Sonoco Products Company

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter 2023 Sunoco Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lisa Weeks, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks to everyone for joining us today for Sunoco's second quarter 23 earnings call. Joining me this morning are Howard Coker, President and CEO, Rob Dillard, Chief Financial Officer, and Roger Fuller, Chief Operating Officer. Last evening, we issued a news release highlighting our financial performance for the second quarter, and we prepared a presentation that we will reference during this call. The press release and presentation are available online under the Investor Relations section of our website at sunoco.com. As a reminder, during today's call, we will discuss a number of forward-looking statements based on current expectations, estimates, and projections. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Therefore, actual results may differ materially. Please take a moment to review the forward-looking statement on page two of the presentation. Additionally, today's presentation includes the use of non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes provides useful information to investors about the company's financial condition and results of operations. Further information about the company's use of non-GAAP financial measures including definitions as well as reconciliations to gap measures, is available under the Investor Relations section of our website. For today's call, Howard will begin by covering a summary of second quarter 23 performance. Rob will then review our detailed financial results for the quarter, and along with Roger Fuller, we'll discuss our guidance update for the full year 2023. Howard will then provide closing comments, followed by a Q&A session. If you will turn to slide four in our presentation, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Howard Coker.

Thank you, Lisa, and good morning to everyone. I just want to start by acknowledging the strong performance in cash flows of Sunoco against the backdrop of a highly volatile environment. Rob will take you through the details, but what I'll tell you is that market conditions were pretty turbulent in the quarter. the market downshift in demand as the quarter progressed, translating into lower volumes across virtually every area of our business on a global basis. For the second quarter, net sales were $1.7 billion, EBITDA was $275 million, and adjusted earnings per share were $1.38. Most of our businesses were at or above expectations for the quarter, due to commercial and operational excellence and productivity improvements. The noted businesses that were most affected by lower volumes were consumer metal and global industrials, which were impacted by inventory management and destocking programs with our customers. To give you my perspective overall, customers in metal and industrials are buying less, both related to staples and discretionary items. Our customers are searching for price point elasticity which creates demand and inventory management challenges throughout the supply chain. Our customers are faced now with real macro driven changes to consumer buying habits, their own working capital management priorities, and promotional timing, which makes visibility harder in the near term. The downstream impact is reflected in our industrials business, where we provide products serving the broader manufacturing sector and packaging used in household staples, discretionary goods, and construction. Buying is slowing down and lower volumes are the result. However, even though through these turbulent times, we were able to deliver 16% of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter. Our hard work over the past few years on the portfolio, structural simplification, operational improvements, and commercial excellence have enabled more stable profitability than in prior economic slowdowns in our history. While we're not satisfied with these results, our excellent cash flow and EBITDA margins reinforce the durability of our underlying profitability and integrity of our strategy. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Rob for more details on the quarter and our 23 outlook. Rob?