Good morning. My name is Mary, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fourth Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Mr. Dave Johnson, Treasurer and Vice President of Investor Relations. The floor is y ours.

Thank you, Mary. Welcome, everyone, to OI's earnings conference call. Our discussion today will be led by Andres Lopez, our CEO; and Jan Bertsch, our CFO. Today, we will discuss key business developments and provide a review and outlook of our financial results. Following our prepared remarks, we'll host a Q&A session. Presentation materials for this earnings call are available on the company's website at o-i.com. Please review the safe harbor comments and disclosure of our use of non-GAAP financial measures included in those materials. Unless otherwise noted, the financials we are presenting today relate to adjusted earnings and adjusted cash flow, which excludes certain items that management considers not representative of ongoing operations. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP items can be found in our earnings press release and in the appendix to this presentation. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Andres.

Thank you, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Let me begin with an overview on the slide 3. The year 2018 offered plenty of challenges for the like, yet it does offer the opportunity to display our improved leadership, accountability, new capabilities, improved culture and ability to execute as a single integrated global enterprise. Altogether, we are more resilient than ever before and this year is a clear demonstration of the ongoing success of our transformation overcoming both external and internal challenges. For instance, coming in to the year FX was projected to be a significant headwind, by mid-year it has become a headwind for the full year. We faced all our expected issues as well, the transportation strike in Brazil, a bad disruption in Mexico, very high trade in the US and a soft going season in Europe. Further, in 2018, we took a pause in effect to emphasize a large incremental asset maintenance program that retrofitted assets to new market needs and added incremental capacity to support growth in our new markets. As we said in prior earnings calls, the region hit its 50% margin target exiting the year. In all, this focused effort has helped reset the region for a sustainable improvement trend going forward. Again, O-I is a resilient company. It is a changed company that can absorb these shocks, meet financial commitments, while investing to setup the drivers of future shareholder value creation, and of course Europe continues to grow year-after-year with three consecutive years of three-fold digit margin expansion. Europe is the region’s most advanced in our transformation. They are showing us what is possible as we properly segment our markets, clearly define where to play and how to win and execute effectively to achieve desired results. The outline if they rated this as planning…

Thanks Andres. Turning to slide 10, I want to first remind you of our key metrics, which we presented at Investor Day last November. We’ve updated the slides for 2018 actuals, in short, we achieve our previous commitments certainly not without new challenges and we are excited to move forward to the next phase. We see 2019 as a pivotal year for the company’s transformation. We have momentum and are on track to achieving growth, margin expansion, cash generation and return cash to shareholders over the three year plan. Before jumping forward though, let me review the EPS bridges for 2018 on slide 11. Beginning with the full year, on the chart on the left, entering the year we thought FX would be a tailwind of about $0.10. However, as we look back on the full year, the strengthening US dollar led to a $0.02 headwind for earnings, a $0.12 delta to expectations, and that’s just on translation. It’s even higher when considering the FX impact on cost inflation, which would add another nickel or so. So, on a constant currency basis, adjusted EPS for full year 2018 was up $0.09, with half of this coming from the business and the other half from our investment in share buybacks. As we look at the reconciliation for the fourth quarter on the right, most of the full year commentary holds for the quarter. Currency was a $0.01 headwind, while segment operating profit was higher. Net interest slipped to a headwind as a result of higher variable rate. While the tax rate for the full year was essentially flat, there was a benefit in the fourth quarter due to the favorable impact of closed audits and statute exploration. Moving on to cash flow on slide 12, we delivered adjusted free cash flow…

Thanks Jan. I trust and you can see that we will continue to (inaudible) what we have accomplished over the past few years, not just stabilizing the business but elevated it and investing in capabilities to grow in further. As I described on investor day in the next year [running] horizon there are several valued platforms that will unlock shareholder value. The first, is grow and expand, O-I aim is to leverage newly developed capabilities and translate favorable market trends in to grounded, ascribable, topline growth opportunities that will help us grow and expand with our strategic customers. Next is the structural cost improvement; we believe product system cost is a best-in-class approach to a structural cost reduction and will contribute to our bottom line for years to come. Our third area of focus is sustainability, given that very real global traction of sustainability O-I will exert given more focus on this dimension moving forward. We also made substantial progress on innovation and developing breakthrough technology. The MAGMA pilot is running well in our Streator facility. We are on a schedule successfully and timely hearing important milestones. The progress is very encouraging, exciting and has generated tangible interest by key stakeholders. We will continue to provide updates in every earnings call even if be like this one. And Jan just mentioned capital location and how the risking O-I’s balance sheet coupled with increasing the return of cash to shareholders will drive value to all holders for days to come. Now that we have completed our remarks, we are happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Mark Wilde from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

I wondered if you could just give us a little more color on sort of the volume in particular regions around the Americas in the fourth quarter and what you’re expecting in ’19? And then also given the declines you mentioned in the US, whether you have any plans for potential footprint moves over the next year or two?

So the situation in the Americas is as follows; we see solid demand across the region, with exception of mega-beer. So we continue to see the same decline rates we talked about before, we already factored them in at current decline rates. Now beyond that everything else we see is quite solid. Now if we talk about the US, and when we look at all product categories in the market, all of them offering opportunities for growth, and as you know we have been focused on those categories for three years now and we’ve been adapting the footprint in those three years too, and now is the moment to start enjoying even more, the benefits of that work that we did over the last three years. When you look at particular areas that are growing quite fast for us, products like kombucha, it is growing both double digit and is being sustained, so it’s quite solid. We’re seeing double digit growth in carbonated RTD tea too and we’re seeing situations like one very important food customer that moved the product some time ago PET coming back to glass this year 2019. So that’s quite a successful story there. So bottom line US mega-beer declines, run rates already reflecting in forecast as we know them today. All the categories growth and we’ve been focused on this three years and that’s why we’re confident, we’re going to see this performance in 2019 as we move forward. When we look at Brazil, very strong demand across all categories, premium beer demand is growing really fast, its 40% of the total business in Brazil at this point. Customers’ want glass to be part of that portfolio for premium beer, so they’ve already been asked to be able to supply enough for them. And as…

Your next question comes from the line of George Staphos from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is now open.

Andres and Jan I want to take a step back and we appreciate all the color on volume and the outlook and your confidence there. If we go back a few years ago, one of the mantras within Owens-Illinois was around stability and bringing stability back to the organization both from an operating standpoint and a volume standpoint. One, can you comment a little bit in terms of how you feel you’ve progressed there, relatedly when we look at the Americas there’s about $48 million negative year-over-year variance in operations. I’m assuming a lot of that was the one-off stuff that you talked about on the quarter call just now, but how much of that was manufactured and maybe was under your control that you could have done a better job on and hopefully we’ll improve on in the future. And then around stability, when we look at cash flows on asbestos, Jan can you give us a little bit more color in terms of why it’s prudent to proactively pull these claims forward as we think about the stability and the cash flow?

George, when we look back we said, achieving the stability in operations and volume was very important for us. And I think we made very good progress, it’s quite solid, so we counting on that as stability to wield our growth that we are seeing in to the future. I think the work that we’ve done with customers is creating stability in the volume side, I’m going to talk about the Americas in a minute for the full quarter, and the operations are more and more stable over time. And obviously that’s a long term effort, however our stability is significantly higher than before. Now what caused is we have now a chance, and we had that chance over the couple of years to focus on building this new demand and when we were in that day we proposed that we’ll 10% in the following three years and that’s because we have a very (inaudible) opportunities, very specific opportunities in a specific segment already identified that we’ve been working our customers for quite a while that we’re starting to close. So when I look at the position we have when we were (inaudible) based on that stability and the growth momentum, at that point in time we were confident and we were optimistic and I would tell we were even more confident and more optimistic because we made substantial progress on the agreements we needed to put in place to be able to secure the demand for the following three years. Now, when I look at the fourth quarter, the demand in the fourth quarter wasn’t good, and it was a disappointing quarter, but it has quite a few things in there, so it’s driven by the Americas, within the Americas half of it is with the United States, half of that is the transfer of that volume to the JV which is going to lap now so we don’t have that issue with that comparison anymore, the only happening is mega-beer which we already know it is already factoring (inaudible) as the run rate we know. Now the other portion is the specific issues with the customer that was supposed to hurricanes that lost the demand altogether and that other customer that stopped buying but is resuming purchases. So these two very specific issues, very unfortunate, but they don’t define the demand pattern for us going forward. And the other situation is Brazil, we were growing very strong for the year and it becomes a decreased year-on-year for the fourth quarter. All the reason for that is capacity. So we need to equal the capacity in Brazil, we already have plans for that, we’re making very good progress, we’re about to start that plan that we mentioned before, and we continue to evaluate our capacity up in Brazil.

And George let me clarify, I think if you’re talking about the operating cost in Americas that you see on, I think it was slide 27 of negative 48 million cost, that is cost inflation, but the trade cost spread is relatively flat, so the driver of decline in volume, which John just mentioned. Let me go to the second part of your question when you were talking about asbestos. But before I do that I just want to mention one other thing, Andres talked about the stability, we also tried to put a lot emphasis over the last several years in the stability of our balance sheet. And whether it was renegotiating our bank credit agreement or changing our debt profile to reduce the exposure, the currencies, spreading out the maturities or annuitizing more pensions that we have it was all a goal of developing a stronger balance sheet and balancing our risk, reducing our risk for the company. Another piece of that of course is asbestos, and to get me to the last part of your question, it’s probably best if I set some context for the broader topic of asbestos to really answer your question thoroughly. All of the fundamental metric that we monitor related to our legacy asbestos liability continue to progress in the right direction. I mean the key drivers are the company’s 1958 exit from this business and the resulting declining demographic trends. And from 1948 through 1958 this company owned and an installation business that produced and sold materials containing asbestos and in April of 58 the company sold the business unit and therefore the timeframe appropriately reflects the mortality of current and expected claims. But as 30 years asbestos liability are in litigation, rather has shown us, it’s volatile in many external…

Your next question comes from the line of Chip Dillon from Vertical Research. Your line is now open.

Just a quick question about the asbestos situation, I do know that you had a slide from investor day that talked about the potential to do the de-risking accelerated payments. I don’t recall though, and maybe I just missed this, that there was likely to be an increase to the cumulative reserve which was 125 million. And so my question is, was that increase something that you either missed or maybe you just didn’t - that you knew was going to happen or is it something that is a result of the recent development since November? And then as you go out, how high is your confidence level that we won’t have to see another increase in the reserves?

Chip at investor day we were in the midst of executing our strategy to mitigate future risks, but we hadn’t finished negotiations. And with much of that behind us, we have more clarity about the asbestos related payments over the next few years. So that’s why we think about 150 million on average for the next two years before falling back to a lower level of 60 million to 80 million for the last year of our three year range and then declining thereafter makes sense. And that’s consistent with the demographic trends as we see them today. Of course, we’ll continue to review our asbestos accrual and liabilities on an annual basis or more frequent if we need to adjust like we mentioned back in 2015 and have done ever since. But I hope you see this as a more aggressive way to continue to tackle this very difficult situation and to help hedge against future increases and to be able to overall reduce the risk of this company, which has been a strong focus especially in the last several years.

Your next question comes from the line of Debbie Jones from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

I have a question on your guidance for Europe, your point to modest growth in Europe’s different region. I was just wondering if you could talk about some of the factors there, I am sure you’ve got FX as a negative and volume growth has been as positive, and how should we model in the cost side of things. And then specifically in Q1 can you elaborate on the comments that you made around some of the temporary items?

So let me just make a comment on Q1 and one of the major reasons why we’re seeing a number that is below prior year. And that is we are installing capacity and as you would expect that comes along with the standing, and we got to hire people, we got to train people, we got to half spend to put a capacity in place and then we got to run that. So that’s part of why we’re seeing at least from an operational perspective impacting in Q1, which in fact is very positive as you look at the following quarters, but we got to go through that quarter to be able to get to the higher performance quarters. So, from an operational perspective that’s what’s taking place.

And Debbie maybe I can share a few numbers with you. When we look at Europe for the first quarter, we see a pretty balanced price cost spread, maybe slightly positive. We see from a volume standpoint things pretty on track versus prior year. FX looks like in the first quarter is going to be a headwind in Europe. I would say $5 million, $6 million or so is what we’re looking at based on the January 31 rates when we compare it to last year. You can see the big movement between the Euro and that’s a comparison area. But that’s where I see the biggest changes overall really are really flat for Europe in the first quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabe Hajde from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

I was wondering if you could comment at all Andres bigger picture, on your expectations for volumes given where we are sort of in the economic cycle or climate, any slowdown potential from consumers or travel related spend for some of the higher end liquors and stuff like that? You had a sense for maybe where customer inventories are and how that could impact sales and if in fact something materializes on the slowdown side?

Well at this point in time, what we’re seeing is across the world when we look at all end users, the only segment really that shows weakness and decline is mega-beer in the United States, which we have fully factored. When we talk with customers, they continue to see a growth outlook for the businesses. We haven’t seen any change in that regards and we continually test that. We’ve seen a premium product category to be the driver of our growth going forward. This is a category of products that has proved to be quite resilient even when you have some downturns. And we tested that in Brazil, we’ve been able to grow in that premium beer over the last three years or four years even though the economy was in a very bad situation. I highlighted the mega-beer before, it’s important to have in mind that even though that sub-segment declines, it is only 5% of the total volume. Now at the same time, premium beer grows very fast in the United States and we are very well positioned to serve that segment as you know because of the JV that we have a Constellation branch. So in all I think demand is quite healthy around the world, we haven’t seen any change on that. The primary focus for us right now is to be able to finalize some of the initiatives and agreements that we got to have in place. Some of them are already finalized, we continue to be focused on the orders and we are focused on the execution around its starting capacity which we had started last year in Europe with the regional lines and we continue this year with regional lines in Brazil, in Europe, with the addition of capacity in Colombia, with increasing productivity in Mexico. So that’s where we got to go right now.

Your next question comes from the line of Tyler Langton from JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Just had a question on the divestitures, I think you mentioned on investor day that you expected net proceeds I think 400 million to 500 million through 2021. So if you could just talk about how that process is going and what you’re seeing in general?

So we continue with the same expectation, we identify the potential businesses that we can deal with or part of businesses that we can deal with to do that and we are just moving forward with all the stage that you would expect we got to go through. So we’re actively executing on that.

So let me just add Tyler since you asked about that. I think that’s an important part of the conversation related to the cash for the company, because we anticipate based on where we are today and in our plan to reach an adjusted free cash flow of $400 million for the company this year, we’ve talked about asbestos being a $150 million, $160 million payment this year. So that reduces the free cash flow to about 240. If we just add the cash component of these divestitures on just for the sake of conversation, we have about $440 million available to invest in the company, deleverage or return value to our shareholders. And based on our plan we will take about half of that over $200 million to return value to the shareholders through a combination of a dividend which will cost us about 30 million this year and then a couple of 100 million of share buyback that we talked about. So you can clearly see the merits of kind of tying our proceeds from the divestiture with our share buyback plan, it’s an important component of it and we’re taking it very seriously. And then on the other side, we have another couple of 100 million plus to pay for minority dividends about $20 million for the year and then our investments and joint ventures specifically like our joint ventures with Constellation brands as well as RMBC and the remaining component of that $150 million, $170 million we will primarily use for deleveraging or strategic capital for the company that yields very solid returns on capital. So there’s a balanced approach of investing in the business, pay down debt, reducing our leverage and returning value to the shareholders.

Your next question comes from the line of Edlain Rodriguez from UBS. Your line is now open.

Just one quick one on the EPS guidance, should we make anything about a slight change in tone from $3 plus to approximately $3, and has anything changed at all since the investor day plus or minus?

I’m glad you asked that question, I saw it came up several times in the commentary last evening. The answer is no, please don’t over analyze that. When I read it several times I was actually surprised. Our goal is to hit that three handle, obviously we’d like to be a bit higher than $3. We are working on everything we can to be that way, but we’re sticking right now with our $3 a share. So please don’t look any deeper in to the minor wording change that was made between last November and last evening in the release.

Your next question comes from the line of Scott Gaffner from Barclays Capital. Your line is now open.

Just a quick question Jan going back to the thoughts on share buyback, a couple of things there, can you talk about in context of de-risking the balance sheet. As you mentioned its $240 million of free cash flow after you subtract out the asbestos payment. So, first would be, should we think about the share buyback being more weighted towards the second half once you’ve finally finished some of these divestitures. The second part being, should we think about in divestitures and share buyback being more neutral to earnings on a go-forward basis. And then just lastly, on the capital spend, you said 12% return on capital for Brownfield, are you getting later in this cycle and seeing lower return on capital from new investments on a go-forward basis?

Let me first talk about the share buybacks, we already did in January about $40 million of share buyback. So we started the share, we also had about an equivalent amount last December. So if you think about it that way we probably have close to 160 million more to do the balance of this year. We always said that we would time it and make sure that it made sense with other demands on cash in the company including CapEx and everything else and the proceeds from large divestitures. So we’ll continue to try to match that up. Saying that Andres mentioned that we’re on target on very clearly looking at our open land that we have available for sales as well as some other divestitures that we’re looking at. And so I think we’re on target this year to execute that entire 200 million, and I think it’s a little bit premature to give you by quarter how much that is, but we’ll share that as we go forward. And you also asked about, is it more neutral to earnings going forward, and we do have a program as of the end of last year of 550 million on share repurchases. So if we execute 200 of those this year, you can think that we’ll have a remaining balance to do through the next couple of years of our plan as well. I think we have good return in excess of 12% for our Brownfield in Europe and it clearly adds value overtime. We look at each one of these opportunities that we have standing on its own as well as in conjunction with what else we’re doing in the region or for the company and so we’ll continue to be very prudent and very disciplined on making decisions that makes sense for the company.

Your next question comes from the line of Ghansham Panjabi from Baird. Your line is now open.

Going back to Europe 3Q 2018 volumes were a bit sluggish, I believe relative to initial expectations. I guess did 4Q ’18 sort of benefit from any sort of catchup, I’m just trying to understand the volume increase and then related to that, just looking at Europe on a full year basis volumes were basically flat, however we’re at this point where we’re capacity constrained in Europe from your vantage point. And then just separately Jan, how is that going to be accounted for in the P&L?

We spent some regional lines in Europe late last year. So they held at the very end and have been across the full (inaudible). We got a little bit of the improvement in wine demand at the very end, but when the 2018 harvest was confirmed to be very strong, we all expect that the dynamics in the market change from that point. So we saw some improvement due to that. And we continued to focus on the premium segments, they have opportunity for growth and so as we make capacity available, we’re confident that we’re going to see improvement in demand in Europe and that’s why we’re putting in place or planning to put in place these Brownfield that will start operation in Q1 2020.

And you also asked about Comegua, that’s a non-consolidated joint venture. So we’ll see the equity earnings of that will be reflected in the Americas segment operating profit.

Your last question comes from the line of Arun Viswanathan from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Just wanted to go back to the Americas’, obviously we’ve been experiencing these declines on US mass beer for a while. Just wondering, I think you’ve obviously reduced that exposure. Do you think you kind of found a steady state on other categories or will mass beer continue to decline, and if so what kind of percent of the portfolio would that become and what would the other categories become?

The mega-beer in our assumption continues to decline and continues to decline at the career run rates. We’re not assuming that that’s going to stop any time soon. It could but it’s difficult to predict. So our assumption is it continues to go down. And as you know we’ been working on the other categories of products for three years now, both commercially and from a capacity standpoint. So I think we’re going to see more and more opportunities materializing as we go through 2019. Now, we got to take in to consideration the volume that we are gaining through a JV, because we are in fact with larger presence of O-I containers in the US market. When you put together what we sell within the US made with US capacity plus the JV. So we think the growth of the older categories and when you consider the joint venture too, it’s going to have the total US market for us growing to 2019.

Thank you everyone. That concludes our earnings conference call. Please not that our first quarter conference call is currently scheduled for May 2, 2019. We appreciate your ongoing interest in O-I, and a gentle reminder to choose glass packaging made from natural ingredients, it’s safe, it’s pure and a 100% recyclable. Thanks and have a great day.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.