Republic Services, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Republic Services Third Quarter 2019 Investor Conference Call. Republic Services is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RSG. All participants in today's call will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nicole Giendonoto, Vice Senior President of Finance and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I would like to welcome everyone to Republic Services' third quarter 2019 conference call. Don Slager, our CEO, John Van Der Ark, our president, and Chuck Sirianni, our CFO, are joining me as we discuss our performance. I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that some of the information we discuss on today's call contains forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and may be materially different from actual results. Our SEC filings discuss factors that could cause results to differ materially from expectations. The material we discussed today is time sensitive. If in the future you listen to a rebroadcast or rerecording of this conference call, you should be sensitive to the date of the original call, which is October 30, 2019. Please note that this call is the property of Republic Services, Inc. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Republic Services is strictly prohibited. I want to point out that our SEC filings, our earnings press release, which includes GAAP reconciliation tables, and a discussion of business activities, along with a recording of this call, are all available on Republic's website at republicservices.com. I want to remind you that Republic's management team routinely participates in investor conferences. When events are scheduled, the dates, times, and presentations are posted on our website. Please note, all third quarter volume results discussed on today's call are on a workday adjusted basis. Therefore, they exclude the benefit of an additional workday in the quarter versus the prior year. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Don.

Thanks, Nicole. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased with our third quarter results. We continue to successfully increase price in excess of our cost inflation and expand underlying EBITDA margin by 60 basis points, and drive double-digit growth in adjusted EPS and adjusted free cash flow. During the quarter, we continue to see additional weakness in global recycled commodity markets and further declines in U.S. rate counts and drilling activity. Despite these macro headwinds, the business is performing ahead of plans. As a result, we are raising our full-year adjusted EPS guidance to $3.28 to $3.30. We also expect to achieve the upper end of our adjusted free cash flow guidance range. In the third quarter, we generated $372 million of free cash flow and approximately $1 billion of cash flow year-to-date. We utilized our free cash flow to invest back into our business and return the remainder to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. We believe investing our free cash flow in acquisitions is the best way to increase long-term shareholder value. We look for appropriately priced solid waste acquisition opportunities to further strengthen our leading market positions and expand into new markets with attractive growth profiles. We also look for opportunities to increase the scale of our environmental service offerings, including materials management and waste disposal. These offerings address the needs of our upstream E&P customers and downstream refinery and petrochemical customers. In the third quarter, we invested approximately $275 million in acquisitions. This brings our year-to-date acquisition investment to $490 million. Our acquisition pipeline remains robust. For the full year, we are on track to invest approximately $550 million and believe 2020 could be another strong year of acquisition investment. Regarding 2020, Given the predictability and consistency of our business, we are providing a preliminary outlook as we have in prior years. We are midway through our annual planning process, and assuming current business and economic conditions continue, we project the following for 2020. Adjusted EPS of $3.46 to $3.51, and adjusted free cash flow of $1.15 billion to $1.2 billion. We will achieve this by continuing to prioritize the safety of our people and communities above all else, targeting value-oriented customers to drive profitable volume growth, leveraging our scale to minimize costs and drive operational improvements, continuing to make disciplined acquisition investments to grow free cash flow, and further investing in technology to enhance the customer and employee experience. Similar to prior years, we will provide detailed financial guidance for 2020 in February of next year. Before I turn the call over to John, I'd like to congratulate the Republic team for being certified as a great place to work for the third consecutive year. We believe an engaged and diverse workforce is the greatest indicator of our success. This is yet another recognition of the inclusive culture we are building at Republic. one where the best people come to work. I'll now turn the call over to John to discuss our third quarter operating performance. John?