Greif, Inc. (NYSE:GEF) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call June 8, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Matt Leahy - Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations

Ole Rosgaard - President and Chief Executive Officer

Larry Hilsheimer - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Michael Hoffman - Stifel

George Staphos - Bank of America

Gabe Hajde - Wells Fargo

Operator

Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Greif, Inc. Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Matt Leahy, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Matt Leahy

Thanks and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Greif’s second quarter fiscal 2023 earnings conference call. This is Matt Leahy, Greif’s Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. And I am joined by Ole Rosgaard, Greif’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Larry Hilsheimer, Greif’s Chief Financial Officer. We will take questions at the end of today’s call. In accordance with regulation fair disclosure, please ask questions regarding the issues you consider important because we are prohibited from discussing material non-public information with you on an individual basis.

Please turn to Slide 2. As a reminder, during today’s call, we will make forward-looking statements involving plans, expectations and beliefs related to future events. Actual results could differ materially from those discussed. Additionally, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics can be found in the appendix of today’s presentation.

And now I will turn the presentation over to Ole on Slide 3.

Ole Rosgaard

Thanks, Matt and good morning everyone. Greif posted an exceptional second quarter in the face of historic volume headwinds, the likes of which we have not seen since The Great Recession. Our teams are executing extremely well this year, taking swift action to lower our cost base across our manufacturing network, maintaining discipline on pricing under our value-over-volume philosophy and extracting cash from our businesses by driving down working capital. I could not be proud of our team and the work we are doing to advance our Build to Last strategy.

Our performance in the first half of 2023 and specifically, our ability to execute well under challenging market conditions has been a process years in the making. As we shared with you at our Investor Day last June, the growing benefits of our continued evolution as a company are becoming more visible now and the hard work our teams have put in over the past several years are bearing fruit today.