Amcor Grew Sales 57% in a Year Its Volumes Fell. Now the Fiscal Year Itself Is Changing.

Amcor reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 before the open on August 12. Net sales for the year were $23,506M, up 57%. Adjusted EBITDA was $3,673M, up 68%. Adjusted diluted EPS was $4.02 against $3.56.

The company also disclosed the bridge that produced the 57%, and it is the most useful paragraph in the release. Of that growth:

• ~$7.9 billion (about 52 points) is acquired sales net of divestitures — the Berry Global combination.
• ~$240 million (about 2 points) is the pass-through of higher raw-material costs.
• ~5 points is foreign exchange.
• −2 points is the net of volumes and price/mix.

Strip the acquisition, the resin pass-through and the currency, and what Amcor's own business did in fiscal 2026 was shrink slightly.

That is not a hidden fact — Amcor publishes the bridge itself, every quarter, and deserves credit for it. But it means the headline growth rate describes a transaction, not a trend.

The quarter

The Q4 bridge tells the same story as the year: of +26%, about 19 points is acquired sales, 6 points is raw-material pass-through, 2 points is FX, and −1 point is volume and price/mix. Volumes were +0.5% against estimated combined legacy Amcor and legacy Berry volumes; price/mix was −1%.

So the underlying business is roughly flat on volume and giving back a point on price — in a quarter management describes as managing "unprecedented input cost inflation."

Where the earnings actually came from

Gross margin of 20.90% is the best since the Berry deal closed — up 3.3 points year over year, and the highest in our stored series since the 21.33% of the June 2024 quarter, when Amcor was less than half its current size. It improved in a quarter when price/mix was negative, so it has to have come from cost, and Amcor says where:

Synergy realization came in ahead of plan, while performance in our non-core businesses improved substantially. — Peter Konieczny, CEO

Concretely: ~$100M of Berry synergies in the quarter, ~$240M for the fiscal year. Of the +37% adjusted EBIT growth in Q4, about 15 points is acquired EBIT, 3 points is FX, and the remaining 19 points is synergies plus cost and productivity execution.

Two other lines do a lot of work in the GAAP comparison and none of it in the operating one. Restructuring, transaction and integration expenses fell from $236M to $36M, and other income, net rose from $4M to $102M. Together those explain most of how a −$39M net loss became +$389M of net income. Adjusted EPS growth of 23% is the honest read; GAAP's swing from negative to $0.83 is mostly the absence of last year's deal charges.

Rule of 40 — and a composition change worth more than the score

Amcor's Rule of 40 score for Q4 FY2026 is 47.15 — 25.90 of revenue growth plus 21.26 of free-cash-flow margin.

The score fell almost thirty points and the business got better. The growth half collapsed because Berry turned one — the deal closed April 30, 2025, so the June 2025 quarter already carried two months of it, and the acquisition arithmetic is now largely lapped. The cash half went from roughly zero to 21.26%, the strongest in the series.

This is the clearest illustration we have of why a Rule of 40 score built on acquired growth is a temporary number. For four quarters Amcor scored 61 to 77 on a growth rate it bought. The 47.15 is what the combined company looks like when it has to run.

Expect the growth half to fall further. Once the Berry anniversary is fully lapped, the −2% underlying line is what remains, and the score becomes almost entirely a free-cash-flow story.

The cash quarter

Amcor generated more free cash flow in the June quarter than in the entire fiscal year — the first nine months were net negative. That is normal seasonality for this business, but it is worth knowing before annualizing anything from this print.

The company's own adjusted free cash flow of $1,424M for the quarter and $1,303M for the year is built differently — from adjusted EBITDA plus working capital, interest and tax paid — and is not comparable to the figure above.

Net debt is $12,897M, and dividends paid in fiscal 2026 were $1,195M. The quarterly dividend was raised to 65.0 cents from 63.75 cents, payable September 24 — a 2% increase in a year adjusted EPS grew 13%.

Two structural changes every Amcor chart has to absorb

The fiscal year is moving from June 30 to December 31. Amcor will report a six-month transition period covering July 1 to December 31, 2026, then calendar years. Guidance for that stub period is $1.80 to $1.90 of adjusted EPS and leverage of 3.5x to 3.6x.

There is no "FY2027 Q1" for this company. The next report covers six months, and any model that annualizes it — or any table that lines it up against a three-month quarter from a peer — will be wrong by a factor of two.

And there was a 1-for-5 reverse stock split on January 14, 2026. Every prior-period per-share figure in this release has been retroactively adjusted. This one is a live trap in the raw data: SEC XBRL still carries $0.113 of diluted EPS for the September 2025 quarter on the pre-split basis, alongside the $0.565 implied by the restated nine-month roll-up. A chart built from unadjusted filings will show Amcor's earnings quintupling in January for no reason.

What we corrected

Capturing this print surfaced three errors in our own stored free-cash-flow series for Amcor, all now fixed:

The last one mattered most: the March 2026 quarter was stored as its raw operating cash flow, which overstated free cash flow by $228M and reported a negative quarter as a positive one. The Rule of 40 table above uses the corrected figures.

What the call added

Three things came only on the call, and each changes how the print reads.

Amcor committed to double-digit adjusted EPS growth in calendar 2027. That is the first forward commitment the post-Berry company has made beyond the stub period, and Konieczny framed 2027 as "the first pretty much clean year after the combination" — the bulk of a $650M three-year synergy target delivered, the organisation focused on six core categories. Leverage was guided to about 3x by the end of calendar 2027, against the 3.5–3.6x the release gives for December 2026.

Roughly $500M of working capital is tied up by the Middle East conflict, and it cost about $200M of free cash flow against plan. This is a real qualifier on the $1,360M cash quarter above: the strongest cash quarter in the series was still short of what the company expected, for a reason that appears nowhere in the release.

Synergy capture is running ahead of plan on the call's own construction — $115M in Q4 and $285M for FY2026, described as ~10% above the first-year target, with about half of the separate three-year $280M growth-synergy goal already secured and new business awards approaching $140M annualized. Note these are not the $100M/$240M in the release: the release figure is the portion attributed inside the adjusted-EBIT growth bridge, the call figure is total capture. Both are right; they answer different questions, and the bridge arithmetic earlier in this piece uses the release's.

Underneath, the category detail is where the post-acquisition growth rate actually lives: food service, pet care and protein up; liquids and beauty & wellness flat; healthcare down — with Konieczny cautioning analysts not to "read too much into the volume performance on the healthcare side." Scherger added that July volumes tracked consistently with Q4.

Also disclosed: five divestitures closed in the second half of FY2026, which will reduce prior-year adjusted EPS by about $0.04 on a comparable basis.

What to watch

The transition period ends December 31 and reports in early 2027. Three things to carry into it:

1. Whether synergies keep beating. $240M realized in FY2026, "ahead of plan," against a deal that added ~$7.9B of annual sales. The margin story is entirely this.
2. Whether volumes turn positive. +0.5% in the quarter, −2% for the year on the combined base. With the acquisition lapped, this is the growth rate.
3. Leverage at 3.5–3.6x against $12.9B of net debt and a $1.2B annual dividend — guided, not hoped for, which makes it checkable.

What we learned

1. Amcor publishes the bridge that dismantles its own headline, and that is to its credit. Of 57% full-year sales growth, about 52 points is acquired sales from Berry Global, 2 points is resin pass-through and 5 points is currency — leaving −2 points of volume and price/mix.
2. Strip the transaction and the underlying business shrank slightly. The same shape holds in the quarter: of +26%, 19 points acquired, 6 points raw-material pass-through, 2 points FX, −1 point volume and price/mix.
3. Volumes were +0.5% and price/mix was −1% against estimated combined legacy Amcor and legacy Berry — roughly flat on volume and giving back a point on price, in a quarter management describes as managing "unprecedented input cost inflation."
4. Gross margin of 20.90% is the best since the Berry deal closed — up 3.3 points and the highest in our stored series since June 2024, when Amcor was less than half its current size. It improved while price/mix was negative, so it came from cost.
5. The GAAP lines swung further than the adjusted ones. Operating income +642% to $646M and GAAP EPS from −$0.10 to $0.83, against adjusted diluted EPS of $1.23 against $1.00. The distance between those two rates of change is the deal accounting annualising out.