GRIFE is going well, and we are confident in our ability to capture the 7 million of synergies previously communicated. As a reminder, the primary synergy opportunities are in the form of raw material scale advantage and expected and planned elimination of executive leadership overlap both of which are already largely in effect. We are extremely pleased with our investments and value creation on the way. However, I'll also note that given recent short-term softness in the global active markets, our revised fiscal 24 guidance reflects an expectation of smaller contribution for the six-month ownership in fiscal 24 than previously communicated one rate. Additionally, Earnings for fiscal year 24 will be impacted by a one-time expected 8.4 million inventory evaluation expense, approximately 6.7 million of which was included in the second quarter results. This combined operating, the combined operating expertise of our Rife and legacy IPaC chem colleagues working together over the past 60 days has further strengthened our conviction in the solid organic growth fundamentals of the business as well as long-term earnings power of the capital we have invested in the small plastic and Jerican markets. Please turn to slide 7 as we shift gears to the quarter and a discussion of our recent operating environments. In the past three months, we have seen a continuation of the same mixed demand trends as in recent quarters. In APAC, which, as a reminder, is approximately 5% of total company net sales, was showing positive demand signals in Q1. However, in Q2, trends reversed after the market's strong demand expectations for Chinese New Year fell short of expectations and a quick but significant destocking occurred. That lower level of demand has thus far persisted into Q3 In AMEA, Greif's largest GIP market, positive demand trends have continued for the second quarter in a row, with growth coming broadly across end markets, but notably in chemical and lubricant demands. In the Americas, LATAM was flat year over year with mixed demands. However, we are encouraged that LATAM saw the same growth in chemical markets as AMEA, despite slower demand from AgChem. North America likewise remains mixed, but has improved overall on a sequential basis. Although overall chemical demand remains weak in that region, we anticipate continued sequential demand improvements in Q3 in North America, as well as LATAM and EMEA, which is reflected in our revised guidance. We'll be monitoring our key end markets closely and responding to real-time demand changes to ensure We fully capture opportunities as they present themselves. Lastly, our North American paper business continues a slow but steady improvement in container board, driven by our bulk box business, which feeds into e-commerce channels, offset by softer, although sequentially improving, Cuban core demands, driven by stronger construction and film core volumes. We also expect this modest improvement trend to continue. In May, we saw that continuation with our paper business showing modest improvement led by construction and film demands in URB and anticipate continued improvements in container boards driven by the opening of our Dallas sheet feeder. GIP EMEA, North America, and LATAM all show sequential improvement over April with APEC demand mixed with slower China demands and stronger Southeast Asia demands. Overall, when talking to our customers, there is generally positivity. However, it remains coupled with our customers indicating continued short visibility to their own demands, resulting in uncertainty to the duration of this improving demand trend. For that reason, we are continuing to be prudent on cost management, while also monitoring end markets closely for more clearly defined signs of improvements. And with that, I will now turn it over to Larry to walk you through our detailed financial results on slide eight.