Sonoco Products Company

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fourth quarter 2023 Sunoco's 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 this session, you will 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 would 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 fourth quarter and full year 2023 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 fourth quarter in full year, 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. 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 risk and uncertainties. Therefore, actual results may differ materially. Please take a moment to review the forward-looking statements 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, we will have prepared remarks regarding our results for the quarter and 2023 and an outlook for the first quarter and full year of 24, 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 thanks to all of you for joining our call this morning to review our 2023 results and 2024 outlook. In 2023, we continued to make progress on strategic initiatives and delivered solid results in what was a pretty difficult year from a volume perspective. Despite these lower volumes, we delivered strong EBITDA margins of 15.7%, which is somewhat similar to last year. Our strong margins were the result of record performances in our consumer rigid paper cans and flexibles businesses. On the industrial side, despite volume levels similar to 2008, our team delivered record profit margins through diligent cost management throughout the paper ecosystem. Our adjusted earnings of 526 were within our guidance range for the year. And with intentional focus on working capital, we generated record operating cash flow of $883 million and free cash flow of $600 million for the year. We also returned capital to shareholders and increased our annual dividend for the 40th straight year. We completed acquisitions and divestitures according to plans, and our teams did not skip a beat on executing initiatives to further strengthen our foundation. I want to close 2023 by thanking this incredible team of Sunoco for the resiliency and dedication throughout the year. Certainly the global economic and external factors did not make this an easy year at all. but we did not stand still, and we delivered the second-best annual financial performance in the company's 125-year history. I'm grateful to work alongside these great people of Sunoco, as well as our customers and supplier partners, and we continue to look to the future with optimism. And with that, I'm going to turn the call over to Rob to cover our financial results and outlook. Rob?