Lorin Crenshaw: Hi David, it’s Lorin, and when you look at 9/30 on a year-over-year basis, you’re right, it is higher. And it’s roughly half related to Salt and half Plant Nutrition. In terms of Plant Nutrition, Ogden performed very well production-wise throughout last year. In the face of a sales environment that was severely diminished and so we restored our inventory levels at Plant Nutrition to levels that are frankly more normal and if there’s any silver lining that was it. From a Salt perspective, we ran Goderich for a normal winter, and only an 80% winter actually happened. And so those are two reasons for the inventory to be higher. With that said, if you look back over the last four or five years from a units perspective, our units of inventories are only up about 5% versus that average, 5% to 10%, it’s inflation for that same unit that has risen.
And one of the things that Kevin talked about is this notion that our customers understand that the cost of holding this inventory has gotten more expensive and I don’t know, Kevin, if you want to elaborate but we’ve restored the profitability of the business EBITDA per ton but working capital is more expensive to carry.
David Silver: Okay, thank you for that. I’d also just ask you for an update, I guess, on your business realignment or your cost reduction program. You had some targets in terms of lowering the fixed cost base as of the kick-off, I guess, of fiscal year ’24. So, if you could just update us on that, that would be great. Thank you.
Lorin Crenshaw: Yeah, when we did — we did an 8-K where we laid out about $15 million to $20 million of cost that we were going after last year, and those are split roughly 50% SG&A, 50% cost of goods sold maybe half Salt, quarter Plant Nutrition, et cetera. And so, we’ve captured those costs and they are reflected in this, the guidance that you see. Of course there are offsets like merit that would eat into some of that along with other factors, but we feel good about what we’ve accomplished and it’s reflected in our guidance.
David Silver: Okay, great. And then maybe just a last one, I would like to go back to Fortress. And I understand there’s quite a few moving parts on how your first fire season when and timing issues and whatnot. But I believe you had some longer-term, I guess, market share targets for — how your product might be — might be positioned once it’s fully accepted in the market. And any thoughts about where your market share shook out, this first year and whether the expectation is that — that share would be maintained or increased over the next year. Thank you.
Jamie Standen: Yeah, sure. David, this is Jamie. We were — we were right around 3% to 5% share as it relates to the US Forest Service total contract in 2023. We expect that to grow that year-on-year, we absolutely expect to increase our base count and expected volumes as we negotiate this contract here this month, hopefully to be resolved later this month or early January and then we’ll build from there. Our expectation is to continue to reinvest in the business, add bases, add share, and grow over the next several years. So, nothing on that front has changed that was part of the investment thesis, when we made the acquisition and we feel good about where we — how we’re positioned and we can deliver on that plan.
David Silver: That’s great, thank you very much.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Chris Kapsch with Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Chris Kapsch: Yeah, good morning. I had one on the Salt business, specifically around the 3% pricing outcome from the fiscal ’24 contract bidding season and maybe just supposed you can still look back at ’23. So you specifically used words like referring to your value over volume strategy in ’23, but I don’t think I have heard those words reflecting ’24. So, I’m curious about the outcome this year was, is it partly a function of that strategy still or is it more simply a function of other considerations like, whether it’s the inflation, for example, you flagged the interest rates and higher carrying cost of inventories or other residual inflationary costs or some other dynamics like the winter mine strike. Just wondering if you could provide additional color on that — on the value over volume strategy if that’s persisting. Thanks.
Kevin Crutchfield: Let me hit that at a high level, Chris and then Jamie probably want to add some color, but we approach the bid season again with the same mindset, which is value over volume, let’s focus on areas that we are geographically advantaged from a delivery and transport cost, that last mile stuff in this business like any business and we stayed very disciplined through the whole marketing season. Competitors do what competitors do and they’re driven by different things, but our goal was to promote value in the marketplace, which is what we did and I’d like to just hand kudos to the team for delivering 3% price up in the face of — or on the heels of an 80% winter, which is kind of unprecedented when you think about it.
So our team did a good, I think in terms of kind of promoting that value in the marketplace and I would tell you that you can expect that strategy to continue going forward as we try to march above $20 a ton and continue to move that number up over time.
