Good morning, and welcome to Greif's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you'll need to press Star followed by the number One on your telephone keypad. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press Star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Leahy, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Greif's third quarter fiscal 2022 earnings conference call. This is Matt Leahy, Greif's Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations, and I am joined by Ole Rosgaard, Greif's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Larry Hilsheimer, Greif's Chief Financial Officer. We will take questions at the end of today's call. In accordance with Regulation Fair Disclosure, please ask questions regarding your issues you consider important because we are prohibited from discussing material non-public information with you on an individual basis. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up before returning to the queue. Please turn to slide two. As a reminder, during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements involving plans, expectations, and beliefs related to future events. Actual results could differ materially from those discussed.
Additionally, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics can be found in the appendix of today's presentation. Now I'll turn the presentation over to Ole on slide three.
Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. Following on our formal introduction of the Build to Last strategy at our June Investor Day, we are very pleased to present our third quarter results. We delivered both earnings and EBITDA growth against a historically strong Q3 2021 comp. During a time of economic uncertainty, record inflation, continued supply chain pressures, and the ongoing pandemic. We delivered third quarter adjusted EBITDA of $251 million and adjusted EPS of $2.35. Perhaps most impressively, we delivered a record single quarter adjusted free cash flow of $175.8 million. These results are indicative of the Build to Last strategy's powerful value creation when executed effectively by our exemplary global Greif team.
Our company has also achieved a milestone by ending the quarter below our target leverage ratio range, opening up significant opportunities to accelerate our capital allocation priorities and deploy capital to drive shareholder value and grow our business. Our confidence in the Greif team's ability to produce continuous strong results had led us to raise our expected fiscal 2022 guidance, as Larry will discuss later. Please turn to slide 4 to begin discussion of our detailed results. Global Industrial Packaging delivered an excellent third quarter. We continued to see solid demand across our global resin-based portfolio, with plastic drums down low single digits percentage and IBCs up 10% per day versus a strong prior year comp.
Steel drum volume fell by mid-single digits per day versus the prior year on late-quarter weakness in EMEA and APAC, driven by customer challenges around raw material availability, supply chain and labor disruptions, and inventory rebalancing which impacted order patterns. Our North American end markets remain stable, and our LATAM business continues to outperform with strong volumes across the ag chem, citrus, and lubricant end markets. As a reminder, our GIP business benefits from a portfolio effect of mixed geographic products and end market exposures, as discussed at Investor Day. Adjusted EBITDA decreased year-over-year by approximately $29 million. We are proud of our team's ability to largely offset multiple headwinds when viewed against the historically high performance of third quarter 2021.
In addition to the absence of a $10 million contribution from FPS that benefited the previous year, as well as a higher year-on-year incentive accruals, the team has also been excellent at taking steps to offset the previously discussed $100 million one-time full year 2021 benefits related to last year's historic run up in steel prices. Much of the impact of that tailwind occurred during the second half last year. Our teams also faced the continued headwinds of non-raw material inflation but were diligent in passing along costs ahead of the inflationary curve. Our global GIP team has exemplified relentless execution and discipline during these challenging times. Please turn to slide five. Paper Packaging's third quarter sales rose by $131 million versus the prior year due to steady and solid volumes in all paperboard grades and higher average selling prices.
Adjusted EBITDA rose by $42 million versus the prior year due to higher selling prices. Partially offset by higher raw materials, notably a $10 million headwind related to higher OCC costs, higher incentives, and the continued and substantial headwinds of transportation, labor, and energy inflation. Third quarter volumes in our CorrChoice sheet feeder system were down 3.5% per day compared to the historically strong Q3 2021, in line with industry box demand, but remained 10% above pre-pandemic levels. Third quarter cube and core volumes were down 2.4% per day versus the prior year due to softness, mainly in film and textile end markets, being partially offset with strength in our other key end markets, as well as our growing adhesive business.
As some may know, we had a fire in one of our production lines at our Riverville mill towards the end of July. Most importantly, we are happy to report that all of our colleagues are safe and unharmed from the event. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of those colleagues, the fire resulted in only 20 days downtime at one of our two lines at the mill. The team did an excellent job of bringing the line back to operation in a short timeline. The time focused on that incident led us to determine we should defer our planned 13 days of maintenance downtime into next year. As a result of that shift, the fire will result in a loss of net 7 days of production during the fourth quarter, equivalent to approximately 9,000 tons. That is factored into our fourth quarter guidance.
I will now turn it over to our CFO, Larry Hilsheimer, on page 6.
Thank you, Ole. Good morning, everyone. Our third quarter results demonstrate our team's ability to perform despite substantial ongoing headwinds. Despite a combined $59 million of non-volume related raw material, transportation, labor, and energy cost headwinds in the quarter, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $251 million, well ahead of prior year. You will note that our EBITDA growth was driven by our Paper Packaging business, which is exhibiting strength during a quarter where GIP was faced with several headwinds and a difficult prior year comparison. The portfolio effect provided by these businesses act to create stability of earnings over the long term for Greif, and this quarter is no exception. We have included in the appendix of today's presentation a slide from Investor Day, which displays this dynamic over the past seven years.
During this quarter, we also grew earnings by over 20% with adjusted earnings per share of $2.35, and most impressively, produced record free cash flow of over $175 million during the quarter. This cash generation provides proof of another of our core messages from Investor Day, the resiliency of the Greif business system as a highly generative cash machine regardless of business cycles. Our teams are also executing below the line where interest expense was a year-over-year benefit to earnings of $0.12 a share as a result of our deleveraging efforts and a favorable refinancing. Tax expense was a $0.09 negative year-over-year earnings impact, primarily due to higher income in the United States. Please turn to slide 7.
We are again increasing our fiscal 2022 guidance as a result of our team's extraordinary efforts in continuing to deliver for our customers and managing well through an inflationary environment. We are raising the midpoint of our adjusted earnings per share guidance by $0.40 to $8 a share for fiscal 2022, reflective of our strong third quarter performance and confidence in our team's ability to deliver results to round out the year. We are also raising our free cash flow guidance for fiscal 2022 with a new range of $415 million-$445 million. Continued outperformance on the operating line coupled with improving working capital management and slightly lower CapEx is driving the upside. We anticipate these working capital benefits to continue to support strong free cash flow into 2023.
Finally, you will find a slide with key modeling assumptions in the appendix of today's deck for use as needed. Please turn to slide 8. Reflecting back to our Investor Day and the promise we made to continue to provide value to shareholders, we are increasing our quarterly dividend by 8.7% to $0.50 on A shares and $0.75 on B shares. In addition to raising our dividend, we continue to repurchase shares as announced at Investor Day. Our increasing dividend and commitment to share repurchases offer a compelling shareholder return opportunity. Furthermore, we have reached yet another milestone in delevering our balance sheet to below our target leverage ratio target. The strength of our balance sheet affords us the flexibility to pursue new opportunities to deploy capital opportunistically in the coming year.
Our acquisition pipeline remains robust, and we are excited about the opportunities to further grow our business. With that, I'll turn things back to Ole on slide nine.
Thanks, Larry. To sum up our thoughts, we are extremely proud of our team's performance in the past quarter. As discussed at our Investor Day, our focus and disciplined execution on the four missions of our Build to Last strategy ensures that we will deliver exemplary performance in any economic environments. Included in the appendix for today's presentation is a summary of our key messages from Investor Day. We are confident in the ability for our Build to Last strategy to drive long-term value creation, and this quarter is a prime example of that strategy in action. Thank you for your interest in Greif. Operator, can you please open the line for questions?
Certainly. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. We ask that analysts please limit themselves to one question and one follow-up question. Thank you. Our first question comes from Ghansham Panjabi from Baird. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi, this is actually Tom Digenan sitting in for Ghansham. For my first question, could you characterize fundamentals in PPS as you see them right now? We've seen containerboard momentum for the industry pull back somewhat recently, so I'm wondering how we should think about demand now and going forward relative to earlier this year.
We saw towards the end of the quarter a slight weakening in demand. I will stress that our demand is still solid, and our backlogs are still around 7-8 weeks.
Gotcha. That's helpful. Could you also characterize the macro in each region? Also, how would you say dynamics have evolved since Investor Day? Also any commentary around what you're seeing across the European customer base as it relates to natural gas shortages would be helpful as well.
Sure. We can walk around the world. If we start out in APAC, what we see out there is basically the effect of the continued lockdowns in China. Those lockdowns prevent transportation across the Chinese regions, and that puts a damper on some demands. We also see end markets like auto, like construction, being affected. That means that there's less demand for paint, less demand for silicone, which all gets transported in our packaging. Also the increased supply chain cost has an effect on the whole region. That's really why we see, you know, a weakening in that region. For Europe or for EMEIA, we also see some, you know, some weakening, not to the extent of APAC at the moment.
That is really caused by several things. One is the conflict in Ukraine. It's the inflation in energy prices, gas, restrictions that causes companies to basically take down capacity for cost reasons. We do see pockets in EMEIA where, you know, demand is remained strong. But in terms of, you know, the materials that goes into auto production and some consumer goods are weak. In North America, we see weakness to a lesser extent, but we do see the same picture in terms of auto, which has an effect on paint and some types of chemicals. LATAM is strong. And overall, we see strong demand in ag chem.
We see strong demand in food-related packaging as well.
That's really helpful. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Our next question comes from George Staphos from Bank of America. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi, this is actually Cashen Keeler on for George today. I guess just heading into 2023, you know, would you be able to provide any initial color on that, you know, for both segments? What might be your biggest risks to margins as well?
You know, 2023 is a long way off, yet particularly given just the uncertainty of the economic path here. I mean, obviously even the Fed's struggling with that. I mean, we're working hard at you know, building out our budget plans now, and we'll be well prepared to talk about that on the fourth quarter call.
Our next question comes from Adam Josephson from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Ole, Larry, Matt, good morning. Hope you're well. Thanks very much for taking my questions. Larry, would you mind just going through your volume trends by month in the quarter as well as in August? In other words, compared to the down 2.8 in fiscal 3Q, can you tell us what each of the three months was as well as what August was and relatedly, what your volume expectation for 4Q is embedded in your updated full year guidance?
Yeah. We, you know, like we had talked at Investor Day, where May and June were so, you know, they weren't showing really any signs of weakness. Things tailed off a bit in July, leading to, you know, the results we published. As we look at August, it continues the trend that we saw in July. You know, Ole went through, you know, where we're seeing steel, you know, sort of, it's, you know, looking down that mid-single, you know, mid-single digits kind of number on steel. You know, IBCs remained positive, up even in August. Our sheet business remained strong in paper. As he mentioned, our backlogs are still close to 8 weeks in our paper business. You know, a lot of mixed signals, Adam.
You know, overall, things are, you know, a little weaker, but nothing that is overly concerning at the moment.
I appreciate that. Just related to Ole, the comment about the 7-8-week backlogs in your paper business. Obviously, your volumes were down in fiscal 3Q. Obviously, you took your OCC guidance down by $10 at a time. You know, can you tell me like what you're expecting in terms of the OCC decline in September? Relatedly, if your backlogs are still strong in your paper business, why do you suppose OCC prices would be falling by as much as they are?
Yeah. We build in, you know, it's 127 in August, then we reflected going down to 107 for September and October. You know, you are seeing people taking a lot of different maintenance downtime within the industry. You know, I do think that there is some weakness out there that's driving down demand a bit, in the paper industry. You know, we continue to do well against our specialty businesses. Our URB and CRB businesses are continue to be strong. There's some pieces that are showing weakness, but others not. I mean, you know, you've got residential construction, you know, while you may see housing starts down, you still have housing completions up year over year over a strong 2021.
Actually, permits went up in July year-over-year. We're seeing, for example, if you look down in our URB business, carpet and floor cores and roofing cores are actually up, 6% and 12% August over August. You got now construction tubes, which goes more into commercial construction, is down 6%. It's just a mixed bag across the portfolio, and like I said, on balance, still pretty good for us.
Adam, when you follow housing, you have to remember that, you know, when you sign a contract to build a house, you know, that house will be built from now and then 9, 12 months into the future, and you can't stop that. You will see demand for housing-related products continue, you know, well into 2023.
Thank you, Ole.
Our next question comes from Mark Wilde from BMO. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good morning, Ole. Good morning, Larry.
Hey, Mark. Good morning, Mark.
Ole, can you just talk with us a little bit first about how you think about your ability to hold on to these recycled box board price gains? I've kind of lost track at this point, but it seems like we've got about $400-$450 worth of price hikes out there in the last 18 months. If OCC is a little over $100 right now, that's really not terribly much higher than it was 2 or 3 years ago. It seems like you've picked up quite a bit of spread there, and I'm just curious about your ability to retain that spread and how you think about that.
The way I think about it, Mark, is really it's a supply and demand issue. I mean, put it very simple.
Okay. Can you also talk a little bit around your leverage targets and whether you might be willing to operate below the low end, below that 2x number for some extended period of time?
Yeah. Mark, you know, we don't find that terribly capital efficient, but we're not going to be crazy to deploy the capital and chase things that don't make sense. To the extent that there is nothing for us to acquire that is attractive, we could see that fall some. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our acquisition pipeline is very robust. We are looking at a number of things. We'll remain disciplined in deploying that capital. Yeah, if we don't execute on any of those, I could see us being down for a while so that we have that dry powder to do things. We'll continue to look at returning more and more capital to our shareholders to the extent that we don't. We're not gonna be rash about it.
I wouldn't anticipate us, you know, falling dramatically below that for a long period of time.
Okay. Finally, Larry, just on the M&A front, can you just give us a sense of what you're seeing out there from sellers? Because it's clearly a really tough financing market for the private equity buyers. In fact, it seems to me it's kind of frozen at this point. I'm just curious if you're seeing an awful lot of sellers just pull back from the market right now.
We're not. We're actually seeing lots of opportunities, but they're not huge opportunities. I mean, we're not talking Caraustar size deals, Mark, by any stretch. We look at this as an opportunity for us. Obviously, to the extent that they're having more difficulty in financing, we don't have any trouble financing. We have the dry powder to be able to do this very rapidly, and we'll take advantage of that in the market to the extent that we're able to find transactions that make sense for us and that fit our target objectives.
Okay. Thanks, Larry. I'll drop back in the queue.
Our next question comes from Michael Hoffman from Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question. I'd like to tackle the overall commodity book, and you've alluded to fiber, the OCC trend. Could you share with us your thoughts about your mix of resins, steel trends going into 4Q and how we think about that comparative year-over-year?
Hi, Michael. This is Ole. Are you thinking of like raw material prices?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Sorry.
We have obviously seen a steady but not dramatic decline in raw materials over the periods. We expect to see a continued sort of slight decline of raw materials towards from now and towards the end of the year. We don't expect anything dramatic on that front at all.
Okay.
That goes to both steel and resin.
Okay. That's good to know. Larry, on the CapEx side, is the intention that that gets rolled into next year? Is this a supply chain issue and you're trying to deploy it, but you can't find the things you wanna buy? Just to understand why.
Yeah.
Why that happened?
Yeah. That's it, Michael. It's a bit frustrating for us because that's been a continuing story for the last three years, unfortunately. You know, three years ago it was sort of a unique situation on a large piece of equipment, but then last year as the supply chain difficulties became more pronounced, then that became an issue. We thought until, like, three weeks ago that we were still gonna be in good shape on not having to lower our CapEx spend this year, but then we got told some equipment wasn't gonna come in. Yeah, it's all supply chain related. It's not anything related to desire or capability. You know, it will go into next year. We do have plans as we've announced about having a new Texas sheet feeder next year.
That's a major capital spend, that'll fall into the guidance we'll give for next year.
Okay. If I can just tweak out a little, given the trend. I get you're not giving guidance, but just so everybody's modeling intelligently, given the trend on the raws, by definition numbers year-over-year are tighter. You know, we're having a flat to slightly down conversation which nobody should be surprised about, but that's the way to think directionally.
Yeah. I think that's the way to think about it. The one thing that I would talk about is, you know, as that occurs, cash generation just goes up. I mean, because, you know, the need for working capital declines, the collection on receivables and those things play out. As you would expect, when we modeled out doing the stock repurchases and the dividend increase, we modeled out a bunch of scenarios and even in a really tough drop, which we don't anticipate, I mean, we're talking 20% declines in EBITDA over the next couple of years, we still are just printing cash and getting our leverage ratio will remain down below our target range, even if we do some decent-sized acquisitions.
We may see that fall off in earnings if the economy goes south, but you know, cash flow is gonna be strong.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Gabe Hajde from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Ole, Larry, Matt, good morning.
Hey, Gabe.
Real quick, as we think about, I guess, energy volatility and what could happen over the winter months, can you give us any sort of framework in terms of regional profitability to the extent that you have to. Your customers perhaps move where they're manufacturing their product, any potential capacity limitations that you might have? Again, I don't know specifically, but for example, in Germany, if someone is trying to make XYZ product and they choose to make it in the United States, again, to the extent they have the capability, you know, just anything that we should be mindful of that can impact profitability.
Yeah. I don't think you'll see a lot of that, Gabe. I think to the extent that we see movement, you generally will see it might move to, we've seen things move to Saudi Arabia before and, you know, our plants down there. We see things move, you know, oftentimes into China, but China is difficult right now, obviously, with all the shutdowns they have there. To the extent that they would move to the United States, for us, that's a very good answer.
A very good answer.
That'd be, like, really good. We haven't seen much of that in the past. I think the migration would be more the kind that I just mentioned. I don't know if you have other thoughts on that.
No. Just remember, if we talk about ourselves, our mills consume 70% of our energy, and that's in the U.S., and we obviously have no energy issues with supply here. It's more in Europe, you see that.
All right. Thank you. Then just one quick one to dial in. I guess this fire issue, which it was fortunate that no one was injured. 9,000 tons of downtime, if I assume maybe $300 a ton of underabsorbed fixed overhead, it may be a $3 million headwind or so to fourth quarter. Is that I mean, what maybe less than five? Is that fair?
Yeah, that's roughly it, and obviously it's already built into our guidance. Gabe, we didn't build anything into the fourth quarter for any kind of business interruption recovery because, you know, we don't know the timeline of when that might occur. We're obviously working on that. We've got high deductibles against that stuff anyway, so it's not gonna be substantial. I didn't put anything in for that.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Justin Bergner from Gabelli Funds. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Good morning, Ole. Good morning, Larry.
Hey, Justin. Morning, Justin.
On past calls, you've bridged the change in guidance from one quarter to the next, and I was wondering if you might be able to do that for the earnings guide, you know, maybe breaking it down into-
Sure. Yeah
The sort of benefit from lower OCC, you know, below the line of
Yeah
other factors. Maybe for free cash flow, if you could do the similar thing, you know, between-
Happy to do it.
operating and capital and CapEx.
Happy to do it. Our guidance, that midpoint was $0.76 on Q2. Operations other than our paper business pricing and OCC, which I'll break out separately. Operations across both businesses, driven mostly by GIP, was a pickup of about $0.17 . PPS pricing on mix, 'cause we had built in price increases that we knew we had already announced and executed, but the mix left us with about $0.12 pickup. The OCC drop relative to what we had built in before, you know, it came out at $143 a ton versus $152. What we add in is $0.24 . Interest expense on some of the variable part of our interest expense is a $0.05 bad guy.
Some other expenses, just unrealized currency loss or that kind of thing, was $0.06, and tax and other was $0.02. Five, six, and two on the negative. That should walk you from $7.60 to $8. I'll pause and see if you get all that. Did you get all that?
Yeah, that's great. The positive operations across the businesses, mainly GIP, that $0.17, could you just provide a little bit more color there? Was that just better execution, better volume?
Yeah, really disciplined execution on, you know, selling prices relative to non-raw material price increases. We got a little bit of benefit of some timing on the decline in some of the steel. It played well for us, minor amounts there. It's just a combination of those things. Then in PPS, some more integrated tons where we have, you know, it plays out better for us in our specialty products in our CorrChoice operation, in our tube and core business. Combination of all those things amounted to that $0.17 lift.
Okay, great.
Cash flow side, I'll do the same walk. We started at $410 million was the guidance. That same operation, it's gonna be the same elements, obviously, but $1.9 million on those operations, $7.1 million on the pricing, $14.5 million on OCC. Interest expense down $32 million. Adjusted CapEx was up because we spent less than we expected, so $6.6 million. We are going to spend less than we expected, as I just discussed. Other things, cash taxes, other miscellaneous stuff is a - $69 million.
Great. Thank you for all that detail. Second question I had was on repurchases. You repurchased $60 million in the quarter. I assume the 10-Q will speak to sort of the price at which you repurchased. I mean, should we think of that as not an insignificant amount of dollars relative to your market capitalization. Should we think of that as something that you will continue to do in subsequent quarters unless you know the M&A activity picks up, or was it more one time?
No. Yeah, we had announced at Investor Day that we executed on the $75 million ASR program. If you look at our cash flow statement, you actually see two entries related to it. It breaks it into pieces of $60 million and $15 million. You get delivered, you know, 80% of that on day one, and that stuff impacts earnings per share. I'll come back to that impact in a minute. You don't really know the price that ultimately gets paid until the ASR program gets filled out, which will happen over the rest of this year. Then we also plan to do another $75 million in open market, which probably be about 2/3 B shares and 1/3 A shares.
You know, that'll play out how it plays out in the market. Coming back to the earnings per share impact. $0.01 per share in this quarter of lift on earnings per share. Another $0.03 in Q4, so $0.04 for the whole year. If it plays out the way we think it is, on that first $75 million, it'll be about $0.15 for the whole year next year. We'll execute on the other $75 million open market. Hopefully it has way less impact per share because hopefully our stock price goes up and it costs us more money to buy it back.
Great. That's very helpful as well. Just lastly, the $100 million headwind from price cost versus the benefit in 2021, is that still sort of the right number or has it become a little bit larger or smaller?
No, no. That number was fixed. I mean, that was what we got out of the rapidly increasing prices last year that just wasn't gonna repeat this year and didn't. You know, we've lost more than that as we've gone through the year just in the normal payback through volume decreases and stuff. No, the $100 million is a fixed number.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Adam Josephson from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Thanks very much. Larry, just one follow-up on the volume question I had earlier, which is if you're down 3% in 3Q, July was the worst, and then you said, I think August was trending fairly similarly to July. Should we assume that July was down 5%, if not more, as was August?
Yeah, let me look here, Adam. I'm looking at,
Yeah, thanks. I could ask another one.
I don't remember what July was down. Actually, do you know that, Matt?
I don't have it in front of me here, no.
I mean, if I look at HRC steel globally, it's, you know, mid- to upper single digits. I hesitate on that 'cause so much of it is driven by China, you know, and just what's slowed down there. I mean, it's
Adam, what we also have to remember, Adam, is you know, we're obviously pushing our inventories down, but so are our customers. There comes a point where you need to replenish your inventories. Whether it's 50%, you know, I don't know, but there is an element of that. You will see customers starting to once they come to the end of that cycle, starting to increase their purchases again or their demand again.
Right.
No, I'm just trying to figure out what a reasonable volume expectation is for fiscal 4Q. In other words, what is embedded in your guidance? I assume it's down more than 3%, but I obviously don't know that.
Well, yeah. I said mid-single digits.
Yeah. It's about that.
That's on steel and, you know, plastics.
Okay.
You know? Yeah. That, that's about right.
Well, okay. I was talking total company, but okay. Yeah. Then, with regard to, you know, Mark asked about the sustainability of these URB and containerboard prices, given what's happening to OCC prices and the historic spread between the two, and your response was it's all supply and demand. Volumes are falling in tubes and cores and in containerboard. Is it reasonable to think in light of that these—I mean, based on the demand trends that you're seeing in tubes and cores and containerboard, is there any reason to think that these prices are sustainable?
I mean, you know, we don't comment on future prices, Adam. I mean, you know, you can obviously make your assumptions. We're very comfortable that our business is gonna continue to operate well. We're gonna obviously try our best not to give up price, you know, because it's very valuable to us. You know, to the extent that, you know, demand drops dramatically in the market, yeah, I mean, it's gonna follow supply and demand. If you're projecting the demand's gonna drop, I think it's not an unreasonable expectation that prices would at some point come down.
Yeah. Just one last thing along those lines, and I appreciate that, is URB versus containerboard. You know, URB has historically been more economically sensitive than containerboard because a lot of containerboard goes into food and beverage and other non-durables. What do you think a reasonable expectation is for URB versus containerboard demand if we are going into a pretty meaningful recession over the next year or so?
I mean, our URB, the end markets it goes into is extremely diverse. I mean, if you go back and you look at the pie chart stuff that we've provided over time, I mean, it's extremely diversified. But it's different than containerboard. I mean, you know, there's a lot of differences in the end market. I don't think they correlate that closely, and I don't think that it's fair to assume that they're worse.
Adam, you know there is.
Yeah, go ahead, Ole. Sorry.
Yeah. There's two points. As we also explained during Investor Day, you know, we rebalanced our portfolio, so we have a lesser extent of containerboard in our overall portfolio. Just to comment on demand. On URB, demand is stable, which indicates that there will be no price pressure, at least at the moment. Also CRB, you have strong demand.
Whereas in containerboard, Ole? Demand?
I didn't comment. I didn't comment on containerboard.
Well, I mean, we talked about our backlogs. Our backlogs remain the same at through-
Exactly.
Yeah.
Got it. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Mark Wilde from Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Now we got the right country. I wonder, Ole and Larry, can you give us any color on just where you're thinking about the best internal reinvestment opportunities? In other words, if you're gonna invest kind of on projects, capital projects in your existing businesses over the next 2-3 years, what's that gonna be focused on? Is it more sheet plants? Is it some mill upgrades? Is it IBC build outs? What would that pie chart look like?
Yeah. I mean, Mark, if we go back and appreciate you weren't at Investor Day, just for a very good reason, at least in my opinion. You know, we're gonna do this sheet feeder in Texas, which is a significant spend next year. Will get us more integrated in the containerboard space. We're gonna spend, continue to spend in the IBC space. It's a primary focus of us. Small plastics, you know, think jerry cans and that expanding our business from where we have it in isolated places around the world, where we have a very attractive business for us. You'll see us spending more and more on automation, you know, in just recognizing, of course, labor components, and you know, upgrading our facilities, those kind of things.
Those are the primary focuses. I miss anything, Ole?
No. You got it.
Okay. I'm just curious, are there any opportunities you think to potentially recapitalize in the URB business? I mean, if you look at sort of across the industry, you know, there are a lot of old cylinder machines that are probably 80 or 90 years old. I'm just curious about the, you know, potential to perhaps recap some of that capacity.
Yeah, it's something that we've looked at, Mark. I would say to you that our team has not yet been able to convince me that the returns from that type of investment on a wholesale basis make any sense for us. You know, people like to play out 20- and 30-year curves, and you modify one assumption an eighth of a percent, and it changes the answer. I mean, we'll continue to examine it, and we will just spend money to the extent needed to make sure that the plants continue to operate well. We'll continue to explore whether something of the nature you mentioned makes sense, but so far it hasn't.
Okay. Sounds good. Thanks. Good luck in the fourth quarter, guys.
Thanks, Mark.
Our next question comes from Michael Hoffman from Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you for the follow-up. A lot of questions with regards to the economy and supply and demand. How do you think of your own channels and what's in your sort of channels as far as inventory, what your customer channel looks like, and then what your competitor channels look like? That ultimately will be the major shock if we're overstuffed.
Yeah. I mean, you know, we have some places in the world, Michael, where we had some excess inventory related to concerns about supply chain. We have been working that down and will continue to do so. That obviously was one of the big drivers of cash flow in this quarter, year- over- year. It was a dramatic improvement in working capital, and that focus will continue. In terms of you know, inventories of our products in customers, we don't have that many customers who actually keep much of our inventory because you're basically storing air when you think about it. You know, empty steel drums, empty plastic drums. We do have some customers who actually store them in semi-trailers, and some of them they pay us rent for them actually while they keep them.
That's a small portion of what we have. I'd say the same thing relative to our competitors in that space. You just don't store that much. The same goes on the containerboard side. I mean, the box plants don't store a lot of paper waiting to use it. It's more real time.
The channels aren't overstuffed. This really comes down plainly to what your perception is about an economic cycle.
Yeah. I mean, Ole mentioned it. We did have some impact of some supply destocking in the limited group of customers that I mentioned that do store some of our inventory. But you know, we think that's coming to the end and you know, so we would expect order patterns to pick back up, offset by any further drop in the economy.
Yeah, those inventories are safety stock, Michael, so they're not huge. They'll come to an end shortly.
That's very helpful.
We have no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Matt Leahy for closing remarks.
All right. Great. Thanks everyone for joining today. Hope you found the call helpful. Have a safe and enjoyable week, and thank you again. Take care.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.