Cementos Pacasmayo S.A.A. (NYSE:CPAC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Francisco Suarez: The question that I have first relates with the social unrest. I want to understand a little bit better where did the road blockades happened? Is this actually disrupting the shipments coming from Piura to the southern portion of your footprint or that is concentrated actually much more within the Pacasmayo area and the southern portion of your footprint. If you can help us a little bit to understand because on to my knowledge, I think that the social unrest has been concentrated much more in the southern portion of the country. and to some extent, in the Lima market as well. But I wanted to understand what are the risks of disruptions from shipments from Piura. And if the need this is actually something that might be occurring in the year going forward?

And my second question, if I may. I just want to — I was trying to do a brief math here. And it seems that excluding the CapEx related with the Pacasmayo expansion, your overall free cash flow conversion ratio might be somewhere at the levels of 35%. So just wanted to check if that number is roughly accurate. And what expectations you may have for your free cash flow conversion to for 2023 might be excluding the expansion — the CapEx and expansion of Pacasmayo. Thank you.

Humberto Nadal: Francisco, it’s Humberto. Good to hear from you. Clearly, the social unrest has been much more focused on the southern part of Peru in . The Northeast remains pretty calm, even though there have been some interruptions in the area of Chao going to Chimbote. So, the southern part of our area a little bit affected, but in nothing at all compared to what has been going on in the South where they’ve had four, five, six, eight days of operation that could not go ahead. So, no. And as we are speaking right now, there’s no roadblocks currently, that was something happened towards the second week of January. So that’s scale fair part. And the second part of the question, yes, you’re right on the conversion number.

Francisco Suarez: Okay. Perfect. And do you think that, that free cash flow conversion ratio might be something that you might be sustaining on the year going forward?

Humberto Nadal: Yes. indeed, I mean, once you take out the Pacasmayo project, which is almost done, we should be sustaining that.

Operator: Your next question is coming from Tunde Ojo from Harding. Your line is live.

Babatunde Ojo: Just sort of a few follow-up questions that I have left is can you provide sort of some guidance into what you’re expecting in terms of your performance for 2023, maybe like volume growth expectations, revenue, EBITDA margins, if you can provide all of those three or any of them will be helpful.

Humberto Nadal: Sure. It’s very hard to predict volumes with a country in the middle of such social embrace but despite that, we closed last year on 3.4 million tons, and we would like to remain somewhere around that area. In terms of EBITDA margins, I think they’re going to be stable until we have our kiln number four coming into Pacasmayo in the third quarter that will jump EBITDA margins as we start making our own clinker and start not depending on imported clinker, then that should be higher.

Babatunde Ojo: Okay. When you mean EBITDA margin stable now? So, are you talking about 22%, 33% because you have different numbers across the year or are you talking about the average for 2022?

Humberto Nadal: You can calculate for EBITDA margin.