Algoma Steel Group Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rajat Marwah: It will be around $20 million to $25 million.

Anoop Prihar: Okay. And we should assume basically throughput returning to normal in Q4 on the plate part?

Rajat Marwah: That’s correct.

Michael Garcia: Yes.

Anoop Prihar: Alright. Okay. And then just lastly on the quality, so the quality coming out of the plate mill now, is it higher than what it was before you guys started the expansion? In other words, the quality improvements that Phase 1 was supposed to achieve, have they been achieved?

Michael Garcia: Anoop, yes, they have. One of the €“ and the critical €“ there is a couple of critical pieces that were involved in Phase 1 that are delivering that quality primarily the new leveler, which gives us much better control and levelness of the product. We also have a new de-scaler, which de-scales the plate as it comes out of the reheat furnace before it hits the first rolling operation, the four-high. So, those two new pieces of equipment especially have delivered significantly better surface quality and profile of the plate.

Anoop Prihar: When do you €“ what’s the reasonable expectation then for when you will be able to get a higher realized price for that improved quality product?

Michael Garcia: Well, it will still be some months probably the €“ probably at the earliest, the second half of this calendar year. You can appreciate that we have some amount of work to do with our current base of customers and any new customers that we want to work with, given our difficult start-up over the second half of last calendar year. So, we are working very hard on that now. We are restocking or repopulating our stocking program so that we have heavy runners in terms of specific dimensions of plate. We have those on hand, ready for quick delivery. And we are working through and with the intention of eventually eliminating any remaining backlog orders that built up over the start-up of €“ from Phase 1.

Anoop Prihar: And Mike, just lastly, just to be clear, what’s the reasonable expectation for sort of the net margin improvement that you could realize when you are actually in a position to get a higher price?

Michael Garcia: Yes. That’s difficult to give you a specific number, Anoop, because there is a lot of kind of moving pieces within that. But obviously, we are going to want to bias our ratio of plate and strip as much as we can to the plate side and take advantage of that historically high spread between As Rolled Plate and Hot Rolled Coil. I think looking at last week’s CRU number, that spread stands at $657, which is against a historical spread of $150 €“ between $100 and $200 usually over the years. Now, how much incremental above that can we get with kind of the higher margin part of the plate market kind of remains to be seen, but it’s our intention to position ourselves in that area.

Anoop Prihar: That’s great. Thank you.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Ahmad Shaath with Beacon Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Ahmad Shaath: Hi guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess just one for me on the CapEx shift for the EAF. I noticed about 25% kind of spilled over from fiscal €˜23 to €˜24. Can you give us a little more color on that, please?