Bernardo Vieira Hees - The Kraft Heinz Co.
Management
Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we review our results and talk about the year ahead, I want to provide context to today's conversation by reviewing our goals and strategies. As you know from our last call, our strategy is based on three objectives: profitable sales growth, achieving and maintaining best-in-class margins, and a superior return of capital as an investment-grade company. This is our multi-year plan on one page, and it is important to understand that not everything starts to deliver at once. In some cases, like revenue management, it's not a project. We must build an internal capability before we can achieve sustainable results in return. So, with that as the background, let's turn to slide three to talk about where are we on our journey. Overall, 2015 was a year of significant accomplish for Kraft Heinz. We came together as one global organization and began building on the rich history of our dynamic company. The integration team executed an extensive action plan with two main objectives: one, operating as one company with one set of goals and business objectives; and two, achieving solid alignment on the 2016 budget, built from the bottom up by country and field teams. In many ways, we are pleased with what did not happen in 2015, namely business disruption. We made difficult but necessary decisions around organizational restructure that will improve our efficiency, making Kraft Heinz more competitive and accelerating our investments in our brands, products and people. We have already made solid investments in our people, promoting more than 2,400 team members worldwide, and introducing a new long-term incentive program that gives many employees the opportunity to increase their ownership in the company. In short, our vision, values and process are building the culture of ownership and empowerment necessary for the long-term achievements of our company. We have also made significant investments in our world-class brands. We were successful with Big Bets and innovations like Lunchables, P3, Heinz Yellow Mustard, Sauces in Europe and Mayo in Brazil, and we continued to support strong levels of investment in R&D to carry forward Big Bets in 2016 and 2017. Finally, we made meaningful progress across our global operations. We significantly improved our case fill rate in United States and Europe to over 97%, our best performance in both the legacy Heinz and legacy Kraft business in quite a while. We delivered solid EBITDA and margin gains based on savings for manufacturing footprint efficiencies and improved product mix, and we achieved strong performance in the U.S. cheese and meat business, effectively managing pricing net of commodity costs. This led to the establish of a solid financial base for the new Kraft Heinz Company that we believe can grow strongly and sustainably. Before I go to our agenda for 2016, I'm going to ask George and Paulo to talk about how we landed 2015 and provide a deeper update on the overall status of our key business. George?