Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CCL Industries fourth quarter investor update. Please note there will be a question and answer session after the call. The moderator for today is Mr. Geoffrey Martin, President and Chief Executive Officer, and joining him is Mr. Sean Washchuk, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, gentlemen. Thank you very much, operator, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first quarter conference call. Before we start with the numbers, I just wanted to say a few words about the situation in the Ukraine. We're as saddened as everybody in the world is about what's happening there. We're very proud of all the efforts of our employees around the world to donate money and goods and chattels to the support of the displaced population there, and particularly our employees in Poland, Austria, and Germany, who've organized accommodation for you know more than a few hundred Ukrainian refugees. We're very proud of their efforts, and I'd like to acknowledge that on the call here this morning. With that, I'm gonna hand the call over to Sean, who's gonna take you through the numbers. Thank you, Geoff. I'll turn everyone's attention to slide two, our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. I'll remind everyone that our business faces known and unknown risks and opportunities. For further details of these risks, please look at our 2021 annual report in the MD&A. You can also refer to our Q1 report, which has some updated risks regarding the conflict in Ukraine and additional supply chain challenges. Our annual and quarterly reports can be found online at the company's website, cclind.com, or on sedar.com. Moving to the next slide, our summary of financial results. For the first quarter of 2022, sales increased 12.8% with organic growth of 10.8%, acquisition-related growth of 4.5%, partially offset by 2.5% negative impact from foreign currency translation, resulting in sales of CAD 1.52 billion compared to CAD 1.35 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Operating income was CAD 228.6 million for the 2022 first quarter compared to CAD 223.1 million for the first quarter of 2021. A 5.1% increase, excluding the impact of foreign currency translation. Geoff will expand on the segmented operating results of our CCL, Avery, Checkpoint, and Innovia segments momentarily. Corporate expenses are up for the quarter, principally due to higher expense for long-term variable compensation versus the prior year quarter. Consolidated EBITDA for the 2022 first quarter, excluding the impact of foreign currency translation, increased 5.3% compared to the same period in 2021. Net finance expense was CAD 14.7 million for the first quarters of 2022 and 2021. The overall effective tax rate was 24.4% for the 2022 first quarter, compared to an effective rate of 24.2% recorded last year first quarter. The comparative effective tax rates for the first quarters of 2022 was slightly higher due to a higher portion of taxable income being earned in higher tax jurisdictions. The effective tax rate may change in future periods depending on the proportion of taxable income that's earned in different tax jurisdictions. Net earnings for the 2022 first quarter were CAD 150.2 million, up 4.7%, excluding foreign currency translation compared to the first quarter of 2021. Moving to the next slide, earnings per share. Basic earnings per Class B share were CAD 0.84 for the first quarter of 2022, compared to CAD 0.82 for the first quarter of 2021. Adjusted basic earnings per Class B share were CAD 0.85 for the 2022 first quarter, compared to adjusted basic earnings per Class B share of CAD 0.82 for the first quarter of 2021. The change in adjusted basic EPS to CAD 0.85 is primarily attributable to CAD 0.05 advance in operating income, CAD 0.01 from equity contributions from our JVs, partially offset by CAD 0.02 negative currency translation and CAD 0.01 increased corporate costs. Moving to our next slide. Free cash flow from operations. For the first quarter of 2022, free cash flow from operations was CAD 38.1 million, compared to CAD 87.6 million in the 2021 first quarter. An increase in net capital expenditures of approximately CAD 43 million reduced free cash flow from operations for the first quarter of 2022 compared to first quarter of 2021. For the twelve months ended March 31st, 2022, free cash flow from operations decreased approximately CAD 237 million compared to the 12 months ended March 31st, 2021. The comparative decline is attributable to an increase in net working capital coupled with an increase in net capital spending. Moving to the next slide, our cash and debt summary. Net debt as at March 31st, 2022, was CAD 1.46 billion, an increase of CAD 214 million compared to December 31st, 2021. The increase is principally a result of new borrowings to finance the acquisition of McGavigan in January and the repurchase of shares under the company's NCIB. As at the end of the first quarter, the company had repurchased in excess of 1.7 million shares for approximately CAD 100 million. Although the company's net debt increased, the balance sheet closed the quarter in a strong position. Our balance sheet leverage ratio was 1.24 x, increasing from 1.06 x at the end of December 2021. Liquidity was robust with CAD 616.9 million of cash on hand and CAD 1 billion of available undrawn capacity on the company's revolving credit facility. The company's overall average finance rate was largely unchanged at approximately 2.3% on March 31, 2022, compared to 2.4% at December 31, 2021. The company's balance sheet continues to be well-positioned as we move through fiscal 2022. Geoff, over to you. Thank you, Sean. Good morning, everybody. I'm on Slide seven, highlights of capital spending. As Sean just mentioned on the cash flow slide there, capital expenditures are up CAD 43 million quarter-on-quarter. We're pretty much in line with Q1 2020 before we saw the impact of the slowdown in capital spending in the COVID era. Excludes right-of-use assets and the depreciation under IFRS 16, and we're planning to spend CAD 380 million for the year. Slide eight, highlights for CCL segment, 7.3% organic sales growth. A lot of that price-driven. North America, high single-digit%. Europe, mid-single-digit%. Asia Pacific, low single-digits%. Latin America up a very strong 25%, where we gained some share. Very strong quarter in the home and personal care business offset tough comps at CCL Secure. We had a very good start to that business last year, so it's really more about all the timing, anything going on in the business. CCL Design was slower in automotive than we expected. Electronics was pretty good, but so it's much slower in automotive than expected for all reasons you've read about in the newspapers. Sales up at food and beverage and at healthcare and specialty, but our profits were impacted by inflation and mix in the latter. Slide nine, highlights of our JVs. As everybody knows, via press release, we've suspended any future investment in our joint venture in Russia. Our partner continues to run that business with the plants we have there, and we had a strong quarter in the Middle East. Slide 10, highlights for Avery. One of the success stories for the quarter, strong trajectory continues, especially in North America, where we had good recovery of inflation and a very good recovery in the growth of name badges, which are almost back to pre-COVID levels. MasterTag and RFID Hotel acquisitions outperformed. Raw materials availability and inflation and elevated component costs from China remains challenging, and it probably did hold back our sales somewhat in the quarter. Our price pass-throughs were very well done, and there's more of that still to come in the second half of the year. On to Slide 11 for Checkpoint. Mixed story here. Merchandise availability of what we call our MAS business grew in all regions except Europe. Profits were impacted by Chinese freight and component inflation. Although we implemented some price increases, the benefit of that we're not really gonna feel till the second half of 2022. That was more than offset by very strong growth in our apparel label business, 40% for the quarter, organic, driven by RFID and then augmented on top of that by the Uniter and Tecnoblu acquisitions. ALS really outperformed and MAS underperformed, but the total was above the prior year quarter. The small Meto price marking operation in Germany was impacted by inflation. We've implemented price increases there, which will have impact in the second half of the year. Slide 12, highlight for Innovia. Sales gains here really all about resin and freight inflation pass-through. Big surprise for the quarter was the energy inflation surge we experienced in Europe. A lot of that due to the situation in Ukraine did impact profitability. We have implemented pricing surcharges, which will begin to take effect in the beginning of the second quarter, will get progressively better as the year moves ahead. The changes to resin pricing in the Americas also impacted. We had a drop in resin prices in the latter part of last year, which we had to pass through to customers. We had inflated resin prices in inventory at that time. We got a bit of a margin squeeze around that but we've got the reverse impact of that in Q2 as resins have increased again in North America. Slide 13, some comments about the outlook. Many inflation price pass-throughs have been implemented which would benefit the core CCL label businesses, especially in the second half. Avery volumes should continue to improve, augmented by recent acquisitions. Checkpoint price increases are also underway, and we expect RFID to continue to grow at ALS. The CCL Design customer supply chain issues remain, especially in automotive, but recent acquisitions and new business wins are an offset. The biggest concern we have for the upcoming quarter is the situation in China with lockdowns. It's affecting Checkpoint and CCL Design, which have very big operations in the country. Q2 impact frankly depends on the duration, how long the government keeps things locked down there for. Some of our businesses in China are about domestic consumption and some are about production for the world markets and domestic consumption. We think some of this demand constraint in China will be temporary and will recover. The demand for cars is latent and there. Demand for soft consumer goods, probably if you lose that demand, you don't ever see it again. It's a pretty mixed story there. Comps are difficult but less challenging at CCL Secure for Q2. They do ease significantly for the second half of 2022. Finally, we'll be starting up the EcoFloat line in Poland in this quarter. Lots of customer interest there about enabling PET bottle recycling by easier sleeve removal. We're very excited about that opportunity in Poland. With that operator, we'd like to open up the call for questions. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone at this time. We ask that while posing your question, you please pick up your handset if listening on a speaker phone to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Thank you. Your first question is coming from Adam Josephson of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Adam, please ask your question. Geoffrey and Tom, good morning. Morning, Adam. How are you? I'm well, thanks. I hope the same goes for you, Geoff. Yes, we're really great. Good. In China, Geoffrey, you mentioned that's your biggest concern at 2Q. Can you give us a little more perspective on the impact in April? If that were to continue, what that might mean for the balance of the quarter? Well, the problem we've got really with so much about April. April was a shorter month this year than it was last year. April had an extra work day in 2021 versus 2022. That probably had more impact than China. We did see some profit drop in China in the CCL Design and Checkpoint space because our plants, a number of our plants were impacted by shutdown measures. CAD a few million of EBIT would be how I describe it now. Obviously, if that was CAD a few million per month, per quarter, it could end up being a much larger number. It depends on how quickly the government allows things to normalize there. It's really a doubled question into whether your plant is impacted in terms of whether it's open or shut. More importantly, what's happening with the customers. I'm sure most of the people on the call, you know, heard what Tim Cook said about the impact on Apple. Yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, there was an article about Tesla in China, which I'm sure a lot of people have read. I think everyone's waiting for the cork to be pulled out of the bottle so things can get back to normal there. Right now, it's still a difficult country to operate in for sure. Have you seen any recent changes, Geoff, for the better or worse along those lines? Well, I think there are signs that the government is beginning to let people back to work in the affected areas. You know, if there's an outbreak in city X or Y, then the authorities come down pretty hard still. It's really about where your factory is located and where your customers' factories are located. Things seem to be easing a little bit in Shanghai now. That's a good thing. Other cities it's got worse. It's a pretty mixed story, I would say, and everyone wants it to normalize. I think the important thing, Adam, is, I think if you think about it, you know, for things like cars and phones, which we're somewhat focused on in China, you know, we're able to produce that in inventory. We may not sell it, but we can still produce it in the plants that make it. We will eventually get those sales come what may. Where it's domestic consumption in China, so whether you move into the consumer business, you know, a lost sale for shampoo in China is really a lost sale for good. A lost sale for a car in April you may well still get in May and June. That's really the difference. Yeah, no. Thank you for clarifying that, Geoffrey. In terms of demand more broadly, how was it compared to what you expected in the first quarter? What was it like in April? What are you thinking thereafter? I would say the Q1 results for us were better than we thought we might get. I think a lot of that was due to we did a better job with the pricing execution. I think that applies to a lot of companies, both our customers, retailers, everybody in the supply chain, I think has done a good job of doing inflation cost pass through. That was the positive surprise for the quarter. Demand was still relatively strong, you know, in Q1. A bit stronger than we thought. Not at CCL Secure, but that's just all the timing. Outside of that, relatively strong. At Avery, we saw a big bounce back as you've seen. You know, that was a very pleasant surprise. You know, three months ago, you said, look, demand is the million-dollar question because there's all this inflation. Everyone's passing on these huge price increases, and we really don't know what the consumer Yeah. impact is gonna be. Do you feel any differently now than you did three months ago? No, I think it's still the big unanswered question is what will the demand picture look like really in the second half of next year? I think there'll be some noise in Q2 like there was in Q1. What's the long-term trend? I don't think anybody has the answer to that. It's, that's the thing everybody's waiting to see what really happens when some of this inflation noise dies down and then what the impact is on the consumer, what the job market be like, what will the economy be like, what impact will the higher interest rates have on demand. So on and so forth. Will the supply chain side return to normal somewhat, you know? I think a lot of the inflation at the moment is really supply side driven. If that supply side returns to normal, will that have some calming effect on the markets, you know? Yeah. Yes. We don't know the answer there any more than anybody else does. No, I get that. There are two other one. Just on that demand question again, I would've thought that demand might have been hit more in Europe, just given the inflation is particularly acute there. Did you not see that? Are you not seeing that? What are you seeing in Europe broadly speaking? Yeah, I would say Europe was, you know, we still saw growth in Europe in Q1, and it's continued in Q2 so far. I don't think the rubber's hit the road yet. What the impact is on this whole situation in Russia is still open to debate. We're waiting to see. So far we haven't seen anything dramatically different from what we saw in Q1. Just one last one on the NCIB, Geoff. See, last year you had up to 8 million shares authorized through Q1. I think you said you bought back 1.739. Can you just talk to us about why not more than that? Obviously, your balance sheet remains in very good shape. Were you expecting to buy roughly this number of shares over the past year? Again, just walk us through that situation, if you don't mind. Well, we only started buying back stock this past quarter, and there are limits to what we're allowed to do by the rules of how much stock we can buy in any one quarter and how many trading days there are. You have to remember in Q1, you know, we didn't release our results until we were in the blackout period for most of Q1. We didn't have very many days where we could buy back stock. There are limits to how much we could buy at any one time. Sean can talk you through that if you want. No, I appreciate that. That's that sounds terrific. Thanks, Geoff. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Walter Spracklin of RBC Capital Markets. Walter, over to you. Thank you very much, operator. Good morning, everyone. Morning, Walter. Maybe we could go back to the demand environment. I think I heard you that you know, food and beverage, healthcare, yes, a lot of price increases as part of the organic growth there, but demand's solid. It's the home and personal care where I guess you had the most swings in disruption within the division, right? I mean, there were a lot of products that were extremely in demand during pandemic and a lot that fell off significantly and perhaps reversing now. Do you have any better sense now on what the overall picture is with home and personal care now that you know, now that we're going into a bit of a new normal here? Well, I would say it was very strong in Q1 in North America. You know, by North America, I mean Mexico and the U.S. Those markets and Brazil also were strong. Throughout the Americas, I would characterize the demand picture as strong and across all the categories we're in in those markets. Aerosols, tubes, and labels. Things that subsided like sanitizers, obviously, that was a negative. The upsides were things that were more cosmetic and travel related, where we got a big bounce back. Sun care creams, things like that, you know, bounced back. Internationally, in Europe and Asia, demand was a lot more muted. The weighting of household and personal care is very much driven towards how we perform in the Americas. Moving to pass-throughs, I think you've done a great job with pass-throughs to date, and you signaled some more to come. Can you walk us through how a pass-through works? Is it simply you're just waiting till the contract renews and you build in a new pricing structure? Secondly, when that new contract renews, is there anything that you're doing differently now in terms of building in, you know, perhaps some automatic or formulaic pass-throughs like we see with fuel and others in other sectors? Is there any opportunity for you in this demand environment to be able to, you know, change a little bit the way you construct a contract to allow yourself a better ability to pass through costs? Well, we have thousands of contracts, I mean, literally thousands. You have to remember, it's across the whole spectrum of our businesses. You know, at Avery, we're dealing with retailers. At Checkpoint, we're dealing with retailers. At CCL Design, it's the automotive tier ones and the electronics OEMs. Then you go into the consumer label business, and you've got all the P&Gs and Unilever and L'Oréal and all those kinds of companies in HPC. It's a pretty broad picture, and I wouldn't say there's any rules for it. You know, things are always changing in our business. We've got some parts of the company where we're able to just finesse the price increases through, others where we have to go and knock on the door and say, "This is what's happened in the world, and the prices have to go up." If you can't get a price increase now, Walter, I don't know when you ever do. Many of our customers are more focused today on supply availability than they are the price point. Getting hold of what you need is as important as to what the price point is. But I wouldn't say we're changing particularly the dynamics of our contractual arrangements. As you've seen, we've considering the degree of inflation we've had, we've done a pretty good job, I think, at managing it. That makes a lot of sense. Last question from me is just on public market volatility and the impact that that might have on private market multiples. Are you seeing any sense that the volatility we're seeing in the public markets is weaving its way into the private sector takeout multiples at all, or what's your sense there? Not yet. I would predict it will come. You know, there's, you know, probably it takes a good old-fashioned credit crunch for that to really change. Till private equity firms have difficulty getting leveraged finance so that the rates they're getting it at today, then probably, you know, we're not gonna see any contraction in the multiples. There was still some pretty fancy takeout multiples happening even in Q1. You saw one in Canada with ITP, a pretty nice takeout multiple for that company. That's probably indicative of what's going on in the world out there still today. Will that change over the next year or two? I think quite possibly. Okay. That's all my questions. Thanks for the time, as always. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Stephen MacLeod of BMO Capital Markets. Stephen, please ask your question. Thank you. Good morning, guys. Good morning, Stephen. Morning. My first question, I just wanna follow up quickly on China. You talked about the differing dynamics between domestic manufacturing and export. Wondering if you could just break down your business in China and how much of it is domestic and how much of it is export. Well, I'll comment to the extent I can on that. So pretty much everything we make for the MAS business at Checkpoint is made in China. Not all of it, but the vast majority of it. So if you think with the MAS revenues, they're all China-derived. So the CCL Design, you've got the extent to which the car industry exports. You know, probably it's more domestic-focused than it is export-focused. So that's a factor. Electronics is more export-focused than it is domestic-focused. So I think the demand level there, that's the one probably where I would say if we lose demand in one month, we'll pick it up the next because we're dealing with the world market for components, not the Chinese market. You get into the CCL Label business with the consumer products, which is entirely domestic-focused. I couldn't break it down for you any more than that, Stephen. Yeah. No, that's really helpful. Thanks, Geoff. In terms of your plants, I mean, are your plants that are focused on domestic markets up and running right now, or are you sort of in a hold mode as well? We had some disruption in April. I mean, I would call it sporadic. We had some plants closed for a couple of weeks in some cases. We saw some impact in April from plant closures. I would say the bigger impact was the closure of more of our customers. A number of customer factories were closed in the month of April, particularly in the Shanghai region. That had more of an impact than our operations, to be honest. Right. Okay. Thank you. Just in the CCL segment, you know, you talked about, you did get price, obviously. Can you talk about how volume broke down versus price in the CCL segment? Apologize, there's a fire alarm in my building right now. Yeah, we'd just be guessing. Sorry, Jeff, I didn't hear that. No, I don't think we can do that, Steve. Okay. It's too many transactions. We can't measure volume in the CCL space. Yeah. Okay, I understand. Thank you. Then just for the full year, I mean, obviously I know a lot of moving parts, but in the past you've talked about overall demand this year being up in sort of the 4%-5% range. Is that still something that you think is a reasonable expectation? We would hope so. For the current quarter, we're quite optimistic about till the news about China hit, we were quite optimistic about Q2. That's a dampener, really. That aside, we're still. Our plants are still busy. We've still got more orders than we can cope with in parts of the business. The demand picture still is quite strong. China's a big country. If China catches a cold, the world has. It's not just the U.S. anymore that when the U.S. has a problem with a cold, the rest of the world gets pneumonia. With China, if they get a cold, well, we get a cold too. I think that's just something you have to bear in mind. Yeah. It's a big place. Okay. Okay, great. Maybe just one last one, just switching gears a little bit. Just with Innovia, you've had two quarters of massive price pass-through. Wondering what you think sort of Q2 would look like in that business, just given some of the raw material movements and other inflation. Yeah. Well, we won't have the problem of the Americas' margin squeeze that I talked about, where we had the dip in resins at the end of last year, and then it bounced back. When you get the bounce back, we get the reverse squeeze. We're more optimistic about Innovia in the current quarter. And we've implemented a number of energy surcharges in Europe. But it's still difficult, you know. It's, you know, we've raised prices very extensively. I mean, most of our customers have passed it on. You know, we know that 'cause we're paying for some of it indirectly ourselves. you know, there's no question in the film extrusion business where your main two costs are resin and energy, it's pretty obvious there's been a lot of inflation in both of those categories. Right. Okay. Well, thank you, Geoffrey, appreciate the color. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Mark Neville of Scotiabank. Mark, please ask your question. Hey, good morning, Geoff. Good morning, Sean. Good morning. Great job on the quarter. If I could follow up on some of these questions, maybe to Walter's question on price. Geoff, you're not waiting on anything sort of to go after price. Like, you're Well, sometimes we do. You know, if you've got a contract that's up in June. It's April, you know. The contract terms say that the renewal date's July the first. We'll go on July the first. You've got a whole mix of, you know, we've got thousands of these contracts. Some of them we do depending on who the customer is, we'll pick our moment. Others we implement it immediately. When you've got just no contract at all, it's just what's the price of product X or products Y, well we build the inflation in immediately. Mm. It's a very broad picture of different commercial circumstances. Yeah, sometimes we do wait 'cause there's no point in rubbing salt in the wound if you don't have to. Understood. Still on pricing, could you sort of maybe just help us understand sort of roughly where you're at with pricing? I mean, are a lot of the actions almost done? Is there still quite a bit to do? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there is some more to do 'cause it's inflation is still going on, you know. It's not like it all happened in one month and we just have to then pass it through, you know. We had inflation happening in March, you know. Mm. It's a permanent battle, you know. That's the issue really is I think most companies are facing, is it's just nonstop, you know. It's just like a wall of water coming down on you. As soon as you got through the first wave, the second wave's coming at you. That's the issue. It's really, it's still going on. There are signs of it plateauing out, but it's been pretty full on. You know, that's really the difficulty Mark. It's not one moment in time the price goes from X to Y. It's just every month the price of the component's changing, and then you have to pass that through. Then you pass it through. Yeah. It goes up again. Right. Yeah, yeah. I guess in Innovia, I guess ignoring the margin percentage, like do you think you'll be able to get enough price to get sort of EBIT dollars back? Again, I know there's a lot of inflation in that business, and so I'm just more curious about EBIT dollars I guess than the percentage. We'll have to wait and see. You know, it's just, we just have to wait and see. You know, there's been so much inflation, you know. I think the market needs to settle down and I think everyone's tired of the, you know, the mass inflation, you know. I think. Mm. Things need to settle down a bit till we see where it pans out. I think the team at Innovia have done an excellent job of passing it through. I mean, no customers want to hear about inflationary price pass-throughs. But Mm. Let's face it and you know what we're doing, it's not exactly like we're the only company in the world doing it, you know. Everybody is. Sure. It's not just Innovia. It's paper, it's freight, it's ink, it's adhesive, it's- Yeah. Silicones, it's varnishes, it's cardboard, it's pallets, it's everything. Insurance. Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. Understood. Just two more. In Checkpoint, does all RFID growth sort of structurally change or improve the margin for Checkpoint? Or should it? Yeah, we've really improved the ALS business out of all recognition from when we bought it five, six years ago. That's now from being a loss-making business when we bought Checkpoint in 2015, 2016. It's now a soundly profitable business and doing better and better each quarter. This past quarter, MAS was really impacted by that China situation and the component inflation in the hardware business, so electronic components. The inflation around that in China is pretty immense. Yeah. Last question, just on the buyback. I think this is the first time you've been buying stock in maybe 10, 15 years, maybe longer, I'm not sure. That's right. I guess I'd just be curious for the motivation. Is it more balance sheet where the stock's trading or just the difficulty doing large M&A? Yeah. Combination of all three. It's, you know, I think the stock is very attractively priced right now. Mm-hmm. We're doing what you would expect us to do when the stock's attractively priced. I think the stock's undervalued. It seemed like, to us, a very good time to start. We had the balance sheet capability to do it. No large M&A on the horizon. We've got a nice balance sheet. The stock's underpriced, so why wouldn't we do it? Sure. All right, thanks. Thanks for the time, Geoff. Appreciate it. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Michael Glen of Raymond James. Michael, please ask your question. Hey, good morning. Geoffrey, just in terms of that Checkpoint MAS business over in China, are you looking at all or has the discussion come up towards looking at some new locations for manufacturing or perhaps re-shoring some of that business? Yes. Okay. On the Adelbras acquisition in Brazil, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. Can you maybe speak to the opportunity within that market? This is a Brazil-focused business. Is this something that you wanna grow perhaps in North America or Europe? Could be. You know, we're gonna test the water in Brazil. Adhesive tapes is a category that's in the Avery kind of businesses. It's pretty big business around the world. There's lots, 3M is the dominant player in it globally, and there's a number of tier two and tier three players available to buy in that sector. This company is actually located just down the road from our CCL Label operation in Brazil. Our manager down there is one of the most highly talented people we have in the company, wanted to buy this company, and we thought it was a good idea, so we did. We'll see how it goes in Brazil. If it goes well down there, we know there are lots of other opportunities around the world to expand it. The strategy is to test it in Brazil and see if it works before we go anywhere else with it. Can you export that product from Brazil? No, no. No, no. No, No, no. No, No, no. No, no. No. Okay. I think there's a split between Avery and CCL Design on that. Like, can you give what the rough split is? The vast majority of it will fall under Avery. Okay. In terms of semiconductor, I know there's a ton of commentary out there. There's a lot of people giving opinions on what's happening in that market, but just interested in hearing your thoughts on the chip situation. Are you starting to see things ease at all? Do you think the industry has moved beyond the worst of the chip situation? I think the answer to that, definitely hasn't got better, that's for sure. I think the parts problem isn't just chips. It's components in general. I think the supply chain side of automotive and now electronics because of the shutdowns in China is semi-broken. That's why everyone's having to wait as long as they're waiting for their cars. Chips is a huge problem, but it's not the only problem. Okay I think there's a lot of people focused on trying to improve it. We buy chips for you know our RFID labels. You know we know from that experience that's kind of hand to mouth and they're pretty low-end chips compared to the ones that go in cars. We don't see any signs of anything good happening yet. Okay. Thanks for taking the questions. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Daryl Young of TD Securities. Daryl, over to you. Hey, good morning, gentlemen. Morning, Daryl. Just one quick one for me, with respect to CCL segment and the CPG companies that are operating in Russia. Does that present any market share redistribution opportunities as they maybe look to move out of manufacturing capacity in Russia for you? Or is there any commentary you can give there? No, I wouldn't say that's a factor, much of a factor at all, actually. Okay, perfect. That's all for me. Thanks, guys. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from David McFadgen of Cormark Securities. David, please ask your question. Oh, thank you. A couple of questions. Just looking at Avery, was every segment up in that business, or was there any segments that actually declined? Well, it was the positive signs all came out of North America. The international business was not as good. In North America, it fired on all cylinders. Just on like MAS, you said was. I'm just wondering if it was up overall despite it being weak in Europe. No, no. MAS was down. Profits were down in MAS. I think maybe a lot of people are kind of wondering how much price increase do you still have to implement to recover all the inflationary costs? No, we don't know that, David. You know, 'cause you have a price increase in March, you have another one in April, you have another one in May. The prices, the price increases, it's not a singular event in time where the prices go up 15%, and you just pass it through. It's happening every month, everywhere. It's not stopping. You've got to constantly be putting the prices up to reflect the current realities, and that's the problem. The reason there's a lag, and I think this applies to all companies, you know, including all the big CPGs. You know, you make your pricing adjustments, and then the next bout of inflation comes the next month. That's the challenge. When will the waves stop coming and we go down to calmer waters again? That's what we don't know. That's why we say there's still some more price to pass through because I think we passed through everything pretty much that we had through most of last year. In Q1, we had more inflation. Wow. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's all right. No problem. Thank you. Your next question is coming from Ben Jekic of PI Financial. Ben, please ask your question. Good morning. Two quick questions from me, Geoff. Just on the Adelbras acquisition, seems like the margin profile for that addition is lower than Avery. Are you expecting that the synergies will happen from sort of procurement, or will it be volume growth down the road? Time will tell. Okay, second question on energy costs in Europe and specifically Germany. Can you quantify where for you know, how much higher they are compared to like February 24th when When Russia attacked Ukraine or, you know, year over year, how much higher are they? I think Germany wasn't a big impact for us because we don't extrude much film in Germany. Our CCL Label business and our other businesses use energy, but not to the same extent we use it. The impact was really all in the U.K., in the Innovia facility, and it was pretty significant. Okay. Can't say more than that, but very significant. You know, I think consumers in the continent of Europe are talking about their domestic heating bills going up by factors of two and three and four times what they were this time last year. Right. Okay. Thank you. That's all for me. No problem. Thank you. Your final question is coming from Adam Josephson of KeyBanc. Adam, over to you. Thanks, Geoffrey. Just a couple follow-ups from me. One on Geoffrey, you made a comment on inflation, even though it's everywhere at the moment, you're seeing some signs that it may be plateauing. Yeah. Can you just talk about what those signs are and how consequential you think they are? We've seen it as, you know, the one category where we track it daily is aluminum. Aluminum has started to drop in the last few weeks. That's, I think, a good indicator. Aluminum is energy dependent as well as raw material dependent, but we've seen the price of aluminum drop in North America in the last few weeks, not by a lot, but by some. It had only headed in one direction for pretty much all of 2021. We did see a dip in the last few weeks. We've seen paper prices stabilize a bit. You know, the UPM strike is now over, so we're hoping that will stabilize things a bit in Europe and take some of the heat out of the paper market. That's probably a good thing too. Yeah. No, I agree. You mentioned that your plants have more orders than they can produce. I think maybe that was before China locked down. Just intuitively, do you understand or does it make sense to you that demand, broadly speaking, would have remained this good for as long as it has, given what's happening in Europe, given weakness in Brazil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah. Well, I think we haven't seen any weakness in Brazil, by the way. I mean, our Brazil business has been very strong and was in Q1. That's why I made a comment about share down there. We haven't seen any weakness in Brazil. I would say, you know, the real question for everyone to try and understand is how much of the demand we see today is people taking caution in the supply chain to make sure they've got what they want in an era where availability is an issue, as opposed to how much of it is real end demand related. I would say we don't really know the answer to that. The CPG numbers for Q1 were mixed, right? Some companies did very well, Coke, P&G. You know, others did less well. The numbers were mixed, but some did well, some did less well. But I wouldn't say—I wouldn't have said we saw a crisis in the CPG business in Q1 at the demand level. We do know that I think many of them are taking some caution in the supply chain to make sure they've got what they need to be able to supply the demand that's out there. Yeah. Yeah. Last one for me on the NCIB. Can you just remind me why you didn't buy back any in the preceding three quarters? Just how much higher the share price was than it was in Q1, just to give us a little perspective along those lines. Well, you know, I think we filed the NCIB a year ago. Stock price was in the mid-70s last summer. You know, we released our half-year numbers in August. I think the stock was at 70-something. Then we began to ponder it as things changed in Q4, and we certainly pondered it in Q1 when the Ukraine happened. You have to remember, Adam, we can't buy stock in a blackout period. January, most of January and a good portion of February, we were blacked out. Got it. Have you bought stock subsequent to Q1? I forget if you disclosed that, Geoff. We can start buying stock next week. Right. Okay. Got it. We were in blackout. Thank you very much. for those four weeks. Yeah. Right. Yeah, no, understood. No. Thank you, Geoff. No problem. Okay, there appears to be no further questions in the queue. I'll now hand back over to Geoffrey for closing remarks. Thank you very much, Jennifer, and thank you for everybody joining the call today, and we'll look forward to sit talking to you again in August. Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect your phone line and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.