Mativ Holdings, Inc.

And welcome to Mative's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. On the call today from Mative are Julie Chertel, Chief Executive Officer Greg Whitesell, Chief Financial Officer and Chris Cooper, Director of Investor Relations. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay later this afternoon. At this time, all participants in a listen only mode and the floor will be open for questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your touch phone. If you need to remove yourself from the queue, please press star then two. And should you require operator assistance at any point, please press star zero. We ask that you please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Chris Cooper. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for MADF's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that comments included in today's conference call include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these comments for reasons shown in detail in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Some financial metrics discussed during this call are non-GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations of these metrics to the closest GAAP metrics are included in the appendix of the earnings release. unless stated otherwise, financial and operational metric comparisons are to the prior year period and relate to continuing operations. The earnings release, issued yesterday afternoon, is available on our website at ir.mative.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Julie.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Before we get into our results, allow me to highlight the three key takeaways from today's call. First, Our SAS segment turned in another excellent quarter of results, capping a very strong year in 2024. And we continue to see positive momentum across all categories in the segment. SAS's continually improving performance gives us confidence that we can expand the success more broadly across MATIV, which I will cover in my upcoming remarks. Second, as we acknowledged during our previous call, Sam experienced a difficult quarter as we continue to endure sluggish industrial macros together with volume declines and paint protection films stemming from our production quality issue in late 2023. You'll hear more about this shortly, though rest assured we have fully addressed the quality issue and are focused on regaining the trust of our key customers in this category. Third, While we restructured the organization and removed over $20 million of overhead costs in 2024, we are continuing to further reduce costs and streamline operations. Our prior efforts have proven that we can generate meaningful results from internally focused cost actions, and we are prepared for and acting on what it will take to further improve the profitability of the enterprise. With that, let's discuss overall MADDV results. Sales were up 4% organically. We saw volume improvement in many of our product categories, partially offset by lower demand, again, primarily in advanced films. In SAS, our strong performance in Q4 demonstrated continued and increased momentum with volume increases in all categories. We had mixed results in SAM with strength in some of our filtration categories offset by softness in our advanced films business, which we highlighted last quarter and about which I will provide an update momentarily. The strong momentum that we have seen in SAS since early 2024 continued in the fourth quarter with sales up almost 13% year over year on an organic basis. adjusted EBITDA was up almost 8% compared to prior year. All SAS categories delivered volume improvement in Q4 with tapes, labels, and liners driving the largest gain, followed by paper and packaging and healthcare. On a full year basis, SAS produced meaningful reported adjusted EBITDA and margin improvement in all four quarters of 2024. resulting in full year adjusted EBITDA up almost 19% and margin up 210 basis points. The strong SAS order pace has continued into Q1, and the team is focused on the opportunities that lie ahead in 2025. One example of the discipline and upside within the SAS commercial team is that our 2025 sales pipeline today is more than 50% greater than what it was a year ago. We have also expanded our presence in targeted growth categories such as digital print, e-commerce, and specialty tapes, as well as significantly improved the volume and financial profile of our healthcare business. I am very pleased with the progress in this segment. Turning to FAM, our overall results were mixed in Q4 with stable performance and filtration and challenges in advanced films consistent with what we discussed in our previous call in November. During that call, we commented on our comprehensive turnaround plan for paint protection film, which is now well underway. Our first priority was restoring quality. Within paint protection film, low demand, Driven primarily by a quality issue with products manufactured in late 2023 resulted in share loss. Since mid 2024, our quality has improved significantly with recent investment and visual detection technology in our largest film site and improved process controls to ensure sustainability of our quality improvement. We are actively working closely with existing and new customers to qualify our products subject to these new quality control improvements. Second, we are focused on growing share in adjacent specialty markets, such as medical and optical films. After paint protection, these are our largest film product categories, and I'm pleased to report that volume was up 30% in Q4 versus prior year, with stronger order pace carrying into Q1. We are aggressively adding operator capacity at our largest film plant in the U.S. to keep up with this growing demand. Third, we have developed a mid-tier price point paint protection product that has similar margin profiles to our existing film products. and that we will continue to advance with customers this year. We expect to gain traction with this initiative throughout the year. Fourth, we have replaced and upskilled site leadership as well as sales and quality leadership to drive improvements in this business. And lastly, in support of our efforts in adjacent categories, we announced new smart glass film partnerships with two companies that create innovative film and glass solutions that reduce costs and improve comfort. While early in development, these products have received strong interest from new and existing customers, and we expect these relationships to support longer-term growth in optical films in 2026 and beyond. The challenge in paint protection film affects an isolated part of our business, albeit an important part. and we are working expeditiously to recover as well as diversify into strong adjacent film product categories. Notably, as we enter Q1, we are seeing sequential improved demand across all film product categories. From a raw material perspective, we are expecting moderate headwinds on input costs to offset expected inflation we have announced selective pricing actions in both segments. These pricing actions will be very targeted to areas where we see the biggest raw material impact and supply chain imbalance. Additionally, we are working on initiatives to further reduce complexity, streamline our organization, and reduce supply chain and operating costs. Our commitment and culture of continuous improvement will not slow as we enter 2025. In the last 18 months, we have repositioned the portfolio, divested underperforming and non-strategic assets, reduced our debt by over 35%, streamlined our plant footprint by over 25%, and restructured our organization, reducing non-operating costs by over $20 million in 2024, with plans for an additional $20 million of overhead reduction by the end of 2026. As part of this effort to further unlock cross-customer and business opportunities, we have promoted Ryan Elwert, our current leader of SAS, to lead the commercial activities across all of MADIS with responsibility for SAS and FAM. Ryan joined us in early 2024 and his and his team's strong leadership, commercial discipline, and customer focus has been instrumental in driving our staff segment to deliver strong results, including three consecutive quarters of sales growth and four consecutive quarters of reported adjusted EBITDA and margin growth. I am confident we will further leverage these capabilities across Mattis and with our most strategic customers. Before I turn it over to Greg, I want to end with a few words about our strategy and execution approach in 2025. We have a clear portfolio strategy with identified growth platforms and investments for the future aligned with our strongest markets and customers. This includes investments in capacity and capabilities in filtration, release liners, specialty tapes, and healthcare. From an execution approach, as we enter 2025, we are laser focused on profit growth, cash flow generation, and reducing our debt and leverage. While I firmly believe the initiatives and successes that the team has achieved in this past year are the right actions, and they set us up for the future, we have been in a low industrial demand environment longer than expected. As such, in 2025, you will see us reduce overall capital spending while still investing for growth, be even more aggressive on our footprint efforts, continue to streamline the organization by reducing complexity in how we go to market, and further reduce supply chain and manufacturing costs. These actions are targeted at reducing costs while simultaneously supporting and improving customer relationships. And based upon our growing momentum and success in SAS, as well as our keen awareness and action plans in FAM, we are optimistic about what we can accomplish as we leverage our teams and commercial excellence best practices across MADIS. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg for a more detailed discussion of our financial performance.