JELD-WEN Holding, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Maria, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the GELS When Holding, Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. James Armstrong, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Armstrong, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. We issued our second quarter 2023 earnings release last night and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website, which can be found at investor.jeldwin.com. We will be referencing this presentation during our call. Today, I'm joined by Bill Christensen, Chief Executive Officer, and Julie Albrecht, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Bill, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our earnings release and provided in our forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. GELDWIN does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, including the guidance we are providing with respect to certain expectations for future results. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable financial measures calculated under GAAP can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix of our earnings presentation. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Bill.

Thank you, James, and thank you everyone for joining our call today. I'm pleased to report that our second quarter came in better than we expected, and we continue to make progress against our short-term goals to strengthen the foundation of Gelgwin. First, I want to take a moment to thank all of our associates around the world. Due to their continued hard work, we are delivering on our commitments, including solid financial results in the first half of this year, despite continued challenging market conditions. Let's begin with our second quarter highlights on slide number four. While sales were in line with our expectations, earnings were above our forecast due mostly to continued solid price-cost results. In addition, we are generating strong cash flows driven by earnings and working capital improvements. I'm also pleased that we are delivering on important commitments, including reducing our cost structure, improving our customer service with a focus on on-time info metrics, both in retail and traditional, as well as completing the sale of our Australasia business, which I'll speak to in more detail shortly. Julie will also be covering our financial performance in more depth during her comments. Turning to slide five, as you have heard me say before, We continue to implement a two-pronged approach to improve GELDWIN for all stakeholders, paying close attention to both the short as well as the long term with a framework structured around people, performance, and strategy. We are making good progress on strengthening the foundation of our business. One important focus area is our cost structure, and we are taking a disciplined approach to this opportunity. We are righting our workforce across the business, optimizing our footprint, addressing procurement opportunities, as well as analyzing many other operating expenses. As an example, we're in the final stage of closing our Atlanta facility and expect to achieve full run rate savings from the closure by the end of the third quarter. Such measures will support delivery of the approximately 100 million of cost savings this year. And we are still in the early stages of engaging all associates to identify as well as implement ways to make GELDWIN a more effective and efficient business. Additionally, we continue to focus on improving operating cash flow to fund the projects that will support our margin improvement and drive higher returns on invested capital. Now, turning to the long-term part of our two-pronged approach, we are focused on developing a strategy that delivers sustainable and profitable growth. First, focusing on people, we strongly believe that culture and capabilities will be a critical foundation for our success. I have visited more than 15 of our manufacturing sites during the last six months and have been listening to our frontline associates to get their perspective on what is working well and where we can improve. In addition, we recently completed an employee survey and collected feedback from over 80% of our global associates to gain insights about how well our organization is aligned and suited to adopt and sustain a higher level of performance. We see significant opportunities And in the coming months, we'll dig deeper into our culture opportunity as part of our journey to improve GELDWIN for all stakeholders. Second, we are focused on driving improved performance and have intensified the transformation program that we started last year. We are close to completing a thorough due diligence process in which a broad set of opportunities have been identified and we are now validating significant potential benefits, both in operations and on the commercial side. As the next step, we move into a bottoms-up planning process focused on developing actions that detail specific steps and resources required to deliver the respective improvements. As we move forward, we are putting a greater focus on transparency, accountability, and governance of our transformation activities. I look forward to giving you more detail around these opportunities over the next few quarters. Moving to slide number six, on July 2nd, we completed the important strategic action of selling our Australasia segment, generating approximately $446 million of net proceeds, allowing us to both simplify our business and focus on our two remaining largest segments, both North America and Europe. We then acted promptly to deliver our balance sheet and last week, on August 3rd, we repaid $450 million of senior notes and expect an annual interest expense reduction of approximately $25 million. Our net leverage is now below three times net debt to adjusted EBITDA on a trailing 12-month basis, and we expect further improvements before year ends. Turning now to slide number seven. And as you can tell from this year's result, we are making progress to become a stronger, more efficient company. We have shifted our priorities with a focus on driving accountability and engagement, as well as improved profitability and return on invested capital rather than just getting bigger. During this challenging market environment, we are implementing identified self-help opportunities and are working diligently to find more opportunities and then sequence their execution. These actions, combined with our focus on developing culture and capability, will create a solid foundation for future performance. On capital allocation, we remain committed to a healthy balance sheet and investing in ourselves through strong payback projects to further improve profitability. As we reduce leverage, we are also reviewing our portfolio to assess further actions to better position ourselves for returns above our cost of capital. We are well underway in developing our short, medium, and long-term goals within each region. I am very optimistic about the significant opportunities we have to improve GELDWIN in the quarters and years to come. However, we still have work to do, both in terms of due diligence scoping and in developing a clear roadmap to achieve our goals, including resourcing and related costs to achieve. I continue to give you my commitment to share more information when appropriate and for providing milestones so that you can evaluate our progress along the way. I'll now hand it over to Julie to discuss our detailed financial results.