You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: They can be accessed at ir.
Following our prepared comments, we will open up the call for a question-and-answer session.
We describe these risks and uncertainties in our filings with the SEC, including our 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2020.
The extent of these impacts, including the duration, scope, and severity, is highly uncertain and cannot be predicted with confidence at this time.
We will also be referencing non-GAAP financial measures during the call.
It's great to be joining you all today on my first earnings call as WestRock CEO.
I've been in this role now for seven weeks and spent that time meeting with our customers, our business leaders, and teammates.
With every interaction, I'm impressed with the capability and strength of the WestRock team and couldn't be more excited about our future prospects.
It's still early in this process, but what I'd like to do today is share with you my initial observations since joining and my priorities going forward.
Before doing that though, let me touch briefly on our performance in the second quarter which Ward will discuss in more detail shortly.
Faced with dual issues of the ransomware incident and significant weather disruption, the team focused, executed, and delivered for our customers, generating revenue of $4.4 billion, adjusted segment EBITDA of $641 million, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.54 per share.
The ransomware and weather incidents lowered our adjusted earnings per share by $0.23.
Ward will provide additional detail about our performance.
I am pleased to say that we have fully restored our IT systems with all sites up and running, and we continue to make excellent progress on restoring our supply chain and customer service levels.
During the time we were dealing with this incident, we prioritized serving our customers and incurred additional costs that impacted earnings in the quarter.
We are accelerating investments that were on our IT development timeline to further strengthen our infrastructure.
Throughout these events, the WestRock team demonstrated incredible resiliency and dedication, and we have made a remarkable recovery.
With all of this now behind us, I am confident in our team, our markets, and our path forward.
I mentioned at the start that much of my time over these first seven weeks has been spent getting to know our company.
I toured 12 facilities, met virtually or in-person with hundreds of teammates, and spoken with many of our top customers WestRock has built a unique portfolio, successfully integrating acquisitions, and investing to create a differentiated set of capabilities with incredible opportunities for growth.
I've seen firsthand how the consumer, corrugated, and machinery businesses work together, and believe we can do even more to maximize the performance of our platform.
We serve, diversify, and grow in packaging end markets and the demand for fiber-based paper and packaging continues to gain momentum.
Key markets that we serve such as food and beverage, e-commerce, and healthcare continue to grow.
For example, the demand from customers for safe and secure e-commerce solutions has only been accelerated by the pandemic, and I believe this remains a significant opportunity that WestRock Solutions are well-positioned to address.
One of my visits was to our high-quality, low-cost facility in Florence, South Carolina, and it was great to see the new state-of-the-art paper machine up and running.
This slide includes a QR code you can use to view a video of the mill and the new equipment.
This machine produces high-performance containerboard grades at low basis weights and replaces three machines in our system.
This mill is well-positioned to serve a diverse set of customers seeking these low basis weights to drive more sustainable packaging solutions.
This investment makes Florence one of the lowest-cost virgin containerboard mills in North America.
We expect Florence to ramp up to full capacity by the end of our fiscal fourth quarter.
The Florence mill is a great example of a strategic capital investment that improves our capabilities, lowers our costs, and expands margins.
Looking forward, there are a few key priorities that I want to focus on.
WestRock has a unique portfolio of sustainable fiber-based packaging and great opportunities to leverage the enterprise and help our customers win in their markets.
The path to long-term shareholder value creation is through a focus on attractive markets where our differentiated portfolio and combination of products and services are valued and rewarded.
We will also focus on improving our productivity and operational excellence across the enterprise, which are both important levers to grow earnings and margins.
I believe strongly in the leadership role that WestRock can play in improving the circular economy and helping our customers improve the sustainability of their products.
We recently refined our sustainability platform to focus on people and communities, bettering the planet and innovating for our customers and their customers, whether it's developing new fiber-based packaging solutions that enable our customers to meet their sustainability goals, initiatives to reduce our own environmental impact, or our work to improve the diversity inclusion of our company, WestRock has substantial capabilities and opportunities to help drive a more sustainable future.
And a more sustainable future means that we must focus on innovation to develop new fiber-based packaging that meets the needs of customers and consumers.
Removing plastic from packaging and developing more sustainable packaging solutions through design, material science, digital, and automation continue to be growth drivers in our industry.
WestRock has a capability to create new, recyclable fiber-based solutions that are good for our customers and the environment.
Next, I'd like to share my initial thoughts on capital allocation.
I believe that disciplined, balanced capital allocation is a key factor in creating sustainable shareholder value.
I'm impressed by the strength and stability of West Rock's cash flows and believe this is a positive attribute for the company and our investors.
We will invest in our business to maintain and improve our assets, and investments and acquisitions and strategic capital projects will be tightly aligned to our strategy and deliver returns above our cost of capital.
We will remain committed to returning capital to our dividend and intend to steadily increase it every year.
We've already taken the first step today with the announcement of a 20% increase to our quarterly dividend.
Today's increase reflects our confidence in the outlook and cash flow generation of our business.
In addition, we will evaluate share repurchases in the future as another way to return capital to shareholders.
We remain committed to our investment-grade credit profile and believe that our leverage target of 2 in a quarter to 2.5 times is appropriate.
And in the coming months, I'll share more detail about my priorities and vision for WestRock's future.
We were able to serve our customers, deliver solid earnings, and continue to reduce our leverage despite the challenges in the quarter.
We generated revenue of $4.4 billion, adjusted segment EBITDA of $641 million, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.54 per share.
These results were impacted by both the ransomware incident and winter weather.
The two events negatively impacted revenue by $189 million, adjusted segment EBITDA by $80 million, and adjusted segment EBITDA margins by approximately 110 basis points.
Adjusted earnings per share was $0.23 lower as a result of these events.
In addition to the impact of the ransomware incident that we show on the adjusted segment EBITDA bridge, we also incurred $20 million in ransomware recovery costs.
The $20 million of recovery costs were excluded from our adjusted segment EBITDA and adjusted earnings per share.
We estimate that the total insurance claim will be approximately $75 million, and we expect to recover the claim from our cyber and business interruption insurance coverage in future periods.
It's important to look beyond the events in the quarter to see the underlying trends in our business.
Demand is strong and we continue to focus on improving our business mix.
In addition, we are currently implementing the published price increases across all of our paper grids.
The implementation of these price increases and improved business mix drove $88 million in year-over-year earnings improvement.
Notably, we had record second-quarter North American box shipments which increased 5.5% year over year on a per-day basis.
Cost inflation was driven by a $43-per-tonne increase in recycled fiber from Q2 of the prior year, coupled with higher chemical and energy costs resulting from the winter storm.
Transportation costs were also higher due to tight availability across all modes.
We did not exercise the option to purchase an additional 18.7% equity interest in Grupo Gondi.
As a result, we recorded a charge of $22.5 million that we excluded from adjusted EPS.
As we indicated earlier in the quarter, the lag in customer invoicing from the period when our systems were down negatively impacted our working capital in Q2.
As expected, accounts receivable increased in the second quarter and we expect receivables to normalize in the third quarter.
Despite this, our net funded debt declined $74 million from Q1 and our net leverage decreased to 2.8 times.
Due to the decisive actions we have taken over the past year to strengthen our balance sheet, we have reduced our adjusted net debt by $1.6 billion.
Demand continues to increase for sustainable fiber-based packaging, and we sell into an attractive set of end markets.
Our overall packaging volumes increased by 3% in Q2, including e-commerce box volume growth of 18.4% on a per-day basis.
Our paper sales represent 27% of our total revenue in the company and we are focused on reducing our participation in the export containerboard and specialty SBS markets.
The pricing environment has improved across our paper and packaging grades.
We are implementing published increases across our paper and packaging businesses as expected.
Turning to segment results, our corrugated packaging segment reported revenue of $2.9 billion and adjusted segment EBITDA of $438 million.
North American adjusted segment EBITDA would have been $54 million higher and margins approximately 140 basis points higher without the events in the quarter.
Corrugated box demand is very strong across most of our end markets, and we reported record per-day shipments for the second quarter.
As I said earlier, corrugated box shipments were up 5.5% per day year over year.
Excluding the impact of the ransomware and weather incidents, per-day box shipments would have increased approximately 8%.
We lost approximately 121,000 tons of containerboard production and revenue due to the disruptions in the quarter.
This directly impacted our external containerboard channel sales as we could have sold all of the lost production.
We highlighted the primary drivers of cost inflation earlier, higher recycled fiber, energy, chemical, and transportation costs.
However, we offset this inflation in the quarter through higher pricing and volume, excluding the impact of the events.
We also continue to implement the previously published price increases and expect the benefit of these increases to more than outweigh inflation.
Inventory levels remain low as we head into our peak mill-outage quarter in Q3 with 112,000 tons of planned maintenance outage downtime.
Finally, we are making great progress on our strategic capital projects.
The Florence mill continues to increase its production and operate well.
As David commented earlier, we expect the mill to be at full production levels at the end of the fourth fiscal quarter.
The margins in Brazil have been lower in the past two quarters as a result of the maintenance and capital outage related to the Tres Barras expansion.
Demand is strong in the Brazilian market, and we expect margins to improve in the second half of the fiscal year.
Turning to consumer packaging.
The segment reported revenue of $1.6 billion and adjusted segment EBITDA of $212 million.
EBITDA would have been $26 million higher and margin's approximately 100 basis points higher without the events in the quarter.
Our sales mix is improving by shifting to higher-margin food and beverage packaging sales.
Food and beverage packaging revenues were up 4.7% year over year, driven by improved mix to quick-service restaurants and beverage packaging.
We lost approximately 46,000 tons of production and corresponding revenue due to the disruptions in the quarter.
In addition, we had approximately 20,000 tons of consumer paperboard shipments that were deferred into the third quarter due to these disruptions.
Backlogs have increased across all substrates and are currently at six to eight weeks.
We are in the process of implementing the previously published price increases.
The increased pricing improvement in our business mix and productivity more than offset inflation in the quarter.
We continue to produce containerboard at our Evadale, Texas mill, given the strong demand and low inventory levels.
In addition, we are making progress with CNK production at the Evadale mill and are on track to deliver 25,000 tons of CNK production in FY '21 and 50,000 tons of production in FY '22.
We are able to flex the CNK and containerboard capacity from SBS with no additional capital investment.
Here are some things to consider for our fiscal third quarter.
We expect adjusted segment EBITDA of $775 million to $805 million and adjusted earnings per share of $0.88 to $0.97 per share.
The primary drivers of our sequential increase include the implementation of the previously published price increases, continued strength in packaging demand, and the return to normal operations for the third quarter.
These items are partially offset by modest sequential inflation across recycled fiber, chemical, and transportation costs.
In addition, we will take approximately 112,000 tons of scheduled maintenance downtime across our North American containerboard mills.
Finally, we expect higher incentive accruals due to a stronger earnings outlook.
We want to share with you our current outlook for fiscal 2021.
We expect the continued flow-through of the previously published price increases, as well as packaging growth across our primary end markets.
As a result, we expect full-year adjusted segment EBITDA to be approximately $3.05 billion.
Given our earnings outlook and continued strong cash flows, we fully expect to be within our leverage target of 2.25 to 2.5 times by the end of the fiscal year.
We will provide additional details on our next earnings call.
And now, I'll hand it back over to David for closing remarks.
I'm excited about the future of WestRock.
We have great opportunities to grow our company and provide value to our customers, our teammates, and our shareholders.
We have a broad portfolio of products that is uniquely positioned to meet our customers' needs, and we will further leverage the power of the enterprise to create value.
We intend to lead in sustainability by being a valued partner to our customers to help them achieve their sustainability goals as we work to achieve ours.
To do this, we will focus on accelerating innovation, creating products that enhance the performance and sustainability of our products and services, and we will continue to be disciplined in our capital allocation strategy.
We have confidence in our future, evident by the increase in our dividend this quarter.
As recovery picks up momentum, we are well-positioned with significant financial flexibility to pursue our goals.
The future is bright at WestRock, and I am proud to be part of the team.
James, we are now ready for Q&A.
[Operator instructions] Operator, may we take our first question, please?

user
westrock increases quarterly dividend.
q2 sales $4.4 billion.
q2 adjusted earnings per share $0.54.
quarterly dividend of $0.24 per share declared by board of directors, an increase of $0.04 per share, or 20%.

assistant