Joel Quadracci
Analyst · Macquarie. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks, Kyle, and good morning, everyone. As you saw in our news release issued last evening, a key narrative for the second quarter is our continued solid cash flow generation. Free cash flow is the foundation of our strong balance sheet and enables us to deploy capital in ways that generate value for our company and our shareholders including pursuing compelling investment opportunities, deleveraging the balance sheet through debt and pension liability reductions and returning cash to our shareholders. We believe Quad/Graphics will continue to be a significant free cash flow generator and accordingly reaffirm full year 2015 free cash flow guidance in the range of $180 million to $200 million. In addition, we are narrowing our guidance for net sales and adjusted EBITDA due to ongoing industry headwinds including a sluggish advertising environment for publishers and a less than robust retail environment all of which impacted our sales. As we continue our journey to transform Quad/Graphics and our industry, we remain focused on creating value for our clients through a full complement of integrated solutions across print and digital channels to advance their marketing programs. We accomplished this objective through our strategy to walk in the shoes of our clients. One of our five longstanding strategic goals that we believe will allow us to be successful despite ongoing industry headwinds. When it comes to strengthening our core print operations another of our primary strategic goals, we are focused on reducing our overall cost structure by maximizing the productivity of our platform through technology, automation and process improvement programs and increasing the capacity utilization of our most efficient plants and equipment to continue to be the industry's low cost provider. For example, we are currently in the process of installing a significant number of automated guided vehicles and automatic palletizers to perform basic test in our finishing department. This technology not only improves productivity, but allows us to reduce labor cost associated with work in process and finished goods. As always we continue to invest in our mail preparation and distribution programs. In May, we expanded our Midwest commingling operations near our direct mail production facility in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Like co-mailing for publications and catalogs, the commingling process mergers individual letter size mail pieces from multiple clients into a single mail stream that then qualifies for U.S. postal service [resort] [ph] discount and dropship savings. Our company's massive commingling and co-mailing volumes drive the greatest possible postal savings for our clients, while speeding up in home delivery and persevering product quality. Beyond strengthening the core, we continue to focus on transformative growth opportunities. In this next chapter of our company's history, we remain focused on serving our clients well, while profitably growing our business by adding new products and services and reinventing our current product lines. Recently, we entered and expanded our presence in the growing packaging industry, we bolstered our in-store and large format marketing solutions for the global marketplace and announced the strategic repositioning of Blue Soho, our integrated marketing and brand activation firm that helps retailers, publishers and fortune 500 companies deliver their brand consistently across multiple media channels including print in a very integrated way. In addition, our three-year plan to transform our book platform is well underway. The plan which includes an investment in 20 or more high-speed color digital web presses is quickly gaining attention and momentum. We are realizing increased demand for our digital book printing capabilities. A number of high profile book publishers are choosing to take advantage of our digital press platform to deliver variable quantities of high-quality books, faster and more cost effectively. As we continue installing color digital web presses, we see tremendous opportunities for this platform to support multiple product lines including publications, direct mail and commercial and specialty. We will continue to build our digital press platform and related data driven marketing capabilities to create revenue generating and cost saving opportunities for multiple product lines for our clients. We are proud to be printers and proud to be a trusted partner in helping our clients find a better way to solve their marketing challenges. Whether that is through innovative solutions that help them reduce their mailing and distribution costs, stand out on the newsstand in the mailbox or in the store or connect their printed content to other channels such as mobile digital video and social media to increase engagement emotional connection and overall performance. Print continues to be foundational to successful marketing programs and remains a large component of overall marketing spend. What is happening with our offering today is a natural evolution of services based on the changing needs of our clients and the conversations taking place in the marketing world given the explosion of new media. Our goal is to position Quad not only as a proud printer, but as a printer who helps our clients market better in ever changing media landscape. To that last point, we are seeing an increased number of e-tailers who have not traditionally used print reach out to us to help them watch their first ever printed catalog and direct mail. They understand that in this fragmented digital world, print is a highly effective medium for driving consumers online to shop and purchase. It's all about multiple marketing touch points and the integration of channels. Even big digital advocates including top executives at ad agencies WPP and Saatchi & Saatchi are publicly backing the power of print. In brief, they are saying the death of print is overplayed. And that advertising community needs to consider print in the marketing mix because it delivers high levels of engagement. At Quad we have always believed that print delivers high levels of marketing ROI especially when used in combination with other media channels. No channel is an Island. Each influences and impacts the other. Yet, much of marketing is still silo, which has created a crisis in measurement, how do marketers successfully measure the impact one channel as on another? This is not a question of the strength and power of print, but rather a question of measuring true ROI across and between all channels both online and offline. As we move forward both as a printer and media solutions provider, we will continue to listen to our clients and look for ways to make it easier for them to understand and measure true ROI using our integrated solutions. But, before I hand over the call to Dave, I would like to take a brief moment to recognize and thank all of our employees. Together we are writing an exciting a new chapter in our company's history. Thank you for all the heavy lifting you have been doing to increase productivity, reduce waste and control costs, while at the same time delivering an excellent client experience. With that, I will hand over the call to Dave, who will provide a detailed financial review of the quarter and year-to-date. Dave?