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

Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining the UBS Global Materials Conference. We're pleased to welcome O-I Glass to the stage. My name is Josh Spector, UBS North America chemicals and packaging analyst. And then with us, we have Gordon Hardie, who took over as CEO earlier this year for O-I. Joining from a position on O-I's Board, Gordon comes with 35 years of industry experience recently with Bunge prior to what he's doing now, leading its food and ingredients division. We also have John Haudrich, O-I's CFO since 2019 and has 25 years of experience with O-I. Gordon has a presentation to give an intro overview. So I'll turn it over to him in a second. Just I need to give a disclosure just as an analyst need to disclose relationship of UBS on my own of that company, which I express a view on the call today. Those are available at www.ubs.com/disclosures or e-mail me. With that, I'll hand it over to Gordon.

Thank you, Josh, and the UBS team for hosting us this afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll give an overview of the business at O-I Glass and outline our framework for increasing the value of the business sustainably over time. John and I will then be happy to take your questions at the end of this brief presentation. Before we proceed, please review the safe harbor comments on Slide 3 and various disclosures found in our presentation, which is posted on our website. Let's start on Slide 4, where you can see a high-level profile of the company. O-I is a global scale, trusted supplier in glass packaging for the global food and beverage industry. We serve thousands of customers across Europe, Asia and the Americas through a privileged network of 68 plants in 19 countries, driven by our team of 23,000 associates who work tirelessly to serve our customers. We service many of the largest brands in the global beverage industry and help our customers create millions of moments of enjoyment across the world every day. Glass is the preferred packaging from many customers who seek to leverage packaging to help build their brands and create a premium experience for consumers across the world. Consumers just love consuming food and beverage products from safe, sustainable glass containers. Glass is synonymous with quality. Customers appreciate our high service levels, deep manufacturing and design capabilities and how they benefit from our privileged footprint. As you can see, adjusted earnings per share improved nicely over the past few years, and we also managed to significantly improve our balance sheet position and risk profile. While current market conditions are challenging and near-term performance is under pressure, we have a solid foundation. We are determined to drive increased earnings and grow the value of the business. We believe we are not dependent on significant general market recovery to do so, but rather on a combination of self-help productivity measures and focused commercial efforts in key segments with winning customers. This foundation of the recovery for us is our Fit to Win program, an end-to-end productivity review of the business, changing how we work with our suppliers, our customers and among ourselves. This program, combined with an economic profit mindset will drive a renewed competitiveness, deeper partnerships with customers and suppliers and increased value of our company. Moving to Slide 5. O-I serves many of the brands that consumers love and trust. Glass packaging is core to the equity value of many of the world's great beverage brands. We have profiled just a handful of our 6,000 customers, which span large blue-chip brands shown here as well as many leading local and regional hero brands. For example, we serve the top 10 global spirits brands with leadership in glass for beer in the Americas and in Europe. O-I excels at building customer relationships supported by strong design capabilities and service levels. As such, we are well placed to help our customers be efficient to drive growth, to deliver differentiation and to become more sustainable. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to grow earnings and increase the value of the company. Moving to Slide 6. The company has a privileged footprint across both the Americas and Europe with deep technical and manufacturing capabilities. In the Americas, we serve many different markets from Canada to Brazil through our network of 32 plants across 7 countries. We see the strongest growth in Latin America that we intend to make our North American business stronger and more stable over time as we drive our Fit to Win program. In Europe, we serve thousands of customers including many of the iconic food and beverage brands that are exported across the world. Europeans love glass with twice the glass intensity per capita of the other markets we serve. Overall, we expect European glass demand to grow at about 1% a year on average, which we support with our network of 34 plants across 10 countries. But approximately 55% of our business is with large multinational accounts with long-term contracts. The remaining business represents regional and local customers with annual purchase agreements. As you can see, we serve a wide range of end-use categories across the food and beverage market. Moving to Slide 7. Like many manufacturers, we face near-term market challenges. However, over the long term, we expect glass demand will recover and an improved competitive position will enable O-I to leverage key mega trends that will support low single-digit growth. These trends include premiumization, health and wellness, new differentiated brands, sustainability, growth of global brands in beer and spirits and a rebound in travel retail. While current demand is soft, given cyclical macro conditions, we believe these trends will resume once markets normalize. This view is shared across our customer base. Moving to Page 8. Let me switch gears and discuss some road map to significantly increase the value of our company. Since joining O-I in May, I've traveled widely and met with many key stakeholders across the value chain, our own people, our customers, our suppliers and on and off premise retailers. From these interactions, I have a much deeper understanding of market dynamics and the needs and expectations of our stakeholders. I also gained critical insights into how to make our company safer, fitter, more sustainable and more valuable. O-I has significant potential. We have a great team. We have a privileged footprint. We have long-standing relationships with customers. However, it is clear that we have not achieved our full potential. Despite significant efforts to advance the company, our economic profit has declined in recent years as illustrated on the right. We aim to reverse this trend and increase our profit capture over 3 horizons. During Horizon 1, we will focus on a new program called Fit to Win that we expect will drive a deep change, a step-change improvement in profitability, cash flow generation and a competitive position of the company. Importantly, I see significant earnings improvement that is within our control and not dependent on the level of or timing of a significant market recovery. I will detail more on the next slide. During Horizon 2, we intend to accelerate profitable growth as we leverage a much more competitive cost position enabled by our Fit to Win program and align with customers who need suppliers who can facilitate their growth through productivity, innovation and aligned capital projects. Going forward, we intend to align our CapEx with strategic customers' long-term plans, particularly in large and developing markets. Finally, in Horizon 3, we expect that we have strategic optionality. This may include geographic expansion into new growth markets with large profit pools, which could be a great fit for our MAGMA technology. While it's early days, we have established initial 3-year targets, which span both Horizon 1 and 2 and are captured on this slide. Specifically, we expect by 2027 to generate sustainable adjusted EBITDA of at least $1.45 billion, free cash flow of at least 5% of sales and economic spread that is at least 2% above the cost of capital. Turning to Page 9 and expanding on our Fit to Win program, which represents the First Horizon of our value creation road map. It is said that performance equals potential minus interference. Our Fit to Win program is built to drive a step change in O-I's competitive position as we address the interference that is holding us back. This program includes 3 pillars. Our first pillar of focus is on enhancing our competitiveness. We plan to take actions to simplify both corporate and our go-to-market structures and decentralize decision-making and accountability. We intend to enhance operational excellence and asset management through a full end-to-end supply chain review, which will include network reorganization and optimization. Finally, we expect to improve the business as we improve the quality of our mix or exit unprofitable contracts, lines of business or products. We are acting fast. Within the first 90 days, we have analyzed all 68 plants in their portfolios by SKU to their level of economic profit. We also have a clear road map to reduce the SG&A load of the business to target levels outlined. We are rapidly reducing excess inventories in our system as we have temporarily curtailed 24% of capacity so far this quarter. As detailed in this morning's announcement, we intend to permanently close 4 furnaces, which include a single furnace plant over the next 6 months as first steps to eliminate redundant capacity. We will no longer warehouse capacity in our fleet if we cannot deliver a target economic return. In total, we plan to close at least 6 furnaces and will more fully communicate the scope of these initial network optimization actions and our 2025 SG&A savings plan on our third quarter earnings call. Our second pillar of focus is on driving greater capital discipline and cash generation by leveraging an economic profit mindset. We intend to direct resources and capital where we can achieve at least our target return with a clear framework to prioritize and drive value-creating investment decisions. Furthermore, in future, only capital projects with a clear path to an economic spread that is at least 200 basis points above our weighted average cost of capital will be sanctioned. Over the balance of the year, we are revising our capital and restructuring plans, which we will discuss further at our next earnings call. Our third pillar stresses improving our financial performance and consistently achieving our commitments through a relentless focus on execution. We have presented our recent economic profit performance on the previous page and are developing an economic profit tree that connects enterprise economic profit to each plant and function within the company. Likewise, we are integrating economic profit as an element of our future management incentive plan structure. Overall, Fit to Win is off to a strong start, and I'm confident that we can drive solid financial performance in 2025 and achieve the targets we laid out for 2027. Turning to Page 10 and a few words on MAGMA. MAGMA's core technology works. The Generation 1 melter development is complete, and we are ramping up production at our Gen 2 greenfield in Bowling Green, which was designed to test all of MAGMA's current operating technologies at full industrial scale. MAGMA's increased flexibility has the potential to rewrite our business model, but it must also deliver meaningful economic profit in a reasonable time frame. This is a new challenge I have set for the MAGMA and commercial teams. Likewise, we intend to roll out ULTRA, a proprietary technology that can reduce the weight of our glass containers by up to 30% to improve convenience, reduce logistics costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Moving to Page 11. We are increasing the discipline around capital allocation decisions, which is critical to improving economic profit over time. We now have made all profit center owners responsible not just for the P&L but also for their balance sheet and cash flows. As noted on the right, we have significantly improved our free cash flow profile since 2022 with the successful resolution of asbestos-related legacy liabilities. Over the past decade, nearly half of our free cash flow prior to the Paddock resolution was used to fund asbestos payment, which exceeded $1.5 billion over that period. Starting in 2023 and for the first time in decades, all of our cash flow is now available to enhance shareholder value. As we look to the future, we intend to allocate capital to get Fit to Win, improve our capital structure and eventually return to shareholders. Slide 12 includes a few comments on current market conditions. Please note, we are not updating guidance from our second quarter call. While near-term performance reflects current challenging market conditions, we fully expect our financial performance will rebound as O-I implements the Fit to Win program and markets gradually recover over time. Let me conclude on Page 13. O-I is a global scale systemic supplier in glass packaging with strong customer relationships that reflect our high service levels, privileged footprint and strong manufacturing capabilities. While market conditions remain challenging, we expect glass would benefit from favorable long-term mega trends, which will support future growth. We are taking an economic profit mindset as we refocus the company on a new set of priorities aimed at creating long-term shareholder value. We are not pleased with declining economic profit nor our 2024 results, but we are taking rapid action and sustained actions to address this and are determined to rebuild the value of the company. The team is acting quickly to implement our new Fit to Win program that will make O-I more competitive, improve performance and enable economically profitable growth as markets gradually recover. These efforts will set O-I up for success in '25 and beyond. This is an exciting time for our company. We are determined to increase the value of our company as we execute Fit to Win, drive greater capital discipline and deliver profitable growth. Josh, over to you for any questions. Thank you.

Thanks for the overview. I'll let you come walk over here for a second. But maybe to start on the near-term side of things. So you said you're not updating guidance, but you had a comment on the slide about sluggish demand, modest volume growth in 3Q. So maybe just to start, what are you seeing in 3Q demand wise? And how does that compare to your initial expectations?

Demand continues to be sluggish. We had an increase in July. August is there about where we expected. So no major changes, but certainly still sluggish out there.

And I guess slightly further when you talked about '24 and your volume growth, the second half implied mid-single-digit growth. I guess, what gives you confidence in that and particularly an acceleration, I guess, in the fourth quarter based on what you're seeing today?

Yes. Look, I think we're at the end of destocking in beer, we see some green shoots in premium beers, end of destocking in wine and in food, still some destocking going on in spirits. But no major changes to the outlook as we saw in July.

I can add a little bit on there. We closely track what's going on with consumer consumption and take a look at Nielsen data and things like that. If you take a look at the 5 categories that we serve, food and NABs have returned to kind of flat on a year-over-year basis from a consumer consumption standpoint, okay? But if you take a look at the other categories, beer, wine and spirits, they're still down low single digits, but they're getting better every month, okay? So slowly, those categories are getting closer and closer to breakeven, but still down low single digits. So entering the year, we thought, hey, that crossover point would happen sometime maybe at the end of the first quarter, it looks to be later in the year. But every month, you're seeing a little bit of improvement. And keep in mind, when we look at growth in the back half of this year, it's off of a fairly easy comp last year because there was significant destocking in all the categories at that time, whereas right now, the destocking is limited only to the spirits category.

Understood. That makes sense. And I guess to maybe build on that, looking at some of the consumer data, particularly Nielsen, I mean it still appears weaker for glass relative to some of the things we're seeing in plastics and cans. I guess, why is that the case? And what does that mean for your longer-term view around growth?

Yes. So we've had a couple of those questions today. And if you take a look at it, the cost differential or price differential between glass and aluminum cans tends to shift over time. And right now, we're seeing it the price differential is a little bit higher than normal average. It's closer to between 25% and 30% premium for glass over aluminum cans as an example. What we've seen, though, looking back at historic data as you look to numbers that are more like in the mid-teens, you see a conversion and shift back to glass, okay? So everything moves in ways with associated with different input costs and indexes on metals, for example. But it also underscores the competitiveness program that we're looking to do, the more that we can improve the cost position of our product on a consistent, sustainable basis, the better chance that we're going to have to be able to win in the marketplace and drive market share position. And keep in mind that the areas where we cross over with aluminum is limited really primarily to mega beer categories and some of the nonalcoholic beverage categories. It's really not in other categories like spirits, wines, foods and the premium beer categories for that matter, too. So it's really a limited subset of the categories that we serve that have a crossover point.

Maybe just a follow-up on that point. So then what closes the gap? Is it energy prices come down to maybe normalize the price? Or is there something else that you see that gets that to more of a historical level?

From my perspective, I think it's taking a look at the business from an end-to-end view and stripping off any areas of waste or inefficiency across the chain. So there's no one single item per se. It's a whole range of opportunities we have to get more efficient, to get more productive, that will close the gap to that sort of mid-teens position where we feel once we get there and you look at historical dynamics, we've seen a flow from cans back into glass.

Okay. I want to come back to the cost savings on the productivity side. But I think maybe to cap off the demand side, just I get the question when longer term, looking at different markets, what are structural areas of growth that you see for glass, either product or region, but what should give investors confidence in that 1% growth target?

Food and nonalcoholic beverages certainly is an area of growth. You see continued premiumization as a trend across beer, across wine and across spirits. We are, I would say, under-indexed in premium, particularly in premium spirits and premium food. About 16% of our portfolio is in spirits and yet we have the capabilities to have that form a much larger proportion of our portfolio. If I look at our total portfolio, about 80% is what I would call commodity to mid-premium and 20% then stacked above that through superpremium, ultra-premium. And it's clear that, that has not been a major focus for us in the past. And I think by getting more competitive and getting closer to customers and understanding the design requirements that can be a much bigger part of our portfolio in the coming years.

And one thing I would add is if you really slice and dice each of the markets that we serve and the categories that we serve within it and look at it over a multiyear period of time and not so much in the current unusual macro conditions. Just about all categories tend to grow. Historically, the challenge has been in the mega beer category in North America. And I think we know the challenges there. But that now is down to about 14% of our business in North America and about 3% or 4% globally. So we're less and less indexed and exposed to the category that has been the most sensitive and most challenging one over time.

And just to build on that, I think as well, if you look at the whole travel retail channel, over time, that is going to grow consistently. It's still not yet back to pre-COVID levels, but over time that will reemerge and continue to grow. And that is a huge channel for spirits and particularly premium and ultra-premium spirits. So that's another element that underpins our belief that we can premiumize our portfolio.

Okay. Shifting over to the productivity side. I guess, when you look at the history of O-I, there's been a lot of cost savings programs saved a lot of money over the years, but now Fit to Win is another one. So what's going to be different in your view with this program, how you're approaching it and maybe culturally or what do you expect to ingrain?

I think the team has done a really good job on our margin expansion programs over the last few years. And they've been what I would call really targeted programs around specific areas. There's been some SG&A work, some work in manufacturing, developing far deeper confidence around pricing. What's different? I think this is an end-to-end review of the business. So really looking at the whole cost buildup right across the value chain and working, we buy, we make, we sell. So really disaggregating those 3 blocks and figuring out where the waste and the inefficiency is. That means we're going to have to work very differently with suppliers and working together on how we strip over waste and inefficiency across that part of the chain. How we work with customers? There's opportunities to make the value chain between ourselves and customers more efficient, reduce inventories in the chain, drive faster return on assets. And just become a more efficient supply chain overall. And then even within our own business, how we work with each other, how we leverage on the one hand, our global expertise or functional experts, and on the other hand, how we run much fitter, leaner, more effective operations and with more dynamic go-to-market models. So I think, culturally, that's a shift. And as I said, it's a more value chain approach as to specific initiatives...

[Technical Difficulty] As when we were doing a lot of the other projects we've been doing and as well as the Fit to Win. What I would say is we're looking at a paradigm shift within the business, all right? A lot of the ways that we look at, we're going to redefine what good is. And a lot of the -- what we define as the standards for good production efficiencies and things like that were set 20 or 40 years ago. And they're inside the glass industry standards. I think what we're looking at now is bringing a lot more external end view and really finding out what is best-in-class performance that we can go for. But it's not necessarily defined within the glass industry. And so bringing those insights in and tools and advisers and to be able to help with that really redefines what good is and good can be a lot better.

And just to build on that. We took 2 plants that would be deemed high-performing plants within the fleet. We put it through our new diagnostic program and a different way of looking at how we run the plant. And the outcome of that diagnostic was opportunities to improve the efficiency of those 2 plants by anywhere between 10% and 15%. And so you can see how that might change the whole cost structure of the business going forward.

And maybe that dovetails into, you talked a lot about economic profit and that mindset shift. So maybe tie this together of what that means, how you approach that differently to add value here?

Yes. So we've got 8, if you like, operational groups that kind of make the product and touch the customer. And I think in the past, those roles would have been deemed P&L roles. So we've made clear going forward, we don't have P&L roles any longer. We have P&L, balance sheet and cash flow roles. So those of our colleagues who are leading businesses will be accountable, not just for the P&L, they will be accountable for their returns on capital, and they will be accountable for cash flow. That is a shift in how the business was run and where the focus was in the business. We've also, in the first 100 days, knocked every client, every SKU and every customer to an economic profit level. And each part of the business now has visibility on that, and they have visibility on what levers they can put in control hopefully to make that happen, and will be given the freedom and the autonomy to do that. So moving from maybe what would be deemed maybe a more centralized model toward decentralized model for decision-making and autonomy to make things happen quickly to deliver a better economic profit outcome.

How low is that economic profit mindset going to the P&L responsibility? Is it by region, plant, I guess, what level of...

It will go right down to plant. We have visibility right down to SKU, tonnage per plant. As we move forward, we're in the process of building what we call an EP tree, an economic profit tree, which will be mapped to each level of the 6 levels in the business. So everybody will have a clear view on the KPIs that they are accountable for and how that relates to improving the economic profit of the business. So people will be able to stand back and say, yes, here in my role, I'm accountable for these KPIs and this performance, and I can see how that impacts the economic profit of the business. And I think culturally giving people that visibility and that freedom to operate in that autonomy will drive a better outcome. People drive better outcomes when they have visibility and they have the freedom and with the accountability to operate.

That makes sense. And in terms of your EBITDA target, so $250 million, $300 million improvement, can you roughly bucket that into what your assumptions would be there, volume, price and kind of what's in your control versus market?

Yes. So I think as we review the business, I think we're pretty clear that the vast, vast majority of that is what we would call self-help initiatives. So we're not relying on major shifts in market volumes to achieve as committed number. We feel there's enough opportunity within our control or opportunity, we can highly influence that will get us there without relying on big volumes in the market.

Okay. And I guess to think maybe a little bit more granular around the cadence over the next few years. Obviously, this year has a certain amount of headwinds in it. But you think about, I guess, the next '25, '26, '27, how should people be layering some of that in, if a lot of it is something market related?

Yes, I would say that the initial levers that you have are around the SG&A optimization activities, as well as how we take a look at capacity management. So right now, in 2023, tough year, given the need to draw down inventories, we're absorbing about $180 million this year of unabsorbed fixed cost to draw the inventories down. So that should return back to the business, and that should be achieved either through exiting the inventory destocking phase or addressing permanent capacity, just like the furnace announcements that we just had today, right? So those are 2 variables that should be on the front end of the activities. And the process, as Gordon was talking about, is going through each of the plants and identifying how they can improve the operating efficiencies and the example plants where we can get 10% to 15% improvement in productivity, that will take a little bit of time to cycle through all the facilities. And so that one might be more spread out over the period to 2027.

Okay. Maybe shifting to some of the growth investments that you're doing or some of the new technologies. So specifically to start with MAGMA, I don't know if there's any update you can give on Bowling Green. You talked about commissioning, if that's going to plan. Any further comments there?

Yes. So we're commissioning, as we speak, glass is flowing. It's progressing well. As of yesterday, I had an update that we're well on track to have the commissioning completed by the end of October and move into full-scale industrial production. We know the technology works. The core technology works. Bowling Green is designed to test all aspects of MAGMA at full industrial scale. I've given another challenge to do that in a way that delivers economic profit. And so it's one thing for the technology to deliver, but it also needs to do in a reasonable time frame in a way that delivers an economic profit. And so that's the twin sort of lens through which we're judging MAGMA currently.

So I guess if that's successful, I guess, how quickly you think about when you could deploy this more broadly instead of doing some rebuilding of legacy furnaces? And just how does this process change the cost structure? Is it a cost structure move? Or is it enables more local manufacturing where it's a growth move?

Yes. I think it helps you move to a more flexible business model. At the core of this technology is a furnace, you can switch on and switch off. that allows you tremendous kind of flexibility and it starts the process of variabilizing something what is now fixed cost. It also allows you to deliver variability at a reasonable cost. So on traditional furnaces to be cost efficient, you need long runs. This gives us the capability to do sort of premium, super premium, ultra-premium products, shorter ones and still make an economic profit. So they are the kind of twin pieces. I think it will allow us to invest in logistically challenged markets. For example, either with very long distances between markets and maybe where some production facilities are or places like Brazil, for example, where moving from state to state, there are often taxes that are imposed. And it also means that we can rightsize investments for what the customer requirements are. These are fundamentally smaller producing plants and legacy furnaces. In the past, you know to make something economically viable, has to be a larger furnace, you may have signed up for a certain amount of volume and then you've got to go and get volume for the rest in the market, which may or may not have been at an economically profitable level. So this gives us a lot of flexibility on where we invest the kind of returns we can expect to deliver. So it's not going to ever replace the traditional model, but it does give us flexibility and allows us in certain markets or for certain customers give us a more flexible business model at lower capital intensity per ton.

How about on ULTRA. I guess you've talked about it. What are you doing to drive the adoption?

Yes, so we're well down the track on ULTRA, which is a series of technologies and IP that will allow us to produce bottles that are up to 30% lighter and still are robust and fit for purpose. And we have a number of customers lined up and ready to go on that. So we'll start rolling that out as we move forward in '25.

Can that be done at the same cost point? Is there a trade-off?

Yes, it can be plus as we go forward and we look at how we run the plants more effectively, things like ULTRA will be even more important to us.

Okay. Maybe thinking longer term here, just with the capital structure and what you're talking to do, how long do you think it takes to get to that 2.5x intermediate target? And then when you get there, what are the priorities for cash?

Yes. Well, we've set out our stall in terms of Horizon 1 is about getting fit, Horizon 2 is about profitable growth on the basis that we are more competitive. And when we get there, we're showing off 5% of revenue as free cash flow. That will allow us obviously get back to 2.5x or even towards 2. I think it's very important that business cycles that has a cyclicality to it and a fairly significant commodity piece to it as we have a conservative balance sheet. And we run the business hard for cash. As we move into Horizon 3, that opens up possibilities to how we look at returning capital to shareholders, whether it's by buyback or by dividend. We believe that we need to make sure that, that's sustainable. But by 2027, I think that becomes a lot clearer as we've delivered on our commitment.

If you look at our leverage ratio, last year, we ended at about 2.8x. It's going to be more like mid-3s this year given the soft market and the inventory drawdown commitments that we have. But if you look at our 2027 targets, they are aligned with getting back to 2.5x leverage and then that would become a clear window where you could start making some of these decisions.

I think that makes sense. And I think with that, we're about up on time. So I want to thank O-I for joining me on stage and everyone for joining us for the UBS Materials Conference today. Hope everyone has a good rest of their day.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks, Josh. Thank you.