Smurfit WestRock PLC

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Smurfit West Rock 2025 Q1 Results Webcast and Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Kieran Potts, Smurfit Westrock, Group VP, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sharon. As a reminder, statements in today's earnings release and presentation and the comments made by management during this call may be considered forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors identified in the earnings release and in our SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forwarding statements. Today's remarks also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in today's earnings release and in the appendix to the presentation, which are available at investors.smurfordwestrock.com. Before handing over to Tony, I would ask that you limit your questions to two, and should you require any clarifications on what we are discussing today, myself and Frank will make ourselves available after the call. I will now hand you over to Tony Smurfit, CEO of Smurfit Network.

Thanks, Ciaran, and good morning, good afternoon, everybody. I'm joined here today by Ken Bowles, our CFO, and I'm delighted to again report a strong first quarter performance across all of our regions in line with our stated guidance. I'm particularly happy at the structural improvement we have shown in our North American region, which, you will all recall, is in the early days of our integration together. Our EMEA and APAC regions' performance was good, given the environment was somewhat challenging, while our Latin American region performed very well, driven by our value approach. I'm delighted to say that our Synergy Program also remains strongly on track and is expected to deliver the $400 million of promise synergies within the tight timeframe we have set. Moreover, having put the two businesses together, we now see very significant operational improvements that will garner at least the same again in additional benefits. This is something the team is working on day in and day out to ensure that Smurfit Westrock continues with the objective of becoming the highest performing company in our sector. As you're all aware, we in the management team are all stakeholders in the company. And through the lens of being owner operators and treating capital as our own, we continue to review our asset base at all times, both through investment and return on capital, optimizing our system to ensure that our assets are and will be in the future best in class. We are relentless in our pursuit of excellence and will continue to adjust and develop our asset base as we go forward. We have proven over the years that we are an effective stewards of capital. having successfully navigated many different challenges over the decades. The key to the development of Smurfit Westrock will be ensuring that we have a well-invested asset base that can be developed for the benefit of our customers to ensure the best quality, the best service, the best innovation, and the highest standards to give our customers and our business leaders the chance to win in their marketplaces. As such, we'll continue to invest in our asset base to ensure these objectives are met Across our regions, we're reducing our cost base in our paper mill systems, investing to improve reliability and output, and ensuring we have the best converting machines available to meet the needs of our modern customers. We have recently authorized an initial investment of around 25 converting machines across our system to begin implementation in 2026, which will also help to lower our operating costs so that our shareholders can be rewarded for these investments. We remain excited about the number of opportunities we see to continually optimize our system for growth, but also for cost takeout. In line with all of that, and as and when appropriate, we continue to look at rationalization opportunities within our system. And while these are very difficult decisions to make, it is entirely in line with our philosophy of ensuring that our stronger assets get stronger, but at the same time increasing operating efficiencies. In the last 48 hours, we've announced the closure of over 500,000 tons in paper capacity in the U.S., which coupled with the recent actions in Mexico and the Netherlands totals nearly 600,000 tons. These actions will make the company stronger as we invest to ensure better longer-term returns across our business units. I remain very excited about the combination we created some 10 months ago. We have an unrivaled geographic scale operating in 40 countries and many different product areas where we have strong leadership positions. What has been heartening in such a short period of time is to see the improvement in our North American business, where our commercial approach and the focus on plant-level autonomy has been embraced and is contributing to improved margins. At the same time in North America, we have streamlined their operations and have significantly reduced SG&A costs by a reduction of over 1,800 people, and this being prior to the recent announcements. In our European market, which is currently on an improving trend, we continue to have industry-leading returns with our innovative and sustainable packaging offering. With a very well-invested asset base and highly motivated people, we have many exciting growth projects in certain regions and certain business areas, while at the same time continuing to tackle our cost base. With regard to our LatAm business, you will see that we continue to execute as a result of our leadership positions and our market-facing approach. We continue in Smurf at Westrock to see obvious cost takeout opportunities. I have authorized us to implement close to 140 quick win projects, as we call them, that will deliver around 50 million of extra EBITDA in the North American region, and over 60 projects in the European and APAC region, which will deliver 20 million in 2026 and beyond. These projects give guaranteed cost takeouts with IRRs ranging from 25% to 150%. In Latin America, we remain focused on expansion, where we see an opportunity, especially in our Brazilian market, to grow rapidly with new facilities in different parts of the country. I'll now hand you over to Ken, who will take you through our financials.