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Text: Before we get started, I want to let you know that we have slides to accompany our discussion.
Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are posted on our website, as well.
Turning to Slide 3, you'll see the agenda for today's call.
I'll start with some highlights of our 2020 accomplishments and a look into 2021 before handing over to John, who will go into more detail on our outstanding performance and outlook.
Let's start with an overview of the year, turning to Slide 4.
When we started the transformation, we had a specific plan for turning the Company into the highly functioning successful organization we all knew it could be.
The team has embraced the process, driving operational performance, optimizing our portfolio, and strengthening our financial discipline.
And they did it during one of the most challenging environments in recent history.
As we go through the results for the year, you'll see the power of the new Bunge.
One significant change we made was transforming our operating model to improve visibility, and speed to act.
As a result, the commercial and industrial teams are better coordinated, helping us to maximize our assets.
In 2020, outside of Argentina, we processed record volumes in soy and soft seed crush.
Our commercial teams ensured our plants had the supplies they needed, and our industrial teams reduced unplanned downtime at the facilities, by more than 30% year-over-year in soy, and approximately 20% year-over-year in soft seeds.
This improved capacity utilization, brought immediate financial benefits without a significant additional use of capital.
This is just one example of how this more global approach has improved our network efficiency.
We were also better able to capitalize on market and customer opportunities, as they arose throughout the year.
As COVID lockdowns changed consumer eating habits, we quickly adjusted our production to help some of the world's leading brands continued to keep their products on the store shelves.
We also worked closely with our food service customers, as they continued to adapt to the changing demand patterns.
Agility is also critical, as we continue to look at how our vital work can be done more sustainably.
We're proud to be an industry leader in protecting the environment in areas where we operate.
We are a leading supplier of certified deforestation-free soy from Brazil.
And as we work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our operations, we're converting more facilities over to wind and solar power.
For instance, our corn and soybean processing plants in Kansas run on wind today, and we recently announced a deal to use renewable energy at our Fort Worth, Texas packaging facility.
As we look at our assets, we've now announced all of the significant portfolio optimization actions we originally identified.
With these major changes behind us, we can now shift our focus to continuous improvement in growth opportunities.
In the immediate future, we know that COVID will still be with us.
We continue to remain focused on our top priority of protecting our team, their families and communities.
Our global and regional COVID crisis teams continue to meet regularly to make sure our operations have the resources and tools needed to keep our employees safe, so we can continue to serve our customers.
Now, let's turn to our results on Slide 5.
With our strong team and unmatched platform, we've created a resilient model for moving forward.
This quarter and the full-year really highlighted the earnings power of that platform, benefited from improving trends throughout the year, and we're able to move quickly to capture the opportunities they've presented themselves in markets around the world.
During the year, we saw demand-led markets with higher volumes, volatility and prices.
And with our platform and operating model, including our industry-leading risk management, we captured upside well above our earnings baseline.
In the fourth quarter, agribusiness benefited from a better-than-expected market environment, with particularly strong results in our North American operations, driven by higher oilseed crush and elevation margins.
In edible oils, we realized exceptional margins in our Brazilian consumer business, and also benefited from increasing demand from biodiesel in South America, and renewable diesel in the US.
We continued to innovate to deliver solutions that benefit our customers on both ends of the supply chain, consumers and farmers.
A great example of this is Karibon, a Shea-based substitute for cocoa butter, we launched in the fourth quarter; a sustainably sourced ingredient that also benefits the communities in Africa, where we sourced Shea.
2020 also demonstrated the power of our approach to risk management.
There will always be volatility in this industry.
But our approach to risk management allows us to capture the upside of that volatility, and protecting its most of the downside.
While we won't always manage it perfectly, this approach is what makes our model unique and powerful.
The strength will be critical, as we look ahead into 2021.
Many of the conditions that helped drive our success in 2020 remain in place today, but we don't have clear visibility into the second half of the year.
And while we don't expect all of the conditions that existed in 2020 to repeat in 2021, we do expect to deliver adjusted earnings per share of at least $6 per share.
Our team will be closely watching the key factors that could impact our forecast, including changes in demand, crop production, and a post-COVID recovery.
And with that, I'll hand the call over to John to walk through the financial results in detail, and we'll then close with some additional thoughts on 2021.
Let's turn to the earning highlights in Slide 6.
Our reported fourth quarter earnings per share were $3.74, compared to a loss of $0.48 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Adjusted earnings per share was $3.05 in the fourth quarter versus $1.69 in the prior year.
Our reported results included a net gain of $0.59, primarily related to our previously announced sale of our Brazilian margarine and mayonnaise assets, as well as the impact of an indirect tax credit related to the favorable resolution of a tax claim.
For the full-year, 2020 rates per share was $7.71 versus a loss of $9.34 in 2019.
Adjusted full-year earnings per share was $8.30 versus $4.76 in the prior year.
Adjusted core segment earnings before interest and taxes, or EBIT was $637 million in the quarter versus adjusted EBIT of $467 million in the prior year, driven by strong performances in our agribusiness and edible oil segments.
Agribusiness closed out an excellent year with a very strong fourth quarter.
Higher oilseeds results were primarily driven by soft seed processing, where earnings were higher in all regions, driven by robust veg oil demand and record capacity utilization.
Soy processing results were in line with the prior year.
These improvements in our North American and Asian operations were offset by South America and Europe.
In Grains, higher results were primarily driven by our North American operations, which benefited from strong export demand and exceptional execution of logistics.
Results also benefited from favorable risk management and optimization in our global trading and distribution business.
In South America, earnings decreased largely due to lower origination volumes, as farmers have accelerated sales earlier in the year, in response to the spike in local prices.
Edible oils finished up and turned out to be an excellent year, with very strong results of $113 million, up $38 million compared to last year, primarily driven by higher margins in our consumer business in Brazil, as a result of tight supply and strong demand.
Higher results in North America were largely due to increased demand for renewable diesel sector, and higher contributions with our key customers.
Results were also higher in Asia, driven by lower costs.
Earnings declined in Europe due to lower margins.
In Milling, lower results in the quarter were driven by North America, which was impacted by lower volumes and margins, as well as the loss of earnings from our rice milling operation, which was sold during the quarter.
Results in South America were in line with last year, as higher volumes were offset by lower margins.
Fertilizer also had a strong quarter, with results of $32 million, similar to 2019 finishing off a very strong year.
Total adjusted EBIT for corporate and other for the quarter was comprised of a negative $81 million from corporate, and $2 million from other.
This compares to a negative $95 million from corporate and negative $60 million from other for the prior year.
The decrease in corporate expenses during the quarter was primarily related to the timing of performance-based compensation accruals in the prior year.
The increase in other reflects the prior-year impact of our Beyond Meat investment.
Results for our 50/50 joint venture with BP benefited from higher year-over-year average ethanol prices in local currency, as well as improved industrial efficiency.
Earnings in the fourth quarter of last year benefited from lower depreciation due to our Brazilian Sugar and Bioenergy operations being classified as held for sale.
For the quarter and year ended December 31, 2020, income tax expense was $97 million and $248 million respectively, compared to $16 million and $86 million respectively for the prior year.
The increase in income tax expense during 2020 was primarily due to higher pre-tax income.
Adjusting for notable items, the effective tax rate for the year was just under 70%.
The effective tax rate was lower than our prior forecast, primarily due to earnings mix.
Net interest expense of $66 million were slightly higher than our prior forecast, due to increased short-term borrowings to support higher commodity prices and volumes.
Here you can see our positive earnings trend adjusted for notable items and some timing differences over the past four years, reflecting the execution of our strategy to drive operational performance, optimize our portfolio, and strengthen financial discipline.
Slide 8 compares our full-year 2020 adjusted SG&A to the prior year.
We achieved underlying addressable SG&A savings of $50 million toward our savings target of $50 million to $60 million established at our June Business Update.
While we are pleased with our progress, we recognize a portion of the savings was accelerated due to COVID-19 related restrictions, such as reduced travel.
However, we are confident we will return to pre-pandemic levels, as we have all learned to operate differently, and we will continue our focus on further streamlining the business.
The net increase of $90 million in the specified items reflects a significant increase in performance-based compensation accruals due to our improved financial performance this year, slightly offset by other items such as inflation and the impact of foreign currency fluctuations.
Moving to Slide 9, for the full-year 2020, our cash generation, excluding notable items and mark-to-market timing differences, were strong with approximately $1.9 billion of adjusted funds from operations.
The cash flow generation enabled us to comfortably fund our cash obligations over the year, and apply retained cash of $1.1 billion to reduce debt.
Slide 10 summarizes our capital allocation of adjusted funds from operations.
After allocating $254 million to sustaining capex, to include maintenance environmental health and safety, and $34 million to preferred dividends, we had approximately $1.6 billion of discretionary cash flow available.
Of this amount, we paid $282 million in common dividends to shareholders, invested $111 million in growth and productivity capex, and bought back $100 million of our stock.
As shown previously, the remaining cash flow of approximately $1.1 billion was used to strengthen our balance sheet in support of our credit rating objective of BBB/Baa2.
Moving on to Slide 11, a $1.1 billion of retained cash flow offset a portion of our $3.1 billion of cash outflow of this year for working capital.
As a result, net debt rose by $2.2 billion over the course of the year.
The growth in working capital, primarily reflects an increase in readily marketable inventories, resulting from higher commodity prices and our deliberate decision to increase volumes to optimize earnings potential.
As the slide shows, our availability under committed credit lines remained largely unchanged, leaving us with ample liquidity as we enter 2021.
As you can see on Slide 12, at the end of the fourth quarter, only 9% of our net debt was used to fund uses other than readily marketable inventories.
This compares to 17% last year.
For 2020, adjusted ROIC was 15.9% or 9.3 percentage points over our RMI-adjusted weighted average cost of capital of 6.6%, and up from 9.7% in 2019.
ROIC was 12.2% or 6.2 percentage points over our weighted average cost of capital of 6%, and well above our stated target of 9%.
The widening spread between these return metrics reflects how we have been effectively using merchandising RMI, as a tool to generate incremental profit.
As a reminder, we have adjusted these return metrics to exclude the impact of changes in foreign exchange rates on book equity as of year-end 2018.
We believe this provides a clear picture of our economic performance from the management actions we've taken over the past two years.
Moving to Slide 14.
Here you can see our cash flow yield trend, which emphasizes cash generation measured against our cost of equity of 7%.
For the year ending December 31, 2020, we produced a cash flow yield of nearly 26%, up from 13.4% at year-end 2019.
As Greg mentioned in his remarks, taking into account the current margin environment and forward curves, we expect full-year 2021 adjusted earnings per share of at least $6 per share.
In Agribusiness, full-year results are expected to be down from 2020, primarily driven by lower contributions from oilseed processing and origination primarily in Brazil.
While we are not forecasting the same unique environment or magnitude of opportunities that we captured during 2020, we do see some potential upside to our outlook, resulting from strong demand and tight commodity supplies.
In Edible Oils, full-year results are expected to be comparable to last year.
Higher results in the North American business, driven by a recovery in food service and increased renewable diesel demand are expected to be offset by lower results in our consumer business in Brazil.
In Milling, full-year results are expected to be in line with last year.
In Fertilizer, full-year results are expected to be down from a strong prior-year.
In Non-Core, full-year results in our Sugar and Bioenergy Joint Venture are expected to be a positive contributor, driven by improved sugar and Brazilian ethanol prices.
Additionally, the Company expects the following for 2021.
An adjusted annual effective tax rate in the range of 20% to 22%, net interest expense in the range of $230 million to $240 million, capital expenditures in the range of $425 million to $475 million, and depreciation and amortization of approximately $415 million.
With that, I'll turn things back over to Greg for some closing comments.
Before turning to Q&A, I want to offer a few closing thoughts.
We set ambitious goals for Bunge's transformation, and we can see the results from the changes we've made.
Now that we've completed the majority of the actions we originally laid out, we're able to focus on continuous improvement in growing the business across the cycle, as we move forward.
As we did in 2020, we're going to be leveraging our platform and the operating model we've put in place, and look for the opportunities ahead of us, as we work effectively to capture the upside and minimize the downside.
Looking over the longer term, we remain excited about the structural shift we're seeing in the consumer demand for food, feed and fuel.
In particular, we're focusing on four primary areas of growth; oilseed processing and origination, renewable feedstock for biofuels, plant protein ingredients and plant lipid ingredients, which is our specialty fats and oils.
And with our global platform, culture of innovation, and oilseed leadership, we believe we're in a unique position to benefit from those trends.
The leadership team and I are incredibly proud of the entire Bunge team's continued focus on execution.
And while 2021 will surely present different challenges and opportunities, I'm confident we have the right platform, and I look forward to continuing to work together to maximize Bunge's full potential.

user
compname posts q4 earnings per share $3.74.
q4 gaap earnings per share $3.74.
favorable market environment continuing into 2021 overview.
to date, the company has not seen a significant disruption in its supply chain.
in agribusiness, full-year results are expected to be down from 2020.
in milling, full-year results are expected to be in line with last year.
in non-core, full-year results in sugar and bioenergy joint venture are expected to be a positive contributor.
in edible oils, full-year results are expected to be comparable to last year.
qtrly earnings per share $3.05 on an adjusted basis excluding certain gains and charges and mark-to-market timing differences.

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