Spectrum Brands Holdings, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2022 Spectrum Brands Holdings, Inc. 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 that session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you hear any assistance during the call, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Jeremy Smeltzer, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Smeltzer, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Spectrum Brands Holdings Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. I'm Jeremy Smeltzer, CFO of Spectrum Brands, and I will moderate today's call. To help you follow our comments, we have placed a slide presentation on the event calendar page in the investor relations section of our website at www.spectrumbrands.com. This document will remain there following our call. Turning to slide two of the presentation, our call will be led by David Mara, our chairman and chief executive officer, myself, and Randy Lewis, our chief operating officer. After the opening remarks, we will conduct Q&A. Turning to slides three and four, our comments today include forward-looking statements, which are based upon management's current expectations, projections, and assumptions, and are by nature uncertain. Actual results may differ materially. Due to that risk, Spectrum Brands encourages you to review the risk factors and cautionary statements outlined in our press release dated February 4, 2022, and our most recent SEC filings and Spectrum Brands Holdings' most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarter the reports on Form 10Q. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. Also, please note we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures in this call. Reconciliations on a GAAP basis for these measures are included in today's press release and 8K filing, which are both available on our website in the Investor Relations section. I will now turn the call over to David Mara.

Hey, thanks Jeremy. Good morning everyone and welcome to our first quarter of 2022 earnings update. Thanks everybody for joining us this morning. Look, I'm going to kick the call off with an overview of the company's performance and our capital allocation priorities. After that, Jeremy is going to provide a more detailed financial update and then Randy will come on and give an operational update, including all the different business unit results. If I could turn everyone's attention to slide six, Look, these are very exciting times for Spectrum Brands. We've now begun our evolution into a faster growing, higher margin, pure play global pet and home and garden company. We believe we can create meaningful shareholder value with this transformation. Our first quarter went largely as expected with continued top line growth while margins contracted as input cost inflation exceeded price increases. We have additional pricing actions in place and more targeted to offset the unprecedented inflation we are currently experiencing. We continue to expect to achieve our earnings framework for the full year of mid to high single-digit net sales growth and low single-digit adjusted EBITDA growth. Consumer demand and retailer interest in our products and categories remain positive. We also continue to work towards the closing of the sale of our hardware and home improvement segment to Assa Abloy for $4.3 billion. We remain confident that this transaction will close this year, and we are pleased to say that strong demand persists in HHI's end markets. Moving to slide seven, the TriStar acquisition, which we announced this morning, will be transformational for our home and personal care segments. The ability to leverage the studio content creation, DRTV, and direct-to-consumer business model of TriStar's talented team should enhance some of our legacy brands and help us drive continued market share gains with our combined slate of new product offerings. The increased scale and profitability of the combined HPC and TriStar business will now enable us to create an independent global appliances company poised for faster growth and expanding margins, and it creates a platform for further acquisitions in this space. We firmly believe that this value creation opportunity will create tremendous value to our shareholders, and we look forward to updating our investors on the progress of the separation of this business from our holding company as this year progresses. Slide eight. Our capital allocation priorities will continue to focus on allocating capital internally to our highest return opportunities. We believe this strategy has been paying off for us as we continue to drive growth through product vitality across all our businesses. Secondly, we plan to continue to return cash to shareholders via dividends and opportunistic share repurchases. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 1.1 million shares of our common stock for $110 million. More recently, we concluded the prior quarter's $150 million buyback plan as approved by the Board of Directors. At our recent board meeting this week, we have authorized the repurchase of another $150 million of our common stock as we plan to continue to opportunistically repurchase our shares. As we get closer to the closure of the HHI transaction, we may accelerate our share repurchase activity. Third, we will continue to pursue disciplined and strategic M&A transactions that are both synergistic and help drive long-term value creation. Today's announcement of the TriStar acquisition accelerates our plans to create an independent appliance company. We believe this separation and the resulting pure play global pet and home and garden company should lead to a re-rating of the multiple of Spectrum Brands' common stock. and create tremendous shareholder value. As we have discussed on previous calls, we expect to deleverage our balance sheet to approximately 2.5 times gross leverage upon the closure of the HHI sale. Additionally, we have adjusted our long-term net leverage ratio to a more conservative 2 to 2.5 times net leverage. Before I turn the call over to Jeremy, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of our global teams whose efforts have helped to minimize the impact of these supply chain headwinds to our consumers, retail partners, and the business overall. Our supply chain team, enabled by our center-led globalized operating model, has found creative ways to deliver our products to our customers. I'd like to thank all of our global employee partners and the management teams for their tireless efforts in the face of many challenges that this company has overcome over the last several years. This team's success continues to demonstrate our winning culture and the successful adoption of our operating model and honestly inspires me every day. Now you'll hear more from Jeremy on the financials. Over to you, Jeremy.