Ball Corporation (NYSE:BALL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Adam Samuelson: There’s a lot of ground covered. Maybe just going back to EMEA. I appreciate the kind of noise on a year-on-year basis with Russia and prior year results. You have disclosed what the non-Russia EBIT was in the prior year. So how do we think about that business on an organic profit or on a like-for-like profit basis progressing over the balance of the year? And as we think about the new capacity in Czech Republic and the U.K. layering in, in the second half kind of the implicit underlying volume growth that carries over into 2024 without broader market kind of expansion?

Scott Morrison: Okay. The game plan really for Europe this year is to be able on a euro basis to replace those Russian earnings that we had for nine months last year. So that — if we can do that, that’s a hell of an accomplishment, because Russia was a very nice profitable business. And so if they can do that, I think, that’s victory. They have done a great job of managing their cost structure, managing their contracts, managing the supply chain and so we are really happy with the performance of the EMEA business.

Dan Fisher: Yeah. I think in the simplest terms, the plan that we have set out this year inclusive of Russia, would be we are going to make significantly more money on less volume and we are going to generate more cash and a lot of that is coming from Europe’s ability to offset the $80 plus million of comparable operating earnings in Europe. So they have got a significant plan for improvement and they are off to a good start executing against that. And they have been the business that has done — they have done extraordinarily well here since we acquired that business from Rexam. They have continued to deliver against plan and the only time I think we didn’t was when we had a global pandemic. So we are feeling pretty confident in that team’s ability to deliver.

Adam Samuelson: Got it. And the carryover on volume into 2024 from the new facilities?

Dan Fisher: It would be in the range — on those two facilities in the range of 2 billion units.

Adam Samuelson: Okay. That’s all really helpful color. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Dan Fisher: Thank you. And I think, with that, we look forward to talking to you here in another quarter. Thanks for everybody’s attention and participation today on the call.

Operator: Thank you. This does conclude the conference for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Thank you. Have a good day.