Greif, Inc. (NYSE:GEF) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

They are now taking their safety stocks down to a significant lower level than we’ve seen in the past. And what that means to us is that we see a lot of smaller but more frequent ordering. We see sort of urgent orders, panic orders and that sort of thing. And then our customers are paying us to respond to that accordingly, which is what we are doing.

Michael Hoffman: Okay. And then on the PPS business, we’re seeing – and again in another part of our coverage beginning, a very gradual beginning recovery in recycled fiber. And how have you reflected that in this revised guidance?

Larry Hilsheimer: Yes. We – you are aware, Michael, that resin increased OCC pricing in a week ago or early this week. We believe it will trend up slightly more through the rest of the year, maybe another $10 or so. We – that is primarily generation related. There is just – with all of the economic downtime being taken across the industry, it’s less paper being produced. And so the supply side of that is down, although we also imagine that some of the trash haulers and stuff may dominantly, I would say, more of the one-off kind of things in various communities, the pricing is still not at a level that allows profitability. So our belief is some still getting land built instead of sold.

Michael Hoffman: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from George Staphos with Bank of America. Your line is open.

George Staphos: Thanks so much. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for the details and congratulations on a really good quarter relative certainly to our forecast. Larry, one thing I wanted to come back to relative to your answer to Michael’s question. On price/cost mix, you said it was a $51 million benefit in the bridge, but I did not catch the breakdown between GIP and PPS, if you can go back to that. And also in terms of just classification, during the discussion, Ole, you were talking about your end markets. You said North America was weak, but some other markets had also weakened. I just wanted to make sure I had that for posterity in terms of what had weakened, and I had a couple of other follow-ons.

Larry Hilsheimer: Yes. So George, the breakdown on that $56 million was $51 million GIP and $5 million PPS. And I’ll reiterate, this is the walk from the guidance numbers we gave in Q1 to the revised guidance. So different from, obviously, year-over-year Q2 to Q2, which I can address separately if you like, but I’ll turn it back to Ole.

Ole Rosgaard: Hi, George. So you mentioned North America. So if we look at the North American market, it was clearly the weakest in our portfolio. And aside from non-residential construction, all other markets were sequentially worse than in Q1. For LatAm, LatAm has been fairly stable, but volumes came under real pressure in Q2 at a strong Q1. And the reason is they are coming primarily from the [indiscernible] and the loop markets. And then in EMEA and APAC, volumes were still down year-over-year, but those markets are actually showing greater resiliency than other regions, and that’s primarily coming from ag again and then the auto end markets.