Ole Rosgaard
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open
Thank you, Matt, and good morning everyone. I'm extremely proud of the results, our colleagues delivered in 2022, easily the most successful in financial terms in Greif's history. We believe these outstanding results are driven by the high engagement among our teams. Our focus on delivering legendary customer service and our consistent commitment to value over volume approach. This year has seen headwinds related to volatility in both raw materials and other input costs, complex macroeconomic issues including the war in Ukraine and varied regulatory responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Internally, it was also a year of change. A new executive leadership team created our Build to Last strategy, which we presented at our Investor Day in June. I believe that change opens doors for opportunity and our results this year are evidence of the global Greif team's ability to capture those opportunities. Therefore, before discussing our detailed fourth quarter results, I'd like to express my heartfelt appreciation for the resilience, dedication and consistency of performance from our whole Greif team. We ended the year with a strong balance sheet, record free cash generation and strong EBITDA and earnings performance when compared to a historically strong full-year '21 comp. We do anticipate some challenges heading into 2023 but are confident, our team can manage well through any market environments and I'm excited for the year ahead. Regarding our long-term strategic objectives. The team has made excellent progress on all four missions of our Build to Last strategy. During the past quarter, we formally launched our fifth and sixth Colleague Resource Groups furthering our diversity, equity and inclusion objectives and our goal of creating thriving communities. In the quarter, Newsweek recognized this progress by announcing Greif as number 58 on their 2022 America's Most Loved Workplaces publication. In regard to Legendary Customer Service, we released our 12th Net Promoter Score survey, resulting in a five point improvement from the prior year. Lastly, by the end of the calendar year, we plan to release our 2030 sustainability targets, which are designed to help accelerate our progress towards protecting our future. Our sustainability leadership was recognized in the quarter through AA MSCI rating, Gold EcoVadis rating and ranking number 49 on Investor's Business Daily Top 100 Best ESG Companies. In addition to the record results our team achieved in 2022, I'm also excited to further discuss today, our planned acquisition of Lee Container and what that acquisition means for our strategy. Please turn to Slide 4. As discussed at Investor Day, the acquisition priorities in our GIP business are to grow in resin-based products with jerrycans being an important part of our strategic growth plan. Our most attractive targets are close to our core business of industrial packaging and add diversification benefits in product offerings, geographies and end markets served. Financially, our ideal M&A targets are immediately margin accretive supporting our margin expansion and return on capital goals outlined at Investor Day. Lee Container is an outstanding example of utilizing our disciplined M&A framework to drive growth and value for our company and shareholders. Lee provides a strong foothold in the North America small plastics and jerrycan business segments, one in which we have expertise elsewhere in the world, which furthers our expansion into less cyclical end markets and provides a platform for continued growth through both organic and inorganic investments. Lee's exposure to the attractive agrochemical and specialty chemical end markets support above average growth and the sustainability element of their packaging as to the attractiveness of our products and future partnership opportunities for our customers. We see the Lee team as an excellent addition to our GIP business and anticipate closing the acquisition prior to year-end. I'm very excited to welcome our new colleagues to Greif. Let's now return to our quarterly results on Slide 5. Our Global Industrial Packaging business experienced growing headwinds during our fiscal fourth quarter. Volumes fell across our GIP platform in most geographies as we saw sequentially declining demand through each month of the quarter. Global steel drum and plastics were down mid-single digits year-over-year. EMEA saw a step down in demand due to impacts to our customers from energy inflation and challenges related to the war in Ukraine. Similar to prior quarters, our APAC demand remains sporadic with a continued strict lockdown protocols in China impacting supply chain and industrial production, resulting in softness in most end markets excluding automotive, which has seen a modest recovery as a result of government's incentives. North America also experienced sequential demand weakness as domestic spending and manufacturing activity slowed. Our LatAm business remain strong in Q4 up mid-single digits of a strong Q4 '21 comparison, due to robust demand in the citrus and transportation markets. In the fourth quarter, our GIP business also faced headwinds from the rapid decline in steel costs. In North America, steel prices declined over 43% from June to November, with a similar trend although not quite as severe in EMEA and LatAm. As we have explained in the past, rapid declines in steel negatively impacts our profitability. The lag effect on price cost drives near-term margin compression as we work through higher cost steel inventories all orders over the past three plus months, while selling at lower index adjusted prices. This headwind is temporary. But in the near term, we expect this margin pressure to continue in our steel business during the first half of fiscal '23, as our price adjustment mechanisms continue to reset. The combination of these factors, along with unanticipated currency impacts resulted in a year-over-year decrease in adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of approximately $25 million or $17 million, excluding the $8 million contribution from our divested FPS business in Q4 '21. Despite a lower fourth quarter, our GIP team again put up record adjusted EBITDA performance for the full fiscal 2022 on a very difficult 2021 compare and I'm proud of the team and their contribution to Greif's results this year. Now please turn to Slide 6. Paper Packaging's fourth quarter sales rose by approximately $44 million versus the prior year due to continued favorable price cost dynamics despite sequential month-over-month volume erosion through the quarter. This decreased demand resulted in a total 26,000 tons of economic downtime during the quarter, approximately 23,000 of which occurred in the month of October. Fourth quarter volumes in our CorrChoice sheet feeder system were down high single-digit per day compared to the very strong Q4 '21. This demand decline was in line with the overall box industry, which was down approximately 8% over the same periods. Fourth quarter cube and core volumes were down high single digits per day versus the prior year due to softness in film core, paper core and textile end markets despite relative strength in some end markets such as construction tubes. Despite declining demand and continued raw material cost inflation, favorable price cost led to an approximately $33 million increase in adjusted EBITDA in our PPS business, capping off a strong year of record operating performance for this business. I'll now turn you over to our CFO, Larry Hilsheimer on Slide 7 to discuss our Q4 financial review as well as outlook for fiscal 2023.