WestRock Company (WRK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

WestRock Company (NYSE:WRK) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call November 10, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Rob Quartaro - Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

David Sewell - Chief Executive Officer

Alex Pease - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Mark Weintraub - Seaport

George Staphos - Bank of America

Phil Ng - Jefferies

Mark Wilde - Bank of Montreal

Mike Roxland - Truist Securities

Kyle White - Deutsche Bank

Adam Josephson - KeyBanc

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the WestRock Fourth Fiscal Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rob Quartaro, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Rob Quartaro

Good morning and thank you for joining our fourth fiscal quarter 2022 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 are 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 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 30, 2021.

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 will now turn the call over to you, David.

David Sewell

Thank you, Rob and thank you all for joining our earnings call today. Fiscal 2022 was a tremendous year for WestRock. We achieved record financial results, realigned our segment reporting more in line with our long-term strategy, executed several portfolio optimization actions, initiated self-help cost improvements and set the foundation for our transformation agenda.

On our call today, I will provide a review of our results, give an update on our transformation initiatives, and provide further details on our plastics replacement innovations. Following that, our CFO, Alex Pease, will provide a deep dive into the quarterly results for our segments and other performance. I will also provide guidance for the fiscal first quarter and full year 2023. We will then move to Q&A to answer any questions you may have.