Yahoo Finance

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Thank you, Ole. Following up on Ole's comments on taking strategic actions towards our long-term goals, I'd first like to briefly touch on another strategic announcement.
In late January, we announced the planned closure of our A1 paperboard machine in Mostel, Georgia, as well as our container board and URB flex machine in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. At Investor Day, our Chief Operations Officer Kim Kellermann talked about our quadrant analysis to assess plants as either invest to grow, protect the core, transform or fix, and invest or close.
Despite the continued excellent work by our colleagues, at the end of the day, these two facilities fell into the lower quadrant and did not achieve the level of earnings necessary to support continued operations.
The two closures will reduce our container board mill capacity by 100,000 tons and our URB capacity by 90,000 tons. In the short term, this action will be even a headwind of $3 million in fiscal '25 versus our prior guidance due to one-time closure costs and the timing of shifting tons to other facilities.
We expect this closure to be even a positive of $8 million by 2027 due to the increased efficiency of those tons being redeployed into our remaining network.
As we are still working through the closure and not certain of the exact timing of the benefits, we have not yet included it in the run rateop cost optimization and achievement that all we touched on earlier.
While building for the future, we have also remained resilient in our day to day execution. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $145 million an improvement of $7 million over the prior year quarter and in line with our expectations for Q1. Adjusted EPS for the quarter was $0.39, which was lower than the prior year due primarily to the non-reoccurrence of a one-time tax benefit of $48 million as well as $14 million of higher interest expense this year due to higher debt from recent acquisitions.
Working capital management was solid in the quarter. However, adjusted free cash flow was a net use of $62 million slightly higher of a use than prior year due primarily to the higher interest expense.
Please turn to slide 9, where I'll provide some additional context to our performance at a segment level.
Gross profit margins in three of our four segments increased year over year due to effective cost management and GBS 2.0 gains, despite the stagnant demand environment that only touched on earlier.
Integrated solutions gross profit margins were down year over year primarily due to product mix. Note also that Q1 results for our now divested delta filling business are presented in integrated solutions prior year results and was an e but a contributor of $2.8 million.
While the overall gross profit improvement did drive $7 million positive EBITDA but year over year, even the margins were also impacted by by higher year over year SG&A costs.
As we discussed throughout 2024, we anticipated short-term SG&A cost inflation as we reallocate and invest resources to areas of maximum long term value creation. Right now we are at the peak of that curve. We have completed our business reorganization in 2024.
Our new structure and SPUs are in. Place and now is when we will start aggressively pursuing streamlining of those processes. This short term divergence between gross profit, and even a margin percentage is mostly due to higher SG&A cost, which is one of the key opportunities listed in our $100 million cost optimization initiative, which only discussed earlier.
Please please turn to slide 10 to discuss 2025 guidance.
As a reminder, this fiscal year is only 11 months and and will conclude on September 30th following a two month fouth quarter. In Q4, we presented a low end only view of guidance which incorporates only known upsides year over year, but all downsides of which we have visibility.
Given the lack of any compelling demand inflections, we concluded that low-end guidance continues to be appropriate. However, we also feel it is warranted to raise the low end for specific known upsides.
First, an additional $27 million of positive price/cost, which reflects the $40 per ton container board price increase announced by [RICy] last Friday, as well as our lower four full year OCC assumption of $85 per ton.
It additionally factors in better price costs in our polymers and metals business, which is trending better than our original low end guidance assumed.
As I mentioned during our Q4 call, we anticipated a short-term headwind in Q1 related to the flow through of high priced steel in our balance sheet. Our supply chain team did a good job of neutralizing that impact.
Additionally, our metals team has had great success with value over volume discipline in the quarter. Those two factors drove the metals price/cost tailwind in the quarter.
Second $8 million of lower transport and manufacturing costs, which are actualizing lower than assumed in our original low-end guidance due to continued solid day to day management by our GBS group.
Lastly, we are including $3 million which reflects the portion of run rate impact of the cost initiative savings Oy touched on earlier, which will be beneficial to fiscal '25. However, that is offset by the $3 million headwind from the recent mill closures I discussed earlier.This net change results in a new low of guidance of $710 million dollars for fiscal '25.
Our low end free cash flow guidance is also raised by $20 million to $245 million for the full year, partially offsetting our even increase of $35 million is an assumption of $20 million higher working capital costs, which reflects the working capital impact of improving paper price costs.
But additionally being low end guidance, we have contemplated some downside for further cost inflation without the benefit of offsetting mitigating actions. Separately, we assume a small $6 million incremental tailwind in other operating costs which balances to the $20 million free cash flow guidance increase.
This is a low-end view and so our expectations is not that the business will end the year at this performance, but it is the only data point which we have conviction in sharing at this point.
In subsequent quarters, we will reassess returning to arrange guidance for our usual approach. With that, let me turn it over to Ole to close on slide 11. Thanks.

Ole Rosgaard

As demonstrated at our recent invest today, we continue optimizing and fine tuning our business. We are transitioning from good to great. We are a market leader in our chosen markets. We have strong track records and are very disciplined in the way we execute our strategy.
In other words, we are well positioned for growth. We are helping ourselves to grow in very depressed, in a very depressed market, and when that market just returns even the slightest, we are in an ideal situation to take off.
Thank you for taking the time to listen in today, operator. Please open the lines for questioning.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions)
And one moment for our first question.
Which will be coming from Ghansham Panjabi. your line is open.

Yeah thanks operator good morning everybody.
I just want to go back to the to the first quarter results specific to fiber, and just your view as it relates to whether that came in on an operating profit basis or whichever way you want to look at it in line with your plan because it was quite a bit below our expectation in context of your price increases, etc.
Thank you.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Yeah, I got you, thanks for the question. Let me go to that. It came in line with our expectations actually a little bit slightly better. Here, here's the issue that's confusing the matter.
We have a protocol for allocating SG&A across the businesses and you know we'd ask all of your patients as we've transitioned to this new business model because it's having impacts and the way that we allocate our SG&A is based on value add, which is just our price versus less raw material.
But I would tell you that gross profit is a really good proxy. And so what happens is as margins are expanding in the fiber business, it gets allocated a bigger portion of our SG&A, and somebody might say, Well, why do you do that?
Well, if you talk to virtually any CFO or controller and you talk about getting into allocations among your internal businesses, it is a rat rabbit hole you'd go down forever. I mean, people will argue about how you allocate.
So we have a basic protocol for how we've done it and it's in our former operating model, you really didn't see it because you'd go across geographies and you had all of the different segments going into those geographies.
So again I ask you to bury your patience, but yes, fiber was good for us. It's picked up a higher allocation of SG&A and then SG&A was higher than, what most of you build in your models. We thought we had done a good job of articulating the fact that we were going to have, SG&A costs, for example, for [MyE chem] in this first quarter since we didn't have it last year.
We thought we'd explained we'd made some investments that we're going to turn around. Obviously we didn't explain it enough, and so that one falls on us. We weren't doing as well as we hoped relative to all of you, as our customers slash investors.

Okay, that's very helpful, Larry.
Thank you for that. And then Oli, your comments on, the global businesses Eia being the most resilient and North America, maybe at the other extreme in terms of being the weakest, is it a difference in terms of end market exposure that would explain the two.
Because that's certainly counterintuitive relative to, the macroeconomic strength between the two regions and then related to that. You know what is your expectation in terms of volume assumptions as relates to your guidance?

Ole Rosgaard

Well, thanks.
Well, first of all, as we laid out even in 2022 and then at our recent investor today which end segments and in markets, we are targeting for growth, and all of those are GDP plus growth markets.
One of those is the agrochemical markets, and that's really where you have seen significant growth here, recently coming out of both. Yeah, but also North America for starters, and we continue to focusing on those markets and just to remind you, it's food and beverage, it's pharma and medical.
And it's flavor and fragrance in addition to agrochemicals. As to your second question, just remind me again.

Yeah, the embedded volume assumptions, as you kind of think about the portfolio for fiscal year '25.

Ole Rosgaard

Yeah, so we have seen, obviously in some of these markets I just mentioned, especially in the in the polymer markets, we have seen some sequential improvements, but I would say I would caution, being too optimistic. Generally we don't see any difference from, the previous quarter sequentially, so I haven't seen any inflection point yet.
We'll keep looking. Yeah, but you could call this green shoes, but it's too early to say anything on that. So I would, I, I'm cautiously optimistic about the future.

Got it thanks so much.

Operator

Yeah one moment for our next question.
And our next question will be coming from Matt Roberts of Raymond James, your line is open.

Hey, good morning, everybody.
Thank you for taking the questions. Maybe Larry, to that point on the SG&A that that some of us might have missed in there, could you just help us frame the margin expectation going into two and maybe how that progresses through the year and any lingering impacts we should expect in the next quarter.
I just don't want to be caught off guard on my own internal model there.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Yeah, it's a good question, Matt. Thanks.
So if you look just to give some perspective and a little more color back on on some of this element, when we look at SG&A sort of year over year in IPAC 1 it's like $11 million which, $5 million was amortization related to purchase price.
Allocations onurable items, goodwill, that kind of stuff, intangibles. You've got another element that's a little bit less clear, but when we went to this new structure relook at all of our enabling functions and where costs resided, we ended up moving some people out of what we're manufacturing channels.
To enabling functions like into Kim Kellerman's group or into supply chain out of, backwards that ended up us just doing a shift of $3 million of cost of goods sold into SGA levels on a full year basis it's like $10 million.
So I'm just talking about a quarter right now. And so you've got those two items as we go through the year. Obviously.
Once we get to when we bought APAC chem, you're going to have not that year over year increment and just generally our even margins are going to steadily improve through the year, which is typical for us. You get volume lifts which you know leverages our fixed.
Cost leverage and and those kind of things, so steady increase the margins for the remainder of the year and then that year over year comparison, matching on APAC.

Very helpful. Appreciate all the detail there, Larry. And then secondly, maybe if I could ask on the Timberland sale, do you have any additional color?
I know it's early in the process, but any additional color on this asset and how may it compare to the timberland that was sold in 2021, I believe Soterra was $9 million and even the last year versus I think less than $2 million of what you sold in 2021, so.
What are any differences that we should consider when thinking about proceeds there in terms of either you know age or or productivity of the timber there or any other business considerations of of this asset that make it different thanks again for taking the questions.

Ole Rosgaard

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, but we can't comment on timing or value at this time, and 2021 it's a long time ago. And when you look at the different tracks of Timberland and so on, it's very different. You can't really compare them.
We are highly confident in both interest and value and in fact we, on an ongoing basis receive unsolicited offers for our timberland. And we know we can get a very good price for it, but we can't comment on it at this moment in time.

That, that's certainly fair, but maybe if I could kind of a different angle on that. I believe we talked recently about that increasing polymer mix and even getting to 30% organically, so maybe once land is gone and some of the fiber closures.
We talk about what the polymer mix will be or you know what the remaining GAAP to get to that level will be is it largely due to higher growth and markets from polymers or just where you see that that shaping out. Thanks again.

Ole Rosgaard

Well, yeah, but as we explained that, both invest today in 202 and last year, we are shaping our portfolio and we have identified the end segment markets like I mentioned before AI.
Food and farm and so on as GDP plus growth in segments. Those end segments are serviced with basically polymer solutions and that's why, we talk about so much about polymer solutions.
The sale of our land is not linked to that.
The sale of our land, the proceeds will be used to pay down debt basically. And that's it, and they will, take our leverages down and give us more firepower for the future, but we will continue to focus on those segments I mentioned and grow our customized polymer business. Yeah.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Man, I'll supplement what Oli said earlier just a little bit is, while the prior sale was so long ago, it's not indicative and all pieces of land are different, it's like buy pieces. Of city downtown properties different than out in the suburbs, but everything's different.
That said, a lot of things that have been happening in in land management and our team is really good at what they do. So things like carbon sequentration, solar farms, all of those things have actually been increasing the value of timber land.
Does that mean every one of our acres is going to be worth more than the last time?
We don't know, but like Oley said, we, he's, we've gotten a lot of just inbound calls with broad offers. Most of the time they are higher values than what we got we sold before, but that doesn't guarantee anything.
The other part of that is that, we will have a tax haircut. We've said before we always have low tax bases.
And just as a perspective of time, the last time it took us about eight months to do the transaction, whether it's eight months, ten months, six months, five, we don't know, but what we're going to do is maximize value and that, that's the primary focus of this.

Larry and Ole, thank you both again.

Operator

And one moment for our next question.
And our next question will be coming from Aadit Shrestha, Stifel, your line is open.

Hi, good morning, thanks for taking my questions.
Just going back to the guide, maybe could you help us also bridge sort of the $27 million price/cost spread, how much of that is actually within fiber versus power and metals and.
And just so that I'm understanding it clearly, the $15 million to 25 million run rate savings, that's actually not built into the guidance, so that creates some sort of upside. I think you've captured $3 million of that. Is that correct?

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Yeah, that's correct. So just a bridge, so you're going from the 675 guide, the price/cost element of it is about $27 million. We have roughly $800 million tons of container board, 40 bucks, that'd be $32 million a year, half a year, 16, pick up another $3 million on our OCC cost assumption going down.
For the full year, average 87 to 82 gets you $3 million so that's 19 of that 27. The other is split across the remaining substrates, a little bit actually price increase in integrated products and benefit in both polymers and steel at, relatively small levels.

Okay, great.
Thank you. And in terms of volume so that we get it right, what, how should we think about the cadence, for, going to 22 and then, sort of the second half and for the full year? How should we think about volume year over year based on? Yeah.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

I think the way to the way to look at it, I mean, first of all you gotta build in IPA chem because we acquired it, last April. So that impacts things, for the next, month and a half, February, March and part in April.
You then have, I would say, we don't have a clear picture of what we think's going to happen on volumes. If we did, we'd have a range. I mean, that's the whole constraint here.
We don't know when the inflection is going to come, but I would say the best guide to use is just look at the same path that we've had for the past two years. I mean that's what we've got built in our guidance and that's what I'd say you should utilize in yours.
So slight, pick up in Q2, Q3, and slight fall off in Q4, generally that's, the high level stuff.

Operator

Alright thank you.
One moment for our next question.
And our next question will be coming from Michael Rockland of Truist. Your line is open.

First off, can you maybe elaborate on some of the demand trends in boxboard specifically as your closure announcement for Oustel, I think he includes commentary that Specific sub sub segments of demand were declining, and then maybe an early read on trends you're seeing right now in box board and container board.

Ole Rosgaard

And he goes over here. So total box spot, is basically flat year on year. And when you look at the URB business, then the air's protection is softest, but the tube and cors themselves, like spiral bound products, they're actually off year on year.
Until we see. A paper market inflection. We don't really see a big drive of demand, and the biggest product we have is actually core for paper. So we're selling that to paper mills. So when we see a demand inflection there, then that business will take off as well.

Got it thank you and then.
I guess covering all your your strategic actions and in the framework of that the quadrant analysis you would have had the investor day I mean are there. If you can answer more mills that fall into that kind of correction or invest to grow the best to close buckets. Or you know how much.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

We, yeah we can't Nico we couldn't comment on that right now we're looking at all of our footprint obviously that impacts human beings and jobs, so we're not going to talk about what's on a list at this point in time, but everything we have is under review as part of this cost cost optimization.

No, completely understand.
Thank you very much for the call.

Operator

One moment for our next question. Our next question will be coming from Richard Carlson of Wells Fargo. Your line is open, Richard.

Good morning guys.
So I just wanted to revisit the the Timberland cell and wonder if if that is an indication that you have a full pipeline and some some capital that you can redeploy there and then secondly I also wanted to ask about the competitive landscape specifically to polymers and metals just wondering if you're seeing any signs of stress in some of your smaller competitors.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

I'll address the first part, only Ollie said it before. We're we're selling the timberland because we looked at our portfolio. We had these incoming calls. We think it's the decision that it's a better asset for somebody else than us, and we're going to use the proceeds to pay down debt.
As Zoley's also said before, our M&A pipeline always is robust, but that doesn't mean you're going to spend it tomorrow either. It means we're analyzing a lot of things and looking at a lot of things. Our first priority right now is those paying down debt.

Ole Rosgaard

And with that, Richard, a lot of, we continue to work on our pipeline and the service that it's solid. I spent a lot of time with targets on all that, and we're not going to let up on that, but we don't always decide the timing of these things.
And with regard to to competition, basically we focus on value over volume, and that's, that serves us well in times like this when you, have, more macroeconomic, parameters or in the market, then, that competition tends to be more hungry for volume, and if we can.
Get a fair price for what we do and the service we provide. We walk away. Those customers, tend to come back to us because our service and our product quality is very high compared to a local player who wants some volume.
So we don't see that as an issue, and you'll probably ask, have you lost market shares and my answer to that is a big no, we haven't. So in other words, we're confident we're confident in our ability to maintain our market position due to our differentiated value proposition.

Very helpful thank you very much.

Operator

Our next question will be coming from Daniel Harriman of Sidoti and Company. Daniel, your line is open.

Thank you. Hey guys, good morning.
Thank you for taking my questions. Kind of following up from an earlier question with the kind of shift in focus now towards in markets over geographies and all the announcements from the investor day.
I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about the in markets in which you're most excited about and have the greatest level of confidence, as we go out through 2025 and then on the flip side.
Where you have the most concerns and then with your ability to continue to execute and operate in a difficult environment and the increase in the low end of the guide, I'd just be curious to hear your thoughts about where you are, how you feel about your current net leverage ratio.

Ole Rosgaard

I'll take the first question and I'll hand you over to Larry. So just talk about the end markets, the one we're most excited about is Agrochemical. That's the one we went into Agrochemical in a big way when we acquired Reliance Lee and APAC chem and basically became the global leader in the in that market, providing, very special solutions to the customers.
Another one that we have grown in is food and beverage, where we have some very large global customers as well. We provide solutions to the the end market that excites us as well, where, but which takes. A fair amount of time to get into is the farmer space.
We do have some, solutions, that we provide to some farmer customers, but the runway there is very long, and it takes time, but obviously that in market excites us as well.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

And Daniel relative to our leverage ratio, first of all, I mean, obviously we were thrilled that our board was wholeheartedly supportive of us moving forward on selling our land business. Although it's hard to part ways with our colleagues who are so wonderful and great down there, but it's the right thing for us.
Obviously those net proceeds are going to help us lower our debt ratio quite significantly. That said, even if we weren't, I am have not been at a discomfort level at all because we're operating well in a very difficult environment and as we've said before, if we recover to just normal volume levels out of this industrial recession whenever this Happens.
I mean, we're looking at $150 million of EBITDA to lift from just that, and that doesn't even take into impact our cost optimization efforts and even that billion dollars dollar bridge we showed at Investor Day didn't include the most recent price increase.
So we've got lots of factors here that are driving EBITDA up. So that debt leverage ratio is going to come down very rapidly as the industrial economy improves.

That's really helpful. I really appreciate it guys and best of luck in the quarter.

Lawrence Hilsheimer

Thank you, Daniel. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back to Ole Rosgaard for closing remarks.

Ole Rosgaard

Thank you, and I would like to thank, our analysts and our investors for your time today and for your continued interest and investment in growth.
We remain committed to delivering exceptional results and are focused on accelerating our performance towards our 2027 commitments of $1 billion EBITDA and $500 million in free cash flow.
We are confident that our relentless pursuit of operational excellence and our customer-centric growth will create enduring value for all our stakeholders.
Thank you.

Operator

And this concludes today's conference call.
Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.