Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (NYSE:CLF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Lawson Winder : I wanted to ask about the fixed price volume. So just looking at your volume guidance of 16 million tons, would you be able to provide a little bit more color on what percentage of those would fall under the fixed-price contracting? So historically, you said sort of like 40% to 45%, which would imply 6.4 million to 7.2 million short tons. So I just wanted to confirm if that still made sense, and whether or not that included any of your assumptions around service center fixed price volume?

Lourenco Goncalves : Yes. We have something like 7 million tons of fixed contract tonnage in the 16 million. 5 are direct auto, and we have 2 of several others and include some own service centers, include some on electrical, some on stainless, some on tinplates, pretty much everything. But tinplate, altogether, it’s between 250,000, 300,000. So it’s not really, in the big scheme of things, it’s not enough. But anyway, I would assume the 45% is a good number at 7 million tons.

Lawson Winder : Okay. Fantastic. And maybe you could also comment on any quarterly variability in that ratio?

Lourenco Goncalves : Yes. Not that I expect anything meaningful. It will be all dictated by the cadence of the automotive industry to build cars. They are building more cars they absolutely build more cars in January than they did in the previous quarter, each one of the months of the previous quarter. January was our best shipment volume for the quarter. So that’s a data point that we have on hand right now. And we expect that these things will continue at least at the very same level that we saw in January. It may be better if things start to shape up as we are seeing — as we saw this morning, inflation going down, employment is still okay, the CPI not crazy one way or another. So the doomsday scenario that some were anticipating is not really materializing.

It’s doing good. We are doing good. Our order book is showing that’s why we’re able to announce and enforce the previous price increase. And the one we announced yesterday, so far so good. The last 24 hours were good in bookings and everything. So we’re in good shape.

Operator: Our next question comes from Phil Gibbs with KeyBanc Capital Markets. SP-10 Feel

Philip Gibbs : Lourenco and Celso, the pension expense or credit this year, what is that relative to last year? And then also, what are your interest expense expectations because I know rates have been changing?

Lourenco Goncalves : Yes, I want Celso to reply to this one. Celso, go ahead.

Celso Goncalves: Yes, sure. Hey, Phil. So we have a big balance drawn on the ABL. So — and that’s a floating rate instrument. So interest expense has been going up because of that. On a full year basis, you can — including the ABL, plus all the bonds that we have, you can call it, $260 million to $270 million of interest expense for the year. And then as it relates to pension and OPEB, what was your question exactly on that?

Philip Gibbs : I think you had a decent credit, but — last year, but most of that was from below the line. How is that full year expense or credit changed given everything that you’ve done to your plan and interest rates?