Alpha Metallurgical Resources, Inc. (NYSE:AMR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dan Horn: I’ll do the second part first, now let Jason give his thoughts on cost movements. As usual, and we go through the budget, we like to inform, what we plug in for costs is, usually a kind of an amalgam of what the market research folks show for the 2024. And we like to — we also kind of outside again, where the futures are, this year, there’s a pretty sizable disconnect between where those are, at least with the front half of the season, the back half of the year. So we kind of had to use a little bit of judgment there. But we do tend a bit more towards the conservative when we set up our budget, so I would say we’re closer to the market research folks’ numbers then the futures as far as for utilization for budget purposes. But, Jason, if you got some more thoughts on cost.

Jason Whitehead : At the monocytes you I think you said you understood the labor and that’s just a function of shoring up our ability to make the volume. As we mentioned, we’ve been productive with the labor we have, but it’s just about loading the mines up and producing at $16 million tonnes. But on the other side, I mean, we’re still in the middle of contract negotiations with various vendors. Some are complete, some are ongoing and there’s still a few to top by the end of the year. So I think the escalators that were used in the budget year-over-years just kind of a weighted average of all those materials prices.

Nathan Martin: Great appreciate all the color and the time guys. Best of luck in the fourth quarter.

Operator: Thank you our next question is from Lucas pipes with the Riley Security. Please proceed with your question. Lucas, you’re live with our speakers. Lucas, are you muted?

Lucas Pipes: Sorry about that, I was muted. Thank you very much, operator, thank you for taking my follow up question. So my first one is on the transportation side, I think there’s typically like a one quarter lag in terms of price adjustment, or rather cost adjustments to the transportation costs with the index. So I wondered if you could speak to that for Q4. And then more broadly with where prices are today? Where would you expect transportation costs to be? Any other considerations to take into account for 2024, be it inflationary pressures et cetera? Thank you.

Dan Horn: Well, Lucas, you’re correct on what you said about there’s a component that the transportation rates do largely move for the seaborne shipments, they move with the indices, so and they do have a lag. So that’s right. So as the market moves up, behind it, our real costs move up. Going forward, we’re still in negotiations for next year’s rail, or with our rail provider. So I really don’t want to comment any more about next year at this time.

Lucas Pipes: Got it. So maybe a little bit of a benefit Q4. And then with the stronger pricing today that would then lead to higher transportation costs early 2024. And then the broader discussion, we’ll just have to stay tuned?

Andy Eidson: Yes, that’s directionally correct, Lucas. Yes.

Lucas Pipes: Okay, thank you for that. And then a follow up to the volume discussion. For 2025, should we expect higher volumes with the new mines coming online?

Dan Horn: Well, Lucas, how about we, we table that question until this time next year, and I’ll have a budget to talk to you. If I start trying to opine on that, and Todd’s will smack me. So we’ll just because we do we’ve got we’ve got depletion of other mines, we got other actions we need to take into consideration. So I’d hate to give guidance to anything, when it’s premature.