Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Owens Corning First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Daisy, and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand the call over to your host, Amber Wohlfarth from Owens Corning to begin. Ms. Amber, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us for today's conference call and review of our business results for the first quarter 2023. Joining us today are Brian Chambers, Owens Corning's Chair and Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Parks, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our presentation this morning, we will open this 1-hour call to your questions. In order to accommodate as many call participants as possible, please limit yourselves to one question only. Earlier this morning, we issued a news release and filed a 10-Q that detailed our financial results for the first quarter 2023. For the purposes of our discussion today, we have prepared presentation slides that summarize our performance and results and we'll refer to these slides during this call. You can access the earnings press release, Form 10-K and the presentation slides at our website, owenscorning.com. Refer to the Investors link under the Corporate section of our home page. A transcript and recording of this call and the supporting slides will be available on our website for future reference. Please reference Slide 2 before we begin, where we offer a couple of reminders. First, today's remarks will include forward-looking statements based on our current forecasts and estimates of future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. We undertake no obligation to update these statements beyond what is required under applicable securities laws. Please refer to the cautionary statements and the risk factors identified in our SEC filings for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties affecting such forward-looking statements. Second, the presentation slides and today's remarks contain non-GAAP financial measures. Explanations and reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP measures may be found in the text and financial tables of our earnings press release and presentation, both of which are available on owenscorning.com. Adjusted EBIT is our primary measure of period-over-period comparisons and we believe it is a meaningful measure for investors to compare our results. Consistent with our historical practice, we have excluded certain items that we believe are not representative of our ongoing operations when calculating adjusted EBIT and adjusted earnings. We adjust our effective tax rate to remove the effect of quarter-to-quarter fluctuations which have the potential to be significant in arriving at adjusted earnings and adjusted earnings per share. We also use free cash flow and free cash flow conversion of adjusted earnings as measures helpful to investors to evaluate the company's ability to generate cash and utilize that cash to pursue opportunities that enhance shareholder value. The tables in today's news release and the Form 10-Q include more detailed financial information. For those of you following along with our slide presentation, we will begin on Slide 4. And now opening remarks from our Chair and CEO, Brian Chambers. Brian?

Thanks, Amber. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. During our call this morning, I'll provide a broad overview of our first quarter performance and the work we're doing to further strengthen and grow our company. Ken will then provide more details on our first quarter results. And I'll come back to discuss what we're seeing in our markets and our near term outlook. Owens Corning delivered strong first quarter results within a very dynamic market environment. During the quarter, our global teams continue to demonstrate the ability to react and respond to shifting market conditions as we manage the impacts of ongoing inflation, higher interest rates and continued geopolitical tensions, which is leading to slower global economic growth and lower demand in a number of our end markets. I will begin a review of the quarter as always with our safety performance. At Owens Corning, our commitment to safety is unconditional. During the first quarter, our recordable incident rate was 0.64, in line with our performance during the same period last year. Over the past 12 months, nearly one half of our global facilities have worked injury-free. Financially, we delivered revenue of $2.3 billion similar to first quarter 2022. Adjusted EBIT of $361 million and adjusted EBITDA of $487 million were both down versus prior year. Despite facing more challenging end markets, the structural improvements we've made to our businesses, combined with our leading market positions and disciplined execution, positioned us to generate another quarter of strong financial results, delivering an adjusted EBIT margin of 15% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 21% for the quarter. In terms of free cash flow in the quarter, we had a cash outflow of $322 million, reflecting a more normal seasonal cash flow trend for our company. And consistent with our…

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian commented, we delivered another strong quarter and an increasingly challenging economic environment. Our commercial and operational execution continue to be fundamental in driving this performance. As we've talked about in prior calls, inflation, while beginning to moderate continues to have a year-over-year impact on overall input cost. Positive carryover pricing offset these inflation headwinds in the quarter in all three businesses, and helped to offset the impact of lower demand, including the associated production downtime. Beginning on slide 5, we can take a closer look at our results. Consolidated net sales were $2.3 billion for the first quarter consistent with the same period in 2022. Adjusted EBIT for the first quarter of 2023 was $361 million, down $56 million compared to the first quarter last year. Adjusted EBIT margin remains solid at 15%. Adjusted earnings for the first quarter were $255 million, or $2.77 per diluted share, compared to $293 million, or $2.92 per diluted share a year ago. Slide 6 shows the reconciliation between our first quarter 2023 adjusted and reported EBIT. For the quarter adjusting items totaled approximately $173 million. We recognize the $189 million gain on the previously announced sale of our Santa Clara, California site. We also recognize $2 million of gains on the sale of precious metals. And in addition, we recorded $18 million of charges associated with ongoing cost optimization actions. All of these items are excluded from our first quarter adjusted EBIT. Turning to slide 7, I'll comment on our cash generation and capital deployment. Free cash flow for the first quarter was a net outflow of $322 million driven by the timing of working capital and capital additions, as we return to more normal seasonal patterns within our businesses. Capital additions for the first…

Thank you, Ken. Our first quarter performance provided us with a strong start to 2023 demonstrating the broad capability of our teams and the value of our products. As we move through Q2, we expect market conditions to remain more challenging, as we see residential, commercial and industrial investment decisions, as well as consumer buying patterns continue to be impacted by higher interest rates and slower economic growth. While, we expect these factors to influence our performance over the near term, secular trends in housing, energy efficiency, and the need for more sustainable building and construction materials continue to create significant growth opportunities for the company. Given the near term market outlook, we expect our volumes in the second quarter to decline versus prior year in many of our product categories based on slower underlying market demand. Pricing is expected to remain positive in the quarter as we continue to realize the benefits of carryover pricing from previously announced actions. Given this and the expectation for a more moderate inflationary environment, we anticipate offsetting the impact of ongoing input cost inflation and maintain a positive price costs in the quarter. Overall for the company, we expect our performance in Q2 to result in a moderate decline in net sales versus prior year while we continue to generate mid teen EBIT margins. Now, consistent with prior calls, I'll provide a more detailed business specific outlook for the second quarter. Starting with our insulation business, we expect revenue to be similar to prior year, as continued price realization and the net impact of acquisitions and divestitures offsets lower demand resulting from the decline in lagged housing starts in the US, as well as the ongoing market slowdown in Europe. In our technical and global insulation businesses, we expect continued price realization resulting…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Matthew Bouley from Barclays.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the question. Maybe I'll just ask them roofing in sort of your own volume outperformance relative to the industry. Just curious being an add a little more detail around that driver, what's sort of happening with geographies? And whether that may have resulted in that and as we look out, sort of forecast over the next year, should we kind of expect that to reverse at some point. Thank you.

Good morning. Thanks for the question. Yes, certainly demand for OC products has remained very strong to start the year. I think what we're seeing in Q1 is a very similar dynamic to what we saw play out in Q4, really driven by two factors. One is the level of OC inventory at distributors relative to other brands. And then continued good, strong contractor pull through demand, increasing out the door sales. So I think those two factors played in both Q4 and Q1. So I want to step back a little bit because we've talked about this over the past few earnings call today. I think in roofing particular where we were looking at inventory levels to finish the year, we had talked about distributors starting to be much more selective in the products and brands they were buying. They were looking to right-size inventory levels to end the year. And we saw that the level of inventory of our products in distribution centers broadly needed to be continued to be restocked. And so that drove some additional sales for us in Q4, as they were closing out the year. We saw that dynamic really kind of continued to play out in Q1, which is as inventory levels were being right size to set up for the new year. I think, again, inventory levels of OC products remain very lean in distribution channels. So there needs to be continued restocking to get ready for the heart of the season, which we're just starting to come into. So I think that was a big play over the last couple of quarters, and then continue good demand and out the door sales of our products. And we continue to invest in our contractor conversion strategy and helping those contractors and distributors…

Our next question is from Kathryn Thompson from Thompson Research Group.

Hi, thank you for taking my question today. If you could clarify how much the domestic businesses impacted segment earnings in the quarter and that expectations for the year, and any color on the start of the year pricing negotiations for composites, and how this impacts the ‘23 outlook with, in particular, not as part of this pricing, but also kind of the roofing side and how that also impacts your outlook for composites. Thank you.

Thanks, Kathryn. Good morning. Let's talk about the divestitures piece first. We've sighs pretty clearly the revenue side of that equation, we said that the divestiture of our DUCS assets in Chambéry, France was about $100 million of revenue per year. And the Russia assets were very similar number about $100 million of revenue for a year. And I think you can think about that pretty ratably over the quarters. As far as the profitability of those, I would probably characterize it as this, it's, it probably had a profitability level last year, similar to the profitability level of composites overall, maybe slightly better on the DUCS side, just because it was a very, very strong demand year. But with that, you should probably be able to kind of size it pretty closely as to how it'll affect us as we move through each one of the quarters. And to remind you that DUCS divestiture was done mid-year, while Russia was effectively done at the end of the year. So you'll have the impacts from that one throughout all four quarters. As we think about pricing, a couple of the comments that both I made and Brian made is that we've seen good contract pricing continued through about two-thirds of our composites businesses tied to contracts. And another piece of information to think about as you're thinking about that is that when we think about where contracts are, contracts are more heavily weighted to Europe and North America, while Asia is a bit more of a spot pricing market. So as you think about how those play together, while contract pricing has held in nicely, based upon what we negotiated coming into 2023, we have seen more pressure in the spot pricing business. And as Brian commented on the outlook,…

No, nothing I would add on that.

Next question is from Phil Ng from Jefferies.

Hey guys, congrats for another strong quarter. Brian, I think last quarter you mentioned you had backlogs that would carry you through the second quarter for fiberglass insulation. I think the early rate for spring selling season has been pretty constructive so far. Will you start seeing that ripple through to the second half? And kind of how do you see this demand backdrop playing out front half back half going in next year. And any concerns that we should be mindful of on the destocking side of things on the inventory side?

Yes, thanks, Phil, our insulation business delivering another good quarter, I think a big factor that was the strength of the residential insulation business. And this is also a trend that we've been talking about the last several quarters that we've seen this continuation of strength even though we've seen headline starts dropping over the past few quarters, we've seen good strong demand in resident insulation, I think this goes back to when we look at how starts ramping up in ‘21. And the first part of 2022, we saw starts accelerating, but really started looking at completion rates. And they've topped out at about 1.4 million units. And we we've seen them kind of hold there throughout all of 2022. And we think that's really been the constraint of demand for insulation and some other building material products is the ability for builders to complete their homes. So we saw extended construction cycles, due to labor constraints, material constraints, really impacting in that. So as we came into this year, even though headline starts have been down, completion rates have been staying pretty steady. And we saw that backlog of homes to be finished was going to continue to create good demand in Q1 and we saw that kind of play out. As part of our guide, we're starting to look across the country. And we see now regions where those completion rates are getting cleared, builders are working through their backlog. And so we do see, as we move into the back half of the year, we're probably going to start trending more towards our historic metric, which is light housing starts versus the completion rates, that's going to drive the demand going forward. Now, having said that, I mean, the last couple of months, we've seen housing…

Our next question is from John Lovallo from UBS.

Good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I guess carryover pricing has been pretty favorable across each of the businesses. Can you maybe talk about the opportunities for incremental pricing actions as we move through the year?

John, I would say I think our commercial teams have done really exceptional work across the company to manage price through a very challenging environment, a high inflation environment over the last several quarters. So as we come into this year, we continue to look at the demand environment, we continue to look at the inflationary environment, and we'll continue to make decisions then in terms of additional pricing actions that are required. As you might have seen, we recently announced an increase in our roofing business with an effective date of mid-May, we continue to look at the inflation drivers in our roofing business overall, while we think we're going to see a little bit of benefit here in the near term on lower asphalt costs, we're still seeing inflation in our other materials. And frankly, concerned about some of the supply cuts and other things that are going on in the oil markets that could create some supply constraints as we move into the back half of the year. So I think we're managing that, in terms of the inflation we see in front of us, we've made that announcement, we'll see how that plays out in terms of realization, or we're three weeks, four weeks away from that implementation. But I think we're going to continue to manage pricing, very similar going forward, as we've demonstrated historically here over the past several quarters, and we'll make those calls as we need to as we move forward.

Our next question is from Stephen Kim from Evercore.

Yes, thanks very much guys. Good results. Wanted to ask a question about insulation, in particular, on the technical side of that business. You've spent a lot of time and gave a lot of color around the resi North America. But I'm curious about the price performance in the segment. It suggests that you've had some very good pricing in the other part of your business and the technical side of the business. So wanted to see if you could explain a little bit more about what the dynamics are there. Because I think the fiberglass in North America is pretty well understood. But it seems like you've achieved some very good pricing in the international markets, I think you called out [inaudible] also having some good pricing, help us understand sort of what's driving the pricing outside of resi North America. Thanks.

Yes. Thanks, Steve. appreciate the comments. And yes, we've had very good performance in our technical and global businesses within insulation, and in fact, have been working not just in terms of the pricing actions, but the innovation and other aspects to really to strengthen that part of the business. And, as you rightly call out, that's now about two thirds of the insulation business. And this has been an area of focused investment for us over the past several years to really kind of strengthened out that product line is mineral wool, foam glass, foam product lines that are big opportunities for us that we think we can continue to grow and develop. So as you pointed out, about two thirds of that business is really focused in nonresidential applications. And we're fortunate because of the breadth of our product offering, we operate in a lot of different commercial industrial type of verticals. So not just office buildings, but we're in the data centers and airports and healthcare facilities so that wide variety in a lot of industrial applications that wide variety of end markets have given us the ability to generate, I think, really good result. The key part of this business that we really like, and historically we've seen is while we generally see earnings movements around volumes that can move up and down, it's much more, much less very price sensitive. And that's because a lot of these products are specified. They're embedded into applications that provide unique performance characteristics in terms of thermal performance, structural performance. So that gives us the ability to price these relative to values. And those price points generally are more sticky than we've seen historically in some of our residential applications. So when I look kind of, I'll take Europe,…

Our next question is from Keith Hughes from Truist.

Thank you. Question on roofing and asphalt, in prepared comments you talked about how we're heading into paving season, there's usually some inflation in asphalt as we head into that. I guess my question for year-over-year, sort of your expectation on your asphalt inputs over the next quarter or two based on where the industry is right now.

Yes, thanks, Keith. So we saw asphalt costs coming into the year starting to pick up on a month over month basis, we got into that as far as Q1. So we saw those asphalt costs month over month pickup. In our Q2 guide, we expect to see that continue traditionally and historically, when we've come in into the paving season, that summer season, we see asphalt costs move up, the majority of asphalt are used in paving, not in roofing applications. So that tends to drive a lot of the cost structure in the business. And we would expect that we're going to see a pretty heavy paving season with the infrastructure investments that are being made by states and federal governments. So we're expecting that are asphalt costs are going to continue to move up sequentially. Now on a year-over-year basis, though, we do expect to see a little bit of deflation in the quarter, in terms of our overall asphalt costs. And I'd say as we move forward over the next couple of quarters, we would expect to see paving costs continue to move up in line with just seasonal demand patterns. And the big concern is, again, kind of the supply cuts that have been announced how those are going to impact oil prices, which ultimately then impact asphalt costs. And that's the bit of unknown that we're going to have to play through as we move into the back half of the year.

Our next question is from Michael Rehaut from JPMorgan.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. And congrats on the results on the first quarter. I wanted to zero in a little bit on composites. And you're expecting revenues down low double digits. But some better EBIT margins have also low double digits, compared to this first quarter. Wanted to get a sense of if that's purely driven by perhaps a potentially higher revenue number looks like low double digits down would be still decently higher than the last couple of quarters. And if there's anything that we should think about from this new low double digit EBIT margin in the second quarter, that might be still holding back performance as we think about going into the back half of the year.

Yes. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for the questions. And let's just kind of take each one of those apart a little bit. You've really focused in on one of the really important points, as we're thinking about moving from Q1 to Q2, and we'll talk about that around composite specifically around your question, which is what is really driving that step up? Now you've called out one thing that's absolutely one of the drivers that's going to help us step up those margins closer to back to where we think this business runs in the long term, which is in the mid-teens operating margin rate. And that is better volumes, right? And we're seeing, we're anticipating to see a little bit step up of volumes in North America, we would expect sequentially volumes to be a bit higher in Asia, part of that driven by just how Chinese New Year falls and the fact that the second quarter won't be dealing with that. But certainly volumes are one of the drivers. One of the important things to think about also is energy costs and energy cost as we saw it peak, specifically in Europe in the last quarter of last year. We also talked about on the last call that while we were seeing energy costs peak, we were also seeing our customers start to kind of, let's say rationalize or make sure that they had the right levels of inventory on hand. So it pulled back a little bit on their buying patterns as we finished the fourth quarter. Therefore, just think about how that works, we ended up with a bit more inventory on our books that we were carrying over to the first quarter, that actually had that higher energy costs in it, because it kind of gets…

Our next question is from Anthony Pettinari from Citi.

Good morning. This is Greg Andrew on for Anthony. Thanks for the detailed discussion. And thanks for taking my question. So just in sizable expansionary projects in the pipeline for insulation, I think in Arkansas and roofing in Ohio. I'm just wondering what type of cost curve gains you can realize from projects like this. And if there's a targeted level of returns for projects of this size, whether it be IRR or ROIC or another returns metric. And just as a quick kind of follow on related question, I'm wondering what makes projects like these more attractive in both on M&A in the current marketplace. And if you could maybe just touch on what you're seeing in the current M&A landscape. Whether there's a shortage or surplus of opportunities, valuations, and any color you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

I'll start out and then I'll let Brian kind of take the M&A part of this. But what I would say is that as you think about these projects, and we've outlined, as you said, some insulation projects, we're also in the midst of building out a non-wovens facility also in Arkansas for the composites business. We look at each one of these and you can imagine the points that you lay out, what are the returns? What's the commercial market look like? And what does that create as far as an IRR or discounted cash flow? Every one of these things are positive to that contribution. And it's not just that the project itself has the right financial metrics, but as we look at it, we really start from what is the strategy of where we're trying to grow. And you've heard Brian say many times, building out our material science capability, our manufacturing processes. So we kind of started about, how are we going to continue to grow and expand from the businesses that we have today. Again, we laid that out in November of 2021, in our Investor Day, and therefore, as we look at these projects, we say, not only does it have good financial returns, but it fits that strategy. And so these all have those kinds of returns. And we're confident that they will deliver exactly how we laid out the investment to go both from an investment side as well as the return side. Now, as we think about M&A, you won't be surprised to hear it's not necessarily a choice of, do we do all our growth projects internally for organic growth? Or do we look at things on the M&A front, but there's things in both buckets, and part of our job is to look at that, to look at how do we grow this business organically? And then how do we look at the M&A landscape and pick those things that add on to our portfolio to build ourselves out exactly how we lay out the strategy.

And then I would add here, I think, when we look at our balanced capital allocation strategy, we're really focused on three big pillars. One is to continue to invest in organic growth and productivity initiatives and these organic growth projects for us, we see great opportunities in the market to grow within those product lines, to strengthen our core positions, and generate great returns, as Ken talked about. So that's a key part of our capital allocation strategy to always look internally in terms of growth and productivity initiatives where we can drive into the performance of the business. I think the second big part of that is to look through and look at acquisitions that can expand and broaden our capabilities in the new product adjacencies that really leverage our material science capabilities, our marketing, our manufacturing capabilities, I think you saw that a little bit in some of the acquisitions we did last year, in terms of we moved into a decking category, which we think provides great structural lumber growth opportunities and a composite material, we expanded into new insulation materials. So I think we're targeted around those product adjacencies that we think we can grow at a faster rate, and really kind of strengthen the overall performance of those businesses within our company. And then the third one is also always looking at how we return cash back to shareholders. And so we have a very balanced approach to return approximately 50% over time through dividends, share repurchases. So I think we kind of evaluate our capital allocation choices around those three priorities and make decisions that we think are going to be the best long term interest of the company in terms of growth and performance and shareholders in terms of value creation.

Our last question we have time for today comes from Susan Maklari from Goldman Sachs.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Brian, perhaps building on your comments in the last question, can you talk a bit about the cash generation of the business, especially as conditions normalize, and how you're thinking about the level of free cash flow you can generate here relative to where we were prior to the pandemic?

Sure, so I think we've been very pleased with the performance of the businesses, our focus on working capital, our focus on reducing the capital intensive within the company, that is resulted to very strong operating cash flow performance last year, I think, topping close to $1.8 billion in terms of operating cash flow, free cash flow last year, about $1.3 billion, close to and at around 100% conversion rates. And so those are the metrics that we look at to say we think we've created a company and build an operating structure that can continue to generate very strong operating cash flows, very strong free cash flows, that give us the opportunities, as I talked about in my last answer to then deploy that cash across those capital allocation priorities. So we feel we've built a great engine within the company in terms of working capital management, CapEx management and operating performance that's going to continue to generate strong operating and free cash flows as we go forward.

And I think it's important to point out and maybe I'll add on just a little bit to that, the performance of the business from a cash flow perspective, as Brian points out, really good working capital performance. I think there was concerns coming into this inflationary cycle that our pricing mechanisms may not have been where people had anticipated them to be to always recover that inflation. And we've been able to do that consistently since this started in the middle of 2020. But what I want to point out is also think about the free cash flow generation that we've done in the last couple of years. In light of our cash tax rate, also stepping up, as you know that, for the last decade or so we've been operating with, we have been operating with a cash tax loss carry forward in the US that we basically exhausted. So we saw our cash tax rate in the US go from essentially zero to something more of a normalized number. And I think that just further attributes kind of good work by the business overall on making sure that we are focused on the profitability of our products, getting them to the market the right way, and also managing that working capital really closely. And also, the last point is, as we think about reducing capital intensity over time, you can certainly see us tick that down. We were at about 7% a few years ago. Last year, I think we ran about 4.5% to 5%. So we continue to focus on all those things that ensure that pretty much in all environments we are generating really, really strong cash flows or growing, the profitability of this business and sustaining maintains operating margins.

Thank you. This is all the time we have for questions today. So I'd like to hand back over to Brian for any closing remarks.

Thanks, Daisy. And really just want to say thanks to everyone for your time today and your questions. We appreciate your interest in Owens Corning and look forward to speaking with you again during our second quarter call. So thanks and have a great day.

Thank you everyone for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your lines. And have a lovely day.