Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Aleksey Yefremov : And just a follow-up on Advanced Materials, Mark. Do you need raw materials to come down from where they are today to get to your targets of be meaningfully up versus 2021? Or are you assuming sort of current spot raw material prices pretty well for the rest of the year?

Mark Costa : Yes. On the spread assumption that we’ve got and how Advanced Materials improves, we’re assuming that we don’t have another inflation crisis like we did last year, right? So VAM and PVOH prices were extraordinarily high because the VAM producers, half of them in the U.S. were unable to operate for five months. So we had prices for some periods of the spring and the summer were double because of that extreme market tightness. And we had to buy a lot of very high-priced material from the spot market out of Asia to continue to supply our customers. So getting rid of all that market tightness, which is where sort of VAM and PVOH prices have now gone to some degree, I think there’s still more coming down, but we’re just using where we are today for this quarter and how we project spread improvement versus last year.

Same with PX. We’re not assuming a dramatic improvement relative to where PX is now. You could look at 6 million tons of PX capacity coming online this quarter in China, and PX prices could get lower, but that would be upside. We’re not banking on that in our outlook. We are assuming energy costs get lower, as I said, we’re using the forward curve on natural gas for that. But that’s what’s in the sort of outlook we’re giving you for this base case. Could things be higher? Sure. But that would require a pretty significant move up in oil from the sort of $80, $90 range we’re in. And I think we feel good about this base case given sort of the world that we’re in and the macroeconomic challenges that we face right now.

Operator: Our next question comes from Michael Leithead with Barclays.

Michael Leithead : First question, just on the circular plastic build-out, a bit of inflation so far, and you still need to break ground on the second and third facility. So can you just talk about what you’re doing today to help make sure we don’t get further CapEx creep year over, say, the next year or so?

Mark Costa : Sure. So there’s a lot that we’ve been doing to manage a difficult capital construction environment last year for the Kingsport plant and have done a great job in keeping those costs under control. A little frustrated by the challenges in getting craft labor to get the plant sort of completed here, but the cost control is working well. And we’re confident we’ll get this plant up and running early summer. When it comes to the next two projects, there are a couple of things we’re doing. One is some of the commentary we provided in our prepared remarks about how we’re building these plants. So we had a design for building these plants where we were always going to start out with 100 KMT of capacity, but designing them upfront to expand to be 50% bigger when you add it on the second phase.

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