Sylvamo Corporation

Good morning. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Sylvano's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press 1 and 0 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw a question, please press 1 and 0 again. As a reminder, your conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Hans Bjorkman, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Greg. Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. Our speakers this morning are Jean-Michel Rivieres, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and John Simms, 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. We will also present certain non-U.S. GAAP financial information. Reconciliations of those figures to U.S. GAAP financial measures are available in the appendix. Our website also contains copies of the third quarter 2023 earnings press release, as well as today's presentation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jean-Michel. Thanks, Hans.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. Let's turn to slide four, please. In the third quarter, we achieved $158 million in adjusted EBITDA and generated strong pre-cash flow of $155 million. We achieved adjusted operating earnings of $1.70 per share. Price and mix, operation and input transportation costs were all favorable to the outlook we provided in our second quarter call. Our third quarter volume was short of our expectations, reflecting ongoing shadow inventory stocking and weaker than expected demand. We strengthened our financial position in the third quarter with net debt now at $796 million, another 1.2 times net debt to adjust it a bit to our ratio. We also deposited $60 million in escrow to remove cash return limits related to the Brazil tax dispute in our credit agreement, while returning $24 million in cash to share owners in the quarter. Slide five compares our third-quarter key financial metrics versus prior periods. In the third quarter, our earnings were better than our outlook, and we took measures to maximize free cash flow, including selling administrative cost reduction, shrinking working capital, and adjusting the timing of capital spending. I'm proud of how our teams collaborated to take care of our customer needs while executing significant economic downtime safely and as efficiently as possible. Now, John will discuss our third quarter performance in more detail. John?