WestRock Company (WRK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

WestRock Company (NYSE:WRK) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 4, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Robert Quartaro - Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

David Sewell - Chief Executive Officer

Alex Pease - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Anthony Pettinari - Citi

Gabe Hajde - Wells Fargo

George Staphos - Bank of America

Mike Roxland - Truist

Mark Weintraub - Seaport

Cleve Rueckert - UBS

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the WestRock Second Fiscal Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. All participants will be in silence-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 second 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 a question-and-answer session.

During today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements involving our plans, expectations, projections, estimates, and beliefs related to future events. These statements involve a number of assumptions, risks, and uncertainties and 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 fiscal year ended September 30th, 2022.

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 begin our call with some highlights from our fiscal second quarter, then provide updates on our portfolio optimization strategy and cost savings initiatives. Following that, Alex will review our results in more detail and provide our outlook for the third quarter, as well as our assumptions for the full year.