Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's Sylvamo's fourth quarter 2021 investor earnings day conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. I'd now like to turn today's conference over to Hans Bjorkman, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir. Thanks, Angie. Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. Our speakers this morning are Jean-Michel Ribiéras, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and John Sims, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Slides 2 and 3 contain important information, including certain legal disclaimers. For example, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We will also present certain non-U.S. GAAP financial information. Reconciliations of those figures to U.S. GAAP financial measures are available in the appendix. Our website also contains copies of the fourth quarter 2021 earnings press release, as well as today's presentation. With that, I will now turn the call over to Jean-Michel. Thanks, Hans. Good morning, and thank you for joining our call. I'm on slide four, which demonstrates significant improvement in our full year sales and earnings. 2021 net sales increased 16% to $3.5 billion. Adjusted EBITDA improved by nearly 60% to $594 million. This represents a margin of 17% or 460 basis points higher than our 2020 adjusted EBITDA margin. Our adjusted earnings per share has improved by over 70% to $6.94. We remain committed to generating cash and have positive momentum heading into 2022. Let's turn to slide five to review our fourth quarter performance. We are executing our three-pronged strategy of commercial excellence, operational excellence, and financial discipline, which resulted in a 17.5% adjusted EBITDA margin in the fourth quarter. Global demand for uncoated freesheet continued to strengthen as schools and offices gradually reopen. Our volumes remain strong, and we run at full capacity in all three regions. We also continue to realize the benefit of prior price increases, allowing price and mix to outpace increasing input costs. I'm extremely proud of how our teams navigated through input costs and transportation challenges and worked to take care of our customers. We operated well in a challenging supply chain environment and executed two large and comprehensive maintenance outages at our Saillat and Eastover mills safely and efficiently. Implementing this strategy generated free cash flow of $162 million, enabling us to pay down $124 million in debt and to increase our cash position by $48 million to $180 million. All in all, a strong performance by our team. Slide 6 highlights our performance in the fourth quarter, our first standalone quarter. Fourth quarter net sales increased 7% sequentially to $972 million. We generated an adjusted EBITDA of $170 million and a 17.5% margin during the heaviest outage quarter of the year. However, if we had normalized maintenance outage expenses, our adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 19.2% for the quarter. We also generated adjusted operating earnings of $1.71 per share. Let's turn to Slide 7 to discuss our commercial excellence efforts. Our commercial excellence strategy is designed to help our customers succeed. We want to be recognized by our customers as the suppliers they value the most. Here are a few examples where we are winning incremental businesses, which is improving our mix and profitability. In Latin America, we are leveraging innovation to increase our position in other end-use segments, such as thermal paper used for receipts. This is a profitable and strategic segment with growth potential. In North America, we are creating value for our customers with Sylvamo Shop, which allows 24/7 access to critical information to help them run their businesses better and allows them to interface via computers, tablets, and mobile phones. In Europe, we are leveraging our global footprint to expand sales of premium product in strategic channels, which provides better product mix for our customer while optimizing our global trade flows. Global uncoated freesheet demand continues to recover from the initial impact of COVID pandemic, allowing us to improve our mix as our commercial teams maximize opportunities across geography, segments, and channels. Let's turn to slide 8 to look at the 2021 growth by region. Year-over-year global uncoated freesheet industry demand increased by in 2021. Especially in our region, it was up nearly 6% in Europe, more than 13% in Latin America, more than 4% in North America. We still see potential for incremental copy paper demand recovery, which was only up 1.3% globally, since many office workers in North America and Europe have still not returned to their offices. In Latin America, we understand that students will be going back to school this year. In 2021, we outperformed industry growth rates in our regions by 530 basis points. Our 2021 uncoated freesheet shipments were up 12% versus 2020. I'll now turn the call over to John, who will discuss our fourth quarter performance in more detail. Thank you, Jean-Michel. I'm on slide 9. We generated $170 million in adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter, well ahead of our outlook of $140 million-$150 million. We improved price and mix by $41 million, which was greater than our outlook because prices rose faster and at a greater rate in North America than what we had projected. Volume improved by $14 million due to strong seasonal demand in Latin America. In all regions, we had more orders than we could ship. Operations and costs were solid and improved by $2 million. This does include a favorable $10 million LIFO adjustment in North America, as well as a favorable $7 million in overhead benefits and environmental credits in Europe, which we had not included in our outlook. As Jean-Michel mentioned, we successfully conducted two significant planned maintenance outages in Europe and in North America, and spent $24 million more on outages than we did in the third quarter. Input and transportation costs increased by $39 million, with rising costs for fiber, energy, chemicals, and transportation across all regions. Our strong performance in this quarter is a reflection of our talented and engaged regional teams, who worked hard to meet customer needs and managed through significant global supply chain and pandemic challenges. Let's take a look at our regional results on slide 10. Each of our regions performed well in the quarter, demonstrating the strength of our low-cost positions and our iconic brands. Nearly two-thirds of our earnings were outside of North America. Europe earned $27 million with a 9% EBITDA margin. Latin America earned $81 million with a 35% margin. North America earned $62 million with a 13% margin. We conducted an extensive ten-year maintenance outage at our Saillat mill and a cold mill outage in Eastover, which is reflected in our European and North America EBITDA margins. If we had normalized the maintenance outages expenses over a year, Europe EBITDA margins would have been 12%, and North America would have been 15%. Our strong earnings and margins reflect the realization of price increases. Volume improved in Europe and Latin America and remained strong in North America. Our commercial teams focused on strengthening our customer value propositions, and their successful efforts are reflected in these results. The appendix contains additional details on our regional performance. Let's turn to slide 11 to discuss uncoated freesheet industry conditions around the world. Global uncoated freesheet industry conditions continued to improve in the fourth quarter as they did throughout 2021, and remain quite favorable as we enter 2022. Uncoated freesheet demand continues to improve in all three regions, while industry supply is shrinking in Europe and North America as competitors have shut down machines and converted capacity. Input and transportation costs remain elevated, and we expect costs for fiber, chemicals, and transportation to continue to increase. However, our selling prices increased in the fourth quarter and will continue to increase in the first quarter as we realize prior price increases throughout the quarter. Let's move to slide 12 and review our first quarter outlook. In the first quarter, we expect to deliver an adjusted EBITDA of $180 million-$190 million and adjusted operating earnings per share of $1.70-$1.90. We project price and mix to improve by $35 million-$40 million as we continue to realize price increases already communicated to our customers in all regions. We expect volume to decrease by 13 million-18 million, reflecting seasonally weaker volume in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Typically, the fourth quarter is our seasonally strongest quarter. First quarter is our seasonally weakest for shipments. We expect operations and costs to improve by $18 million-$20 million. Fourth quarter results included $7 million in favorable adjustments in Europe and a $10 million favorable LIFO adjustment in North America that won't repeat in the first quarter. We expect input and transportation costs to increase by $18 million-$23 million, which is about half the improvement in price and mix. These increases will be driven by higher costs for fiber, chemicals, and transportation. Let's turn to slide 13 for some additional 2022 guidance. We have revised some of our 2022 selected financial capital spending by $18 million to fund high return and short payback cost reduction projects that will cost less than $3 million, but provide an expected internal rate of return of nearly 50%. We'll also fund a project at our Eastover mill to upgrade the stock prep that will cost a little more than $1 million and offer an expected IRR of nearly 40%. We have many other high return projects to further improve our low cost assets, and we look to fund these in the future. Great. US tax we made and we made foreign tax credits for Brazilian in earnings. We expect this change to increase our 2022 tax rate. I would also like to update you on the Svetogorsk project. In December, our board of directors approved $15 million in capital spending for engineering work for the proposed new recovery boiler, which will replace the two recovery boilers that are approaching end of life at our Svetogorsk mill. We expect that this new recovery boiler to increase production at this very low cost Russian mill. Let's turn to slide 14. Focus on generating cash. We generated strong free cash flow in the fourth quarter, $162 million, and we expect to drive strong cash flow in 2022. We intend to use cash generated from earnings, including $170 million of capital and one-time Georgetown and Riverdale inventory payments to International Paper, and $72 million of one-time and transition costs. We intend to continue debt reduction. We're doing all this to position the company to begin returning cash to shareowners later this year. Slide 15 with a review of our current debt structure. We launched Sylvamo with just over $1.5 billion in gross debt. We ended the third quarter at 2.8 times gross debt to adjusted EBITDA. As we mentioned earlier, we paid down debt by $124 million in the quarter, in the fourth quarter, and we increased our cash position by $48 million. We swapped $400 million of the floating. As you can see from the table, maturities until 2027. With that, I'll turn it back over to you. I'm on slide 16. We are pleased with our performance in our first quarter as a standalone company. We are taking advantage of opportunities to enhance value for our employees, customers, and shareowners. Our major opportunity is capital allocation to generate cash to reinvest in our assets for shareowners. Focus is another opportunity. We are now able to serve the best interest of our customers globally and concentrate on being the supplier that customers value the most. We are also working to simplify our strategy and we will create long-term value through our talented teams, the world's most iconic paper brands, and low-cost mills in attractive locations. Most importantly, we are building the Sylvamo culture, one that is more agile, faster to act, and with a more entrepreneurial spirit across our teams. As we have just become an independent company, our strategy will continue to further evolve with a commitment to increase value for all of our stakeholders. I'll wrap up our prepared remarks on slide 17. We are well-positioned for continued success. Our commercial and operational excellence strategy and tactics will enable us to generate strong earnings and significant free cash flow. We will execute our plans and will increase capital spending to strengthen our low-cost positions. We will continue to strengthen our balance sheet and prepare to begin returning capital in 2021. We appreciate the commitment to our customers. We are passionate about our employees, our customers, and our shareowners. Sylvamo is off to a great start. We are committed to uncoated freesheet and are confident in our ability to drive strong results in 2022. With that, I will turn the call back to Hans. Thanks, Jean-Michel, and thank you, John. Okay, Angie, with that, we're ready to take the questions. To ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star one to ask an audio question. Your first question comes from the line. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for all the details. Congratulations on finishing the year. Guys, I'll start with three quick questions, and I'll turn it over. First of all, relative to what is the outlook for 2022 and I guess more importantly, the post-COVID world, whatever that's gonna look like in terms of consumption and markets and the like. related question, Jean-Michel, I thought you said something about in Europe, your supply chain or your access to the global, supply chain. Can you comment a bit more if I heard that correctly and what you meant? Lastly, on guidance, can you remind us what is embedded in your guidance as far as price increases, and are there any price increases that you've announced that would not be in guidance as of yet? Thank you. Good morning, George, and thank you for joining. I will start with the first two questions, and John will take the third one. In terms of demand, both things. You've seen that 2021 was better than our forecast initially. I mean, North America was 4%. Europe was 5.5%. Total was 5.9% in total. Clearly, we had even more than we expected. This despite the fact that there was not in 2021 return to school or return to the office. It was very slow, which explains why the cut size. I'll say I'm quite bullish for 2022. If you're asking me compared to our original forecast, we clearly see to continue to grow, both in the graphics sector, where worldwide the demand is very strong, and on the cut size rebound, which we're starting to see the effect despite the pandemic. I'm quite positive, and you were asking me if it was more than original. Yes, it's more than original, both in 2021, as we already have the number, and for sure in 2022. Yeah. Jean-Michel, I don't want to be a hog here in terms of Q&A, but just the statistics, yes, we've seen them. I guess the question is really, why? What do you think if you're more positive and we're seeing more positive statistics, why is it happening? Then what are you doing in your collaborative supply chain and the pricing question in terms of guidance? Thank you. The why is I think there are more and more demand in uncoated freesheet. One of the things which has surprised us is, for example, the direct mail, the old commercial aspect which impact offset. This demand, I don't have the latest number, but I remember Q3 number on, direct mailing. Direct mailing from the USPS number. The economy, even which is very favorable to the use of our product. Then I think the back to school, back to the office is positive for us. There are also some, freesheet shifting to uncoated freesheet. We've seen that in quite a few of our customers. I think the fact, uncoated freesheet is sustainable, is affordable, functional, it creates a long-term demand, and short-term, we're seeing it. The coated freesheet is not negligible. A lot of work which used to be on coated freesheet has switched to uncoated freesheet and has created incremental demand we had not planned. That's few examples, but I think there are multiple examples. On the global Europe supply chain, there are different options which we have. First of all, if you look today, all regions, about 8%-10% of opportunity in Europe from Russia, for example, to make sure we align with the strategic long-term customers. Thanks to the demand, thanks to the partnership and work of our commercial team, we are now concentrating our commercial efforts towards having those global customers served from multiple region and optimize both for them and for us what we do as export. The supply chain, for example, Russia to Europe or Latin America to Europe, it's just example, is quite optimized and helping our global customers. You know, from one region mix to another regional mix, we sometimes have $50-$80 different. Very significant. Maybe that answer your second question. Your question on pricing and what is included on that on 2022. Thanks, George, to answer your question, third quarter review, we said that there were price increases in the fourth quarter. We're gonna be realizing in the middle of the fourth quarter, and then carry over to first quarter. We've also announced price increases to our customers in all our regions, Europe, Latin America, and North America in the first quarter. Some of that will start to really realize in the second quarter. There is a little bit of that that is in the outlook for this quarter. Thank you very much. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Hey, George, this is Hans. If you've got any further follow-up questions, feel free to go ahead and ask. George. Oh, hi, guys. Okay, thanks for that. I guess my other two questions, and again, don't wanna be a hog here. What effect, relates to your earlier comment, Jean-Michel, on supply chain in Europe, are the Finnish strikes having on you, both your customers and your opportunities in the market. I n the quarter, Europe trailed sequentially on input costs relative pricing that was put into the first quarter. I'll start with the Finnish. The Finnish strike has a major impact, especially light. It's not really impacting our demand as of now. It's very small. It's mostly a big pulp impact. In terms of your second question, which was mostly. I'm sorry. I lost it. Inflation in Europe. Oh, yes. was ahead of price sequentially. Will that be the case in 1Q? We in one Q have the biggest issue we have is energy cost in Europe, especially gas. It hits our costs one month after, so that impacts January. Moreover, I would say, back to average high in February and March. We have some significant price increase, which have been announced to our customers. We expect Q1 price and mix to be better. We have good momentum on our price increase which we've already announced. The net will be positive for us. Jean-Michel, one last one on the Finnish strikes, and I'll let you go. Certainly that's constraining pulp supply. It's constraining pricing, I guess, relative to what would happen, all else equal pulp pricing. I recognize you don't sell a lot of market pulp, but, potentially some of your competitors are not as integrated as you. Can you talk, if at all, about, how that, you know, could affect you and your competitive positioning, uh, on freesheet in Europe? Thanks. I'll turn it over. Yeah. I think specifically in our competitiveness. There's a very high cost of gas. We use gas, but we're 80% self-sufficient in terms of energy in our mills, so we don't use only gas. We use a lot of biomass. That gives us a big advantage versus a lot of European competitors. Pulp price, as you mentioned, we sell some pulp. Prices good. Where we are first or second quartile, we're right now with high gas price and high pulp price. It's helping us. George, this is John. Our capacities in Russia where the gas price isn't really impacting us. Good point. Thank you, John. I'll turn it over. Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Luft with Eagle Capital. Please state your question. Hey, guys, it's Jonathan Luft. Great quarter. I'd love to just hear a little bit more perhaps about, you know, I know obviously in Canada, there was one plant that was shut down. If you could just expand, you know, you're seeing in Latin America and also in North America competitively. That'd be great. Thank you. Let me take it region per region. In Europe, as As you know, there's been some both integrated and non-integrated capacity which have shut down in 2021, which we'll see the full effect. We're seeing less supply in uncoated freesheet on a significant basis. I would say in Latin America, it's mostly stable. There's been one announcement of a small machine going down, but not huge. North America net with one, as you know, restart from one of our competitors. It's still down in terms of capacity. When we look at the supply-demand right now because it's very strong right now. Which, as you know, is very low right now because the freight cost is making it almost prohibitive from Asia, for example, to go either to Latin America or to North America. We're in a very favorable position all over, all around the world right now. Given the favorable environment, perhaps sign, a longer-term contract or sign more strategic deals. How do you see that playing out for Sylvamo? We've always been on long-term contracts. They work like formal contracts. M ost of our customers have 10 years-plus experience with us. We have the opportunity to reinforce our position to the strategic customers which are aligned with our long-term strategic view. It is very positive for Sylvamo. I feel very good about it. We are up to a great start. I think another thing is our partner, and that we are committed to uncoated freesheet. I think that's creating a very positive dynamic also. Terrific. Thank you so much. Your next question comes from the line of Paul Quinn. Morning, Paul. Morning, Paul. Hey, yes. Strong quarter even including the one-offs. Sorry, busy morning here for me. Just if you could give me a summary of where we're sitting on price increases in 2022 by region, that would be most helpful. Paul, I'll take that. Where we are right now, as I mentioned earlier on the call, is that we have price increases that we announced to our customers in the fourth quarter, and most that was in North America, Russia, and also prices that we had announced even back in the third and second quarter in Russia that we were realizing and starting to fully realize in the fourth quarter, but we're really going to see that in the first quarter. We've also announced additional price increases to our customers, and we're in the process of implementing those. That's in all regions. Europe, Russia, Brazil or Latin- Announcements were all in 2022. Typical lag between price increase and implementation, is that like a six-month lag? Well, it varies. We could see six months in Europe, for example, on some of the contracts and stuff like that. We actually will see, you know, it'll be anywhere from 30-90 days generally. Material change in the relationship in any of the your key markets? I would say no material. It's some of the closure of 2021, we will feel the biggest impact in 2022. That's maybe the changes that you will see. Discussions from some of our competitors on potential closing or incremental or potential change in from uncoated freesheet to other grades, but nothing very recent announcement. Well, Jean, there was the restart of the one machine- Yeah. In North America, which was shut down. Announced shut down. In North America, that almost balances each other out. Right. Okay. Maybe a bonus question just 'cause I got you. I guess debt pay down is kind of the key for you this year. Where do you expect to get on that, you know, by the end of the year? Well, our outlook is to generate significant cash flow. We will certainly be continuing to pay down debt. Also as we mentioned, we think we're going to be well positioned to begin talking to the board about return. Okay. Well, it's helpful. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Douglas Duffy with DC Capital. Please state your question. Oh, good morning. Thank you. Terrific results. Some context in having a major facility in Russia these days from a, from a commercial standpoint. There's been, you know, certainly a lot of talks about stringent sanctions if things change at the Ukrainian border and how you think about that, with major customer base in Europe. Hi, Douglas. Thanks for joining today. Our Russian asset is very important. And to be clear, we've been there very long time. You know, we've been there more than 20 years, and we've gone through different crises with different sanctions. We have a very strong contingency plan in place, where we're looking at all the cases and including the worst-case scenario. I wanna first start by saying we hope diplomacy will win. We care about our people in Russia a lot. As well we care about our sales office and our Ukrainian friends. We are prepared with a very strong contingency plan, which we update almost on daily basis right now. It's difficult to know what could happen. As you know, we're on the side of low risk of a major invasion, then we don't know, we're not expert on that, b ut we've been able to manage in the past those challenging, sometimes, countries relations, and we feel we would be manageable for us. We've got good contingency plans in place. Thank you very much. Thank you. You do have a follow-up question from the line of George Staphos with Bank of America. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the follow on. I know it's late. I'll try to be quick. First of all, if costs were up $193 million in 2021, John, if you did kind of the pencil on paper, what is the current annualized run rate on inflation for 2022, you know, coming out of 4Q or whatever run rate you wanna use in terms of input cost inflation for each of your key products or key inputs, I should say. Secondly, a ticky-tack question, we can take this offline. EBITDA was $14 million more. What causes that difference? Then recognizing you're gonna talk to the board about this, still a lot of water to flow under the bridge. Can you give us some type of value return, either size it or, application types you're thinking about this juncture? Thanks and good luck in the quarter. George, thank you. To your first questions about what we're seeing in terms of input costs, certainly, we're still starting to continue to see some increases in costs and, particularly in chemicals, starting to slow in this quarter. $193 million increase in costs in last year. We're gonna still be higher than last year, but the rate that you're gonna see in terms of the increase is gonna be, you know, $93 million that we saw last year. Question on the earnings per share drop, that was really, you know, you got to remember that based on the carve-out financials of IP, we're still with IP. So the big difference in that really is taxes and that we incurred. Third question. What was the third question? Yeah. Actually, I was looking at EBITDA versus EBIT, but if you don't have the answer on that one, we can take it offline. The other question was just at this juncture, recognizing it's really, really early, what are you thinking about in terms of either dimensionalizing the value return or how you would deliver it to shareholders? That was it. Thanks, guys. Good luck in the quarter. Yeah. We are looking at different options of returning cash to our shareholders. Of course, we're going to continue, as we mentioned, to reduce debt. We're going to talk to our board, and we're going to recommend with them the different options we have being dividend or share buyback. This would probably be the- George, we'll follow up with you on the. Perfect. Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions. I would now like to turn the conference back to Hans Bjorkman for any additional or closing remarks. We just wanna thank everyone for joining us today, and we truly appreciate your interest in Sylvamo, and we look forward to our continued conversations. Have a great day. Thank you for participating in today's Sylvamo's fourth quarter 2021 earnings investor conference call. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.