John Faraci
Analyst · Citi
Thanks, Glenn, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for calling in. What we're going to do from here is, as we typically do, Tim and I will summarize the quarter and then we'll take questions on the quarter. Then, I'll make a couple of comments on the Temple acquisition proposal, and if we have time we'll take a couple of questions on that. So we'll do it in that order. So let me just start off talking about the second quarter. International Paper had a very strong second quarter in a recovering but obviously not fully-recovered economic environment here in North America. Our results were driven by a couple of things: a balanced segment and global portfolio of businesses around the world; very strong contributions from Printing Papers in North America, Coated Paperboard in North America and the Ilim Joint Venture; really outstanding operations and cost management that's continuing; good maintenance outage execution during the quarter; some seasonal improvement in demand and we offset significant input costs escalation that Tim will talk about. This next chart here just shows you the segment and global portfolio balance. It's part of International Paper's business platform today. As you can see on the left, the good balance in terms of where the earnings came from by segment and on the right, good balance in terms of where the earnings came from by geography. Turning to the financial snapshot page, strong revenue growth, revenues up 8%. EBITDA, over $900 million in the quarter, up 16% from the second quarter of last year, a run rate of $3.6 billion. Our free cash flow, amazingly, exactly equal to the first quarter but I would say that, that also has $40 million of additional capital spending in the second quarter. So our free cash flow is actually up around 10%, if you normalize for capital spending during the quarter. Really, if you look at this next slide here, which is the EPS over the last, really, 10 years, you can see there's a step change in our EPS performance. That’s just the result of the transformation plan. The 2009 period you're looking at there is the global recession, that is now in the rearview mirror. But importantly, our earnings over the last 4 or 5 quarters are not from land sales as they were in the prior years. So they were really operating earnings from our businesses and as you can see, we've achieved here on the step change in terms of the capability of International Paper to generate earnings and free cash flow and we think there's more left on the runway as we go forward. In terms of return on capital, 8% return -- over an 8% return on capital over the last 4 quarters into the cost of capital zone, which is important in terms of one of our key metrics. So with that, let me turn it over to Tim to summarize the quarter.