Sealed Air - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Q2 2025 delivered stable top-line and margin expansion: revenue $1.335B (-0.8% YoY), Adjusted EBITDA $292.5M (+2.5% YoY), and Adjusted EPS $0.89 (+7% YoY) on productivity savings offsetting pricing and volume headwinds.
• Results beat Wall Street consensus: revenue $1.335B vs $1.311B*, and Adjusted EPS $0.89 vs $0.72*; management maintained full-year guidance given North America volume softness and evolving trade-policy impacts.
• Food segment was flat with favorable price and lower volume; Protective volumes stabilized with industrial portfolio inflecting to growth but pricing remained unfavorable.
• Balance sheet deleveraging continued: Net Debt $3.99B, net leverage 3.6x; CFO transition announced (Kristen Actis‑Grande joining Aug 25) and $0.20 quarterly dividend declared, supporting investor confidence.
• Catalyst: The combination of an EPS and revenue beat with maintained guidance and signs of Protective volume stabilization may support near-term sentiment; watch Q3 commentary on North America demand and trade-policy impacts for guidance risk.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• “Best volume performance since Q4 2021” with Protective industrial portfolio inflecting to volume growth; management emphasizes “controlling the controllables” via customer focus and transformation execution.
• Margin expansion: Adjusted EBITDA rose to $292.5M (21.9% of sales) from $285.5M (21.2%); Adjusted EPS up to $0.89 from $0.83, driven by productivity (CTO2Grow) and lower interest expense.
• Food segment profitability improved: Adjusted EBITDA $210M (23.4% margin) vs $205M (22.9%) YoY on productivity and slightly favorable net price.

What Went Wrong

• North America volume softness pressured Food volumes (-$13M, -1%); total company volumes down 2% and pricing mixed (Food favorable, Protective unfavorable).
• Protective margin compression: Adjusted EBITDA $78M (17.8%) vs $82M (18.1%) YoY on unfavorable net price despite productivity savings.
• Cash generation weaker YTD: CFO $168.5M vs $313.3M (-46%) and FCF $81.2M vs $207.5M (-61%) due to higher incentive comp and tax payments.

Transcript

Speaker 3

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter 2025 Sealed Air Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during your session, you will need to press *11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press *11 again. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mark Stone, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 2

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Mark Stone, Sealed Air's Vice President, Investor Relations. With me today are Dustin Semach, our President and CEO, and Roni Johnson, our Interim CFO. Before we begin our call, I would like to note we have provided a slide presentation to supplement today's discussion. This presentation, along with our second quarter earnings release, is available to download from our Investor Relations page on our website at sealedair.com. I'd like to remind everyone that during today's call, we make forward-looking statements, including our outlook or estimates for future periods. These statements are based solely on information that is currently available to us. Please review the information in the forward-looking statements section of our earnings release and slide presentation. These sections also apply to this call. Our future performance may differ due to a number of factors.

Many of these factors are listed in our most recent filings with the SEC. Additionally, we will discuss financial measures that do not conform to U.S. GAAP. Information on these measures and their reconciliation to U.S. GAAP can be found in our earnings release or the appendix of our slide presentation. I will now turn the call over to Dustin. Operator, please turn to slide three.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter earnings call. Today, I will give an update on our leadership team, the impacts of shifting global trade policies on the markets we serve, and our ongoing transformation. Later, Roni will provide an update on our financial results and details on our outlook. Yesterday, we announced after a thorough search process, Kristen Actis-Grande will be Sealed Air Corporation's new Chief Financial Officer. We are excited to have Kristen come on board later this month and leverage her experience driving transformations across complex manufacturing and distribution businesses to accelerate the transformation we are driving here at Sealed Air Corporation. She has a proven track record of creating shareholder value, and I'm looking forward to the impact she will make across both of our businesses, Food and Protective.

I want to personally thank Roni for all her contributions during this interim period. Roni has been a trusted business partner since I joined the company, and I'm deeply grateful for her willingness to step up and support me through my transition to CEO, all the while continuing to advance our finance strategy and drive outcomes across the business. She will continue to be an integral part of our leadership team. My sincerest thank you to you, Roni. Moving on to trade policy. Since our discussion in May, we continue to monitor the changing global trade landscape. As a reminder, we are largely domestic production for domestic consumption, and most of our products remain exempt under USMCA, both of which position us well against direct tariffs. The net impact of tariffs was not material to our second quarter results.

While the situation remains dynamic, the second quarter was more stable than expected, with a pause in broader tariff decisions until the third quarter. However, there are pockets of the business, particularly certain specialty resins that are procured for partners in countries being impacted by increased tariffs. We continue to focus on mitigating the impact of tariffs through production or procurement optimization and limited pricing actions. The net tariff impact included in our second half outlook is minimal, and we will continue to provide updates as the longer-term impact becomes more clear. Let's now move to economic outlook and discuss each of our market-focused business segments. Globally, we are closely watching our end markets to understand the extent of demand impacts due to lower economic growth outlooks, shifting industrial production, and changes in consumer spending patterns on the back half of this year, not a go-forward basis.

Beginning with our Protective segment, we continue to be in full swing in our turnaround and are seeing early signs of progress. As a reminder, last year, most of our efforts were focused on our new go-to-market strategy, with a strong emphasis on getting closer to our customers and executing well against the basics. We stepped up our field engagement, invested in frontline sales, refreshed our commercial excellence programs, and reorganized our teams. We are beginning to see the impact of our actions in our results. Our second quarter volumes were down 2%, but Protective's industrial portfolio up slightly, marking the most stable year-on-year quarterly volume results we've delivered since 2021.

Additionally, sales were up 4% sequentially, and adjusted EBITDA was up 6% sequentially, marking the second quarter in a row with sequential adjusted EBITDA growth and the first time in two years we have seen sequential growth in sales and adjusted EBITDA. We remain focused on getting closer to and reestablishing trust with our distribution partners and customers. As a part of that effort, I continue to spend time with the field. More importantly, they are also recognizing the step change in field alignment and engagement. We will continue to build on this momentum as we progress throughout the second half. While turnarounds are typically nonlinear, this is a step in the right direction, and we plan on continuing to control the controllables by improving business fundamentals irrespective of market conditions.

We are expanding our go-to-market strategies more fully across Protective's EMEA and Asia footprint, and we'll share more on the rest of the world go-to-market strategy as we make further progress. We continue to work on addressing fiber portfolio gaps in our Protective business as we advance towards a substrate-agnostic solution set. Our previously announced gyp emboss, paper mailer is gaining traction in the market, and our hybrid auto vac solution that can run either fiber or poly materials is being brought to market now. The process of bringing these innovations to market has led us to further transform our research and development strategy to increase our use of external partners and suppliers. This will reduce time to market and ensure we are addressing our customers' most pressing challenges faster.

This is especially important during a period where we are focused on paying down debt and are not actively leveraging M&A to bolt on new solutions. Lastly, we continue to optimize Protective's network to improve customer service and quality. We recently opened the Lakeland, Florida manufacturing facility to better serve our customers in the southeast of the U.S. We are assessing the entire manufacturing footprint to identify additional opportunities to enhance service and quality while improving our cost positions. Our network optimization efforts will be outlined in more detail over the coming quarters. While we over-delivered in the volume in the first half against expectations and expect our turnaround in Protective to continue to deliver iterative progress, we are being prudent on expectations for the second half, reflecting the market uncertainty ahead of us amid global trade policies that have lower growth expectations across many markets, primarily in the U.S.

Transitioning to Food, our Food business remains resilient and continues to perform throughout the first half of 2025, despite market pressures accelerating in the second quarter. As a reminder, our Food business is focused on serving fresh protein markets across industrial food processing, retail, and food service. Our international business, while tempered from a market perspective, continues to perform well, and we expect full-year volume growth outside the U.S. as we capitalize on opportunities. Our EMEA region is a standout, where we have continued to take share in the market throughout the first half of 2025, building on momentum coming out of 2024. The pressures on the North American market that we outlined at the beginning of the year accelerated in the second quarter, putting even more pressure on the second half. I'll start by focusing on the demand side before shifting to the supply side dynamics.

Despite choppy consumer sentiment, consumer spending continues to be relatively stable in the U.S. What is shifting, however, is where consumers are placing their dollars, especially as inflation continues to escalate across all food categories. The overarching theme is a shift into value grocery, which is affecting each of our end markets. These changes are particularly pronounced in lower and middle-income households. Within industrial food processing, the shifting spend landscape is resulting in pressure on premium beef cuts. Consumers are trading down to lower-end cuts in ground beef. While this shift is compressing our Shrink Bag volumes, it's being partially offset by a pickup in our retail solutions.

Within retail, the shift is away from high-end consumer packaged goods brands into private label, away from the deli counter to prepackaged goods, and from smaller portions into more economical bulk and family-sized packaging formats, reducing the packaging volume per protein weight sold. Overall, changes in consumer spending are resulting in lower outlooks for food service, with a mixed shift from fast casual and quick service restaurants into retail, where we have a broad solution set and increasing focus, but lower market share than our industrial and food service portfolios. We continue to bring new solutions that include new packaging formats, expanded printing capabilities, and enhanced equipment offerings to capture more demand. While we are making progress, the strategy will take time to fully capture the market opportunity ahead of us. Shifting to the supply side, the U.S.

beef slaughter rates are declining at an accelerated pace, leading to volatility in the beef markets. While we've been closely watching the North American beef cycle, which is at 50-year lows, this quarter we saw an inflection point in the market, with slaughter rates decreasing 7%, worse than our previous expectations of down 1% for the quarter. This second quarter U.S. beef production and a softer second half is now resulting in lower full-year volume assumptions compared to what we anticipated at the start of the year. While herd rebuilding has begun, it's only the first step in a lengthy return to a more normalized and predictable part of the cattle cycle. As a reminder, the time between heifer retention and the resulting cattle going to market is approximately three years. An improved FX outlook on the weaker U.S.

dollar is helping to offset the top line softness in North America, and as a result, we are reiterating our sales guidance. As we mentioned during the last call, with the anticipated slowdown in the U.S. market and the visibility we have into the structures that support each business, we continue to further streamline each business to make them fit for purpose for their respective long-term strategies. The overarching themes remain simplifying our organization, moving closer to the markets we serve, and becoming easier to do business with, which will result in long-term sustainable growth in earnings. Shifting gears, I continue to be pleased with our disciplined approach to capital allocation. We are below $4 billion of net debt for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2022. We are on track for the full-year free cash flow guidance and will continue to solely focus on debt paydown.

Before turning the call to Roni to review our second quarter financial results, I'd like to reiterate my confidence that as an organization, we are on the right path. Our priorities are unchanged and remain keeping the customer front and center, operating with urgency, driving further productivity, and transforming the business to deliver long-term sustainable growth. Roni.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Dustin, and good morning, everyone. Let's turn to slide four to review Sealed Air's second quarter performance. As Dustin mentioned, we executed well in the quarter and came in ahead of expectations. Net sales were $1.34 billion in the quarter, down 1% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $293 million, up 3% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted earnings per share in the quarter of $0.89 was up 7% as reported and 10% on a constant currency basis. Our adjusted tax rate was 24.4% compared to 25.5% in the same period last year. Our weighted average diluted shares outstanding in the quarter was 147 million. Turning to slide five, during the second quarter, volumes were down 2% across both businesses. Food volume weakness was primarily due to softer than anticipated volumes for industrial food processing, predominantly in North America.

Protective volumes were down 2% in the second quarter, our lowest volume reduction since the end of 2021. The fulfillment portion of the portfolio, which represents about 40% of the Protective business, was down mid-single digits as we lapsed the tail end of material customer churn. The fulfillment declines were partially offset by volume increases within the industrial portfolio. Price was up 50 basis points, primarily on formula contract pricing in Food, which was partially offset by pricing declines in Protective of about 2%. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA of $293 million increased 3% on a constant currency basis. Margin of 22% was up 70 basis points. This performance was mainly driven by cost takeout, productivity efficiencies, and a one-time benefit of $7 million from a lease buyout related to G&A network optimization, partly offset by unfavorable net price realization.

Moving to slide six, in the second quarter, Food net sales of $896 million were flat as favorable pricing and formula pass-throughs were offset by softer volume. As Dustin mentioned, protein markets decelerated more rapidly than we initially anticipated entering the quarter. The global protein markets we serve were down approximately 1%, the largest of which was the U.S. beef cycle, which was down 7%. Despite these market headwinds, our case-ready retail solutions benefited from prior share gains with volume up slightly. From a regional standpoint, Food's EMEA and Asia businesses showed strength with volumes up low single digits in both regions. Food adjusted EBITDA of $210 million in the second quarter was up 3%. Adjusted EBITDA margin remains strong at 23.4%, up 50 basis points compared to last year. The increase in adjusted EBITDA was primarily driven by productivity and cost takeout savings combined with favorable net price realization.

These were partially offset by lower volume. Protective second quarter net sales of $439 million were down 3% as reported and 4% in constant currency. While volumes declined 2% overall, declines in our Fulfillment Portfolio were partially offset with slight growth within our industrial portfolio. Protective adjusted EBITDA of $78 million was down 5% in the second quarter as reported. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.8% was up 20 basis points from the first quarter. On a year-over-year basis, cost takeout and productivity savings partially offset negative net price realizations. Now let's turn to free cash flow and leverage on slide seven. During the six months, we generated $81 million in free cash flow as compared to $207 million in the first six months of 2024.

The primary driver of this anticipated reduction was an increase in incentive compensation payments and the timing of tax payments, partially offset by lower interest payments and capital expenditures. At the end of the quarter, our total liquidity position was $1.2 billion, including $354 million in cash and approximately $830 million available under our revolver. Our net leverage ratio was 3.6 times. We remain on track to drive net debt to adjusted EBITDA to approximately 3.0 times by the end of 2026. Let's turn to slide eight to review our outlook. We continue to operate in a low visibility and more volatile environment within both our Food and Protective businesses.

As a result, the strong first half performance and improved foreign currency assumptions will be offset by softer volume expectations, primarily in Food in the second half, and slightly lower pricing across both segments due to deflationary raw materials driven by the global trade impacts. Foreign currency impacts are now expected to be approximately 1% better than anticipated in our previous outlook. We are maintaining our previous sales guidance range of $5.1 to $5.5 billion and adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $1.075 to $1.175 billion. Our net price realization assumptions across the total company remain relatively consistent for the full year. We regularly monitor our legislative changes to determine impacts to the company's performance. In early July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed. We are currently evaluating the impact of these provisions and their impact on our effective tax rate and cash tax payments.

For now, we still expect our adjusted tax rate to be ranged between 26% and 27% for the year. Based on our outperformance in the first half of 2025, we now expect adjusted earnings per share for the year to be slightly above the midpoint of our previous guidance range of $2.90 to $3.30 per share. Lastly, regarding free cash flow, we are maintaining the midpoint of our previous guide of $400 million. We continue to improve our discipline around capital deployment, reducing our outlays while improving our return. As a result, we expect capital expenditures to come in lower than our original expectations, though slightly offset by higher working capital. While our cash generation was more linear in 2024, we typically generate more cash in the second half of the year, mainly due to the seasonality of the business.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, we remain prudent given the uncertainty around consumer spending, primarily in North America, combined with a faster than anticipated deceleration in the U.S. beef market. As a result, we expect net sales of approximately $1.3 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $270 million, and adjusted earnings per share around $0.68. With that, Dustin and I welcome your question. Operator, we would like to begin the Q&A session.

Speaker 3

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press *11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press *11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Matthew Burke Roberts of Raymond James & Associates Inc. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the questions. Dustin, you gave a lot of good color on the beef headwinds. It seems pretty well documented, but certainly appreciate that. What does that translate into a volume impact for a second half or any annualized impact we should expect in Food? Maybe just broadly, any additional color on Protective volume expectations for the second half, either by product line or end market? It sounds like you're seeing good wins there. Maybe any incremental color on new customers or products and from the lift contribution and just broadly how you're thinking about volumes for that segment in Q3 and second half. Thank you for taking the question.

Speaker 1

Yeah, of course, Matt. I appreciate the question. Starting with Food is in the cattle cycle. As we kind of made the comments in the call itself, just keep in mind that the main area that we're focused on is really where the consumer's at. I'll get into the supply side in a second. In general, what we talked a lot about is really more on the demand side relative to where consumer spending is. As we mentioned, it's relatively stable, but where it's going into retail, especially because you're seeing parts of food service and parts of industrial processing shift into that end market. We're just making sure that we're positioned to capture that demand. Still very optimistic about where we're at, what we're doing to get after it. I'll go back to the supply side and give you more color on that.

On the cattle cycle itself, just as a reminder, if you think about the business it's impacting, it's really about $400 million out of our $3.5 billion, right? This is shrink bags that go into the beef end market. Right now for the year, we're expecting 3% to 4% for 2025, down 3% to 4% for 2026, flat in 2027, and then in 2028 is a return back to growth. Keep in mind it's volatile. As we mentioned, you're seeing the acceleration in herd rebuilding right now, but it's still slow relative to heifer retention. You're seeing a little bit more elongation, but a little bit shallow now than our original expectations. I'll just reiterate that it's more volatile as we go forward.

The way to contextualize that, if you think about the roughly $400 million and you take the 3% to 4% off that, that's kind of the year-to-year headwind. If you think about that in the context of a $3.5 billion business, we're still very optimistic that while it's a headwind and it's worth calling out, it's not something that we can't overcome as an organization. That's what we're focused on, going back to the end markets that we're targeting, really trying to rotate more into retail and to food service. If you think about volume expectations in the second half, particularly for the Food business, what we're looking at is roughly down two points relative to where we were. You're looking at the volume mix in the second half being around down three points in Q3 and Q4 from a volume perspective.

Obviously, two points down relative to where we were back in May. That's kind of the shift overall to business, but most of that's related to where we see, again, going back to the end of the consumer. It's still too early to talk about 2026 because we'll have a lot more clarity as we progress throughout Q3 and Q4. When we shift to Protective, obviously really pleased with our performance in the second quarter. While we're still down, it is a mark in progress. Our industrial portfolio took a step up. Fulfillment, as Roni Johnson mentioned in her commentary, is down mid-single digits. As we think about the second half, you had roughly think of this a couple points ahead of our own expectations in the second quarter.

What we've done as we think about Q3 and Q4 is we really maintained our outlook for the second half despite the overperformance in Q2. That's really just around what Roni Johnson mentioned during the prepared remarks around us being prudent around the second half as we closely watch our end markets. We talked about the industrial portfolio, and just to give you some color where some of that opportunity was, our core view business performed really well. Our Shrink Bag business is performing well. Our Instapact, while still slightly down, performed better than it has over the past, think of it as probably six, seven, eight quarters. We're really pleased. There are pockets of it. It's not perfect, like I said, holistically at the portfolio level and mixed around each individual region. Again, really pleased with where we're at.

A lot of that benefit is coming from the work, as we talked about in North America, that we're now going to be extending across the rest of the world because that's where we had the biggest pressure point. All the other areas as well, like the last color commentary I'll give on it, is really around our electronics business and the end markets that we see there. Very strong in the first half of the year. While we're looking at it, trying to make sure it's not transitory related to pre-buying during tariffs, et cetera, what we're thinking about now is really where's it going to be in the second half. So far as we've gotten off to the start here in Q3, it's on track. We haven't really seen any shift in the end market dynamics at this point.

Again, staying close to it and really excited about where we're headed, really positive about what we've been able to do in a relatively short period of time in terms of really beginning to turn the tide.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ghansham Panjabi. Your line is now open.

Hey guys, good morning. I guess, you know, Dustin, on the Food segment, I mean, you're pretty much at a high watermark for margins for that segment. You know, with their commentary on food and for the outlook through 2027, et cetera, I have to assume that red meat is more profitable, especially North American beef. You have the tariff uncertainty as it relates to Brazil, et cetera. How should we think about the near-term outlook for margins specific to food? Also, as you think out to 2026, 2027, the natural headwinds associated with this large profitable market being a headwind. Thanks.

Speaker 1

Hey Ghansham, good question. As it relates to kind of Food margins where we're at now, you're right. I mean, we're really pleased with where we're at from an overall margin perspective. We've talked in the past around Shrink Bag in general, which is what's serving that market and the specialty properties around that particular performance of that application and the equipment offerings we bring with it. It is a high margin business for us. What I would tell you is if I go back to it and you think about 2025 and 2026, in 2027, you're talking about a $400 million business with a slight impact relative to 3% to 4%. In the scheme of things, relative to our overall Shrink Bag business, which is about $1.4 billion in size, it's still relatively contained, particularly to North America.

While there is absolutely a margin impact relative to the loss of volume associated with that, we still believe the network optimization efforts, our transformation efforts relative to productivity are going to continue to buoy and balance out our margins as we have over the past and demonstrated over the past couple of years. We feel still very confident that we're not going to have a material mix impact relative to bags, relative to the rest of the business that would bring down margins and that we're still able to drive earnings power despite that headwind. We will continue to monitor as we go forward throughout the second half of the year and to understand, does the outlook for 2026 become more acute or not.

As of right now, down 3% to 4% in that $400 million business within North America, we feel it's relatively contained and something that we can overcome. We're not as concerned about it.

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from George Leon Staphos of BofA Securities. Your line is now open.

Hi everyone, thanks for the details. Congratulations on Kristen and Roni. Congratulations to you on all you did in the interim role and your work going forward. My question is twofold. One, Dustin, you said that you're maintaining guidance despite what's been an accelerated decline in food. Can you talk about the specific controllables that you're controlling? The specific cost outs, things like that, that you expect for the second half, particularly within food, but wherever you want to talk about what will bolster your earnings in the second half relative to your guidance as a way you can give us a bit of cadence, food versus protective in third quarter. The second part of the question, your release last night mentioned, and I'm paraphrasing, that one of the reasons that Kristen was selected as CFO is that she has experience creating value with complex portfolios.

How does that apply to Sealed Air? Where do you think that to be most applicable? Thank you and good luck in the quarter.

Speaker 1

Yeah, thank you, George. A couple pieces. As we talked about earlier in the year, we really focused on cost takeout. We cited this roughly $90 million number that we're well on track to achieve for the full year. As we looked in the out years, the hope was at that point in time that we could drive even further operating leverage in the business. Obviously, as our outlook and volume has come down, keep in mind that now a lot of that cost takeout effort is really balancing out earnings to get us to the $11.25 midpoint that we're calling out as the middle part of our guidance. Specifically, a lot of these initiatives, while we're continuing to kick off new things, network optimization, we mentioned a couple of the areas that we think will be able to yield benefit in 2026 and 2027 and beyond.

Right now, it's a lot of activities that have been in earnest over the past two years. Areas like that, which we talked about in the past, which is our G&A optimization around our back office in Manila, that started from concept a year and a half ago as an idea, and now we're in full swing. The office is open. We've already hit our 200 plus employees there. Same thing with Mexico City, which is staggered behind it. We're now ramping that up. Those are two examples of it, but there's a litany of them relative to the reorganization work we've done that's been able to streamline the organization, delayer it, actually improve accountability, improve speed of decision making, while at the same time driving earnings power, in this case, even offsetting some of that volume weakness that we have in the second half.

It's a lot of stuff that we've had in motion, and we talked during May around there's other opportunity now to continue to do that going into 2026 and 2027, and we'll continue to work on it. As we progress throughout the second half of the year, we'll give you more color about what's to come and what does that mean for 2026, going back to even Ghansham's question in terms of what we can do more to balance out where we see any pressures in the business. I would say now more than ever being really proactive about it and making sure that we have a pipeline of actions that we're taking that not only improve the business outcomes, but at the same time help balance out the earnings power.

When you think about the question on Kristen, if you take a step back, she has a background, obviously, spent her entire career in industrials and last, last led MSC with doing distribution works. There's a lot in her background relative to managing, if you think about Ingersoll Rand, complex portfolio, international business. If you think about our Protective segment, complex portfolio, international business. If you think about our Food segment, very similar, right? Even within underneath the Food and Protective kind of segments, there's obviously a lot of complexity in the proliferation of solutions and applications we have. Most recently in MSC, she actually led a lot of the transformation work in that business. We think a lot of her direct experience is really applicable here to accelerate the work that we're already doing and also bring new ideas.

If you go back to even my own background where I don't have a natural background in manufacturing, except for my time here at Sealed Air Corporation, she really is going to come in and complement that and bring a different lens to what we're already working on and even bring a new perspective. We're really excited about her coming on board. I'll just take a moment with that said also again just to thank Roni for all she did. I appreciate your words there because she's done a tremendous job over the past six months.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Philip H. Ng of Jefferies LLC. Your line is now open.

Hey guys, congrats on a strong quarter in a dynamic environment. Dustin, I think you guys kept your outlook for Protective unchanged in the back half, despite progress, which makes sense. Are you actually seeing any slowdown in bidding and order activity throughout 2Q and going into July? Some of the uptick you're seeing on the industrial side of your portfolio, can you kind of size up how much of that is internal initiatives versus the cycle turning in? That would be helpful.

Speaker 1

Yeah, going down to your point about July, as I mentioned, I think it was early on maybe in the Q&A, we really haven't seen a change in order pattern, right? I was talking specifically at the time about our fabrication business, but in general, I wouldn't say we've seen a real shift. We're still on track, kind of early here starting in Q3. I feel good about where that business is headed right now. A lot of that is order entry, activity in the market. Keep in mind, Phil, what we're trying to balance out is that a lot of that's being driven from the fact that we invest in sales. If you think about just, and we've lost a significant amount of volume since 2019. We're going back to customers that we lost. We're going to existing customers to expand our business.

A lot of the work we've done in our go-to-market strategies was giving us that confidence and our ability to take, not just grow existing business, but take share in the marketplace, particularly in areas where we've lost it in the past. If I contextualize that with industrial portfolios, what I would tell you is that to me, that's not really a cycle turning. If anything, I would say there's been more market pressure here recently. If you think about areas like the automotive industry, where our foam and plate solutions are used widely, we're obviously concerned about tariffs and what that could potentially mean for our end markets, but we've continued to perform really well. I think that speaks to now that we have that go-to-market motion really beginning to work, beyond the fact, keep in mind too, that we've also minimized churn.

That's not just a Q2 2025, that's for the past six, seven quarters. It's really beginning to bear itself in the results. We're still cautious, obviously, about the second half. That's part of your commentary. We obviously had a beat expectations in Q2. We held the second half relative to volume expectations, which implied a slight uptick in volume in Q4. We're kind of heads down and really focused, just focused on executing against those internal initiatives. When I say internal, keep in mind a lot of this is really just being back out in front of customers, back out in the field, and back out engaging with our distribution partners. It's really been a lot more about, I think engagement is really the first wave of that benefit when some of these other things are going to continue to yield.

I'm really excited about kind of cascading this across our European as well as our Asian footprint and getting further leverage out of that, particularly as we head into 2026.

Okay, thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeffrey John Zekauskas of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Your line is now open.

Thanks very much. Your adjusted EBITDA range for 2025 is $100 million, and you only have two quarters to go, and your EBITDA was, you know, roughly flat in the first half. Why is the range so wide? Is that because of conservatism, or is the uncertainty about second half EBITDA that large?

Speaker 1

Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, just to answer it very directly, it's really just conservatism. As we think about the second half of the year, we don't, the volatility just relative to the end markets that we serve and us being cautious around it, it really is just being prudent with low visibility. Rather than touch the ranges at this point in time, our thought process was let's work through the third quarter.

Once we have more visibility into, obviously, 3Q, we can then not just touch the range, which we indicated to keep in mind in the guidance side of it, that our EPS is above, we expect it to be slightly above the midpoint, but we'll come out more fully and kind of give you a sense of where we're landing across all the dimensions of our guidance and do that at that point in time when we have a little bit more certainty. It really just speaks to the dynamic environment we're operating in, particularly as it relates to tariff impacts. I think that, as we're all aware, right here recently in August, a lot of those decisions were made, but it actually takes time.

I don't think people always fully appreciate that relative to what is it going to do to inflation, what's it going to do to price, and it takes us time to work through the system. A lot of that's just reflecting that. I would say in general, it's not that we believe we're concerned about the outcomes of those far ends of the range up or down. It's more around just conservatism and looking to get through 3Q and give you a more full update.

Okay. Can you describe a little bit of your issue with procuring specialty resins and why things seem to be a little bit more difficult for you?

Yeah, it's not difficult to procure them. This is just really speaking about our footprint and just giving you a little color where we're seeing more impacts on tariffs. Now, keep in mind, I'll reiterate that no real impact in the second quarter. We don't see any real impact full year relative to our outlook at this point in time. There are certain resins, you know, as we've gone through this process with tariffs, we've really been shifting around production. We've been shifting around procurement in terms of being able to try to mitigate the impact as much as possible. It didn't happen on its own, right? Not just ourselves, but most of the companies are going through this relative to how we're optimizing where we buy from. There are examples where we're not able just to mitigate it because certain specialty resins are only available in Europe.

You can't have a large chemical manufacturer shift it to another asset or shift it to another location. This is just an example where we're having to, and we talked about limited pricing actions where we'll have to embed that into our cost structure and then price accordingly to mitigate it. It's just giving you some of that color. No issue with procuring. We don't have an issue at this point in time of procuring anything.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Anthony James Pettinari of Citigroup Inc. Your line is now open.

Good morning. Just following up on Jeff's question on the full-year EBITDA bridge, I'm wondering if you can put a finer point on maybe the total level of the cost saves that you expect to achieve this year and how that offsets net price, which I think you said that that was sort of unchanged. If you can just go through the bridge items for sort of cost saves versus net price falls and FX, that would be helpful.

Speaker 1

Yeah, sure. Anthony, I'll just walk you down and give you a sense of kind of where there's some slight changes. The first thing I'm going to talk about before, because I'm going to talk about net price realization and some of the embedded assumptions there. When you think about net price realization, really what's happened is prices come down, right? That's being offset by, per Roni's commentary, deflationary aspects of our raw materials. It's remained relatively unchanged. It's actually gotten a little bit worse by about $7 million for the full year. It's the dynamics that have actually changed pretty materially, which is price coming down and raw materials coming down to offset it.

When you think about the volume bridge, and excuse me, the EBITDA bridge starting with volume, volume, we're expecting, if you go back to the roughly $100 million we talked about holistically, that drops to the bottom line about $44 million. You get a net price realization down $65 million. The CTO is $90 million, and there's about another $16 million of actions that we're taking on top of that, which brings you to a total of $106 million. Think of this as not just structural savings. This is cost takeout across the business relative to just being also just fiscally disciplined. We've talked about the compensation programs relative to how they paid out last year versus where we're on track this year. That's roughly $20 million, and FX is a drag of about $3 million. That bridges you down to the roughly $14 million year over year.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Edlain S. Rodriguez of Mizuho Securities USA LLC. Your line is now open.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Just one quick one on the price over to a gap, especially in Protective. It's still negative. Can you have any success in raising prices there that could narrow that gap in the second half of the year? It's been that persistently negative. Will we ever see that gap narrow completely as we get into the second half and into next year?

Speaker 1

To answer your question, I'll start with the second half. When you think about, and I'll go to what we think about 2026, keep in mind the change coming into this year relative to expectations that we're all wrestling with is really what's going on in the resin environment. It was really kicked off with the announcements back in the March timeframe around just tariffs in general and what that did to the polyethylene market. When you think about that, what's happened is it's actually created a more deflationary environment across the board. The pricing impact you're seeing in Protective, and this has really been an ongoing theme for the past two or three years, kind of coming from resin highs going back into, I want to say it's 2023 coming down to 22 to 23, 24, 25.

We expected this year to be getting back into a slightly inflationary environment, which is, I would say, positive for us, but positive for the industry and sector as a whole. That obviously did not happen. What you've seen is you've kind of seen it flatlining, kind of where it dropped in the March timeframe and that cascade throughout the rest of the year, which is what's creating that deflationary pricing aspect. That's a market impact. It's not an issue with our products. For a while there, there was the resins coming down and we were also reducing our price gap relative to competition. We're really beyond that now. This is, to me, a market dynamic that's happening in the second half and what we've given for guidance we fully expect from that perspective. If we have optimism, it's what we can potentially do on the volume side.

When you think about going into 2026, it's really what happens to the underlying resin markets that will help drive that, particularly in Protective. Food's a little different for a variety of reasons, but when you think about the primary piece really being low density, high density polyethylene that goes into our Protective business, you're really looking at where resin's going to go. At this point in time, we don't have a clear view of that in terms of 2026. As we progress through Q3 and Q4, we'll get a lot more clarity and be able to give you an update. Our general view is right now where we're at, as soon as we get to kind of a stable inflationary environment, our pricing will go along with it and you'll begin to narrow that net price realization and be able to bring it back to positive.

TBD if 2026 will be that year. Thank you. Are we going to have the next question?

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Nico Pacini of Truist. Your line is now open.

Hi guys, I'm sending in from Mike Roxland today. Thanks for all the color so far. I just had two quick ones. One is how's the cattle cycle faring right now in South America and Australia? Previously, I think you had mentioned targeting growth in fluids. Is there just any update in that area?

Speaker 1

Yeah, on the cattle cycle itself, I'd say there's still kind of peakish in both Latin America as well as Australia. We still expect very strong, I would say less strong relative to underlying cycle, but still strong years on a relative basis going into next year in both of those regions. In the U.S., which I mentioned before, has obviously accelerated this year, which is making 2025 really the first year of those three years where we went into this year thinking it may be like 2024 and it may be elongated. You're down 3% to 4% and similar outlook for 2026 and then flat in 2027 and back to growth in 2028. That cycle will obviously go generally for the next seven years. On fluids performance, that business continues to perform well.

You think about fluids, again, just to break it down, it's really this combination of our Cryovac fluids and liquid solutions as well as the Liquibox acquisition that we closed back in February of 2023. We've talked about the Cryovac side of it, which has continued to perform well. We expect it to perform well this year and continue to be a growth driver for the business overall. Liquibox, we obviously went through our own kind of destocking and down cycle in that business in 2023. We've stabilized it since then. It's not performing to where we would like it to be, which we talked about historically, that end market being able to generate mid-single digits, which is where our fluids business has done historically. If you look at the CAGR of that business, it's mid-single to high single digits.

We're still working on getting Liquibox there, but we feel really good about the progress we've made on continuing to stabilize that business. Now it's beginning to work out of what I would say some of the operational challenges we went through and getting back towards this focus solely on growth. Still more to come, and we'll give a lot more dialogue around this as we progress throughout the second half, and we fully expect it to be a growth driver in 2026.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Gabrial Shane Hajde from Wells Fargo Securities LLC. Your line is now open.

Dustin, good morning. Roni, thanks for all your help. I wanted to revisit a comment you made in your prepared remarks, Dustin, about utilizing some external partners, and I think it was Protective. You mentioned speed to market and maybe intimated a reduction in capital intensity. If maybe you can elaborate on the concept a little bit. I don't know if it's a function of maybe customers being a little bit more dynamic in their own strategies and decision making or what's driving it. Maybe quantify for us, I'm assuming CapEx, but maybe op cost as well, what that could save you.

Speaker 1

Sure, Gabe. A couple of things. Keep in mind that ours, you know, for the past, if you go back pre maybe 10 years ago, a majority of our new solutions were actually developed with external partners. I mean, people coming in to actually help us design and build, you know, think of it as leveraging outsourcing some of your R&D on equipment design, outsourcing R&D on even material. In a lot of ways, it was around applications. Over the past 10 years, we've really taken an approach of vertical integration relative to doing internal development and not just development of new applications, materials, and equipment, but also developing our own internal manufacturing technology. We've really begun to rethink that, broadly speaking. It goes back to the situation we've been in with our balance sheet over the past couple of years.

What I mean by that is, you know, for there's a period of time in our mailer strategy where we were leveraging our existing lines. Now we're looking at, to be very specific, now we're leveraging other manufacturing technology to still produce our application, our product, but in a new form and in a much more cost-effective way. It speeds the time to actually get the lines up the speeds we need. It gives us the ability to scale up much faster in the market relative to, you know, where you place those lines. That's an example where it's not just the application itself, but it's also thinking, rethinking manufacturing technology. In our Food segment, you know, we've talked, you know, at length about our industrial food processing and the strength of our kind of that three-legged stool around material science, equipment, and our service capabilities.

As you think about that broadly for retail, that's what we're thinking about. Is it really our equipment or do we leverage external partnerships? We've talked about this a little bit in the past, but we're being a lot more intentional now about how we go after it. It's really about leveraging people that are good at what they're doing, is their core competency, and giving us time to market versus trying to be everything, you know, being great at everything effectively. That is bringing down some of our capital intensity. If you look at this year for our outlook, we brought it down to roughly, it's what's embedded in Roni's numbers, is roughly $200 million for the full year. If you go back to 2023, we were at that point talking about doing $280 at the beginning of the year.

We brought it down to $240, $220 last year, $200 this year. This is all while increasing our returns, I think addressing some of our performance issues. I think that this approach that we're doing, it's not that we're actually underinvesting the business. To me, we're investing more now than we ever have before. We're just doing it in the right areas that are going to yield better results for us longer term. Hopefully that gives you some color.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Dong of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Hey, this is Brian Dong for Arun Dishanathan. Thanks for taking my question. Can you walk us through your CTO to grow cost savings? What are the different buckets to that? Are you still targeting $90 million of savings for the end of the year? Thanks.

Speaker 1

Yeah, good question. The buckets have remained unchanged. If you think about three broader areas that we've been going after, one is on the go-to-market side. How do we reorganize? This goes back to how do we reorganize back into Food and Protective. How do we reorganize our P&Ls back into the regional P&Ls underneath it? What do we do on the go-to-market side relative to marketing, sales, R&D? That's that first bucket that we did, which is really in the front line, which is really about, while it generated cost savings, it's much more around how do we get to the market, closer to our customers, delayer the business, and drive growth. The outcome of that was also being able to drive further productivity in the business. Another big piece is in supply chain, right?

I'm not quantifying each bucket because these are shifting all the time where we find better opportunities. You kind of see a play between all three of the buckets. Network optimization, we're down about five plants holistically right now, just over the past two years. We've talked about on the call, we're beginning to outline broader plans there as we think about 2026, 2027, 2028. There'll be more to come on that topic. The last bucket's around G&A optimization. I used an example in the Q&A earlier around our Manila facility, and it's really about leveraging a global footprint relative to where we need to be. To give you an idea, when you break down the numbers, it's really between 65% and 35% between CTO and productivity. Just to give you a sense.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our next question comes from Joshua David Spector of UBS Investment Bank. Your line is now open.

Yeah, hey, good morning. Thanks for all the details around Food and the assumptions there. I kind of want to ask about the non-red meat assumptions as you look at the second half. I guess, you know, really rough numbers, you talked about $400 million in sales down high single digits. You roll that through to Food, that's kind of a point headwind or so, I think. The other 90% is down a couple points. Can you maybe unpack that and some of the assumptions between, I guess, the retail market versus maybe some of the processed foods and meats, which I think would be somewhat of an offset for what you're seeing there. More detail there would be helpful. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Josh. When you think about overall things, if you go back to the prepared commentary and Roni's comments, we talked about the overall business, protein, global protein production being down about 1% this year, right? Keep in mind that's what's weighing on some of the broader volumes. I go back to even the consumer itself or the consumer spending where you're seeing that shift out of industrial food processing into retail and food service. Some of the markets, if you really look across every area, whether it's dairy, whether it's poultry, smoked and processed, they've all come down slightly, which is why you see that broader impact across the business. We don't see that as a longer-term headwind for 2026 and 2027. We see it as a condition right now of just the market we're operating in, really more on the demand side.

I'll leave you with that. That's really what's driving that broader impact.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Our last question comes from Stefan Diaz from Morgan Stanley. Thank you. Your line is now open.

Hi, Dustin. Hi, Roni. Thanks for taking my question. You noted industrial strength, which is nice to see, just considering some mixed macro indicators on the industrial side. I was just wondering if any of that industrial and market strength was due to your automation business. Maybe how are you thinking about your industrial portfolio for the second half and into 2026? Maybe how are you thinking about your automation business as well? Thanks.

Speaker 1

Good question. Just keep in mind, we don't think of it as an automation business. The way we think about it is we're bringing a solution to the market that's really combining where we are the strongest, right? I think, if you go back to an example for Protective, it's our APS business, our Auto Bagging Solutions, right? It's an example where you're bringing the piece of equipment, you're bringing out the hybrid one. Now you can bring the great materials, whether it's fiber or poly, and you're bringing great technical service. It's really all about throughput, yield, the ability to protect that particular item, et cetera, and packaging. The Food business is very similar. Keep in mind that we think of it less. I know it was talked about a lot going back three, four, or five years ago around automation for automation's sake.

We're much more around that solution sell and bringing solutions to market that combine that, which creates a lot of value for our customers. Again, on the industrial side, if you really look at our business, if you think about Instapak, right? Same thing. Great equipment, great material science, great service. You think about APS, very similar, right? As you look across the different solutions that we have in Protective and Food, in general, that's where we drive. They're generally higher margin businesses. They deliver more customer value. I think across the board, our approach to doing that and going back to what made us great in that solution sell is really making a difference in the market and is absolutely contributing to some of the industrial performance you see in the numbers. I talked about Instapak as an example, which has performed a lot better than it has historically.

Speaker 3

Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I would now like to turn it back to the President and CEO, Dustin Semach, for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you for joining us this morning. I look forward to updating you in November on our ongoing turnaround in Protective and the growth transformation we are driving in Food. Meet the market challenges ahead of us head on. Finally, thank you to the 16,000 plus Sealed Air employees and our customers who are at the center of our transformation. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you for participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.