O-I Glass, Inc. (OI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Right. Well, good morning. And continuing our morning session, we're very pleased to welcome Andres Lopez, CEO of O-I Glass [indiscernible]; as well John Haudrich, CFO. And I think Andres has some opening comments, and then we'll jump into Q&A.

Thank you, Anthony, and the Citi team for hosting us today. This morning, I plan to discuss how O-I represents an attractive investment opportunity. Afterwards, we'll be happy to take your questions. Before we proceed, please review the safe harbor comments on Slide 2, and various disclosures found in our presentation, which is posted on our website. On Slide 3, you will see a high-level profile for the company. O-I is the global leader in glass packaging. We serve a typically stable and steadily growing food and beverage industry, supporting more than 6,000 customers. These customers value our dedication to service and our unparalleled production network to meet their needs across the globe reflected in a strong and continuously increasing Net Promoter Score. As the industry leader in innovation, we are proud to make glass, the most sustainable packaging solution. Likewise, it is the preferred substrate by most consumers given its premium characteristics and their increased focus on health and wellness. With Paddock's final resolution of its legacy asbestos-related liabilities last year, we expect to generate substantially more cash flow that can be deployed to improve our business profitability and strengthen our balance sheet and create value for our shareholders. At the same time, we are developing a revolutionary new glass production process that will drive profitable growth and boost our financial performance. Let me expand on this strategy starting on Slide 4. I strongly believe O-I represents an attractive investment opportunity. Over the past few years, we have developed a very good track record of high performance. In fact, we have either met or exceeded expectations for 13 consecutive quarters and significantly improved our capital structure. This improved performance is supported by agile execution enabled by the strong capabilities we have built over the last few years and the bold actions we are taking to transform O-I. Likewise, we are capitalizing on favorable trends, such as premiumization, health and wellness to drive profitable long-term growth. Importantly, MAGMA represents a breakthrough innovation that creates a new paradigm for glass to meet the needs of an evolving market. Finally, with glass as the most sustainable packaging option, O-I is set to win in the new green economy as we execute our ESG plan, which is fully integrated into our long-term strategy. Let's expand on each aspect of our strategy a bit more. Moving to Page 5, we have delivered consistent adjusted earnings and balance sheet improvement over the past several years. As you can see on the left, adjusted earnings per share has increased nicely since 2020. As shown on the right, we have significantly reduced our financial leverage over the past few years in addition to resolving Paddock's legacy asbestos liabilities. Overall, our balance sheet is in the best position in over a decade. I'm now on Slide 6. We have been -- we have also been hard at work transforming the company. The team started by building a simple, agile and effective organization. We have improved our structure as we divested noncore assets result legacy liabilities and continue to improve our balance sheet. We are more cost competitive as a result of our margin expansion initiatives, which have generated more than $350 million of benefits over the past several years. As a result of this effort, O-I has been able to overcome elevated market volatility, reduced debt. Now we are squarely focused on advancing breakthrough innovations like MAGMA and ULTRA. All this will support profitable growth, which we believe will resume in 2024. On Slide 7, you see the key benefits of MAGMA, which is O-I's new proprietary glass production system, leveraging new breakthrough technology. Our heritage network is a great fit for many of the categories we have served for decades and will continue to serve into the future, given the strength in health and wellness and sustainability. There are significant future opportunities in a broader rate of end-use categories, which tend to be more differentiated and fragmented. MAGMA is a perfect fit to expand these categories. MAGMA Is more flexible, sustainable and can be more rapidly deployed. It can be colocated with both supply chain efficiency. It is more cost effective with lower capital intensity. Likewise, MAGMA can be used with ULTRA to allow significant container lightweighting, and MAGMA will enable future use of carbon-free energy sources like hydrogen or biofuels. So it increases convenience and sustainability. MAGMA represents a majorly forwarding how glass is produced and will expand O-I's right to win in its addressable market. Overall, we are targeting returns in excess of 20% for future MAGMA expansion projects. Moving to Slide 8, we are very excited about our first MAGMA greenfield plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is on track for initial commercialization in mid-2024. We are designing the plant to be a showcase facility that will demonstrate all of our next-generation capabilities. This new state-of-the-art plant will include the MAGMA melter, new modular batch system and pilot forming machines. You will fully -- it will be fully digitized and high performance, and will have a high-performance operating model. This highly scalable plant will eventually include all MAGMA Generation 1, Generation 2 and Generation 3 solutions, which with the next-generation sustainability features as well as our ULTRA lightweighting system. Located close to the Bourbon Trail, the Bowling Green plan will demonstrate the value of near location and will be a key hub for future customer collaboration, investors business and demonstration of O-I's next-generation capabilities. Let's look to Page 9. Sustainability is another critical element of our strategy, as glass is set to win in the new green economy. Glass is already the most sustainable packaging solution. And as noted earlier, our comprehensive ESG plan is now fully integrated into our long-term strategy. As you can see on this page, we are making solid progress, improving the sustainability of our manufacturing process, and more details are in the appendix. I also encourage all of you to take a look at our sustainability report, which can be found on the company's website. Let me take a moment to discuss market trends on Slide 10. Currently, we are facing a unique set of conditions that have led to a temporary decoupling of consumer consumption patterns and demand for glass containers. The chart on the right illustrates Nielsen retail consumer consumption trends for the categories that we serve and O-I's glass shipments since mid-2022. We also include our current view of [indiscernible] 2024. As you can see, consumer consumption is down low to mid-single digits across the categories that we serve, yet glass shipments have been measurably below this level. We have noted widespread inventory stocking across the value chain as our customers, distributors and retailers adjust their inventory management practices. We believe this change is adjusting for high initial inventories in the supply chain as well as foreign sluggish consumption. By wise, supply chains are recalibrating for more moderate future growth and higher interest rates, which push up the carry cost of inventory. Again, we believe the current situation is temporary, and we expect demand will rebound as we go into 2024. In summary, we expect low to mid-single-digit sales volume growth in 2024. Let's move to Slide 11. O-I is a much more agile and capable organization than in the past, and we have executed well to overcome its challenges over the past several years. We are again acting with agility to navigate the current market situation and taking 4 specific steps. First, we are curtailing capacity given softer demand to adjust inventory levels as we head into 2024. Second, we are accelerating plant network optimization actions across North America as we aim to reposition this business towards more profitable fragmented categories, which are a great fit for MAGMA in the future. Third, O-I is expanding and accelerating our margin expansion initiatives. This includes numerous automation projects as well as additional organization restructuring assets. Fourth, we are reducing our capital expenditures. We remain focused on completing our MAGMA greenfield plant by mid-2024, yet, we have extended the timeline of our expansion projects in Brazil, Peru and Scotland by 6 to 12 months to better align with the market recovery. Importantly, our recently expanded plant in Colombia is now fully utilized to support double-digit year-on-year growth in this key market. While we must contend with the macros, we are again taking proactive measures to drive improvement across the business levers that we control as we aim to deliver a strong performance next year. On Page 12, we have recapped O-I's business outlook shared during our third quarter earnings call. As you can see on the left, we indicated full year adjusted earnings should approximate $3 per share, which will represent a 30% increase from 2022 adjusted EPS and the highest results in the past 15 years. While we are not updating our guidance, quarter 2 sales volume and operating performance trends remain consistent with this outlook. On the right, we see our preliminary view on the 5 key levers that will drive our business performance in 2024. As discussed earlier, we expect low to mid-single-digit sales volume growth next year supported by a growing NPD pipeline. Yet, it will likely take more than -- more time to get a clear view on net price of negotiations have just begun, and many of our annual sales agreements -- many of our annual sales agreements. Importantly, we are accelerating our very successful margin expansion program to help boost operating performance. CapEx should be down, while interest expense will increase consistent with prevailing rates. Keep in mind, we have good line of sight on the levers that we can control such as cost management and CapEx, while it will take some time to gain clarity on certain market-driven factors. As you can see, we are taking active measures to drive performance across several business levers. We expect to provide full year 2024 guidance during our year-end earnings call. On Slide 13, you can see how we prioritize capital allocation NOI. Improving our capital structure remains our top capital allocation priority and leverage should end the year comfortably below 3x. We will continue to reduce debt consistent with our glide path to 2.5x leverage over the next year or 2. Our second priority is to fund profitable growth, which includes our growth, our current $630 million expansion program that should be completed in 2025. Returning value to shareholders is our next priority, in addition to our current anti-dilutive share repurchase program, we may evaluate additional share repurchases or reinstate a dividend as we get closer to our capital structure objectives. Let me conclude on Slide 14. O-I is executing well in a challenging environment as we continue to advance key strategic objectives. We expect a strong [ 2023 ] results with adjusted earnings up about 30% from the prior year, representing the best performance in the past 15 years. While we contend with elevated market uncertainty, we are taking action to drive a strong performance as markets recover. Finally, we remain highly focused on executing our compelling strategy to create long-term shareholder value. We are confident this strategy will create value for all the stakeholders. Thank you for your interest in O-I Glass. Anthony, we're ready for your questions. Appreciate it.

All right. Thank you. Maybe we just start with kind of confidence in volume growth in '24. I guess first, can you talk about what level of sort of visibility you have in terms of customer demand, order patterns, et cetera? And then in terms of what that implies for destocking, sort of run its course, or you expect it to run its course...

Yes. So a few things. We saw our lowest point for the year in September. And October and November have improved from that point and they've been about the same. So that's an important development. Our actuals have been very close to forecast, pretty much on forecast over the last 2 months, which is -- has been something we've been building or preparing ourselves forward because of the very drastic drop in volume. We are observing already stabilization and improvement in all markets for some segments. So for example, in Europe, beer is showing that NAB's, food as well, beer in the Andean countries is very strong, spirits are very strong. In fact, in that market, we flipped from a significant negative in high teens to a significant positive high teen store. We are seeing food and NAB, better performance in North America. So we are projecting better. We believe if we are already reading that well, we are performing in line with that, and we're seeing very positive signals coming from multiple segments in all markets. And finally, the level of new product development activity is very high. And that, I think, is going to contribute to this recovery as we go into 2024. So we feel pretty good about the -- our projection for '24 and perhaps that even represents an upside as markets before.

And so the destock is largely completed across markets or...

So we differentiate between 2 types of supply chain, the charts [indiscernible]. For the chart, we should be approaching that by year-end or very early next year, like for beer, for NAB, food. For wine and spirits, it will be more in the second quarter.

One thing I would add is if you take a look at consumer consumption activity and we get the Nielsen data every month, If you go back for several months this year, most of it, in fact, you saw all end-use categories and a consumer consumption base is actually down. October was the first period across Europe and North America combined that you saw, for example, beer. Beer was up about 1% overall from a consumer consumption standpoint and NAB is up about 2%. And that feeds well into the notion that destocking is probably coming to an end as those markets recover before the spirits and wine categories.

Right. And you talked about this a little bit earlier, but in terms of glasses performance against other substrates, how you think about substrate share shifts, if any, over the last 12 months?

Yes. So when we track the Nielsen data, we see that there is some temporary trade down, right? So consumers are doing that just because of the macroeconomic situation. Every time we've seen that in the past, it is a temporary shift. Now that's a very small shift. And it's not in all markets. It's just in some of the markets. So for all purposes, I think share has been quite stable. And we're not concerned in any way about that.

Yes, if you really slice and dice it back all those different categories. You don't see one category that shifted between glass and other substrates by more than a fraction of a percent. So for example, beer in Europe is maybe 0.5% to 1% shift away from glass. But glass has picked up about 1% share in Brazil, for example. So you're just seeing some minor shifts here and there across different marketplaces, but nothing substantial.

In fact, in Brazil, glass is performing ahead of alternative packaging. And it's a composition of both one-way glass and returnable glass, both for different applications.

Maybe we can go through the regions, and maybe start with Europe. Maybe a lot of consumer stress and maybe recession-like conditions in some markets in Europe. Just wondering if you could talk about demand dynamics and expectations for Europe. And then also, if you could touch upon the pricing mechanism in Europe and the contract negotiations?

Yes. So on the demand side, we're encouraged by the stabilization and some improvement that has been taking place in beer, NABs and food. Those are very important categories for that market. The pressure remains in wine, in particular, in spirits, but we're confident that the -- as they finalize destocking, those markets are going to recover. From a pricing perspective, I think something that got to be factored in is all the information that has been made public around capacity curtailment. So there is an amount of curtailments in that market that I haven't seen before. So that needs to be factored in. As we go into the end of this quarter and the -- let's say, first half of the next one, we're going to have a lot more visibility. We think that by the next earnings call, we should be able to provide more color on pricing and the evolution of that. Now in all cases, we expect that if pricing different than in other periods of time, will be set up for short periods of time just because of the volatility. So rather than a one full year agreement, most likely it will be just a shorter period and it gets adjusted as things progress.

Maybe just to give a little better perspective on how our contracts work on a global basis. We have about 55% of our businesses under long-term agreements, multiyear, large international customers. Those all have price adjustment formulas that look back and recapture the inflation from the prior year. So for example, in 2023, we've had mid-single-digit cost inflation, bad book of business, starting generally in January as most of those trigger dates will get a price increase effective for that. So that book of business should have good price recovery. The other 45% of our business, of which half of it is in Europe, is under annual agreements. And that is what we typically, for example, negotiate between now and, call it, February or March. And so we'll have a lot better visibility of how that plays out. One thing I would add, though, is if you take a look at who knows whether there will be pricing pressure going into next year, but the amount of trapped operating leverage in the business because volumes are down double digits, the value of the recovery of volumes through the benefit of sales volume and also bringing it back to current production that's currently curtailed is significantly more than what we see as the net pricing potential pressure in the marketplace. And so maybe it's a little lumpy over the next few quarters, but I'm pretty confident that as we get into a little bit more of a normalized volume recovery period, even back to pre-pandemic level, not even '22 levels. You really have a net benefit to the business and allow us to come out of kind of the current economic slump in a pretty good place.

Right.

And over the last couple of years, we've been performing well in price and we've been quite consistent with what we forecasted or even better. And that's coming from how this company is organized for that internally. So as we go into this phase, we are having the same strength to be able to make sure that we get the best out of, but it's going to be easy.

And from a supply side in Europe, I mean, there was a lot of capacity, I guess, or some capacity that came in from Russia and Ukraine that got shut down with the war. And then with the gas spike, you had, I think, some smaller competitors just taking furnaces off. Has that come back? Or what you can say about the supply in Europe...

For the most part, it came back. Now it's been also failed as everything else. But for the most part, it came back.

And if you take a look at what the public information, most of the companies are taking about 20% downtime here, for example, in the fourth quarter, so that's an unprecedented level of curtailment going across the industry right now.

I guess moving to the Americas, and I think we can start with U.S. and Mexico. Can you talk about some of the end markets there and kind of expectations for '24?

Yes. So there is positive signals, stabilization and improvement in some categories over there, for example, NAB's in Mexico, food in Mexico. Mexico is a hub for containers, if you will, and some customers feel there and cheap around the world. So there are good signals emerging there. Spirits has been destocking. There was a lot of tequila in the system, all of that is being consumed right now. But we're starting to see positive signals over there in the United States, too, for food and NABs. Beer is following a similar trend as it has been before. Now our position has been favorable in the sense that our customer and product mix has been performing better than the total market. So that has been a positive...

If you take a look across all of our different markets, the best performing market right now is the Andean. They're up double digit. And if you just go back a few months ago, they were down double digits. So it slipped over very quickly, and it's obviously supported by the expansion that we've done here recently. But the next best after that, while still down, is actually North America. And so it's actually fared better than most markets over in Europe, for example, through this current downturn. So...

Can you talk about the importance of promotional activity, what you saw this year and what you expect in '24?

There has been a lot of that. You will imagine that, that is what creates some of the on-prem because some of our packages are better for that. Now that's temporary. So I think as we go into next year, we'll see that evolving, and I think we're going to go back gradually to a more normal market.

And then on the supply side in North America, I mean, that competitor has announced some closures and the closure of Waco. Can you just talk about supply dynamic and your footprint within the U.S. and Mexico?

Yes. So the North America market is a very good market. It's a very rich market. Now as you know, we've been shifting the mix. We focus on for quite a few years now. We are focused on optimizing our asset network. And we will -- we did that. We continue to analyze opportunities in that respect. And our primary focus is to focus on the assets with the highest margin and highest return. That's what we're focused on. The margin expansion initiatives are -- have been accelerated in that market. The commercial conditions have been reset. And with the Kentucky line, we are putting the first MAGMA operation in a market that has a lot of opportunity for fragmented market, and for which MAGMA can do really, really well. So that's kind of how we're thinking about the market. It's a good market opportunity. We've got a shift in several areas, and we're going...

So we've taken action on Waco and some other activity late part of last year, but we're not necessarily done. So we will continue to do this network optimization. And the whole idea here is to get the -- get the performance and the margins back up to the company average over in North America. So that probably is a 2- to 3-year process to kind of restore that and we're progressing very well.

Maybe shifting to Brazil, that's a market where glass has gained some share recently. Can you talk about that share dynamic, and I guess we're headed into the summer season, so...

Yes. So Brazil interesting has been performing quite well from a consumer standpoint, across all segments. Now for us, in particular, for glass, the performance in beer is very strong. And it's because of the premium products that have been introduced to that market and it's been in process of -- the customers have been doing so for quite a few years now. So it's a very long-term trend. So it is driven by that, but also driven by the very good fit that returnable containers are for certain transactions. So the 2 types of packages are coexisting quite well. And as a result of that, we are ahead of any other package in the country.

John, you touched on this, but in terms of margin expansion initiatives for '24, absent just volume recovery, can you talk about the activities and the opportunity there?

Yes. I think in 2024, our margin expansion initiatives, the targeted benefits will be the highest in the 8 years of that program. And on top of it, it will probably be higher than what we see here in 2023, which is also a very strong year. So it's a combination of 3 or 4 different things. The big piece we talked about already, the restructuring and activities, that's all part of it. Ongoing factory performance, the deployment of automation type of technologies and energy enhancements, all those types of things fall into that. We also have what's called a revenue optimization. So even in an environment, where for example, certain pockets might be challenging on the net price environment, there's opportunities to improve that through value-based pricing to be able to have better-than-average performance in that regard. So that's also an element. In the final stages, we're going to be very active on the OpEx side. We've actually just recently completed a pretty significant organization restructuring activity. And so those benefits are pretty much locked into going into next year.

And can you just touch a little bit more on MAGMA? And I don't know if you can talk about sort of unit economics or commercial opportunity and kind of the rollout of MAGMA relative to expectations and how that's changed.

So MAGMA is a very good fit for high-value segments. And what we're doing with the line in Kentucky is exactly that. This is an area where there is a lot of craft distilleries and distilleries in general, that the other product in, for the most part, from outside the country. So I've been able to put -- I mean, MAGMA unit in place, we can have an incremental capacity in that specific area that is small enough and big enough for the market. Now it will be near located to all of them. So that's quite unique for that technology. Conventional technology because of the scale wouldn't fit that. It needs to go 3x, 4x that size. Therefore, you cannot really move forward with that. Now we see that opportunity continuing. So we're taking all the steps that we are taking in the North America market, and then we are going to follow with macro deployment, the first line being this one that, that facility has the potential to accommodate up to 3 lines. But beyond that, having in mind the territory of the United States and Canada is such a large territory that a technology that can go and near locate, colocate with the small market has a lot of potential, has a lot of value we create.

Maybe on some of the economics and the deployment scope and things like that. So MAGMA should have lower operating costs through -- primarily through increased flexibility and lower labor costs because it's very highly automated and digitized and things like that. We believe that it will bridge about 50% of the difference between the typical cost of a glass container and aluminum can, which often that is about a 25% to 30% premium, so you could bridge about half of that. And we believe that the capital intensity ultimately will be 40% lower. Think about it, you're moving from a big smokestack factory into more -- into industrial warehouse, a lot less steel structure, all those type of things will drive a lot lower capital intensity. That is more for the Generation 3 greenfield solution that we have, okay? And as far as the deployment of that, in order to support about a 2% growth, assuming all of it substantially is weighted to MAGMA, we need to put about 3 to 4 of these units in a year. And that's probably in the $100 million to $150 million range once you get the Gen 3 solution optimized and things like that. So probably in 2025, '26, we'll be putting in the Gen 3, and then we can start replicating that across the base going forward from that point.

[indiscernible] technology ends up disrupting the industry and ultimately causing a lot of harm in sort of the short to medium term as it gets introduced. I appreciate that your plan is to roll this out gradually, but in an industry where there's always capacity [indiscernible] and it's not a rapidly growing business, how do you prevent this from tend of being a negative thing for the industry?

So we've got to make the right choices with regard to where we go. And there are many markets that are growing that if more glass was available -- let's talk about normal circumstances, not the moment we're living through right now. But in normal circumstances, the opportunity available for glass is a lot larger than glass has capitalized on. And part of the reason for that is the feed of [indiscernible]. So there are plenty of opportunities around the world to be able to put capacity, to support growing segments without creating the kind of disruptive -- disruptions that you mentioned, which might happen in terms of [indiscernible] are not the right choices. But there are plenty of options to go to without getting into that.

I'll add to that, two points here. We have about 8 different business models that we've identified with MAGMA. But 2 of them, as an example, would be pairing it up with distributors, whether internal distributor that we have right now or an external one, and actually being able to feed that fragmented marketplace that right now. A lot of times, it's imports and things like that, that feed that. And that becomes a little bit less disruptive. So -- or licensing. And we could go in and say, hey, rather than fight the competition, maybe we license this technology if it makes sense in a particular marketplace because it's the net best solution. We have to evaluate those, very mindful of what we're saying is to avoid the disruptive element that, that could be out there. And then back to your other question about the capital. If we wanted to grow 2% a year, which we believe is the kind of the backdrop growth of our business once things stabilize, we probably -- we can always get about 0.5% creep growth out of your business, right? So you really need to invest in probably 1.5% kind of volume growth. And we believe that with MAGMA, that represents 3 to 4 MAGMA units a year, and probably somewhere between $100 million and $150 million of growth capital, probably starting earlier days at the $150, and hopefully, as you improve the efficiencies and scalability of the thing, you're getting closer to the $100 million range.

[indiscernible] 1.5% net capacity for the whole market.

That would be -- that would keep us at a margin share neutral position, to answer that question. Ultimately, you could look for this to be a winner in the marketplace, right, and be able to -- but I think we would target more of the fragmented base and not necessarily going up against the big books of business. I'm saying, there's a lot more margin and there's a lot more opportunity, a lot better fit for MAGMA in the fragmented base than it is necessarily against the bigger players.

[indiscernible]

[indiscernible] No, that we are aware of, no.

There's been efforts around electrical boosting and where you use more electricity in a furnace rather than natural gas. Obviously, it's more of an ESG play. Now there's challenges associated with that, too, because electricity tends to be multiples more expensive than natural gas. So there's really not an economic solution out there, although there's a lot of work on trying to find ESG-related.

I don't mean to [indiscernible].

And there's nothing wrong with that, but that solves one problem, the ESG component of it. What MAGMA provides, the scalability, the flexibility, the modularization, the more rapid deployment, a lot of other characteristics that the competition doesn't play. Within glass, we're the only one that makes any substantial investments in R&D. We spend about $60 million to $70 million in R&D. The next closest competitor is single digits. So that's our long history in the space, focusing really back to the origins of the business, back in the early 1900s is around glass innovation.

Last question, we're nearing close to time. Coming out of maybe the high of the pandemic, I know there was some kind of [indiscernible] rebuilds and operational activity, can you remind us, that you work through all that backlog now in '24, maybe a normal year or we build outside of the year, [indiscernible]?

So we've been increasing the amount of [indiscernible], as we mentioned. In '24, we're going to be a little slower in that to be able to balance things, and then we resume. But there is a very high focus on that area, and we have made significant improvement, but we believe we're very well in control and we'll always be very prudent in that area because of the importance it has.

Great. Well, Andres, John thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone.