Mativ Holdings, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you for joining us for Mativ's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that comments included in today's conference call include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these comments for reasons shown in detail in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Some financial metrics discussed during this call are non-GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations of these metrics to the closest GAAP metrics are included in the appendix of the earnings release, which along with the accompanying slide deck, is now available on our website at ir.mativ.com. I will also note that unless we say otherwise, any comparisons we make to prior periods, including references to our performance since Mativ's formation, are on a continuing operations basis, excluding the divested engineered papers business.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Shruti.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Mativ's second quarter 2026 financial results. I am excited to be speaking with you as this quarter represents a profound turning point in our journey. I'm eager to share the details of our progress. When we established Mativ four years ago, we knew that the company would require fundamental rewiring of how we operate, go to market, and allocate capital. Over the past 18 months, we have transformed our culture, commercial engine, and operating rhythm to manage a set of diversified businesses as one Mativ that delivers value for our customers, employees, and shareholders. Today, I'm incredibly proud to report that our Q2 2026 results represent the strongest quarterly performance since Mativ's inception. We are no longer just talking about transformation.

The strategic actions we put in motion have fundamentally reshaped our business and are firmly anchored across every level of the organization. The evidence is visible in both how we execute and the strong financial results we are delivering. I want to take a moment to acknowledge our global team of dedicated employees. The macroeconomic environment remains undeniably complex. We continue to navigate shifting demand patterns, geopolitical uncertainties, and dynamic supply chain landscapes. I'm proud of how our teams have executed with relentless focus, agility, and precision. They're actively shaping our end markets through continuous innovation, deep customer partnerships, and a relentless commitment to operational excellence. Before we dive into our segment performance and the strategic initiatives defining our future, I want to unpack the key achievements from this quarter.

In Q2, Mativ delivered organic growth in a highly dynamic market environment, emphasizing the resilience of our diversified portfolio and the customer-focused efforts of our commercial teams. Our ability to perform in this environment is a testament to how our engineered solutions enable our customers' innovation and are often critical to unlocking their products' ultimate value and performance. Our unwavering focus has been on driving high quality, profitable growth, structurally elevating our margin profile, and translating that into significant cash flow generation. That focus is noticeable in our Q2 financial statements, where we delivered robust results versus a strong year-ago quarter across multiple metrics, including adjusted EBITDA of $75 million versus $67 million in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.1% compared to 12.8% in the prior year. Free cash flow of $60 million versus $49 million in the prior year.

This performance is a result of our proactive value-based pricing strategy, rigorous cost management programs, and strategic footprint optimization. We are successfully capturing the value of our technical expertise we provide to customers while simultaneously driving efficiencies across our operations and cost structure. Switching to our segments, I'm pleased to report that our SAS segment produced record-adjusted EBITDA and margins with many key product categories showing organic growth. Tapes and labels expanded by almost 10%, led by all finished tape categories and tape backings. Commercial print and packaging outperformed market conditions, delivering flat to modest growth while the underlying market declined. This outperformance reflects the strength of our commercial execution in our SAS segment. Sticking to the SAS segment, I'll provide a quick update on our healthcare category. In Q1, we discussed two discrete events that negatively impacted our volumes, a temporary facility outage in Knoxville and customer de-stocking actions.

I'm happy to report that the outage was brief and that operations were back to normal in early Q2. The resulting volume recovery successfully offset the ongoing impact from unrelated customer de-stocking in the quarter. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we expect healthcare to remain a minor headwind to our consolidated results. In FAM, growth was driven by double-digit increases in specialty films while we continue to see steady demand for our solutions for industrial process filtration and industrial netting. Clean air and water are global imperatives and our advanced filtration media remain solutions of choice in these pursuits due to reliability and lifetime ownership benefits. We were honored to be recognized recently by MANN+HUMMEL, one of our strategic filtration customers, with their Supplier Collaboration Award, underlining our decades-long partnership.

Pivoting towards the future, on our last earnings call, we introduced a foundational blueprint for Mativ's future, centered on a unified vision: to be the preferred global partner for customers delivering innovative and sustainable material solutions. Today, we're excited to expand on that framework, detailing the specific elements of our growth strategy that will guide how we compete, deliver value, and drive long-term profitable growth. At the heart of our strategy remains our core purpose. We go beyond supplying products by transforming materials into performance, elevating our customers' innovations. These priorities are underpinned by four distinct competitive advantages. We engineer specialty materials using advanced manufacturing technologies, ensuring their performance in the toughest conditions. With a robust global supply chain, R&D labs, and manufacturing facilities, we are exactly where our customers need us. We make high quality our standard, building reliability into every delivery.

Most importantly, we co-create with our customers and collaborate openly across product categories, partnering closely to drive breakthrough solutions. As we navigate today's dynamic market environment, Mativ's portfolio diversity continues to be a strategic advantage, elevated by cross-company collaboration and knowledge-sharing, which act as force multipliers. We serve as critical enabler for our customers' evolving R&D efforts, providing highly customized materials that drive their innovation, sustainability, and performance requirements. Ultimately, when our customers win, Mativ wins alongside with them. As evidence that our strategy is translating into commercial success, we recently communicated a sizable new commitment within the aerospace and defense market. Today, I'm pleased to share that our partner, a globally recognized leader in space exploration, continues to successfully test our products. This customized specialty film delivers a lightweighting solution that enables deployment of next-generation communication technologies.

Through deep partnership, Mativ co-developed a product with robust performance requirements using our proprietary manufacturing methods in novel ways. Performance and reliability are mission-critical in this end market, making it a perfect match for the quality of Mativ's highly engineered products. This opportunity validates our state-of-the-art product and process technologies and sets the stage for further expansion into the rapidly growing aerospace and defense sector. The program is ramping up as planned and should serve as the foundation for a new growth channel as we look towards 2027 and beyond. Capitalizing on high-value demanding opportunities requires a keen focus on our core strengths. To further unlock the integrated value of our diverse portfolio and enable prioritized capital allocation decisions, we have clearly defined our three technology platforms. To begin with Coating and Saturation improves material performance by making products stronger, more resilient, and more functional.

This platform drives innovation in critical applications like engineered films, performance tapes, release liners, advanced wound care, and medical device attachments. Next is Extrusion Manufacturing. Here, we deliver custom solutions designed for precision and performance at scale, supporting essential needs in water filtration, advanced films, HVAC, and erosion control. Lastly, in Fiber Solutions and Specialized Assembly, we engineer high-performance fiber-based materials, taking custom solutions from concept through to finished assembly for sectors such as climate control, transportation filtration, consumer wellness, and paper and packaging. These technology platforms represent capabilities where we have a distinct right to win. They leverage our material science and technical expertise and inform our disciplined capital investment process. By adding a technical capability dimension to our existing market and product views, we are elevating discrete capabilities into a cohesive center of excellence network.

By leveraging our interconnected technology platform simultaneously, we can deliver more comprehensive, complex solutions that address a broader range of our customer needs. This ensures long-term growth opportunities, increased asset utilization, higher margin potential, and maximized capital investment returns. Together, these newly formalized elements provide a well-defined roadmap that builds upon the blueprint shared last quarter. We're working internally and with external experts to focus on top-line growth and to unlock meaningful new opportunities across our end markets. As we continue to refine and execute these go-to-market strategies, we'll keep you informed on the progress and the resulting shareholder value creation. Finally, we're leveraging AI and data analytics to drive significant efficiencies across these technology platforms. We're rolling out pilot initiatives to optimize production scheduling and reduce process waste.

By replacing manual production sequencing with real-time predictive insights, we will empower our operators to make faster decisions that boost asset utilization and increase yields. As we validate these solutions, we'll scale them across our network, delivering sustainable cost savings, enhancing reliability, and strengthening on-time customer delivery. Before closing, I want to address the impact from a severe tornado that struck central Wisconsin on July 27th. It extensively damaged our primary third-party paper and packaging distribution center located in Menasha. First and foremost, all Mativ and third-party site personnel are safe. Our thoughts are with our people and their affected communities, and we are actively supporting local relief efforts. While the warehouse sustained structural damage and briefly interrupted customer shipments, our response has been swift. We immediately mobilized a crisis management team, optimized manufacturing capacity to rebuild inventory, and secured alternative warehouse space.