Martin Englert: Sure. I understand that the credits to work essentially when spot prices for energy in France are at a higher level based on the mechanism versus your contracted rate, you’ll get a bigger energy credit, that’s what led to the $186 million for last year. This year you’re expecting $40 million and my question is embedded in that $40 million, what is the dollars per megawatt hour in France.
Marco Levi: Yes, you have to look at the — it keeps on changing every week. You have to look at the published energy market price in France and this is one reference point and it keeps on changing for this year, every week but you are approximately between $70 and $80 per megawatt. And then you have to consider the way we are going to run our operations and our total consumption of energy in France. These are the two elements that, both variable — that can give you the final estimate. This is why I cannot give you a full number but I tell you that it’s going to be lower than $40 million compared to the $186 million in 2023.
Alex Rotonen: Yes. So it’s up to $40 million.
Marco Levi: It’s up to $40 million.
Martin Englert: Okay, upto $40 million. And is there a sensitivity that you can provide on that? I mean I see year-to-date, it’s like right in that range, it’s like $76 a megawatt hour in the spot.
Marco Levi: Yes, like I said, between $70 and $80 Yes. Well, it’s very difficult because like we explained in previous calls there are other factors that influence the final price, like interruptibility, like which times slots of the day we use to run our assets. So it it’s something where it’s very difficult to give you further guidance.
Martin Englert: Okay. And when you say up to a $40 million credit, would that be based on that $70 to $80 range or not necessarily?
Marco Levi: Yes.
Martin Englert: Okay, good. Question on cost savings that were previously undertaken. I think there was an initial program of targeting $180 million EBITDA improvement and stepped up, I think, on your Investor Day to $225 million or maybe just before that, if you can remind me of the base year for that and then you spoke about seeking out some incremental improvements and I just wanted to try to square that away with the EBITDA guide for this year as well.
Marco Levi: Yes. I mean, with the value creation program we mentioned that we approximately achieved $225 million. But there are many moving pieces as they — we are a very different organization versus 2020. What makes their reconciliation very hard is that there have been a tremendous change in certain critical inputs. For example and I mentioned just a couple of things coal input cost has increased more than 100% between 2019 and 2023 because it has increased to $472 per ton. And we used approximately 0.5 million tons of coal, this number is for 2023. In the past, we even used 600,000 tons of coal per year. And the rough increase of $240 per ton in coal means a negative impact to our bottom line of $150 million in terms of incremental cost.
If you make the same comparison on energy, if you exclude France and you consider our energy cost for the rest of our asset footprint when you compare 2019 to today, we have more or less — more than $35 million incremental costs. So when you just look at these 2 categories, these 2 categories impact negatively the bottom line by $150 million and the price of coal or the price of energy are things that are not under our control. Now this is just to give you the feeling of how difficult it is to reconcile our performance versus expectations. But like in every industrial company, there is always room for improvement and the room for improvement in our case is in the area of integrated supply chain and this is where we are focused this year to reduce our overall operating cost.
Martin Englert: Sorry, go ahead.
Beatriz García-Cos: No, Martin, just one additional point to building up on what Marco mentioned. We also produced roughly 1/3 less in number of tons, so this means an impact as well in less cost absorption — fixed cost absorption. So this has been an element that plays against this value creation plan as well.
Martin Englert: Of the 500,000 tons in 2023, that was your external purchases or consumption?
Marco Levi: Correct. External purchases of coal. The rate of our integrated coal from Alden.
Martin Englert: Okay. Would you be able to provide any framework for not metallurgical silicon market prices but your ASP and silicon metal kind of continues to outperform? And I’m curious for — I understand the selling into chemicals and battery applications probably doesn’t occur a heck a lot and the spot market price but are you able to provide a range in recent history where you’ve seen spot market prices for this higher-value silicon metal that goes into [indiscernible] applications for batteries on a price per ton?
Marco Levi: Well, first of all, if you talk about silicon for batteries, we are still relatively small volumes in our product mix but we are talking depending on the customers between $10 and $15 per kilo, so a completely different price range. And in premium applications, the price of silicon metal is decoupled — decoupled from the index. So today, we have volumes in silicon metal that are sold at between $4,000 and $4,500 per metric ton decoupled from the current market price.
Martin Englert: Okay. Excellent. I appreciate all the detail, very helpful.
Marco Levi: Thank you, Martin.
