WestRock Company (WRK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2023

August 3, 2023 8:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the WestRock Third Fiscal Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the conference over to Rob Quartaro, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Robert Quartaro

Good morning, and thank you for joining our third fiscal quarter 2023 earnings call. We issued our press release this morning and posted the accompanying presentation to the Investor Relations section of our website. They can be accessed at ir.westrock.com or via a link on the application you're using to view this webcast.

With me on today's call are WestRock's Chief Executive Officer, David Sewell; and our Chief Financial Officer, Alex Pease. Following our prepared comments, we will open the call for question-and-answer session.

During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements involving our plans, expectations, projections, targets, estimates, and beliefs related to future events. These statements involve a number of assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those we discussed during the call. We describe these assumptions, risks and uncertainties in our filings with the SEC, including our 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30th, 2022, and our 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2023.

We will also be referencing non-GAAP financial measures during the call. We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the appendix of the slide presentation. As mentioned previously, the slide presentation is available on our website.

With that, I'll turn it over to you, David.

David Sewell

Thank you, Rob. And thank you all for joining our earnings call today. I'll be in our call with review of our fiscal third quarter results and the progress we're making on our self-help initiatives. Following that, Alex will review our results in more detail and provide our outlook for the fourth quarter.

Turning to our third quarter results on Slide three. We exceeded our guidance due to strong execution, productivity gains and moderating input costs. Net sales were $5.1 billion and consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $802 million, adjusted EPS was $0.89. Our strong results this quarter against a dynamic backdrop reflect the resiliency of our business and the tremendous efforts of our talented team members. As a reminder, we faced difficult comparisons with record results in the prior year quarter.