O-I Glass, Inc. /DE/ Q4 FY2023 Earnings Call

Thank you, Emily, and welcome everyone to the O-I Glass year-end and fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Our discussion today will be led by Andres Lopez, our CEO, and John Haudrich, our CFO. Today we'll discuss key business developments and review our financial results. Following prepared remarks, we will host a Q&A session. Presentation materials for this earnings call are available on the company's website. Please review the safe harbor comments and disclosure of our use of non-GAAP financial measures included in those materials. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Andres, who'll start on Slide 3.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for your interest in O-I. We are pleased to announce strong 2023 results. Full year adjusted earnings were $3.09 per share as results improved significantly from the prior year and exceeded our most recent guidance. O-I is now a more disciplined and agile organization that is capable of navigating elevated market volatility. We again demonstrated our improved operating effectiveness, as we posted the highest adjusted earnings in the past 15 years and finished 2023 with the best balance sheet in nearly a decade. Likewise, we achieved strong net price, record margin expansion initiative benefits, and the best manufacturing trends in more than two decades. These efforts more than offset the impact of lower shipments as macro conditions softened over the course of the year. We anticipate 2024 adjusted earnings would lag our historically high performance last year, given the continuation of softer macros into the first half of the year. However, we believe the most challenging market conditions are behind us, as we are beginning to see early signs of improvement. Importantly, we have already completed most of our annual price negotiations, and we expect to retain the lion’s share of the strong net price achieved over the past few years. On our strong track record, we are confident our 2024 margin expansion benefits will surpass last year's record savings. Overall, we expect stronger demand, significant initiative benefits, and favorable operating performance will provide O-I with good momentum as the market strengthens over the course of the year. Our business capabilities are strong. Our talent base is solid. Our culture is focused on agility, performance, and delivering on our commitments. Importantly, we anticipate stronger future earnings as both sales and production volumes more fully recover, which we will discuss a bit later in our remarks. We continue to consistently execute our strategy, which includes investing in long-term growth and developing breakthrough technologies. After several years of R&D, we will ramp up our first MAGMA greenfield site in mid-2024 to serve the growing spirits business in the Kentucky area. Customers, investors, and employees will have the opportunity to see firsthand the first benefits of this new technology. In parallel, development of our Generation 3 MAGMA solution is going well, and we expect to deploy our first Gen 3 site in 2025, with commercialization in early 2026. We are very excited about the long-term future for O-I as we aim to disrupt the glass industry.

Thanks, Andres, and good morning, everyone. Building off previous comments, O-I reported historically high earnings in 2023, with favorable performance across most financial measures. Sales improved to over $7.1 billion, both EBITDA and segment operating profit increased more than 20%, while segment margins increased 280 basis points to over 17%. As noted, adjusted EPS exceeded our most recent guidance and represented the highest adjusted earnings since 2008. Free cash flow was $130 million, which slightly exceeded the midpoint of our guidance range. As expected, cash flow was down from 2022 levels, primarily due to elevated capital spending as part of our long-term expansion program. Finally, leverage ended the year at 2.8x, which was below our target. Strong 2023 performance highlights the company's improved agility and capability to manage through challenging market conditions. Our foundation is sound, and we are well positioned to drive higher performance as demand improves over the course of 2024.

According to Page 4, let's review all the market trends, which are key to understanding our recent and future performance. As discussed last quarter, we faced a unique set of circumstances throughout 2023 leading to lower shipments of glass containers. Initially, this was driven by moderately lower consumer consumption followed by significant inventory stocking across the food and beverage supply chains. We have updated the chart on the right with our shipment trends through the fourth quarter and the most current Nielsen retail data. It also includes our current expectations for future consumption and glass shipments in 2024. Looking at this past fourth quarter, we anticipated glass shipments would be down 12% to 15%, yet actual shipments were down 16%, reflecting some acceleration in the stocking activity across the value chain. With that said, I'm encouraged by early signs of recovery and believe the worst is behind us. Let me share a few of the reasons for this initial optimism. First, consumer consumption trends have steadily improved over the course of 2023, as you can see with the green bars on the chart. While some categories still have challenges, consumption trends have turned positive in several NAB categories in many markets. Importantly, we have seen little change in market share or shift to other substrates except for some modest and temporary trade down limited to beer in Eastern Europe. According to Nielsen data, glass has actually gained share versus cans in certain categories in Brazil, Colombia, and the Netherlands. Next, we believe the worst of the stocking is done, especially in beer and NABs, while wine and spirits might linger into 2024. As an example, we have included a Federal Reserve chart in the appendix that illustrates the declining wholesale inventories for alcoholic beverages in the U.S. Overall, glass entered the stocking phase behind many other industries, which have already started to see a rebound, which provides additional confidence. Glass will indeed improve this year.

Thanks, Andres, and good morning, everyone. Building off previous comments, O-I reported historically high earnings in 2023, with favorable performance across most financial measures. Sales improved to over $7.1 billion, both EBITDA and segment operating profit increased more than 20%, while segment margins increased 280 basis points to over 17%. As noted, adjusted EPS exceeded our most recent guidance and represented the highest adjusted earnings since 2008. Free cash flow was $130 million, which slightly exceeded the midpoint of our guidance range. As expected, cash flow was down from 2022 levels, primarily due to elevated capital spending as part of our long-term expansion program. Finally, leverage ended the year at 2.8x, which was below our target.

In conclusion, these factors support our belief we have passed the bottoms and are increasingly confident in low to mid-single-digit volume growth in 2024, with additional improvement in 2025. Now, I'll turn it over to John who will review our performance and 2024 outlook in more detail, starting on Page 5.

Thanks, Andres. Building off previous comments, O-I reported a historically high earnings in 2023, with favorable performance across most financial measures. Sales improved to over $7.1 billion. Both EBITDA and segment operating profit increased more than 20%, while segment margins increased 280 basis points to over 17%. As noted, adjusted EPS exceeded our most recent guidance and represented the highest adjusted earnings since 2008. Free cash flow was $130 million, which slightly exceeded the midpoint of our guidance range. As expected, cash flow was down from 2022 levels, primarily due to elevated capital spending as part of our long-term expansion program. When we look at supply and demand on a global basis, O-I is balanced. At this point in time, we're taking all the measures to be able to achieve our inventory targets in 2024, considering the demand projections that we have. If there is a need for more action, we will adjust, but we believe we are in a good place. When we look at the global landscape, we are seeing lots of curtailments taking place around the world, particularly in Europe, where it is required the most.

Yes, so we are seeing the stocking activity pretty much done in beer and NAB and food. The categories that still need to complete that cycle are spirits and wine, which we expect will improve over the course of the second quarter and should be more normalized by the middle of the year. Our inventories obviously increased last year, and as I mentioned before, we are taking all the actions to bring those inventories back down as per our current business plan for '24.

If you take a look in the fourth quarter, our capacity was down; our temporary curtailments equated to about 20% of our total global capacity. In fact, it was probably skewed higher in Europe, where you see those longer supply chains such as wine and spirit. I think we are taking a category-by-category view and taking a look at that trying to understand the commercial components and considerations there to ensure that we're addressing things to get our inventories down in the right place by market and category.

So when you say you expect to be done on wine and spirit inventory destocking or at least your customers will be done, to what degree do you expect that having built up inventories to too high of a level within the supply chain that your customers will actually destock below what would be normal but nonetheless means another layer of volume decline or progression that you need to manage through?

Yes, let me answer first the question on the margin expansion initiative. So there are three buckets: revenue optimization, factory performance, and cost transformation. They enabled year-on-year margin expansion in a multi-year period. So that's what we intended to do when we created this initiative. And our goal at the time was to have a solid process and capabilities in place, bottom-up and top-down well articulated globally and all the way down to the shop floor.

Yes, exactly. I mean, we don't know exactly whether people are going to land, right where they want to be, whether they will overshoot or undershoot. We had to be very dynamic, and we would rather be quite aggressive on the front end like we were doing here in the fourth quarter to ensure that we're managing the inventories appropriately.

There is something I would like to highlight in previous calls: your adopted point of manufacturing operations, the strength of those operations could elevate performance. And when I look at the manufacturing operations of O-I, I can say to you that I'm seeing the best performance capability to execute in more than two decades.

What I would say is, and we are intentional, just to be clear on the timeline, is a little bit uncertain because it's a function of getting the volumes back to pre-pandemic levels. So if you take a look at our volumes, our volumes are down 12% in 2023, a 10% recovery off that base would get us back to a pre-pandemic basis.

Thanks, John. Over the past several years, we have significantly transformed the company and we're now a much more disciplined, agile, and capable organization. As a result, we have significantly improved performance and delivered on our commitments quarter after quarter. We again demonstrated our improved operating effectiveness in 2023, as we successfully weathered difficult macro conditions that developed over the course of the year, reporting the highest adjusted earnings since 2008 and finished the year with the best balance sheet in nearly a decade.

That concludes our earnings call. Please note that our first quarter call is currently scheduled for May 1, 2024. And remember, make it a memorable moment by choosing safe, sustainable glass. Thank you.

Thank you everyone for joining us today. This concludes our call, and you may now disconnect your line.