Sealed Air Q1 2022 Earnings Report

Sealed Air EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $1.12
• Consensus EPS: $0.92
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.20
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.78

Sealed Air Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $1.42 billion
• Expected Revenue: $1.39 billion
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$24.94 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +11.90%

Sealed Air Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2022
• Date: 5/3/2022
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, May 3, 2022
• Conference Call Time: 6:53AM ET

Sealed Air (NYSE:SEE) is a global packaging company that develops and manufactures a wide range of materials, equipment and services designed to protect, preserve and promote products. Best known for inventing Bubble Wrap® protective packaging, the company serves customers across food and beverage, e-commerce, electronics, manufacturing and healthcare industries. Sealed Air’s solutions help businesses reduce product damage, extend shelf life and improve operational efficiency.

The company’s product portfolio is organized into three primary segments. Food Care provides equipment, films and trays for food processing, packaging and sealing under the Cryovac® brand. Product Care delivers protective packaging solutions such as Bubble Wrap®, Instapak® foam and automated paper systems designed to safeguard goods during storage and transport. Equipment Care offers packaging machinery, software and services that integrate with customer production lines to optimize throughput and minimize waste.

Founded in 1960 by Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, Sealed Air has grown through both innovation and strategic acquisitions to serve customers in more than 120 countries. Over its history, the company has introduced pioneering technologies—such as inflatable protective solutions and modified-atmosphere packaging—and expanded its global footprint with operations in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East.

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sealed Air is led by President and Chief Executive Officer Ted Doheny, who took the helm in 2023. Under his leadership, the company continues to focus on sustainability initiatives, including lightweight packaging designs and recyclable materials, while leveraging digital and automation technologies to drive growth and improve customer outcomes.

Sealed Air Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Strong Q1 performance: net sales rose 12% to $1.4 billion, adjusted EBITDA increased 22% to $327 million, and adjusted EPS climbed 43% to $1.12.
• Launched “Prismic” digital packaging brand, investing over $50 million in proprietary digital printing technology to drive $300 million in digital revenues and target 50% online sales by 2025.
• Raised 2022 guidance: net sales of $5.85–6.05 billion (+6–9%), adjusted EBITDA of $1.22–1.25 billion (+8–10%), and adjusted EPS of $4.05–4.20.
• Automation momentum: equipment bookings grew >20% (AutoBox bookings more than doubled) and the company plans to double equipment production capacity within three years.
• Managing inflation: achieved positive price realization (+16% in Q1) and productivity gains while anticipating $300 million in full-year material cost increases.

Presentation

[Louise Lagache, Company Representative at Sealed Air]

Good morning, everyone. With me today are Ted Doheny, our CEO, and Chris Stephens, our CFO. Before we begin our call, I would like to note that we have provided a slide presentation to help guide our discussion. In addition to our results and outlook, Ted will go through a deep dive on the digital packaging future. Please visit our website where today's webcast and presentation can be downloaded from our website at sealedair.com. Statements made during this call stating management's outlook or predictions for future periods are forward-looking statements. These statements are based solely on information that is now available to us. We encourage you to review the information in the section entitled Forward-looking Statements in our earnings release and slide presentation, which apply to this call. Additionally, our future performance may differ due to a number of factors.

[Louise Lagache, Company Representative at Sealed Air]

Many of these factors are listed in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and as revised and updated on our quarterly report on Form 10-Q and current report on Form 8-K, which you can also find on our website or on the SEC website. We discuss financial measures that do not conform to U.S. GAAP. You will find important information on the use of these measures and their reconciliation to U.S. GAAP. In our earnings release, including the appendix of today's presentation, you will find U.S. GAAP financial results that corresponds to the non-U.S. GAAP measures we reference during this presentation. I will now turn the call over to Ted. Operator, please turn to slide 3. Ted?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Thank you, Louise, and thank all of you for joining our Q1 2022 Earnings Call. Chris and I will discuss our Q1 results and our 2022 outlook. I will first recap our quarter performance and then provide a deep dive into our digital transformation. After that, Chris will review in more detail our financial results and our revised 2022 outlook. On slide 3, you can see we delivered strong sales and earnings despite sustained inflationary pressure and the volatility caused by numerous disruptions around the world. Our SEE operating engine is performing. In the quarter, net sales were up 12% to $1.4 billion, and adjusted EBITDA was up 22% to $327 million. Adjusted earnings per share was up $1.12, up 43% compared to a year ago.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Free cash flow for Q1 was a use of cash of $19 million as we continue to invest in our operations to support growth and productivity. On slide 4, you can see our SEE operating model. As presented last quarter, we aim to achieve 5%-7% annual sales growth over the next three years. We are targeting to have more than 1% of this growth to be digitally generated by 2025. We're also targeting to have 50% of our total sales to be generated online by 2025. We are targeting adjusted EBITDA growth at 7%-9%. We've updated our SEE operating model for free cash flow conversion to greater than 45% to align with our increased capital expenditures in our operations to approximately 5% of sales.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Finally, we are raising our 2022 sales and earnings guidance, and Chris will talk about this in more detail later. Let's turn to slide 5 to take a look at our markets. We're transitioning to a market- and customer-centric company, creating value by delivering savings through automation, digital, and sustainability solutions, powering our engine to grow faster than the markets we serve. While Chris will give you more detail on our geographic performance, I will focus on activities in our top markets. We experienced strong sales performance across most of our markets. We continue to generate increased demand for our automation, digital, and sustainability solutions. In Q1, equipment and system sales were flat in constant dollars due to component shortages and sanctions imposed on Russia, mainly impacting our food equipment business.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Despite this, I wanna highlight that equipment bookings continued to be strong and were up more than 20% this quarter, led by strong demand in AUTOBAG. AUTOBAG bookings more than doubled compared to Q1 last year, while food equipment bookings were up double digits even in a challenging environment. We are investing to double our equipment production capacity in the next three years. You can find more details on our SEE automation business on slide 21 and 22 in the appendix. Turning to slide 6, we'll now take you through a deep dive on our SEE digital transformation journey. We start with our vision statement: to become a world-class, digitally driven company automating sustainable packaging solutions. Our digital operating model will shift our business from an offline to an online operation through e-commerce.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We'll be ramping up our digital sales aggressively, generating an additional revenues in excess of $300 million over the next three years. We're excited to launch our new digital brand, prismiq, Powered by Possibility. Our digital business will include digital packaging, design services, and direct e-commerce sales. Let's look at slide seven. We're transforming SEE's culture and DNA, including a new people plus digital organization. We are building a caring, people first, digitally driven culture with teams passionate about engineering a future where packaging plays a powerful part in everyone's daily life. Beyond nurturing our people, we are investing in new technologies and systems, as well as adapting our processes to new ways of delivering our solutions. We're ushering in new competitive capabilities while simplifying our processes to create new value through packaging solutions, packaging that's digital, experiential, and intelligent, packaging solutions that transform data into results.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We're doing this for our customers, so they can engage with SEE in new and different ways, while enabling them to directly connect with consumers. We're changing the way we work, proactively swarming to connect everyone without functional, market, or geographic barriers and partnering with our customers. Moving to slide eight. Last week, we introduced our new digital packaging brand, prismiq, packaging made brilliant. prismiq will represent our digital packaging solutions from ideation to consumer engagement, design services, digital printing, and smart packaging. prismiq solutions portfolio allows SEE to embed digital printing capabilities within our manufacturing operations as well as in our customers' operations, driving efficiency, personalization directly at each package. We are bringing together both the operational and experiential journeys of our customers to create digitally empowered packaging.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Using design and digital printing as an enabler, we are innovating so each package will be able to provide valuable product information, sustainability indicators, traceability through unique scannable identification markers, and so much more. Our end-to-end cloud-based platform will generate package-specific digital IDs that collect and manage data along the value chain. Customers can access and leverage those insights through dashboards and analytics. We are leveraging world-class partners like Adobe to build scale and speed in digitizing billions of packages we produce today and the many more in the future. Ultimately, we are elevating packaging from its current functional and linear state to a digital ecosystem where it's a billboard for engagement and efficiency. Our proprietary digital printing technology is a core pillar for this new brand. The possibilities powered by prismiq are endless. We're excited by the value this will unleash for our customers.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Let me now turn to slide 9. Here, we highlight our breakthrough digital printing technology as well as our bold moves to rapidly expand our network penetration globally and our e-commerce platform. We've been mobilizing to develop digital printing technology for our unique applications and substrates in our operations around the world. Alongside our prismiq brand, we are unveiling a first of its kind proprietary 54-inch digital press that will offer a combination of wide web, high speed, full color, water-based food grade inks, and double-side printing capabilities for fiber-based materials as well as film-based flexible and shrinkable materials. We're also using this technology to integrate printing systems in line with our operations, often cutting the footprint down 10 times from what it's replacing.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Prismiq digital printing is bringing speed to our graphic services, dramatically reducing minimum order quantities, providing faster prototyping, and now offering serialization that enables tracking and tracing and blockchain capabilities. We've already invested well over $50 million in digital printing technology and have plans to double that investment with the goal of taking our entire platform to digital. Now moving to slide 10. I would like to show how digital printing is a critical enabler of our SEE sustainable ecosystem as we work to create a circular economy for packaging. Our goal is to offer the best solutions at the right price and make them sustainable. To make this scaling possible for the billions of packages we produce, we are leveraging world-class partnerships with suppliers and customers.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Our game-changing innovations in digital, automation, and sustainability are designed to help close the loop on the circular economy. Our SEE ecosystem connects our internal operations to our customers' operations to consumers at home. In this loop, our SEE touchless automation team is gaining momentum. We're developing these innovations across our entire network to eliminate waste, simplify processes, and remove people from harm's way. Now, with our prismiq digital printing, we can move faster. Our touchless automation will enable our SEE operating engine to produce flawless quality, world-class productivity, and exceed our sustainability goals. We're investing in bold ideas like prismiq, packaging made brilliant, that will disrupt the markets we serve and our own business. We are building a caring, people-first culture with talented, passionate, and diverse teams that believe they can make our world better than they find it.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

I will now pass the call to Chris to review our financial results in more detail.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Thank you, Ted, and good morning, everyone. Let's start on slide 11 to review our Q1 net sales growth by segment and by region. In Q1, net sales were up 12% to $1.4 billion. In constant dollars, net sales were up 15%, with 18% growth in food and 10% growth in protective. By region, Americas was up 18%, EMEA up 11%, and APAC up 4%. On slide 12, you can see organic sales volume and pricing trends by segment and by region. In Q1, price was up 16% overall, while volumes were down 1%. Q1 price was favorable 17% for food and 15% in protective. Most of the price realized in Q1 was a result of prior actions and formula pass-throughs.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

These actions to increase price with care to gain share are in response to ongoing inflationary pressures. As always, we are working directly with our customers to meet their needs, save them money, and drive productivity. Food volumes were up 2%, driven by EMEA up 7% and APAC up 3%, while Americas was down 1%. Protective volumes were down 3%, with declines in all regions, mainly driven by normalized demand trends, given the strong demand in Q1 2021. On slide 13, we present our consolidated sales and adjusted EBITDA walks. Having already discussed sales, let me comment on our Q1 adjusted EBITDA performance. Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $327 million increased $59 million or 22% compared to last year, with margins of 23.1%, up 190 basis points. We achieved positive price realization this quarter.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

However, labor and non-material inflation continues to rise at a rapid rate, impacting year-over-year earnings by $24 million compared to $13 million a year ago. In addition, operating costs of -$30 million includes incremental investments to support future growth. Productivity gains totaled $10 million in Q1, and we remain on track to realize approximately $60 million of productivity gains from the completion of Reinvent SEE initiatives and performance of our SEE operating engine in 2022. Adjusted earnings per diluted share in Q1 was $1.12 compared to $0.78 in Q1 2021. Our adjusted tax rate was 25.2% compared to 27.6% in the same period last year. We were an active buyer of our stock in the quarter, with approximately 3 million shares repurchased, valued at approximately $200 million.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Our weighted average diluted shares outstanding in Q1 2022 were 149.5 million compared to 155.4 million in Q1 2021. At quarter end, we had $696 million remaining under our authorized share repurchase program. Turning to segment results on slide 14, starting with Food. In Q1, Food net sales of $808 million were up 18% in constant dollars. Price was up 17% year-over-year, with all regions contributing to positive price, while volume growth was 2%. Automation sales, which includes equipment, systems, parts, and services, accounts for approximately 6% of the segment sales and were up mid-single digits in the quarter.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Adjusted EBITDA of $200 million in Q1 increased 28% compared to last year, with margins at 24.8% up 250 basis points. On the protective side, net sales of $610 million increased 12% on an organic basis. Price was up 15% in the quarter, again, with all regions contributing to positive price, while volume saw a decline of 3% in the quarter as we faced normalized demand trends. As a reminder, volumes in protective were up 13% in the Q1 last year, fueled by the strong growth in fulfillment, e-commerce, and the rebound of industrial end markets following COVID shutdowns in 2020. As for automation sales in the quarter, which accounts for approximately 8% of the segment sales, they were up double digits in the quarter.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Adjusted EBITDA of $127 million increased 16% in Q1, with margins at 20.9%, up 140 basis points. Now let's turn to free cash flow on slide 15. In the first three months of 2022, free cash flow was a use of cash of $19 million compared to a source of cash of $36 million in the same period a year ago. This $55 million swing was largely driven by increased working capital needs, CapEx to support growth and productivity, plus the absence of a $24 million federal tax refund in Q1 2021. On slide 16, we outline our purpose-driven capital allocation strategy focused on creating economic value. We maintain a strong balance sheet while driving attractive returns on invested capital and supporting profitable growth initiatives. We are focusing our CapEx on touchless automation, digital, and sustainability.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

As Ted noted, we are investing in smart packaging and digital printing and see many opportunities to expand our presence in attractive growth markets and geographies. Let's turn to slide 17 to review our updated 2022 outlook. We are raising our net sales and earnings guidance reflecting our strong Q1 performance and the outlook for the remainder of the year. For net sales, we now estimate $5.85 billion-$6.05 billion, a year-over-year increase of 6%-9% as reported, compared to our previously provided $5.8-6 billion range. Our organic growth forecast is 9%-12%, which assumes approximately 1% in volume and 9% in price at the midpoint. Full year adjusted EBITDA is now expected to be in the range of $1.22-1.25 billion.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

This compares to our previous guide of $1.2-1.24 billion. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to grow 8%-10% and implies an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 21%. For adjusted EPS, we now expect to be in the range of $4.05-4.20. This assumes depreciation and amortization of approximately $250 million and an adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 26%, net interest expense of approximately $160 million, and approximately 149 million shares outstanding. Lastly, we are reiterating our outlook for free cash flow, which is in the range of $510-550 million.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

In summary, we are executing on our growth strategy, driving productivity and cash generation, and aligning our business around the SEE operating model. This is reflected in our Q1 performance and revised 2022 outlook. With that, let me now pass the call back to Ted for closing remarks. Ted?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Thanks, Chris. Let's turn to slide 18, where we have our purpose statement. As an ESG-centered company, our purpose guides everything we do. This is how we are making our vision a reality. Our SEE operating engine is performing and maintain momentum despite considerable disruptions and sustained inflation. I'm proud of our team's efforts and perseverance operating in challenging times. We continue to invest in automation, digital, and sustainability to deliver savings and productivity for our customers. Please visit our website to see our full prismiq digital packaging Made Brilliant launch to find out more about where we are going. We are creating long-term value for our stakeholders and making our world better than we find it. Continuing with the theme of providing investors deep dives into our growth drivers of automation, digital, and sustainability, next quarter, we plan to provide a deep dive into sustainability.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

With that, I'll now open the call for questions. Operator, we'd like to begin the Q&A session.

[Moderator]

Thank you. If you have a question at this time, please press star then one on your touch tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. We ask that you limit yourself to one question. Our first question comes from the line of George Staphos with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[George Staphos, Managing Director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch]

Thanks very much. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for the details, Ted and Chris. I wanted to dig into digital and prismiq, and I guess it's a couple of parts to the question, but just wanna reaffirm. You said that you ultimately want to double your investment in digital to over $100 million. You've already put in $50 million in presses like the 5540, and you said you want to get to 100% digital, if I heard you correctly. One, you know, when would we expect for you to be at 100%? Relatedly, what is proprietary? What could be replicated by somebody within your whole prismiq value proposition to customers? Or is it totally proprietary, and you have a very large moat around that? Thank you very much.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Great. Thanks, George, and I'm excited that you opened up with prismiq as the question. I'll use the slides to try to give some color. A couple of points I just wanna play back that you said a little bit differently. We highlighted on the operating model. We actually are looking for digital to bring an additional 1% growth in 2025, actually 50% of our sales. We're looking to go online on digital and by 2025. Back to your specific question, if we look at prismiq, and you see one of the prints there of the picture on slide nine. It's this is actually the largest print we've already deployed, and the $50 million that we talked about. It's a little bit more than $50 million, is just on the digital printing investments that we made.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Since we actually bought the proprietary technology now about three years ago. The other part of our digital investment is beyond just the digital printing. Just to clarify those numbers there. Back looking at the press, this is what's extremely exciting. This is an actual picture of the press that's right now in operation in our Simpsonville facility, the largest food packaging plant in the world. This press is reducing the footprint of it, the current printing operation by a factor of 10. What's exciting about this, we have smaller versions of this and actually single color that we've already deployed. We've deployed some of those in our Illinois facility. We're actually doing mailers, and I could talk a little bit about what that's enabled for us, which is pretty exciting.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We could touchlessly turn mailers now with single color printing, really by phone calls, and have unique printing capabilities per mailer, which is pretty exciting. For the whole footprint, it's gonna probably in the next 3 years, changing out our printing to the digital. This is the actual biggest one. This one we're excited about. Full 10-color printing, also metallic printing. Actually, we've had customers in looking at this, and especially the color that's been most requested from the press is actually invisible ink. That we can work with that track and traceability, so pretty exciting. Great question. Really excited. Much more coming on digital that we can follow up with, but, really excited. Next question, please.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Adam Samuelson with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Adam Samuelson, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Yes, thanks. Good morning, everyone.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Good morning, Adam.

[Adam Samuelson, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Morning. I was hoping to just maybe dig in a little bit on the performance in the quarter and the expectations over the balance of the year. Thinking about kind of how positive price cost spread was in Q1. It seems like that you're expecting that to moderate pretty notably over the balance of the year, maybe offset a little bit by some better year-on-year volume trends as we go forward. Could you just help us think about kind of some of the key puts and takes around that, both Q2 and back half?

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Yeah, very good. Yeah, good question. Maybe just a comment on Q1, just that price realization coming off a favorable price cost spread in Q4, you know, that momentum continued into Q1. We were pleased with that performance in the Q1 in terms of contribution to our overall results. To your point, we do see Q1 as being a very strong price cost spread. We'll continue to benefit that going into Q2. The second half of the year, really the moderation I think on the material inflation side, since we're seeing the material inflation, at least anticipating most of that to be two-thirds of which to occur more in the first half of the year than the second half.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

As we work through, literally, you know, quarter by quarter, just managing that expectation around price cost spread, that's how we're working through it. To your point, there'll be some moderation in the second half of the year in terms of our guidance implies. Strong performance for Q1 out of the gate. We're in a position to basically look at overall full year guidance. Given the strong Q1 performance, we wanted to provide some updated commentary around our full year guidance to reflect some of the favorability into the full year. Want to say anything to that?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Yeah. Adam, just a shout-out to you and the Goldman Sachs conference. I'll be there next week. Actually, I'm gonna bring Emile with me, our Chief Operating Officer, and talk about some of the cool things we're doing in the industrial space. As we look at the volumes, I do wanna highlight just something that's really important to us. If you look at slide 13, you'll notice that we use the term price realization. The pricing here, and we're very explicit, pricing with care to gain share. This was the Q1. We actually give you the formula, how we look at price realization internally. This was the Q1 that we actually had a positive price realization with just tremendous inflationary pressures going beyond resins to pretty much everything. Just wanna highlight that.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Beneath that, if we look at the volumes, just to give you some color of what's going on with our markets, as Chris highlighted, the Q1 on the protective side was dealing with comparable last year that was up significantly. Missing that on the volume side, if we take a look at what we had in the constraints with some of the materials and really the constraints on our automation that I'm sure I'll get another question on, with that shortage, we still had a backlog we didn't ship, and so we still see the volume coming in the year on the protective side. The biggest drop was actually in our mailers. The biggest year-over-year when we had the surge from a quarter ago.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

If you looked at slide five, we're actually introducing a new mailer, really excited about. We'll hit on the second half of the year, a paper bubble wrap mailer. That is significant. We're working with an e-commerce play. We already have a paper mailer out there, but this one is giving that wonderful protective property of bubble wrap and now going paper. A proprietary product that, we got in place, and we're gonna bring automation with that right away. We're targeting to get that at the end of the year, so we can pick up some of that volume in the pretty strong shift of the year. The other part on the protective side I wanna highlight is if we look at all of our markets, if we go back to slide five. E-commerce, still strong.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Year-over-year, not as strong as it was, but industrial's up over 18%. One of the portfolios that came back strong in the quarter was our Instapak. The Instapak going after that industrial space, we had 6% growth on Instapak. Those of you know who followed us for a while, Instapak, very high margins and working with our customers, seeing the industrial space come back. On the protective side, lots of ups and downs, and we still are aggressively cautious, I'll say, on the second half of the year, despite all of our constraints on the volume side. I do wanna mention on the food side on the volume as well. Food's driven, if we look at our top market in red meat. The fresh red meat was still positive despite the proteins market moving around the world.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Our smoked and processed meat was up very strong, where we see in our case ready. The highest growth on the food side was actually in our liquids. Though it's a smaller part of our portfolio, if you remember during the pandemic, we talked about with restaurants shutting down and quick service, that was up almost 40% in the quarter. Things going up, things going down. Also on the food, the seafood side, small, 2%, that was actually down in the quarter. A lot of the shipments from Alaska, Chile, Norway, et cetera, on the food side use our high market share, 10K OTR oxygen transmission rate film, for those in the industry know it quite well.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

That was actually down in the quarter, but we're bringing automation into that, so in the second half, we think that's gonna go up. Very broad portfolio we feel good about. On the second half, we gotta drive some of that growth, and so we're cautiously optimistic that we can drive the volume on the second half of the year. Okay? Next question.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Adam Josephson with KeyBanc. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Adam Josephson, Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets]

Ted and Chris, good morning, and congrats on a really good quarter. Chris, one question on your volume guidance. Can you just walk me through the change from three months ago? I think three months ago, you were expecting about 3% volume growth for the year. Now you're expecting about 1. How much of that is the raw material and automation constraints that you mentioned? How much is any demand elasticity from these higher prices? How much is the just global industrial economy slowing, e-commerce slowing? Obviously, we saw Amazon's report on Thursday. Can you walk us through the buckets and what changed from three months ago?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Sure. Really to your point, we did have a slight change on the volume assumption, as reflected. Still in this low single digits, kind of in that 2%-3% as we first came out with full year guidance, you know, more into the 1%, you know, right now. I wouldn't say there's any one thing. It's as Ted just kind of went through the portfolio of our end markets, it's a combination of a number of things as we're looking at it. The supply constraints are clearly impacting us here in the first half. How quickly does that, you know, resolve itself as we execute the year? Maybe give us some more momentum on the organic side, especially as we think through the automation part of our portfolio.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

You get into the individual end markets, the industrial strength as things start to continue to open up. Clearly, the industrial on the automotive side is still somewhat muted as we all hear about. No one particular answer to that question. I think as we just look to the full year, this 2%-3% volume growth, we felt more like in this 1% range is how we see it today. Of course, we will update that each quarter as we evolve, but it's a combination of a host of items, not any one item for sure.

[Adam Josephson, Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets]

Okay. Thank you, Chris.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Operator, we'll now take the next question.

[Moderator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Larry De Maria with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Larry De Maria, Group Head, Global Industrial Infrastructure, Equity Research at William Blair]

Hi. Thanks. Good morning and nice job, everybody. Hey, thanks, Ted, for the update on prismiq and the digital transformation. You can see the obvious utility in the offering. Can you provide some perspective as to how advanced versus competition this is? How much differentiated it is? And what kind of ROI you think it will provide and be needed in the market? Obviously, you said it's a lower footprint, et cetera. Can you just give a little bit further color on the competitive positioning and the ROI?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Yeah. Hi, Larry De Maria. The competitive position, we have proprietary technology we actually bought three years ago. The digital printing technology that we have, I'll describe it in my non-technical way. We have the ability to do digital printing with actually floating heads that can go over actually flexible materials. Why that's really unique is

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Our materials, they shrink, they change formats at high speed. Having the ability to print that on multiple different formats, multiple different layers, and at high speed, we think we're in a unique position. We think we are ahead of the competition on that. We think we have something that right now we're ahead, and that's why we have to go faster, and that's why we gotta invest faster. That's why we actually are partnering. You saw the announcement last quarter investing with Foxpak, another digital printing capability, so that we can take this and go globally very quick. Our initial phase is with our internal operations, but already dealing with customers is we're putting automation into their facilities. They'll want this digital printing to be into the automation we actually put in their packaging plants.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We think we're ahead. The scalability in the background, as I shared, we're working with world-class suppliers, especially on the software side, so we can scale very, very quickly. We think we're ahead, and we gonna be driving it much faster. That ramp-up number that I gave, you know, we're measuring that actually daily with our teams internally on what our digital sales are. Pretty excited what that's gonna mean, and start affecting our business this year.

[Larry De Maria, Group Head, Global Industrial Infrastructure, Equity Research at William Blair]

Okay.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Next question.

[Moderator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ghansham Panjabi with Baird. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Ghansham Panjabi, Senior Research Analyst at Baird]

Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Maybe you could just touch on some of the, you know, topical events at this point, just in terms of China COVID and the impact potentially on your industrial business, maybe even the food business in Europe. Going back to prismiq, you know, just from a high level standpoint, is it designed to be additive to your sales growth? Is it a productivity boost along the supply chain? Mixed benefit? How would you sort of have us think about the specific impact on Sealed Air?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Let me go that first, Ghansham, so I remember that before I then go through some of the issues. It's actually on the top line, as we put it in a model, we think we're gonna add additional growth with that, so we'll see that added to our business. Also, it's also a cost side. We think, and the customers we've shown the capability of what we can do in printing. If you can visualize our case ready, what does digital printing mean? You see labels on top of everything. Even if you look at our meat, they slap a big piece of paper label on the meat when you see in the store.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We're now gonna be able to digitally print all that information right there on the markings, and your smartphone will be able to tell you everything about the package, what's inside, all that material. The first part of your question, it's gonna drive additional sales. The second part of your question, there's a huge cost opportunity for us and our customers as we digitize the printing capability. It's gonna help us on both. How we're putting that into our modeling, we just put that high level number there, but we think it's gonna help us drive our top line and the bottom line. Other issues, I'll take just a deep breath here.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

When you talked about some of the constraints that are out there, Ghansham, as you know quite well, the resins piece is still out there. There's still the constraints. We are anticipating, you know, we should be sometime on the other side of that curve. But right now, the inflation on our resins and materials is still quite strong. We use special stuff, so we're feeling that. We're still in a rationing situation with a lot of our specialty chemical suppliers. On the other side of the business, where we see the automation, where automation is just a huge growth driver for us, we're struggling like as many of the automation companies are. We got issues with components, with chips. Again, that links directly into the Russian conflict.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We have some of our leading automation right now from Russia that's actually been stopped. That is showing up as another headwind. We've had headwinds in China with the China lockdown and COVID. I was just talking to our China team this morning. We have 200 people in our largest facility in China that we're actually providing housing in the plant, and to keep the operation going, to keep them safe. That lockdown is, you know, significant. Now, these are all, you know, small percentages of the total, but it's where that volume piece right now is hitting us that we think we'll get through these challenges in the second half of the year. Who knows? More are coming.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Right now we're fighting through each one of those, we think pretty successfully, but I don't wanna underestimate how significant the challenges are.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Yeah. Maybe to add to Ted's comments, just thinking about just Q1. As we do evaluate, given these disruptions, we do evaluate what potentially was the lost opportunity for us in the quarter, recognizing we still see the demand, but it's just moving to the right. Probably 1%-2% is how we kind of viewed that organic volume item could have been better if these constraints weren't there. So that 1%-2% is putting, you know, put pressure on the quarter in terms of organic growth. Then also going back to an earlier question, just thinking about our change in the assumptions going from roughly 3% down to 1%. Kind of, you know, shifting in terms of our ability to execute on that, things continue to move to the right somewhat.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

I also wanted to comment that as we think about the earnings for the year, the profile when we first established guidance for the full year in February was more this 48, 52. Right now, as we look at our outlook, we're more in a 51, 49. We're gonna continue to obviously manage it accordingly. Things could get better and obviously provide some upside. On our page 17, when we give guidance, we do wanna provide those negatives, potentially in the downside of our guidance, as well as the potential positives that would provide you know the higher end of our range. Okay. Next question, please.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Roccanova with Truist Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Mark Roccanova, Analyst at Truist Securities]

Thanks very much. Hi, Ted, Chris, congrats on a very good quarter. Just two quick questions. Just wanna get your sense about the demand elasticity and the company's ability to continue to increase prices given the inflationary environment. Just the second part of the question is recognizing that you're material agnostic, any thoughts around expanding in fiber-based. I think last quarter and even this quarter, you mentioned on the slides that 15% of your material was in fiber. Any desire to expand that? And if so, like, why would that be a focus?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

If you look at that slide, let me take the last one, and Chris can come in to some of the volumes. If you look at our ecosystem there, we have the 15% fiber-based, and yes, we use the term that we're material agnostic. If you go through the example that we talked about with mailers before, traditionally, our mailer had been a film-based plastic mailer, the Bubble Wrap mailer. We described earlier, we're moving that to a paper Bubble Wrap. We see this strong push for fiber-based solutions. On the food side, we're working quite aggressively with our customers that are asking us, "Can you help us with the trays?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Can you bring that into a compostable, recyclable product? A fiber-based product coming in the food side, so we have some really exciting developments in that area. The short answer to the question, internally, we're looking to take that number up to be over 20%. You'll see that. I mentioned in my opening comments about the AUTOBAG sales going up. AUTOBAG is actually our fastest growing on the equipment side. AUTOBAG is pulling through paper, cardboard, fiber-based solutions into our AUTOBAG solution. That's gonna help move that number up. To share with you targeted, will we get there by the end of the year? Don't know, but that number is moving to north of 15%. Should be at 20%, hopefully by the end of the year. Chris, if you want to-

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Yeah, no. We're good.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Next question.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Pettinari with Citigroup. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Anthony Pettinari, Analyst at Citigroup]

Hi. Good morning.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Good morning.

[Anthony Pettinari, Analyst at Citigroup]

Just following up on resin, you know, can you talk about underlying assumptions for resin costs in the updated full year guide? Do you basically assume, you know, PE is sort of flat from here on out, or do you anticipate, you know, further inflation? Just maybe to clarify on your earlier comments, do you assume, you know, some improved availability of specialty resins maybe in the second half that are currently scarce, or are you just sort of assuming more of the same? Thanks.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

Yeah. Good question. Anthony, I think the underlying assumption around our full year guide, the updated guide, reflects that we are gonna continue and are anticipating to continue roughly an incremental $100 million on the raw material costs, given, you know, given the change in price or at least anticipated change in pricing, that we all see. Relative to the specialty resins, continues to be elevated, getting better, not only potentially, hopefully getting better from a price point of view as well as just the availability side, as we mentioned earlier in the commentary.

[Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO at Sealed Air]

If you look at the assumptions for the full year guide, what we said in February and what we're saying here in May, we anticipated that material inflation to be roughly $200 million, and now we're looking more like $300 million for the full year.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Anthony, just a little bit more color on the pieces with the resins. We do use specialty resins, and you understand that pretty clearly. There's some of those resins right now that you just can't get. They're actually rationed. Our team has done some incredible redesign of our resin and our barrier, especially with our Cryovac brand. You don't see that in volume, but redesigning what we have to meet some of that demand, we think we'll have an opportunity actually in the second half of the year to gain share when we see some of that material coming back into the market. We think that's some potential upside on the second half. The paper is now also part of our issue. We're seeing the inflationary side on the paper side, especially with energy.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

In Europe, we've had some significant market share gain with our paper products in Europe, but we're seeing that inflationary pressure. Right now, we are working with our teams. We see that continuing through the second half of the year. Again, our price realization, we wanna keep that positive, but we see in the inflationary pressures it for sure moving through the first half of the year, and we're still planning to see it through the entire year. Okay. Next question, please.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Parkinson with Mizuho. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Kieran De Brun, Managing Director and Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst at Mizuho]

Hi, good morning. This is Kieran on for Chris. I was just wondering if briefly you can just walk me through some of the productivity initiatives that you've been working on. It seems like you're well on track to achieve that target for 2022, but are there any areas where you may have been executing quicker than expected or where you're seeing additional opportunities? It seems like there's even a greater opportunity here over time when we look out past 2022. While I understand you're probably going to quantify that this time, just any preliminary thoughts in terms of how you view those trending through the portfolio over the year and then further out. Thank you.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Yeah, it's a great question. If you go to slide 10 or if you look at our ecosystem slide, what we've been working on internally, and right now, we've been talking about price realization a lot because just dramatic inflationary pressure. If we look at the SEE operating engine, what's producing underneath that is the productivity of our operations around the world as we're driving to touchless operations. When we talked about automation last quarter, I shared that we're going from right now our network, where we're talking about currently today, we have in terms of hundreds of robots and cobots in our facilities around the world. Over the next three years, we're gonna take that number to the thousands. We're making some significant progress in the productivity that's underlying our business.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

If you look at our performance today, we're looking at what is that productivity that's driving underneath the engine right now. Though it's in the inflationary environment, it's about that price realization, but we're seeing the productivity actually doing quite well. We're actually going faster on that. Digital printing can even help even more that we can actually simplify our production, both internally and bring some of those production savings to our customer. Your question about the long term, absolutely. That's where we think our productivity in the out years is gonna continue to increase and drive our margin expansion, once we get through this really dramatic inflationary pressure. Next question, please.

[Moderator]

Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Spector with UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Lucas Beaumont, Analyst at UBS]

Good morning. This is Lucas Beaumont on for Josh. I just wanted to go back to your equipment backlog and the auto box products. You've had a pretty big increase there in the backlog. I just wonder if you could talk a bit more about what gives Sealed Air the edge there. I think some of the paper-focused companies also have competing kind of box sizing systems. I just wonder if you could talk a bit about sort of what makes your products different and sort of where your edge is. Thanks.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Good question. To help on that for the automation, not the deep dive focus, but we're keeping the slides in the appendix. If you go to slide 21, if we wanna unpack our equipment and our automation, you can see in the quarter, the equipment was only up 8% year-over-year. But behind that, the bookings continued to be double-digit, so just a huge amount of constraints. As you see on the slide, we've got component shortages, we've got the sanction in Russia. Actually, Russia is on the food side, where we have quite a bit of success, both in fresh red meat and in cheese automation in Russia. Then we got some FX and also the China lockdown is affecting some of our equipment business.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

What we're doing is we're actually spending right now, and we've had this underway on how do we actually double our equipment capacity over the next three years. The other piece that might be a little bit different than some of the other people in the automation space is we're using multiple suppliers to help drive our equipment growth. We think we have a potential to continue this. We want this to be well in the high double digits for growth in sales to match our bookings trends. I'll just go to one slide. If you go to the next slide, just so you can see what this means. Here's the example of the solutions multiplier and two of our examples that talked about in the last quarter. First of all, just on the cheese one, it's done quite well.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

If you look at the cheese systems right now since we launched this just a couple of years ago on automation on cheese, which is almost a lights out production for us with our customers, we sold over 20 of these systems, and we have over 50 of them in our pipeline, that some are stalled, but we think we'll get through those in the next 12 months in the pipeline. The average one of those systems is about $500,000. So just in the backlog alone, we got over $25 million just in the cheese side. But the solutions multiplier, where we sell that piece of equipment, where we autoload, autopack, autovac it, then the pull-through on the materials is $500,000.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

A 10X multiplier if you look at from the equipment to the full solution. The other piece on the solutions multiplier that we're excited about is an example on the protective side, as we talked about the industrials coming back, and this is the auto wrap system for tires. If you look at that piece of equipment is $2 million. That pull-through is $350,000 in materials. It's the film, RFID tags. That multiplier is 3X over its lifetime, over 10 years, or 3X plus. But what does that mean to the customer? This is a big one. It's 8 times the packing speed, 50% reduction of their labor. Also the waste stream.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We've converted this from PVC, polyvinyl chloride, to actually a polyethylene, and it's now 100% recyclable, fully robotic in our customer's operations. Just a tremendous opportunity for us on the automation side. This example is we're using a third-party, fully branded equipment supplier in Europe so we can get to market faster. Okay, operator, I think we have time for one more question.

[Moderator]

Our last question comes from the line of Arun Viswanathan with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Arun Viswanathan, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets]

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I guess I had a question on the pricing strategy. You know, very robust pricing in Q1 with care to preserve share. You know, mid-teens%, and then, you know, we lost, say 1% of volume. When you look out into the future, you know, looks like you know, you still have this model of pricing off of, you know, inflation and, you know, formula-based pricing within food. Would it be possible for you to consider, you know, more of a value-based pricing strategy? I guess would that be more representative of where the company is heading and kind of removing that raw material side so that you could preserve some of this price action once raw materials recede?

[Arun Viswanathan, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets]

How should we think about, you know, kind of the pricing strategy you guys are thinking about internally?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

Actually, it's a great question because it's the pricing strategy is a value-based. I've been personally involved with this with our largest customers around the world. We take very carefully how we described it. We have disciplined pricing to take care of our customers to gain share. With our customers, that's where we bring automation in, we bring digital in, we bring sustainability. How we present this to our customers is we're. It's not how much our materials or how much our solutions cost, it's how much we can save them. Even in this highly inflationary market right now where our customers can't get people, they have tremendous supply constraints and also have inflation like we do. Our pricing strategy, it's not a pricing strategy to raise price, it's to gain share. How do we sell it?

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

We do it on payback. If you wanna see customers that are using our equipment services, you'll see them talk about payback. We're targeting on our automation a three-year payback. It's not how expensive our systems are or materials are, it's how we can save them money. We're focusing on that three-year payback that's actually pulling through the materials. The good news is there's so much waste out there that we think, just like we're looking at our own facilities and how we bring touchless. Some of our large customers, we're actually sending our operations team to help them and how we can help them automate and drive touchless operations through their facilities. It is a value-based selling process. It's price realization more than go raise price, so it's price above our cost.

[Ted Doheny, CEO at Sealed Air]

This is our Q1 of positive price realization. We're very careful on how we share this with our customers. Our strategy is to save them money, as we put in our prepared remarks. Our strategy is that we're going to find a way to help save them money that's gonna pull through our automation, our service, and our materials. Great question. Operator, that closes us for the call. We're right on the hour. I do wanna thank everybody for the call, and I hope everybody stays safe. We look forward to talking to you again next quarter, and we'll be talking and deep diving sustainability. Operator, thank you.

[Moderator]

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.

Participants

Executives

• Christopher Stephens, SVP and CFO
• Louise Lagache, Company Representative
• Ted Doheny, CEO

Analysts

• Adam Josephson, Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets
• Adam Samuelson, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
• Anthony Pettinari, Analyst at Citigroup
• Arun Viswanathan, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
• George Staphos, Managing Director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• Ghansham Panjabi, Senior Research Analyst at Baird
• Kieran De Brun, Managing Director and Senior Industrials Equity Research Analyst at Mizuho
• Larry De Maria, Group Head, Global Industrial Infrastructure, Equity Research at William Blair
• Lucas Beaumont, Analyst at UBS
• Mark Roccanova, Analyst at Truist Securities
• Moderator