But the dynamic was very similar. And I think the reason for destocking were very similar to what we saw at the end of ’21. And again, January started slow. We’ve seen improvement here as we’ve gotten through the second half of February and order books are looking consistent with March 2022 order books for March of ’23. So, we feel like we’ve gotten past these dynamics and now are on a more normal trajectory where we will meet or exceed, which is typically what we’ve done. You’re right, we’re very good at that. Our teams are very brave about pushing more volumes into the market and high margins. We feel like we’re back on that trajectory as of March.
Vincent Andrews: Okay, thank you for all the detail. I appreciate it.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Michael Sison from Wells Fargo. Your line is now live.
Mike Sison: Hi, good morning. If I did the math for ’23 for adjusted EBIT for EM, it looks like you need to be between $12 and $13 and an acetyl chain, $13 to $14. But I guess my question is, if we think about where they could be longer term, maybe ’25, ’26, where do you think EM should be able to get to? And then if the $13 to $14 is the new foundational, what would the mid-cycle acetyl chain potential be couple years out?
Lori Ryerkerk: Yes, that’s a lot of questions. I’ll roll into one, Mike. Let me see if I can parse that apart. So if we look at ’23, there’s a lot of ways we can get to the $12 to $13, and there’s a lot of things that could happen in terms of energy pricing and everything else. I would think of it as going forward, we — including ’23, we expect EM and acetyls to contribute roughly evenly for the next few years. This year, it might be a little stronger on acetyls than EM as we work through kind of the restoration of M&M based earnings and start to capture synergies. But I would say for the next several years, I would consider them roughly equal, because we also have the Clear Lake project coming on this year, which is going to add another $100 million to acetyls.
We have VAM expansions and other things coming on. So I think that’s a good starting place. If we look at a foundational level of earnings, what I would say is today, we think it’s about $1 billion to $1.1 billion. That was before Tow, Tow is going to be at or above kind of the $2.50 that we called out at the time of the Investor Day in ’21. So that kind of puts you in that $12.5 to $13.5 range, which is pretty consistent with the numbers you saw. But then again, we’ll add million $100 million on a full year basis for Clear Lake. But that is, again, the foundational level of earnings. So we’re still operating at very high-capacity utilization in acetyls, despite the softness, despite everything else, even in the fourth quarter, our utilization was 70% in China, but 90% global basis.
That’s still pretty high. And that’s I think where we’re going to see maybe a little more volatility in acetyls as the market is going to react more quickly to outages due to turnaround or unplanned outages or movements in raw material pricing. So, I can’t really say what I think the mid-range is, but I would just say there’s definitely – we’ve seen in acetyls, we can see a pretty sharp spike up in a very short period of time as the market reacts to short and medium-term changes.
Mike Sison: Great, thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Hassan Ahmed from Alembic Global. Your line is now live.
