John V. Faraci
Analyst · Merrill Lynch
Thanks, Glenn, and good morning, everybody or good afternoon depending where you're calling in from. Over the next 20 to 30 minutes, Carol Roberts and I will review our full year and fourth quarter 2011 results and the performance of our individual businesses. We've also got Mary Laschinger, Senior Vice President and President of xpedx, here to give you all an update on the progress we're making in transforming our distribution business. And I'm going to start just by talking about the full year and set that up for Carol to go into the quarter. We had stronger full year results for International Paper. Actually, it was the best financial results in almost 2 decades. Margin expansion where we needed it; price realization stayed with us throughout the year; great operations and cost management, outstanding results from Ilim, which we'll talk about; and excellent cash generation. Looking at International Paper in North America and around the world. This is now on Slide 2, volumes in North America were down slightly, but sales revenue was up slightly, reflecting the fact we've got price flow through and strong margin expansion in our North American businesses of 200 basis points. Outside the U.S., we improved earnings, but it was in a different way. Margins, which were high, stayed high, but we've got good, strong volume growth up 6%, and as a result of that a plus in sales price improvement. Sales were up 17% outside North America, including the Ilim Joint Venture. So we're going to the next slide, looking at all for 2011. Sales moved up from $25 billion to $26 billion, strong improvement in EBIT from $1.8 to $2.3. EPS up by close to 50%. Cash from operations, again, very strong, solid free cash flow even though capital spending was up year-over-year. Year-end debt up some because of the pre-funding or pre-borrowing for the Temple acquisition, and very strong cash balance, even when you take out the debt that we put on the balance sheet for Temple, and we funded the pension plan as well. Yes, this next slide, I think, just shows the journey that International Paper has been on. The transformation plan is over. It was all aimed at putting International Paper in a position. From a portfolio standpoint, we've earned good [ph] returns and the cost to capital zone. And with the exception of 2009, which is now in the rearview mirror, the worst recession we had in 80 years, we've steadily been on that margin in 2011, which is still a challenging economic environment, we got to that 80% return. So we feel very good about the year, feel we had a strong quarter to end a very strong year. I'll come back at the end and talk about how we're looking in 2012. So Carol?