Silgan Holdings Inc.

Thank you for joining the Soudan Holdings Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Kim Ulmer, Vice President, Finance and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Joining me from the company today, I have Tony Allitt, Chairman and CEO, Adam Greenlee, President and COO, and Bob Lewis, EVP and CFO. Before we begin the call today, we would like to make it clear that certain statements made today on this conference call may be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made based upon management's expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks, including but not limited to those described in the company's annual report on Form 2K for 2020 and other filings at the SEC. Thank you, Kim. Welcome, everyone, to our second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. We hope that everyone's doing well as we continue to navigate through the vagaries of this ever-changing pandemic world.

The good news from this call is our businesses continue to perform well as measured both against the record performance at the peak of pandemic levels last year and even more so as compared with the pre-pandemic levels. In addition, we've continued to advance our long-term succession plans as most recently announced in our July 1st, 2021 press release. I am pleased to be in the final stages of the transition to Adam's leadership as the new CEO. I'm looking forward to continuing to be a resource to Adam and his new position. Perhaps more importantly, the executive team that will continue to support Adam is the same team that has been core to the company culture, its missions and principles, and its investment disciplines. We feel confident that this team and the Silgan culture under Adam's leadership will continue to build on its past successes and continue to create value for our customers, employees, and shareholders alike. I've been asked quite a bit since the announcement to reflect on what we've accomplished over the last 15 years in my role as CEO and where I think Sylvan can go from here. From the beginning, we have focused on building strong, sustainable, cash-generative businesses. Our metal container business is the epitome of this. We've invested to make it the best in the world with a particular eye on markets where we see growth opportunities. In the custom container business, We recognized a decade ago that we were not the lowest cost, best answer to our customers, and we made the hard decision to significantly restructure that business. Many thought we should sell at the trough of this process, but we stuck to our plan, improved and backed a great team, and have emerged as an industry leader in terms of profitability and customer service. Finally, we recognized some time ago the need for more growth opportunities to deploy our strong free cash flow. We identified the closures and dispensing markets as great opportunities. Over the years, we focused our team on product development and customer support. We acquired businesses to further expand our products and footprint. And recently, we acquired and built superior dispensing capabilities. Today, that dispensing and specialty closure business is our largest profit contributor and offers significant opportunities for growth in a large array of attractive industries including food, beverage, healthcare, personal care, beauty, and household products. So we enter this next stage with an experienced leader in Adam, with a senior team familiar with accountability and success, and an organization built on a culture of winning. For these reasons, I'm proud of what our team has accomplished, but I'm even more confident that Sylvan's best days are ahead. With that, I will now quite literally turn it over to Adam.