Compass Minerals International, Inc. (NYSE:CMP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Compass Minerals International, Inc. (NYSE:CMP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript November 30, 2022

Compass Minerals International, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.01, expectations were $-0.03.

Operator: Good morning. My name is Chris, and I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Compass Minerals’ Q4 and Fiscal 2022 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. Brent Collins, VP, Investor Relations, you may begin.

Brent Collins: Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to the Compass Minerals fiscal 2022 fourth quarter earnings conference. Today, we will discuss our recent results and our outlook for fiscal 2023. We will begin with prepared remarks from our President and CEO, Kevin Crutchfield; and our CFO, Lorin Crenshaw. Joining in for the question-and-answer portion of the call will be George Schuller, our Chief Operations Officer; Jamie Standen, our Chief Commercial Officer; Chris Yandell, our Head of Lithium; and Ryan Bartlett, Senior Vice President, Lithium Commercial & Technology. Before we get started, I will remind everyone that the remarks we make today reflect financial and operational outlook as of today’s date, November 30, 2022.

These outlooks entail assumptions and expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the company’s actual results to differ materially. A discussion of these risks can be found in our SEC filings located online at investors.compassminerals.com. Our remarks today also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of these items in our earnings release or in our presentation, both of which are also available online. The results in our earnings release issued last night and presented during this call reflect only the continuing operations of the business other than amounts pertaining to the condensed consolidated statements of cash flows or unless noted otherwise. The company’s fiscal 2022 fourth quarter results and fiscal 2023 outlook in the earnings release and discussed during this earnings call reflects the previously announced change in fiscal year end from December 31st to September 30th.

All year-over-year comparisons to fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and fiscal 2022 results refer to the corresponding period ending September 30, 2021. And now I will turn the call over to Kevin.

Photo by Jason Tuinstra on Unsplash

Kevin Crutchfield: Thanks Brent and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. We appreciate your continued interest in Compass Minerals as we work to reposition our company for its accelerated growth, reduced weather dependency, and sustainable value creation by expanding our essentials minerals portfolio into the adjacent markets of lithium and next-generation fire retarget. Fiscal 2022 was challenging from a short-term financial standpoint, but I believe will prove to be transformative in the long-term. We continue to make meaningful strides in all three of our strategic focus areas, building a sustainable culture, delivering on our commitments and leveraging our advantaged assets to create long-term shareholder value.

I’ll take a few minutes to highlight specific accomplishments in each of these three areas before turning the call over to Lorin to provide more details on our financials for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year and then provide some perspective on our outlook for 2023. Starting with employee culture, we took a number of actions over the course of the fiscal 2022 to provide the tools and training necessary to ensure safe and responsible operations. I would like to salute each of our employees throughout North America and the U.K. for their contributions to the outstanding safety performance the company delivered this year. Through their efforts and supported by an increased focus on behavior-based safety training and engineering solutions, we maintained a consistent safety performance throughout the year.

The result was a total case incident rate, or TCIR, of 1.27, reflecting a roughly 56% improvement year-over-year. To be clear, our ultimate goal when it comes to safety is zero harm, meaning no reportable injuries across our platform in a mining and industrial manufacturing environment that’s obviously a very difficult target to achieve, but we owe it to our employees and their families to strive for absolute perfection when it comes to safety. We also continue to believe this goal as possible as evidenced by the fact that several of our operating sites with the entire fiscal year with zero injuries. As I’ve stated previously, I deeply appreciate the level of care, focus, discipline, and collaboration essential to operating safely and responsibly, ensuring that each employee returns home to their family in the same condition as they left.

This is and always will remain a top priority for Compass Minerals. When your culture is strong, it provides the foundation for execution, which was our second area of strategic focus, delivering on our commitments or put another way, doing what we said we were going to do. A year ago on this call, I talked about our commitment to protecting our balance sheet, strengthening our core assets, and increasing our focus on the high-growth opportunities in the lithium and next-generation fire retardant market. From a portfolio perspective, we completed the sale of our South America Chemicals business and received the maximum earn-out payment associated with the sale of our South America Specialty Plant Nutrition business using proceeds from both transactions to reduce our debt.

To ensure we have the leadership in place to take advantage of our emerging growth opportunities, we bolstered our senior management team with the addition of key executives, including Lorin Crenshaw, Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Yandell, Head of Lithium, deepening our team’s financial expertise, industry perspective, and advanced battery supply chain experience. I can’t overstate their influence on our achievements this year and thrilled to have them on board and look forward to their continued partnership along this journey. We also brought in the governance acumen of our Board through the appointment of Gareth Joyce, Rich Daly , Ed Dowling, Melissa Miller, Jon Chisholm and Shane Wagon, who collectively enhance the Board’s operational, financial, advanced battery supply chain, and human capital management expertise.

And with an eye toward the future, we continue to invest in the safe and efficient operation of our core assets through continuing to progress on our Goderich mine plan and a much-needed upgrade to our launch mine. Turning to our financial performance for the full year. As I indicated earlier, fiscal 2022 was challenging from a financial and operating perspective for a variety of reasons. As we’ve discussed on past calls, the inflationary pressures that all industries have had to deal with in 2022 had a particularly acute impact on our Salt segment as the contract architecture of our North American highway business does not allow for the pass-through of inflationary costs in real-time. As a result, our profitability was severely tempered by historic levels of inflation, resulting in higher distribution and production costs.

We took actions throughout the year to partially offset some of those effects, primarily through raising price within our consumer and industrial business. However, ultimately, the impact of these efforts fell far short in comparison to the inflationary effects causing the profitability of our Salt segment to come in well below the inherent earnings potential for this business. The most impactful action we could take during the year to restore the profitability of this business was to approach the recent North American highway deicing salt bidding season with a very disciplined strategy, emphasizing value over volume, and that’s precisely what we did. As a result, we expect pricing in 2023 to rise on the order of 15% and volumes to decline on the order of 9%.

I’m pleased with the team’s efforts and expect to see substantial progress in fiscal 2023 as measured by EBITDA per ton rising to match or exceed the $20 per ton in EBITDA, the Salt segment has delivered on average over time, up from approximately $15 EBITDA per ton is delivered in fiscal 2022. Our Plant Nutrition business had a strong year from a profitability perspective. with EBITDA per ton of approximately $245 above the long run average for this business. However, we continue to be challenged throughout the year to deliver production volumes in line with historical levels. On that measure, we fell short of what we believe is the inherent potential for this business. Again, Lorin will provide more color on the financial short. While navigating these short-term challenges to our core businesses, we stayed laser-focused on advancing our third strategic focus area, leveraging our advantaged assets to reposition our company for future growth.

One dimension of that repositioning relates to our strategic investment in Fortress North America, a next-generation fire retardant company, focused on reinventing wildfire application technologies to make them safer for the environment and also more effective. The Fortress team had three primary strategic objectives for calendar year 2022; secure adequate capital for full commercialization, bolster the leadership team, and advance each main product, FR-600, FR-200, FR-100, and FR-105, closer to qualification and commercialization. From a funding perspective, our $45 million equity investment this fiscal year increased our stake to roughly 45% and helped position Fortress to build out its manufacturing infrastructure, stockpile inventories of raw goods, and began hiring key stack.

From a people standpoint, Fortress made great strides in 2022, naming a Chief Manufacturing and Supply Chain Officer and a Chief of Airbase Operations, who formally served as the U.S. Forest Service Director of Fire and Aviation Management were California Region 5, the U.S. Forest Service largest region in the entire country. They’ve recently recruited several highly skilled air-based infrastructure and operations managers with decades of experience building and operating air tanker basins. Product-wise, FR-600, a ground retardant was fully qualified in early 2022 and placed on the U.S. Forest Services qualified product groups. Fortress production and successfully provided revenue-producing test volumes for select clients with use cases focused on utility, residential, and commercial properties.

FR-200, a liquid concentrate aerial retardant successfully passed all required tests and completed all operational field evaluation requirements, which included successfully air dropping the required 200,000 gallons under live wildfire conditions, which Fortress performed at an air base located in Montana. FR-105, a second-generation dry concentrate aerial retardant has successfully passed all required tests and commenced its operational field evaluation, which we expect to be completed during 2023 fire season. And lastly, FR-100, Fortress’ first-generation dry concentrate has passed all required guests have successfully completed its operational field evaluation requirements. We’re pleased with the progress that Fortress has made, a couple of important milestones that are not entirely within the team’s control, but essential to breaking through are the completion of the Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, by the U.S. Forest Service and substantially being awarded air-based allocations and attendant contracts.

This EIS is scheduled to be updated every 10 years and expired in December of 2021. Our working assumption was that it would be finalized by the end of calendar year 2020. That didn’t occur and the EIS is now roughly 11 months behind its regulatory exploration date. We expect the magnesium chloride formulation at the heart of Fortress retardants to be confirmed as acceptable reviews as part of the EIS. As a result, we expect the eventual completion of this study to provide the necessary environmental clearance for Fortress aerial fire targets and to set the stage for bringing their highly effective, more environmentally friendly flame retardant to market. On the lithium project front, most of you are well aware of the significant progress we’ve made this fiscal year.

In September, we provided a comprehensive overview of our strategic path forward to maximize the value of our North America lithium brine resource. As a part of that strategic update, we announced the achievement of five key milestones. First, we announced a $252 million strategic equity investment from Coke Minerals & Trading LLC to advance Phase I of the development of our lithium brine resource, explore opportunities for execution synergies across the company and further align our capital structure with our strategy through additional debt reduction. Second, we shared the selection of Energy Source Minerals with our Phase I DLE technology provider after three years of extensive testing of multiple DLE technologies and providers. We also shared the results, including a technical report summary of our FEL-1 engineering entity, confirming that our project is projected to be highly cost competitive, the lowest by our estimation on the entire domestic lithium cost curve, leveraging our robust existing infrastructure.

Fourth, we announced our intention to construct by 2025, the conversion facility at our Ogden, Utah solar evaporation site with a target annual production of 11,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate with an expected NPV of between $626 million to $985 million and an after-tax IRR of between 28% and 36% on estimated development capital of approximately $262 million at an FEL-1 level of accuracy. And finally, we announced the completion of a life cycle assessment, confirming a strong sustainability profile for Phase I of our lithium development. From a valuation perspective, the projected after-tax NPV of Phase I of our lithium project is approximately $626 million, assuming an average lithium carbonate selling price of approximately $16,000 per MT, which equates to nearly 40% of our 30-day average market cap were approximately $15.25 per share.

Similarly, the NPV of Phase II of our lithium development is projected to be approximately $1.4 billion, assuming an average lithium hydroxide selling price of approximately $17,000 per MT, equating to roughly 85% of our 30-day average market cap and approximately $34 per share. It’s worth noting that the average sales price for lithium products used to calculate these NPVs is but a mere fraction of today’s indicative pricing, highlighting the upside leverage our project . Together, the growth opportunities we’re undertaking clearly represent sizable potential upside for our business and one that we would expect to benefit our employees, community, and our shareholders alike. Overall, we believe the actions we’ve taken in fiscal 2022 lay the foundation for an increase in the absolute earnings power of Compass Minerals and our long-term earnings growth rate and ultimately in the valuation of our company.

With that said, the fact that our stock price is trading at a considerable discount to the value of successfully executing our lithium development suggest a considerable upside potentially. It also likely reflects a measure of skepticism among investors in our view. Our leadership team and employees embrace the execution challenges before us and expect to resolve the current valuation disconnect over time through successful execution. Looking ahead, our focus in 2023 will be to deliver improved overall financial performance and continue advancing our transformation strategy with an emphasis on the following six strategic objectives. Number one, building on the outstanding safety performance of the past 12 months to continue our drive towards zero harm across each of our facilities.

Number two, restoring the profitability of our Salt business, the levels we’ve demonstrated in the past. Number three, developing and executing strategies to improve the reliability and sustainability of our SOP production, which should allow for increased production levels over time. Number four, achieving the commercial and project-related milestones on our road map to advance Phase I of our lithium development. Number five, supporting Fortress North America’s efforts to become the first new entrant in the market for fire retardant chemicals in two decades during the upcoming 2023 wildfire season, subject to completion of the EIS. And last, number six, continuing to enhance our financial standing and maintain our overall credit profile. In closing, I’m excited about the path we’re on and the sizable opportunity before us as we execute our strategy to accelerate our growth, raise our earnings power and reduce our weather dependency.

I believe that we have the right team and the right strategy in place to realize this opportunity and create real value over time. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to Lorin, who will discuss our financial performance in greater detail and our outlook for the fiscal 2023 year. Lorin?

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Lorin Crenshaw: Thank you, Kevin. On a segment basis, Salt revenue totaled $188.9 million for the fourth quarter, up 18% year-over-year, driven by 15% growth in sales volumes and a 3% increase in average selling price. Both the highway and C&I businesses delivered higher sales volumes versus the prior year. Highway average selling price was up 7% and C&I pricing rose roughly 5% primarily due to continued price increases to offset inflationary pressures. On a full year basis, Salt revenue grew 12% to approximately $1 billion on an 11% increase in sales volumes and 1% increase in average selling price. Despite higher revenue, Salt operating earnings declined 27% to $16.3 million for the quarter and by 34% to $117.4 million for the full year as increased production and distribution costs more than offset revenue growth.

From a cost perspective, roughly two-thirds of the full year increase was driven by higher shipping and handling costs, which rose 19% to roughly $28 per ton and one-third by higher all-in production costs, which rose 7% to roughly $43 per ton. The increase in cash cost was primarily driven by inflationary impacts and higher maintenance costs. The increase in shipping and handling costs primarily reflected the combination of inflationary impacts such as fuel surcharges and higher cost to serve our markets due to geographic mix. Turning to our Plant Nutrition segment. Revenue for the fourth quarter grew 17% to $57.8 million, despite a 22% decline in sales volumes on higher pricing. Specifically, average selling price rose 12% sequentially to over $929 per ton and was up 49% year-over-year, reflecting the continued favorable supply/demand dynamics impacting the global fertilizer sector during the period.

Operating earnings were $12.6 million, up from a loss of $0.2 million and EBITDA was $21.8 million, more than doubling year-over-year. Higher average selling prices more than offset the impact of lower production volumes on sales and cash costs, resulting in operating margins of 22% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 38%, both up substantially year-over-year. Plant Nutrition’s full year results reflected operating earnings of $37.1 million, over 4 times higher than the prior year levels and EBITDA of $72.7 million, up 62% year-over-year, driven by a strong pricing environment. On a consolidated basis, revenue was $249.4 million for the fourth quarter, up 18% year-over-year and rose 9% for the full year. Fourth quarter adjusted consolidated operating earnings increased $2.7 million year-over-year to $5.1 million and declined 42% to $65.3 million for the full year.

You’ll notice in this quarter’s income statement that we’ve broken out the impact of our equity method investment in Fortress. We currently own approximately 45% of Fortress and pick up our proportionate share of their net income or loss as a non-cash item in our income statement. Adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations includes the drag on earnings related to our early-stage strategic initiatives in lithium and next-generation fire retardant. In the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA increased by 6% to $35 million, which includes $4 million of costs for lithium and the non-cash loss related to Fortress. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations was $187.1 million, down 22% year-over-year. This included $13.1 million of costs for those same strategic initiatives.

From a leverage standpoint, we ended the year with net leverage of 4.6 times as defined by our credit agreement. Throughout the year, we took several steps to align our financial policy and capital structure with our strategy to accelerate growth and reduce the weather dependency of our earnings profile, including recalibrating our dividend, earmarking $200 million of the net proceeds from the Coke equity investment towards funding Phase I of our lithium development, and approximately $40 million for permanent debt reduction; and finally, completing the divestiture of our South America Chemicals business and applying the net proceeds towards debt reduction. We are thrilled to be fully funded from a lithium development perspective through 2024 and build the approach that we took demonstrated our commitment to funding our growth in a financially prudent manner.

From a free cash flow perspective for fiscal 2022 despite the substantially below trend adjusted EBITDA performance and $45 million investment in Fortress, we nevertheless delivered positive free cash flow of approximately $18 million, benefiting from the $51 million in proceeds from the sale of our South America Chemicals business and an $18.5 million earn-out payment associated with the sale of our South America Specialty Plant Nutrition business. Overall, our financial flexibility, liquidity, manageable debt maturity profile, and amended credit facility give us confidence that we are well-positioned to manage through a wide range of potential weather-related outcomes in fiscal 2023. Shifting towards our 2023 earnings outlook, first of all, investors will notice that we have modified our approach to providing adjusted EBITDA guidance from only providing guidance assuming normalized winter weather to providing a range of potential outcomes.

Although on average and over time, demand for deicing salt is stable, it’s virtually impossible to reliably and accurately forecast in any single year, winter weather activity and deicing sales volumes in the North American and U.K. markets that we serve, given the highly weather-dependent nature of demand. Accordingly, this year, we provided a projected range of potential earnings outcomes that consider various winter weather scenarios, including the potential impacts of mild or strong winter weather. I’ll start by framing our expectations for salt and plant nutrition and then lay out the high-level strategic milestones we expect to accomplish for Lithium and Fortress our two primary growth initiatives. Starting with the Salt segment. The 2023 range that we provided reflects our current book of business for fiscal 2023 and then assumes normalized weather conditions and average historical sales to commitment outcomes.

Overall, sales volumes for the de-icing business are expected to be down approximately 7% year-over-year, which is consistent with our focus on value over volume during the recent bidding season. As Kevin indicated earlier, we expect North America highway deicing pricing to rise roughly 15% compared to prior year bid season results. This translates into a projected increase in pricing at the Salt segment level of approximately 9% year-over-year. Within our C&I business, we expect pricing to be up a couple of percentage price year-over-year on similar volumes. Under those parameters, we would expect Salt segment EBITDA in the range of $215 million to $255 million in fiscal 2023. Overall, assuming normalized winter weather, we expect our Salt segment to show improved profitability year-over-year to around $20 of EBITDA per ton, up from roughly $15 per ton in fiscal 2022 on higher pricing driven by our successful efforts to pass through inflationary and fuel impacts incurred in fiscal 2022 as part of the recent bidding season and recalibrating our mix toward geographies where we have natural competitive advantages that enhance our profitability.

Achieving EBITDA per ton of around $20 or more would reflect a successful restoration of the profitability of this business to historical levels, which was our objective heading into the most recent bidding season. In our earnings release and earnings deck, we have also provided the estimated impact of volume, revenue and EBITDA for the Salt segment during mild and strong winter weather scenarios. These bookings entail significant estimates by management that use an array of information, including historical weather data and sales to commitment outcomes. In Plant Nutrition, higher unit costs, reflecting elevated production costs are expected to result in lower profitability as measured by EBITDA per ton on a year-over-year basis on relatively flat sales volumes.

As background, SOP production levels in any given year are ultimately a function of the amount of on time available to harvest between September and May, which are, in turn, a function of the quality of the evaporation season, which occurs between May and September. Unfortunately, the 2022 evaporation season resulted in less potassium deposited in the ponds year-over-year due to less than favorable weather conditions, which will adversely impact our fiscal 2023 production capacity. With a focus on servicing our long-standing customer relationships and maintaining our position as the primary North American producer of SOP. This year, we will purchase potassium chloride as a supplemental feedstock, and effective approach to driving more tons, but one that yields lower than normal margin at current potassium chloride prices.

In addition to the increased use of potassium chloride in 2023 compressing our margin, cost per ton are also expected to be higher due to a combination of higher per unit pond processing costs, which have a significant fixed component and incremental costs related to actions we are taking to mitigate the impacts of the ongoing drought at our Ogden facility. Pricing-wise, we expect to continue benefiting from a broadly constructive global fertilizer supply/demand dynamic. Our guidance calls for a modest year-over-year increase in the average SOP price on a full year basis with pricing in the first quarter of 2023 expected to track roughly in line with the fourth quarter of 2022 before moderating each quarter sequentially thereafter. Our view on SOP pricing reflects our best estimate at this time and one that we’ll update quarterly throughout the year.

In 2023, we will remain focused on implementing both short and long-term solutions to improve our ability to predict annual SOP production levels have open more consistently and reliably through data and science-based approaches that enable us to evaluate the myriad of weather and chemistry conditions impacting production there. In the near-term, we’re in the process of further refining engineering controls and design such as raising our dies, improving access to brine, more efficient use of freshwater, and upgrading pumping systems to maximize harvest tons. For the long-term, we have undertaken a detailed review of our holistic end-to-end process designed to optimize our PON chemistry and ultimately ensure more sustainable and reliable SOP production levels, including both PON-based and supplemental potassium feedstock, further solidify Compass Minerals as the leading SOP provider in North America.

Overall, we expect the key drivers of this segment’s profitability in fiscal 2023 to be production yields and unit costs at our Ogden facility and the impact of global prize market dynamics on SOP pricing and volumes. Based on our current outlook, we expect that the Plant Nutrition segment will generate EBITDA of between $55 million and $70 million. I’ll now provide some commentary on a few other financial measures that are important to forecast our business. Starting with CapEx, our capital spending forecast of between $175 million and $230 million is divided into two categories, with sustaining CapEx related to salt and plant nutrition of between $100 million and $110 million and growth CapEx of between $75 million and $120 million earmarked for lithium development.

As a reminder, the net proceeds from the Coke equity contribution were received in mid-October and therefore, are not reflected on our 9/30 balance sheet. However, we intend to use those proceeds to fund the lithium-related CapEx and proceeds from our core operations to fund sustaining CapEx. Over the next three years, until late 2025, when we expect Phase I of our lithium development to come online, it will be important to distinguish between free cash flow with and without lithium-related CapEx to maintain an accurate pulse on the results of our core business. We will assist in that regard by breaking out lithium versus non-lithium CapEx in our reporting. On the topic of lithium, I would also note that lithium-related operating expenses are projected to be in the range of $10 million to $12 million this year versus $8 million in fiscal 2022.

While in the short run, these costs compress our profitability, they are essential investments, enabling us to execute on an opportunity that we believe represents substantial upside and an exceptional proposition for our stakeholders. Finally, we expect our effective tax rate to be in the range of 30% to 35%, excluding any additional expense related to valuation allowances on deferred tax assets. Now turning to Fortress. In our view, 2023 has the potential to be a breakout year with the company’s FR-200 and FR-100 aerial retardants having the greatest potential to impact results. Given that several catalysts are outside of Fortress’ direct control; we’ve chosen not to assume any financial upside for Fortress in our guidance. Instead, we have forecasted our share of its assumed losses, which are included in the corporate facet of our guidance will be around $5 million.

However, as Kevin mentioned earlier, if the EIS is approved in time for the 2023 wildfire season and Fortress is a signed basis, 2023 could be the year that the company starts gaining traction. The key 2023 strategic milestones for Fortress are detailed on slide 10 of our earnings presentation. But at a high level, they include advancing commercialization of FRR-600, supporting the EIS process and ensuring operational readiness to deploy FR-200 and FR-100 and upon EIS approval, securing an initial tranche of airbases. Finally, turning to lithium. In September, we laid out a comprehensive strategic plan detailing our path forward to build an 11,000 metric ton battery-grade lithium carbonate production facility expected to come online in 2025.

The related transcript technical report, presentation and replay may be found online under the Investor Relations section of our website. We are excited to officially shifted from evaluation mode to execution mode on a strategic journey, we expect to reposition Compass for accelerated growth and reduce weather dependency over time. Over the next several quarters, we expect to accomplish the following strategic milestones, securing additional definitive offtake agreements together equivalent to at least 80% of the 11,000 metric tons of anticipated Phase I battery-grade lithium carbonate production capacity, completing an FEL-2 level engineering estimate for Phase I by March, completing an FEL3-level engineering estimate by June, and achieving mechanical completion of a commercial-scale BLE unit by December 2023.

I’d note that we broke ground on this unit in the middle of November, which was slightly ahead of our plan. Finally, for several years, we have issued two snow reports a year, one in January and one in April. These reports have historically summarized winter weather activity as measured by snow events in 11 representative cities in our primary North America highway deicing service area. In fiscal 2023, we will no longer issue stand-alone snow reports as press releases, but will continue to provide perspective on snow events during our first and second quarter earnings calls. The snow events data for the 11 cities is readily available and a reasonable indicator of winter weather conditions in these cities. However, as we have shared in the past, several factors make snow events in these cities and in perfect proxy for our actual quarterly sales to commitment levels, which ultimately are what drives sales volume.

For instance, all this data set reflects relatively large cities, for which data is readily available, we don’t only serve large cities. We typically serve broad swaths of states that include rural areas, metropolitan areas and everything in between. In addition, certain reasons such as the U.K. are important markets for us, but don’t have similar public information that allows us to include these regions in our snow report. Other factors that make the snow report an imperfect proxy include winter severity and year-over-year variations in customer inventory levels. Going forward, we look forward to continuing to provide perspective on snow events with our quarterly earnings results rather than on a stand-alone basis. With that, I will turn it back to the operator to open the lines for Q&A.

Operator?

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. Our first question is from Joel Jackson with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Alex Chen: Hi good morning. This is Alex Chen on for Joel Jackson. Thanks for taking my questions. For my first question, it seems like Salt margins are expected to improve 100 basis points year-over-year. Can you maybe provide all the puts and takes to get to this improvement between 15% higher pricing, cost inflation and other components? And maybe what needs to happen to recover the remaining 500 to 600 basis points of margin to get back to 2021 levels?

Kevin Crutchfield: Yes. Alex, it’s Kevin. I’m not sure that I agree totally with your premise, but let me try to address in the context of the guidance we’ve given. So, we experienced about a 15% price increase across our highway deicing sales for the season, and that’s against the backdrop of about, I think, about a 9% reduction in volume on a year-over-year basis. So, our view is that gets us back into the two-handle ZIP code from a margin perspective, EBITDA per ton, and that’s also got a fair amount of the inflationary effect that we’ve experienced in 2021 carrying in, I mean, 2022, carrying into 2023 as well. So, to the extent that, that inflation abates unexpectedly or inconsistent with our plan because we were pretty conservative.

You can see that margin expansion replicate our view and kind of where we were in 2021. But look, it’s a function of the weather out of our control function of the inflation semi out of our control. So, we’re comfortable with the guidance we’ve given that we’re back kind of into that two handle range with potentially some upside based on how the winter unfolds.

Lorin Crenshaw: And I would just add, when the commercial team enters into the bidding season, we’re thinking about profit per ton, and your question started with margin. And over the past decade, our average profit per ton has been about $20, and that’s what the team has achieved. And so, we’ve restored the profitability to historical levels on a profit per ton basis and that’s the way we entered the bid season.

Alex Chen: Appreciate that color. Thank you. And for my second question, we’ve seen diesel prices increase since bid season and river barges are currently challenged. Is there a concern over barge availability this winter? And if you can elaborate on the costs you expect from maybe higher diesel barges issues in fiscal 2023 and if we could expect significant increases in barge-related costs for maybe 2024?

Jamie Standen: Sure. Thanks, Alex, this is Jamie. Obviously, the Lower Miss experienced low levels pretty much over the last six or eight weeks. But over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of rain in the Midwest the levels have come back up. We had some short-term concerns about it, but now it’s pretty well normalized. We’ve got the barge traffic that we need on a covered barge basis. I would also say, most of our material is already deployed and has been deployed. We started that work-in April and, throughout the summer, we shipped the Upper Miss and then moved down as the season goes along and serve the Ohio River. So, we don’t expect any impact this winter. As it relates to rates going forward, we basically have CPI type adjustments in our agreements as well as fuel surcharges.

So depending on fuel, we could see perhaps some relief there in 2023. And then, as it relates to CPI, we monitor that closely and would expect perhaps a flat to maybe slightly higher, but that remains to be seen.