O-I Glass, Inc.

call today. After the presentation, there will be the opportunity for any questions which you can ask by pressing start followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I'll now turn the call over to Chris Manuel, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Emily, and welcome everyone to the OI Glass year-end and fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Our discussion today will be led by Andres Lopez, our CEO, and John Hodrick, our CFO. Today, we will discuss key business developments and review our financial results. Following prepared remarks, we'll host a Q&A session. Presentation materials for this earnings call are available on the company's website. Please review the Safe Harbor comments and disclosure of our use of non-GAAP financial measures included in those materials. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Andres, who will start on slide three.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for your interest in OI. we are pleased to announce a strong 2023 results. Full year adjusted earnings were $3.09 per share as results improved significantly from the prior year and exceeded our most recent guidance. OI is now a more disciplined and agile organization that is capable of navigating elevated market volatility. We again demonstrated our improved operating effectiveness as we posted the highest adjusted earnings in the past 15 years and finished 2023 with the best balance sheet in nearly a decade. Likewise, we achieved a strong net price, record margin expansion initiative benefits, and the best manufacturing trends in more than two decades. These efforts more than offset the impact of lower shipments as macro conditions softened over the course of the year. We anticipate 2024 adjusted earnings would lack our historically high performance last year given the continuation of softer macros into the first half of the year. However, we believe the most challenging market conditions are behind us, as we are beginning to see early signs of improvement. Importantly, we have already completed most of our annual price negotiations, and we expect to retain the largest share of the strong net price achieved over the past few years. Building on our strong track record, we are confident our 2024 margin expansion benefits will surpass last year's record savings. Overall, we expect a stronger demand, significant initiative benefits, and favorable operating performance will provide OI good momentum as markets strengthen over the course of the year. Our business capabilities are strong. Our talent base is solid. Our culture is focused on agility, performance, and delivering on our commitments. Importantly, we anticipate stronger future earnings as both sales and production volumes more fully recovered, which we will discuss a bit later in our remarks. We continue to consistently execute our strategy, which includes investing in long-term growth and developing breakthrough technologies. After several years of R&D, we will ramp up our first magma greenfield site in mid-2024 to serve the growing spirits business in the Kentucky area. Customers, investors, and employees will have the opportunity to see firsthand the first benefits of this new technology. In parallel, development of our Generation 3 magma solution is going well, and we expect to deploy our first Gen 3 site in 2025 with commercialization in early 2026. We are very excited about the long-term future for OI as we aim to disrupt the glass industry. Turning to page four, let's review evolving market trends which are key to understanding our recent and future performance. As discussed last quarter, we face a unique set of circumstances throughout 2023 leading to lower shipments of glass containers. Initially, this was driven by moderately lower consumer consumption, followed by significant inventory stocking across the food and various supply chains. We have updated the chart on the right with our shipment trends through the fourth quarter and the most current Nielsen retail data. It also includes our current expectations for future consumption and glass shipments in 2024. Looking at this past fourth quarter, we anticipated glass shipments would be down 12% to 15%, yet actual shipments were down 16%, reflecting some acceleration in the stocking activity across the value chain. With that said, I'm encouraged by early signs of recovery and believe the worst is behind us. Let me share a few of the reasons for this initial optimism. First, consumer consumption trends have steadily improved over the course of 2023, as you can see with the green bars on the chart. While some categories still have challenges, consumption trends have turned positive in the beer and NAB categories in many markets. Importantly, we have seen little change in market share or shift to other substrates except for some modest and temporary trade down limited to beer in Eastern Europe. According to Nielsen data, Glass has actually gained share versus cans in certain categories in Brazil, Colombia, and the Netherlands. Next, we believe the worst of the stocking is done, especially in beer and NABs, while wine and spirits might linger into 2024. As an example, we have included a Federal Reserve chart in the appendix that illustrates the declining wholesale inventories for alcoholic beverages in the U.S. Overall, Glass entered the stocking phase behind many other industries, which have already started to see a rebound, which provides additional confidence Glass will indeed improve this year. Demand for new product development has also surged over the past few months, as many customers look to jumpstart their brands. Currently, we are working from a backlog of over half a million tons of qualified MPV projects. Finally, glass demand trends improved in January as shipments were down about 10 percent compared to a 16 percent decline in the fourth quarter. In conclusion, these factors support our belief we have passed the bottom and are increasingly confident in the low to mid-single-digit volume growth in 2024, with additional improvement in 2025. Now, I'll turn it over to John, who will review our performance and 2024 outlook in more detail, starting on page five.