Clearwater Paper Corporation (NYSE:CLW) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call April 29, 2024 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Sloan Bohlen - Investor Relations
Arsen Kitch - President and Chief Executive Officer
Sherri Baker - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Matthew McKellar - RBC Capital Markets

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Brianna and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Clearwater Paper First Quarter 2024 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 would now like to turn the conference over to Sloan Bohlen, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Sloan Bohlen

Thank you, Brianna. Good afternoon and thank you for joining Clearwater Paper's First Quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Arsen Kitch, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Sherri Baker, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Financial results for the first quarter of 2024 were released shortly after yesterday's market close, along with the filing of our 10-Q. You will find a presentation of supplemental information, including a slide providing the company's current outlook posted on the Investor Relations page of our website at clearwaterpaper.com.

Additionally, we will be providing certain non-GAAP information in this afternoon's discussion. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP information to comparable GAAP information is included in the press release and in the supplemental information provided on our website. Please note Slide 2 of the supplemental information covering forward-looking statements. Rather than rereading this slide, we are going to incorporate it by reference into our prepared remarks.

With that, let me turn the call over to Arsen.

Arsen Kitch

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. . As you saw from our press release, we had a great first quarter driven by the continued outstanding performance of our tissue business and lower input costs. We also generated strong cash flows and reduced our net debt by an additional $33 million during the quarter. This resulted in 1.38 times leverage ratio at the end of the quarter.

Slide 3 of our supplementals provides a summary of our consolidated results. We reported net sales of $496 million and adjusted EBITDA of $62 million, which is at the higher end of our expectations. Our tissue business drove the improvement by more than doubling its adjusted EBITDA from $19 million in the first quarter of last year to $46 million this year.