Univar Solutions Inc.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Univar Solutions fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. My name is Alex and I will be your host operator on this call. Currently all participants are in a listen only mode. After the presentation we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. If at any time during the conference call you need to reach an operator please press star followed by zero. I will now turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Heather Kost, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications at Univar Solutions. Heather, over to you.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Univar Solutions' fourth quarter earnings call and webcast. Joining our call today are David Jukes, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Nick Alexo, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Last night we released our financial results for the fourth quarter ended December 31st, 2021, and posted to our corporate website at unibarsolutions.com a supplemental slide presentation to go with today's call. The slide presentation should be viewed along with the earnings release, which has also been posted on our website. During this call, as summarized on slide two, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures for which you can find the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings release, and the supplemental slide presentation. As referenced on slide two, we will make statements about our estimates, projections, outlook, forecast, and or expectations for the future. All such statements are forward-looking, and while they reflect our current estimates, they involve risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. Please see our SEC filings for a more detailed summary of the risks and uncertainties inherent in our business and our expectations for the future. On slide three, you will see the agenda for the call. David will start with the fourth quarter highlights and end market trends. Nick will walk through our financial update, and then David will close with progress on our business strategy. Following that, we will take your questions. With that, I'll now turn the call over to David for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Heather, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone, and thanks for joining our call. I'm delighted to report another exceptional quarter, an outstanding year, thanks to our resilient business model and a hardworking, talented team that over the past three years has transformed the business. Driven by solid commercial execution and centered on the customer experience, we deliver strong year-over-year growth despite the challenges of the pandemic, transport, and constrained supply. We remain focused. on continued organic and margin growth, maximizing cash flow, as well as inorganic growth opportunities to further leverage our cost structure, strong regional infrastructure, owned assets, and digital advantage. As you've already seen, key highlights from the quarter are We delivered exceptional Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $207 million and a full-year EBITDA of $798 million with liquidity of $1 billion at quarter end. Market share grew in the quarter as evidenced by our positive win-loss ratio and higher retention levels for new customers. Our sales of higher-margin ingredients and specialties grew by half a billion dollars in the year to $3.3 billion. Our digital investments are yielding real benefits, with 45% of our U.S. customers now registered on our e-commerce channels and able to utilize 24-7 self-service capabilities. We completed the acquisition of SweetMix, one of the top five distributors in Brazil of ingredients and specialty chemicals, to expand both our food ingredients and case portfolio in Brazil. And with our strong performance and deleveraging goal achieved ahead of schedule, we returned $50 million of capital to shareholders via share repurchases. In the fourth quarter, we continued our trend about pacing prior year in both sales and margin due in large part to our committed market position in key products, as well as utilizing our extensive network of facilities and the advantage of our owned trucking fleet. We believe this quarter was a clear validation of our core value proposition of providing security of supply safely to our customers and sound product stewardship to our supplier partners. Looking at the end markets, our industrial solutions portfolio saw accelerated double-digit growth with strong performance in case, particularly in polyurethane formulation. Home care and industrial cleaning and lubricants and metalworking fluids also performed strongly due to demand in our strategic and our strategic supply positions. Despite challenges in the supply chain, we found opportunities to grow and deliver new solutions for our customers and suppliers. Personal care and food ingredients continue their trend of double-digit growth in all sub-sectors. Personal care demands saw especially strong growth in perfumes and extracts. While in food, growth has come from an increased demand in prepared foods and hospitality, as well as from our new supplier authorizations. Our value to customers in both end markets continues to grow as we formulate solutions to meet growth trends in the market and expand in more sustainable and clean label ingredients. Within the general industrial portfolio, we've seen strong demand across a variety of markets, with ongoing strength in chemical manufacturing and increasing demand in mining chemistries. Our extensive organic chemistry portfolio has supported growth in these segments, while the ability to leverage our scale has enabled us to provide customers with continuity of supply. Our facilities revenue was down in Q4, given the ongoing impact from constrained supplier capacity. A primary strategy in this market remains to leverage our distribution capabilities to provide full lifecycle chemical product management to the markets. Although now a much smaller part of our business, we saw growth in refining and chemical processing as higher oil prices have accelerated reinvestments with increased customer demand for more sustainable solutions in this sector. For 2022, given confidence in our strategic priorities, operational execution, expected market share growth, and chemical pricing expected to stay at a higher level through the first half of the year, we estimate an adjusted EBITDA guidance of $260 to $280 million for Q1 2022 and a full year 2022 of $860 million to $890 million, with resulting strong cash flows. We look forward to a 2022 where we can be solely focused on customers and on growth as we leverage our asset base, including our extensive private fleet and digital capabilities, We believe our much-improved commercial execution, as well as our long-standing commitment to our ESG goals, positions us to continued success well beyond the next four quarters. We believe we have the right people, products, tools, and strategy to grow our delivered gross profit at rates greater than general consensus in the economy, and as such believe we are in a strong position to deliver long-term, sustainable shareholder value. Now let me turn the call over to Nick. He'll walk you through our fourth quarter results and our outlook before I comment on our key strategies and we get to your questions.