Republic Services, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Republic Services fourth quarter 2020 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 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 one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stacey Matthews, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Hello. I would like to welcome everyone to Republic Services' fourth quarter in full-year 2020 conference call. Don Slager, our CEO, John Van Der Ark, our President, and Brian DelGaccio, 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 actual results to differ materially from expectations. The material that we discussed today is time sensitive. If in the future you listen to a rebroadcast or recording of this conference call, you should be sensitive to the date of the original call, which is February 22nd, 2021. 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. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Don.

Thanks, Stacey. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are extremely proud of our strong finish to 2020. We further proved our ability to overcome adversity and execute in a challenging environment. 2020 tested the company's foundation, and the team repeatedly stepped up to the task at hand and demonstrated the strength and resiliency of our business. Through their hard work, dedication, and commitment, we delivered record-setting operational and financial results. We outperformed expectations for the year and even exceeded the high end of the original guidance we provided last February. During 2020, we delivered adjusted earnings per share of $3.56, which represents an 8% increase over the prior year. generated $1.24 billion of adjusted free cash flow even after repaying all deferred payroll taxes, expanded EBITDA margin 130 basis points to 29.4%, improved free cash flow conversion to over 41%, increased customer retention rates to an all-time high at just above 93%, and achieved record-setting safety performance. Profitable growth remains our number one strategic imperative, and we continue to believe that investing in acquisitions with attractive returns is the best use of free cash flow to increase long-term shareholder value. We prioritize acquisition opportunities to further strengthen our leading market positions and expand into new markets with attractive growth profiles. In 2020, we invested more than $600 million in acquisitions. Our acquisition pipeline remains full, and we expect 2021 will be an equally robust year of activity. We anticipate the year will start strong with Santec expected to close by the end of the first quarter. As part of our balanced approach to capital allocation, we returned $620 million to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Turning to 2021, we expect another year of record-setting performance, specifically We expect to deliver adjusted earnings per share in a range of $3.65 to $3.73 and generate adjusted free cash flow in a range of $1.3 billion to $1.375 billion. We believe our strong results exiting the year provide the momentum to further grow in 2021 and clearly demonstrate our ability to create lasting shareholder value. John and Brian will provide additional insights later in this call. Before turning the call over, I want to thank each and every one of our 35,000 team members for their hard work and extra efforts during these unprecedented times. I also want to recognize our frontline employees for their continued heroic service as essential workers throughout the pandemic. Early in 2020, we launched our Committed to Serve program to recognize the contributions of our frontline team, while also supporting our small business customers and the communities we serve. Toward the end of the year, as the vaccine rollout began to signal hope, company leadership decided to again thank frontline team members with a $500 award, which they each received last month. This brings our direct financial support provided to our frontline employees to $45 million since the start of the pandemic. Nothing is more vital to the success of this company than our people, and that has never been proved more true than during this past year. With that, let me turn the call over to John.