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

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Willie McLain : Okay. So let me break that into a couple of parts for you, Jeff. So on the pension, I’ll hit that first. That will not impact SG&A or manufacturing. It’s set forth on our income statement within the . There are two drivers as you think about pension, and they’re equal. So the pension and interest to costs, we had lower discount rates. You can think about 200 basis points on the interest cost in 2022. That increased over 500 basis points, so a 300 basis point change on the interest cost. Our assets are lower year-over-year as you think about the market basically being down about 20% versus our assumed return of about 6%. That’s about $50 million each is what I would roughly say there. On the SG&A question, our variable comp will be normalizing. So that will be a headwind on a year-over-year basis that we expect that to be substantially offset by the $75 million.

Mark Costa : So Jeff, one way to think about sort of the waterfall across the businesses and the cost actions is, the cost reduction actions are sort of equal to offsetting both the pension costs and the return to variable comp and inflation, right? We put all that sort of together. So sort of the fixed cost structure, if you will, is flat. The Fibers improvement offsets the normalization in CI. So you have to have a point of view that the two specialty businesses are able to deliver earnings growth over the annualized FX headwind for this year. That’s another way to sort of think about how we get to sort of flat EPS, including pension is those specialty businesses have to offset basically inflation this year and growth relative to last year. We’ve given you a waterfall on sort of where that growth comes from.

Jeff Zekauskas : Is the pension expense cash or noncash?

Willie McLain : It is noncash. So there’s no impact on our cash flow.

Mark Costa : Yes. That’s why we held the guidance where we did just talk about growing earnings of the segments.

Operator: Our next question today comes from Frank Mitsch with Fermium Research.

Frank Mitsch : Willie, I’ll give you a shout later on and talk about how Fermium can help on your pension plan asset returns. Mark, you mentioned in the prepared remarks that you’re going to keep the cracker down through the first quarter. Can you talk about some of the factors in the outlook that you’re seeing on the CI side of things and when should — should we expect that the cracker will come back up in 2Q?

Mark Costa : Yes, our expectation is the cracker starts to come back up in Q2. Any way you can do the math on sort of cracking spreads right now last year. Remember, our crackers are a bit different where they’re highly oriented towards propane versus ethane. And we’re trying to make as much propylene as we can and as little ethylene as we can with the investments we’ve made in switching into RGP, which we’re doing as much as we can because the ethylene market is very economically challenged for basically at cash costs on bulk ethylene. But as the propylene markets are starting to improve, you can sort of see that through January. The spreads, the crackers are recovering as we go through this quarter and that feeds into our expectation that, that is likely to continue or hold and we bring the cracker back up.

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