Amcor plc (AMCR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

February 26, 2025

New York Stock Exchange US Materials Containers and Packaging conference_presentation 38 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

George Staphos

analyst
#1

Welcoming Amcor to be presenting at our conference, we have Chief Executive Officer, P.K. Konieczny; Chief Financial Officer, Michael Casamento. Michael, P.K., welcome.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#2

Thank you.

George Staphos

analyst
#3

And, also in the audience, we have Damon Wright from the company's wonderful Investor Relations [ effort ]. And also, if you're in the session just at lunch, we have David Clark, Head of Sustainability for the company. So should be another wonderful discussion, we hope. Things have been going well for Amcor.

George Staphos

analyst
#4

P.K., what -- you've been on the road a little bit. What have you been telling to the extent possible about kind of your exit trends from fiscal 2Q into this current quarter, calendar 1Q? And what are the questions you're getting from investors in particular?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#5

Yes, sure. First of all, thanks for having us, George.

George Staphos

analyst
#6

It's our honor and pleasure.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#7

To your question, we are talking about, obviously, trading of the business and where we're at. Of course, a packaging company, as you would all know, have about $14 billion top line, we're global. And we do -- this is very important to calibrate, what we're doing is primary packaging, primary packaging for consumer goods in the areas of food, health care and beverage, okay? So keep that in mind because packaging can be a lot of things. We do this type of packaging. So in terms of exit trends of our second quarter, which was the last calendar year quarter, I think we've been on a good journey for a couple of quarters now with sequential improvements. What's really important for us is that we drive volume performance. And we exited the second quarter as the fourth quarter with sequential volume improvement, which was good and obviously well appreciated by everybody. We have 2 areas which are holding us back a bit -- or have been holding us back a bit. One is our exposure to North American Beverage and the other one is health care, for different reasons. In North American beverage, we have a consumer that is -- and we're serving products which are very discretionary and the consumer demand is down and low and muted, and we continue to see that. On health care, we have seen continued destocking. The other categories that we serve in food and beverage have ended the destocking trend a little while ago, but health care was a little delayed and phased. But we're now at a point where we see the destocking in health care having come to an end. And we are very bullish on health care that health care will return overall to growth again in the back half of the year. So good volume performance overall. If you exclude North American beverage and Healthcare, actually, we saw 4% in the rest of the business, which is about 75% of our top line. So that's a pretty solid volume performance for our business. Including a further expanded margin, we were able to translate that to the bottom line. EBIT and EPS were up 5%. We had better cash flow than the year before. We drove leverage down to 3.3%, which is pretty much where we expected. So it's been a pretty good journey for us. And going forward, again, in terms of destocking, that's over even for health care. Health care is a pretty margin-rich category that, as you would expect. So we've seen a bit of a mix headwind in the past. Now that's getting better as we continue to go through '25. And all of that gave us reasons to reaffirm guidance for the year. So we're feeling good about that. That's the short-term kind of trading performance of the business. But then the other one, real quick, if you allow me, George.

George Staphos

analyst
#8

Please.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#9

Is about the latest developments on our acquisition, which is the combination with Berry Global, which we obviously get a lot of questions on. One question is, where do you stand? Is this thing going to close and when? The answer is yes, it will close. We had a very important milestone yesterday, yesterday afternoon with the shareholders voting on the combination. Both Amcor and Berry's shareholders have both been very supportive of the deal. So that's a major milestone that's behind us. Now the only other thing that we -- the only other thing that we need to get is all regulatory approvals in terms of antitrust and FDI, Foreign Direct Investment. And look, we filed the documentation a little while ago in all the jurisdictions where we had to file. We hold a number of approvals already in our hands. And where we don't have them yet, we're in a good way. The conversations that we have are all positive, nothing that would worry us at this point in time that would give us, again, the confidence to confirm sort of by midyear, the transaction is going to close. And then we get a lot of questions, but I'll stop there. Otherwise, I'll talk too long about sort of the benefits and why we're doing this and so on and so forth, but I'm sure we're going to get into it.

George Staphos

analyst
#10

Sure. And no, that's a wonderful rundown. It wasn't one of the questions that I had relayed to you as a potential topic for this discussion. This is not a trick question that's coming, so don't worry. But the company has done such a good job over the years of driving operating leverage and driving improvement in productivity. Ex-Berry, which will presumably close and will give you lots of opportunity to drive synergies. Where do you stand in that regard, Michael? And what is the company doing differently in that regard now than maybe would have been the case 5 years ago? And certainly, along with that, you've also had sort of the residual element of your cost reduction program, which was a byproduct or a strategy that came about after the Russian business was divested? So catch us up there because I think it's an important part of the story and sometimes gets missed by people.

Michael Casamento

executive
#11

Yes, I think you're essentially talking about the margin enhancement over a long period of time, right?

George Staphos

analyst
#12

Absolutely. Yes.

Michael Casamento

executive
#13

So Amcor has, over a long period of time, been able to drive improvements in margins. And we talk typically, we should be driving kind of 20 to 30 basis points improvement per annum. That will vary from year-to-year depending on whether you've been doing acquisitions, whether you're getting some synergies or whether it's just the normal base. But I think, George, we've been very focused on driving productivity, improving the mix through the innovation agenda, continually advancing the portfolio in that way. Cost out is a strong focus of Amcor, the ability to drive procurement savings through our scale, the global footprint, continuing to assess the footprint. The investment in the capital spend, also, we're investing kind of 3% to 4% in CapEx every year, which helps drive ongoing efficiency improvements as well as organic growth. So they've been the key drivers of getting that margin enhancement. And as we look forward, I think we just see more opportunity around that as a result of the merger. The portfolio continues to be more focused on higher growth, higher margin categories. I think we called out in our material as part of the on -- announcement, we've got now nearly $10 billion worth of revenues that are -- so 40% of the combined company that are now in higher growth, higher margin categories, things like health care, protein, and the like. So that's an opportunity to continue to drive margin expansion. Clearly, Berry's margins are a little higher than Amcor on the portfolio that we're acquiring. And then you put the synergies on top of that. So we do see EBITDA margins continuing to improve. And over time, we would also continue to expand them by 20 to 30 basis points on everything that I've just said.

George Staphos

analyst
#14

Remind me on Berry -- I'm going to come back to it later, but Berry's margins were higher, but was the business also perhaps from what you can see, and you'll know more, hopefully, by the middle of the year, more capital intensive? And so maybe your business is lower margin, but it might be higher quality because it's not as capital intensive. Just thinking out loud here.

Michael Casamento

executive
#15

Look, I think when you compare the 2 businesses together, Amcor's EBITDA margin is around 15%, so good margin. Berry is about 17% on the portfolio we get. And when we combine the 2 and then add the synergies, we kind of get to 18% EBITDA margin on the base. So really, really good margins on that front. Probably the key differences between the 2, it's not a big difference, but the key differences really are -- there's a bit of a geographic difference. So Berry is a much bigger focus in North America, which typically you tend to see on North American businesses slightly higher margins. Amcor has more exposure to emerging markets in Asia and LatAm, which can have a difference. I think the product portfolio, in some cases, Berry have slightly higher margin products, particularly in things like their closures business, which is not a typical closure for a bottle. It's more high margin multi-component delivery systems, dispensing systems. So there are some slight differences in the product portfolio that lend that to the margin enhancement.

George Staphos

analyst
#16

Thanks, Michael. So a lot of the discussion, a lot of the questions that I'm sure you're all getting, certainly our companies and we are getting is what -- to the extent that you know, the impact of any tariff trade policy that's been discussed relative to either products that you're serving, recognizing that most of what you do is local for local and supply chain, anything that we need to worry about in terms of aluminum, fiber, resin, getting to where it needs to be to your converting operations to serve your customers? Anything that we should be sort of building into our outlook for you, P.K.?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#17

Yes, maybe I'll start, and MC, if you want to build, that's perfectly fine. Obviously, a lot of focus on the questions that we're getting on tariffs and what does it mean for us? We have a strong focus and representation in the U.S., but this is mostly a U.S. issue. And we have about 50% of the combined top line of the company in the U.S., we're very comfortable with that. We like that. And then the other 50% is outside of the U.S., 30% would be in Europe, and then you have the other 20% sort of split between Asia Pacific and Latin America. So that's about the split. Now in terms of tariffs, we -- maybe you listen into the earnings call that we had after the second quarter, I said something and that was quoted a lot. We're not immune, but we're pretty robust with regards to tariffs. And why am I saying that? First of all, as George has said, we are a local-for-local business. So we have -- where we operate, we produce locally or regionally, we buy locally and regionally, and then we sell locally and regionally. We do that for different reasons. But even as we have gone through a period of market dislocation with corona, supply chain shocks and everything, if anything, supply chains have become shorter, not longer. And we did that on purpose because we just wanted to have more robust supply chains for our customers. So already then, we've been on a track record not knowing what would be happening with tariffs, obviously. That all said, Michael can dimensionalize that, but we have a smaller portion of material actually that we need to import in order to convert product. And to the extent we need to do that, we feel like we have a pretty good opportunity to pass on the additional cost to our customers.

Michael Casamento

executive
#18

Yes. And I think just to contextualize it...

George Staphos

analyst
#19

Your contracts allow for pass-through of even tariffs and that sort of...

Michael Casamento

executive
#20

Yes. I think to contextualize it, it's probably in terms of our purchases in the U.S., it's about 10% that we import. So it's a small component of the total. And it's aluminum or specialty resins typically where you can't get those locally. Obviously, the tariffs will increase the base price, but that will change the indices and then we would pass through that based on the indices. So we feel pretty confident there's minimal impact on the pass-through approach, George.

George Staphos

analyst
#21

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, PK. Any questions from the audience? Okay. We'll to keep forging ahead here. The company has given guidance, obviously, on earnings this year. Certainly, as we reverse engineer the numbers, looks like margins should be trending higher this year. Tell us when the question comes up to the extent that you can comment, because I don't recall the specific reference if there was one. What's your outlook on return as you typically calculate? Should we be expecting a bit of an uptick in return this year? And if there's a way you can dimensionalize that for us, if possible?

Michael Casamento

executive
#22

Yes, the way we think about returns -- return on funds employed. So for Amcor, we're tracking around 15% -- 15%, 16%. It doesn't -- it's not expected to move significantly.

George Staphos

analyst
#23

I understand.

Michael Casamento

executive
#24

I think but around 15% to 16%. We've seen continual improvement in that since the Bemis acquisition. So prior to Bemis, we were more in the high teens. Drop down to around 11% or 12%. And then consistently over the last several years, you've seen that tick back up to the 15%, 16%. So we've been pretty pleased with where the returns have ended up.

George Staphos

analyst
#25

But from -- when we did some very quick calculations on your mix, making some assumptions and the relative growth rates, yes, in fact, the margins do tend to tick up 20, 30 bps. So we should see the return more or less mirror...

Michael Casamento

executive
#26

Yes, should tick up a little more as well.

George Staphos

analyst
#27

When we think about where the consumer is right now, we've heard a lot about the consumer is still so much stressed in the U.S. depending on who I've spoken with or who's been in the room, perhaps more so in the states as a consumer body versus, say, Europe, where there's a view that maybe consumers in Europe have a greater ability to pay for staples and things like that. Where do you see consumer trends right now? I -- is promotional activity where you had expected it to be this time of the year? Is it giving your -- the consumer enough of a tailwind to keep buying your products? So some broad questions around consumer promotion.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#28

I understand. Look, generally, we sort of try to understand our own growth performance in the context of 4 drivers. One is the consumer, and that's what the question is about. So I'll get back to that. The second one is our customer and the customer performance, and that was part also of your question. The third one that we had to spend a little time on in the past was just simply destocking and destocking trends. We will drop that one going forward because we believe destocking is over. I just made the comment, right? We had the last category with health care drop off of the destocking. And the fourth one is our own ability to gain share, okay? And the latter one actually starts looking a little better on the back of the many things that we have started to do a couple of years ago to strengthen the business. But your question was more about the first 2. So to the consumer -- and I'm sure everybody has their own views here in the room on the consumer. The way that I would phrase it is the consumer is certainly still in a spot where there is generally a value-seeking behavior with the consumer. That's how I would describe it. And that's a result of having gone through a period of significant inflation. And we're all happy that inflation numbers are curbing and they're settling again, maybe not as quickly as we want them to settle, but they're coming down, obviously. The only thing that's not coming down anymore is the price of the product on the shelf. And these prices have significantly increased. And there is an element of discretionary income, obviously. And -- but there is also an element of just psychology. I believe the consumer needs to sort of absorb and get used to the new prices of product on the shelf. I believe that will happen over time. The question is how long it's going to take. But I've never seen prices really come backwards, go backwards. So I think we are in a new reality and that sort of drives consumer behavior on the one side, with regards to discretionary spend, there is more of discipline around that. So consumers are wondering, do I need to buy that? Yes, no. On the other hand, there is changed buying behaviors, which typically you would see go into bulk buying. So there's larger portions that are being bought or just, again, value seeking in terms of multipacks is, again, an element of bulk buying, I guess, or downtrading. Downtrading is also something that we see, right, where people sort of go away from brands that they're very familiar with and they're ready to sort of down trade into other products. I think we're still seeing that. We're still seeing that. And that's why from our perspective, we would not hang our hat on an improved or stronger consumer buying behavior going forward in terms of expecting better volume performance for the company. You may call that conservative. I would call that more realistic probably at this point in time. We would like to see a little more life in the consumer, again, coming back with the consumer spending before we would actually bet on that. But our guidance would not include that.

George Staphos

analyst
#29

Okay. So I was going to say, P.K., so to dimensionalize the -- it -- that you're not expecting much improvement in is the willingness for a consumer to spend a little bit more...

Peter Konieczny

executive
#30

Yes, consumer spending going up.

George Staphos

analyst
#31

So is this an environment that's relatively good for Amcor's customers because it's a lot of -- even if it's a premium, I mean, it's a really affordable luxury, right? We're talking about Nespresso capsules. We're talking about protein packaging. Or is it something that your customers and their products, and therefore, you maybe are a little disadvantaged in? How do you -- how should we see that?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#32

I'm not -- well, I mean, sometimes there's downtrading opportunities in sort of the same product category, right? And we end up sort of providing the same packaging. It's different -- just a different brand, just a different company that offers the same product, right? So from that end, I wouldn't necessarily say that we're disadvantaged. There are some categories like when we think about our North American Beverage business, which I do call out on the calls, which I do talk about. So here, we are serving the isotonics category. These are like just a couple of examples like Gatorade, power bottles, right, ready-to-drink teas. So that's sort of the North American beverage market that we serve. And our package, our product or our customers' product goes through the convenience stores to a large extent, through cold chains, where picture a consumer that pulls up a car in the gas station, right, and then walks in, pay -- if they do walk in, but they do walk in and then they sort of get themselves a drink and then they consume it on the way out. That's the type of stuff that's discretionary. That's what we're seeing. So that's where we see an immediate impact. On some of the other products that are higher margin calorie premium products, we see some improvement that has happened. But generally speaking, I think we're in the same spot as many others. So I don't think that we're particularly disadvantaged nor are we advantaged with our positioning.

George Staphos

analyst
#33

Are your customers relaying at all any imperatives that retailers are putting on them now that might not have been the case 2 years ago? Or is it really the same request for value from them, promotional support? And then the question is, if there is any change, how is it sort of reflecting back on Amcor and what you're doing for your customers?

Michael Casamento

executive
#34

Well, the other question that you asked earlier on the customers, and maybe that gives us a bit of something to talk about or that gives you a bit of an answer is how are the customers reacting to this, right? And we're seeing an environment where the customers generally sort of are thinking about their own volume performance as they go to market. So this comes back to the whole idea of how much promotional activities do we see. If you go back and you sort of put yourself back into the times of really high inflation, our customers, to a large extent, they have driven price in order to pass input costs to the consumers, no question. And the reality is there was a bit of margin creep going on at that point, too. So -- and for that reason, they were able to compromise some volumes for profitability of the product. And we've seen these things happen before everybody goes through cycles. Now the high inflation environment is gone, and therefore, the lever is somewhat also gone. And now customers are coming back to finding a better balance between price on the one side and volume performance on the other. And that leads to some more promotional activity, and we see that in some cases, too. So when I go back to the drivers of our performance, we discussed consumers and now essentially also answered the question on the customers.

George Staphos

analyst
#35

Thanks, P.K. Any questions from the audience? Maybe next, we'll move to Berry since it's obviously going to be a large opportunity for the company. And one of the questions that we had, which you partly answered already, like what are the next mile markers in terms of the transaction? And ultimately closing on it, you got your shareholder votes, can you talk at all on what the regulators have been sort of peering into in terms of combination? From our vantage point, we don't see -- even though it's 2 very, very large packaging companies and largely plastic packaging companies, not a lot of overlap, but I don't sit as a regulator, what are they peering into?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#36

Well, it is [indiscernible]. It is -- well, to the extent I can talk about it, you said a very important thing that regulators are typically very worried about, right, which is the degree of overlap. And this is a very complementary acquisition. Amcor is very big on Flexibles. Berry is very big on containers and closures to keep it very simple. There's a bit of an overlap. Amcor has a scale containers business. This is our Rigid Packaging business. Berry has a scale Flexibles business. So that will sort of strengthen each other's activities as we go forward. But generally speaking, also in terms of the end market segments, it is something that is very, very complementary. There's very little overlap, very little overlap. And I'm a little uncomfortable to go any further into details, very little overlap.

George Staphos

analyst
#37

I understand.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#38

And the conversations are either concluded already. This is where we have the approvals in hand and we're not -- we are talking about those areas, which are very small. And when you go to the merger agreement, you will see that we've made an allowance in there up to $500 million of top line that we would potentially be ready to divest should there be any issue. And I don't have any reasons to believe that we would even get close to it. I would even sit here today and say, we may not even need that. So that's where that stands. So there's a pretty high degree of confidence on the regulatory approval side.

George Staphos

analyst
#39

One of the questions I know you've gotten in the past is on the synergy outlook. We've never done an acquisition. You've done a number of them as an enterprise over the years. How do you get comfort in synergies when you can't actually get in and look under the hood? And in turn, taking the other way around, the synergy guidance that you've provided looks to be relatively achievable, let's put it that way, relative to the scale of your business.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#40

Appreciate the confidence.

George Staphos

analyst
#41

So help us understand, one, how you do it; and two, just looking at it very simplistically, numbers on a spreadsheet, it looks like you should be able to achieve that pretty readily? But I'm not -- I don't sit where you sit, P.K. and Michael?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#42

I didn't [indiscernible] for this, by the way. No, look, I mean, back to your question, how do we come to dimensionalizing some of the synergy pool? First off, we've done a few acquisitions. And there is a few benchmarks out there that you can go to. We have our own. I've been with the company now for 15 years, and I actually joined Amcor for the longer stint that was there before, but then I got divested actually, and then they brought me back in. But they brought me back in for the Alcan acquisition that we did in 2010. That was a transformational acquisition. We did another one in 2019 with Bemis, which was a couple of years ago. And now we do this one. So we have a bit of a track record, and we look at those things and we sort of compare and contrast and so that we're just not getting out of line. That's one. The second thing is, we do, obviously, in the lead up to that, nobody is going to be surprised. We're trying to get some outside help and dimensionalize opportunities in the lead up to these conversations. Berry Global did the same thing. So you have consultants that would have a view and that gives you 2 more calibration points that you can go after. And then there is the data base that you have available is what you can publicly access, obviously. And that then leads up to the financial model that underlines the -- essentially the offer that you make for the business under which you then start negotiating. Then after that, you start integration planning. Now you're somewhat committed already because you sort of made a promise to the market. And Michael can talk a little bit more to the numbers themselves and sort of put them into perspective. But since then, since the announcement of the deal, we go ahead and we have integration teams working together from both sides. Now to a large extent, you're still working with the same data set, but you have more opportunities to look at that and to sort of get a better feel for it. At some point, when you get closer to the actual conclusion of the deal, you have what we call clean team exercises where you bring people into a room that actually see the data and -- but those people, unless the deal comes through, they can no longer work with the company. So typically, that is also very much fueled with consultants. None of what I'm saying here is news to anybody in the room. But that's sort of how you triangulate yourself through the opportunity. And then the other piece is putting it all into context. Maybe you want to talk about that?

Michael Casamento

executive
#43

Yes, maybe just to touch on that. So we've announced $650 million in synergies over the 3-year period. And that's broken down into $530 million of straight cost, $60 million of revenue synergies and $60 million of financial synergies on the back of interest and tax. The revenue synergies is the EBITDA coming from additional growth, which isn't -- we've put that out there. We didn't do that as part of the Bemis transaction, but we really feel confident around delivering some additional growth as a result of the combination. We can talk more about that, P.K. On the cost side, the $530 million is really broken down into procurement, SG&A and then some operational improvements through footprint enhancement. Procurement is the biggest piece, $325 million. And just to put the total in context, so the $530 million of cost is about 5% of Berry sales. So when you triangulate that across all the different metrics that we looked at and the industry averages, that's right in the range there. So it seemed to make sense. You then drive down into the individual components, procurement of $325 million. The total addressable cost of goods spend of the combined companies is about $13 billion, of which about $10 billion is raw materials. So to put the $325 million into context, that's somewhere between 2.5% to 3% of the total spend. If you even think about that over an annual basis, over 3 years, that's kind of 1% a year, which is things that we would be targeting anyway. So I think we feel pretty good about that. And that's really coming from the fact that both companies buy raw materials, but similar raw materials, but in different weights. And so there's opportunity to get some aligned pricing as well as you've just got bigger scale in terms of your purchasing. And then in addition to that, you've got indirect categories like transport and warehousing, et cetera. So we feel pretty good about the procurement and SG&A is really the overlap. And then on the footprint side, you've got 400 sites combined. There is a little bit of overlap on some of those sites. So we see opportunity to revise the footprint and drive the benefits on the operational side.

George Staphos

analyst
#44

Michael, what's the pro forma revenue of the combined entity? $24 billion?

Michael Casamento

executive
#45

Yes. Yes. Okay. I don't -- you want to touch on the revenue synergies or...

George Staphos

analyst
#46

Well, yes, I'm just saying the $500 million, you equated to 5% of sales, but...

Michael Casamento

executive
#47

Of the acquired sales.

George Staphos

analyst
#48

Yes. But I'm just...

Michael Casamento

executive
#49

Yes, on the combined, it's much smaller, yes. Yes -- make that -- and look, you'd expect us -- we've committed to a number externally, and you'd expect us to have confidence in delivering that number. On the Bemis acquisition, just as an aside, we talked about $180 million in synergies, and we outperformed that we said at least by 10%. So we did better than that. Clearly, in the $650 million, we've allocated some contingency in there. So we feel pretty confident in delivery overall.

George Staphos

analyst
#50

So let's get away from the numbers for a minute, but from a sort of a day-to-day practical standpoint, as you got into Alcan, as you got into Bemis, very fine companies, not trying to cast shade on anyone. But what did you find if there was a common theme where Amcor was able to quickly optimize and drive the synergies? What were the sort of categories do companies not do as effective a job of indexing or lean or what have you? With those acquisitions, what did you find? And hopefully, maybe there's some of that for Berry?

Peter Konieczny

executive
#51

You want me to start and you have a moment to think?

Michael Casamento

executive
#52

Yes.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#53

It's always -- it's a very broad question, right, because...

George Staphos

analyst
#54

I'm good at those.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#55

Yes, I can see that. And every acquisition is different in a way. And then across the business, you will find areas where maybe the target is better than Amcor is. And that may be possible. I'll give you an example, Bemis -- the Bemis acquisition, we were very attracted to the R&D capabilities of Bemis. And I think they were more of a material science company than Amcor has been. I see some support here from the audience. So that's something that we very much liked and we made good use of that going forward in terms of driving sustainability and recycle-ready products, which is a journey that we got on pretty much at the time and that we have completed now. Today, we have 95% of everything that we sell. We have recycle-ready alternatives ready on the shelf for trials with customers. They're not all commercial. We heard a bit of that in the sustainability lunch meeting today why that is. But we're in [ pull ] position. So when that comes, we can go forward, and we needed to prove that point. So we were very attractive there with Bemis. Bemis, had a great advantage with the core of their business being in the U.S. The U.S. is the big homogeneous market where you run plants at scale and you have scale advantages. If you compare that with Amcor's big Flexibles footprint of the time in Europe, you are much more scattered fragmented with your footprint, right? So there were opportunities for us to learn from each other while obviously scale is something that you either create or you have, you don't, right? That's something else. Where I think Amcor was strong in that particular case and also strong on the Alcan case was in terms of commercial excellence capabilities. Commercial excellence, we have a commercial excellence program, which we brand as Value+. We've put a lot of work into that within Amcor because at a certain point in time, we had a need to expand margins. And we built a commercial excellence program around that, that essentially helped us do that. And people that look at us from the outside, they would sometimes characterize Amcor as a margin expansion machine. We have, at the time, we've been very successful with that. that has a lot of different elements and activities that sort of go under that commercial excellence program in terms of the initiatives, but we expanded margins quite a bit, and we obviously applied that also to the product portfolio of the businesses that we acquire. And whenever we do that, we're pretty good. Both companies or all acquisitions together has led us to drive our procurement capabilities. And we figured, particularly as a packaging company, you got to be efficient on the input side. And that's anyway, something that you need to do. But when you generate scale, you even more so have an opportunity to do it. So we're probably today at a higher level in procurement, we're probably not the best out there. There's always others that are better than us. But like relatively comparing ourselves to ourselves a few years ago, we would have definitely made significant progress. So we feel pretty good about that. I don't know.

Michael Casamento

executive
#56

Yes. I think the other thing I would say that we've learned over a long journey is just the integration approach and an absolutely dedicated team to integration. So that's key, and you've got to have that in place early on. So we already have our dedicated integration team in place for this one. We allocate teams by function and also the synergy areas so that you've got an early planning approach to that. We've got people from both sides, both companies involved in that team already, the consistent approach to that. So we have the leader of that team who ran the integration for Bemis and was involved in Alcan. So it's the same team, the same playbook. So I think that's really important to be able to get out of the gates early, George. And really, you've got to get synergies once you -- as soon as you can to get out of the gate. And I think that's part of the focus of that integration team right now is around planning for that so we can hit the ground running on day one.

George Staphos

analyst
#57

Michael, on that point, so if I'm envisioning it correctly, there'll be, for example, a -- I don't know what you'd call it, but a footprint team lead who's looking at all 400 facilities or will be charged with that, he or she, and there'll be somebody who's working on sales integration there that...

Peter Konieczny

executive
#58

Absolutely. Procurement...

George Staphos

analyst
#59

I would say on commercial excellence, you folks were way ahead of the curve before anybody else that I knew of who was in consumer packaging going back late 2000s, early 2010. So it's paid dividends. We're finishing up here. Are there any questions in the audience for P.K. or Michael or Damon or David for that matter? Going once, going twice. If not, please join me in thanking Amcor for a great presentation.

Peter Konieczny

executive
#60

Thank you.

Michael Casamento

executive
#61

Thank you for having us.

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