International Paper Company

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's International Papers third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the speaker's remarks, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, press 1 and 0 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw a question, press 1 and 0. I'd now like to turn today's conference over to Mark Nellison, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, and thank you for joining International Papers third quarter 2023 earnings call. Our speakers this morning are Mark Sutton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Nichols, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. There's important information at the beginning of our presentation on slide two, including certain legal disclaimers. For example, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We will also present certain non-U.S. GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of those figures to U.S. GAAP financial measures is available on our website. Our website also contains copies of the third quarter earnings press release and today's presentation slides. I will now turn the call over to Mark Sutton.

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. We will begin our discussion on slide three. where I will highlight our results. In the third quarter, our teams across International Paper executed well with intense focus on optimizing our cost structure while taking care of our customers. Looking at our performance, we delivered on the earnings outlook we provided last quarter, and we continued our efforts to drive out the highest marginal cost across our system. In addition, International Paper delivered $75 million of year-over-year incremental earnings benefits from our Building a Better IP initiative. Year-to-date, this program has contributed $195 million in benefits, exceeding our full-year target for the second year in a row. Our performance was driven by commercial and process improvement initiatives, which I will highlight later during the call. We're also encouraged to see that the demand environment continued to recover across our portfolio in the third quarter, and we expect this trend to continue going forward. Despite these improvements, I'm not satisfied with our absolute level of earnings. Therefore, we are taking additional actions to further strengthen our businesses and improve profitability. I will share more details regarding these initiatives later in the presentation. However, before we move off this topic, I'd like to share my perspective on the series of strategic actions we announced last week to optimize our mill system and reduce fixed costs. These actions include the permanent closure of our container board mill in Orange, Texas, and two pulp machines, including one at our Regalwood, North Carolina, mill and the other at our Pensacola, Florida, mill. While these actions will help us achieve our objectives, they are incredibly difficult decisions to make because of the impact on our team members, their families, and the surrounding communities. We are truly grateful to our team members at Orange, Regalwood, and Pensacola for their contributions to IP over the years, and we are committed to supporting them through this transition while continuing to serve our customers. I'd also like to update you on another strategic action completed in the quarter. We completed the sale of our ownership interest in the Ilum Joint Venture in Russia. Proceeds from the sale totaled $508 million, as expected. With the completion of this sale, International Paper no longer has any investment in Russia. I will now turn it over to Tim, who will provide more details about our third quarter performance and our outlook. Tim?