LyondellBasell Industries

Hello and welcome to the Lyondale-Bassell teleconference. At the request of Lyondale-Bassell, this conference is being recorded for instant replay purposes. Following today's presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. I'll now turn the conference over to Mr. David Kinney, Head of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Good day, everybody, and thank you all for joining today's call. Before we begin the discussion, I would like to point out that a slide presentation accompanies today's call and is available on our website at www.lyondellbasel.com slash investor relations. Today, we will be discussing our business results while making reference to some forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. We believe the forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions and the alternative measures are useful to investors. Nonetheless, the forward-looking statements are subject to significant risk and uncertainty. We encourage you to learn more about the factors that can lead our actual results to differ by reviewing the cautionary statements in the presentation slides and our regulatory filings, which are also available on our investor relations website. Comments made on this call will be in regard to our underlying business results using non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA and earnings per share, excluding identified items. Additional documents on our investor website provide reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures, together with other disclosures, including earnings release and our business results discussion. A recording of this call will be available by telephone beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern Time today until November 27th by calling 877-660-6853 in the United States and 201-612-7415 outside the United States. The access code for both numbers is 13739196. Joining today's call will be Peter Vaneker, Wind-Up Cell's Chief Executive Officer, our CFO, Michael McMurray, Ken Lane, our Executive Vice President of Global Olefins and Polyolefins, Kim Foley, our EVP of Intermediates and Derivatives and Refining, and Torkel Brenman, our EVP of Advanced Polymer Solutions. During today's call, we will focus on third quarter results, current market dynamics, our near-term outlook, and our long-term strategy. With that being said, I would now like to turn the call over to Peter.

Thank you, David, and welcome to all of you. We appreciate you joining us today as we discuss our third quarter results. Starting with slide three, we have three key messages for today's call. First, Linder Basel continues to generate resilient results despite challenging market conditions. Our team delivered exceptional cash conversion during the quarter. And our balanced approach to capital deployment was on full display as we repaid maturing bonds, funded investments to grow and maintain our assets, and rewarded shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. At the same time, thanks to great teamwork, we were able to bolster the cash on our balance sheet. Secondly, we remain focused on executing our long-term strategy. You will recall that our strategy is built on three pillars. The first pillar reflects our commitment to actively grow and upgrade the core businesses that are aligned with our long-term strategy. We are growing our intermediate and derivative segments through the successful startup of our new POTBA facilities, the largest single-train propylene oxide plant in the world. In the third quarter, extremely strong margins for oxyfuels produced from our POTBA assets contributed to record-setting quarterly EBITDA for our intermediate and derivative segments. Kim will provide more details on this in a few minutes. The other half of growing and upgrading our core involves difficult decisions about businesses and assets that do not really fit with our long-term direction. In September, we announced our intent to close one of our two polypropylene production units in Brindisi, Italy. And our plans to exit the refining business and transform the site are very well known. These actions are examples of how the pillars of our strategy reinforce each other. We're actively managing our business portfolio to reallocate resources toward assets and businesses that support the growth of our core while building the second pillar of our strategy, a profitable circular and low-carbon solutions business. we continue to make good progress in this area, producing and marketing over 250,000 tons of recycled or renewable-based polymers since 2019. As Jim Stewart and Yvonne van der Laan discussed in our MORETEC webinar last month, we're looking forward to a final investment decision later this quarter on our first commercial advanced catalytic recycling plant in Germany. And we are not sitting still. In just the past few weeks, we've announced joint ventures in two different Dutch plastic waste recycling companies, a stake in a circular plastic venture capital fund and a joint venture in infrastructure and recycled plastic feedstocks that support our plans for an integrated circular and low-carbon solutions hub in Houston, and also a renewable electricity supply agreement in Spain. Our value enhancement program aligns with the third pillar of our strategy, stepping up our performance and culture. I am pleased to announce that our VEP is on track to exceed our target for $200 million in recurring annual EBITDA run rate by the end of 2023. As a reminder, last quarter we increased our VEP target by $50 million from our initial target of $150 million that we announced at our Capital Markets Day in March. The newfound value unlocked by the VEP supports our investments to grow our core while building a profitable and game-changing circular and low-carbon solutions business. My third key message is that Lionel Basile's focused strategy is strengthening our business portfolio to ensure our company is well positioned to capture value today and into the future. Our track records of effective cost management, operational excellence and innovation all provide competitive advantages. with a sharper focus on core businesses that benefit from leading positions in growing markets with attractive returns, we can maximize the impact of these competitive advantages. I hope you share our excitement for the future of Lionel Basel. Let's turn to slide four and begin the discussion with our foundational commitment to leadership in safety performance. Safe operations are fundamental to our core values and provide the cornerstone for our future success. Lionel Basile's year-to-date incident rate for employees and contractors is 0.14, which means that our safety performance remains above the top 75th percentile for our industry. I want to congratulate our team for their outstanding safety performance. Let's turn to slide five and summarize our financial results. During the third quarter, Linder Basel's businesses delivered resilient results and strong cash generation from our well-positioned and diverse portfolio. Earnings were $2.46 per share. EBITDA was $1.4 billion. At the end of the quarter, our cash from operating activities was $1.7 billion, with $7 billion of available liquidity. Now, let me turn the call over to Michael first and then to each of our business leaders who will describe our financial and segment results in more detail.