Sylvamo Corporation

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's Sylvamo's third quarter 2021 earnings review conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. I'd now like to turn today's conference over to Hans Bjorkman, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Hans Bjorkman Thanks, Angie. Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. Our speakers this morning are Jean-Michel Ribieris, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and John Sims, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Slides two and three contain important information, including certain legal disclaimers. For example, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the impact of COVID-19. We will also present certain non-US GAAP financial information. Reconciliations of those figures to US GAAP financial measures are available in the appendix. Our website also contains copies of the third quarter 2021 earnings press release, as well as today's presentation. I will now turn the call over to Jean-Michel. Thanks, Hans.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm on slide four. Our vision is to be the world's paper company, the employer, supplier, and investment of choice. We are a new corporation with roots that go back more than 120 years. We are committed to transforming renewable resources into papers that people depend on for education, communication, and entertainment. Moving to slide five. As we discussed on investor day, while we have a strong North American business, we generate more than 70% of our profit in Europe and Latin America. Over the last 12 months, we generated sales of 3.3 billion and 535 million in adjusted EBITDA. As of the end of the third quarter, Our gross debt adjusted EBITDA ratio was 2.8. On the net debt basis, we ended the quarter with a ratio of 2.6 times adjusted EBITDA. Slide 6 shows how we built momentum from the October 1st launch. Third quarter net sales increased 8% to $908 million. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $177 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19.5%, above the high end of our target range of 15% to 18%. Adjusted operating earnings were $2.27 per share. We remain focused on generating cash and strengthening our balance sheet. Let's turn to slide seven to review our third quarter results in greater detail. As we continue to realize the benefit of prior price increases, price and mix outpaced increasing input costs. Global demand for encoded free sheets continued to gain momentum as schools and offices reopened. Our volumes remained strong, and we continued to run full in all three regions. We tend to avoid conducting planned maintenance outages during the hardest months of the year. so the third quarter was a low maintenance outage quarter. However, if we had normalized maintenance outage expenses, our third quarter adjusted a bit of margin, we still have been a strong 17.6%. Our customer value proposition has strengthened as our channel partners and customers value a supplier committed to the uncultured free sheet segment. Strong commercial and operational performances during the spin-off period drove our above-target financial results. Now, John seems to provide more detail about our third quarter performance.