ICL Group Ltd (NYSE:ICL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

If we look back to previous years, that’s more robust than in the past. The lowest price in the world right now is in the US, which is why we’re not selling in the US. I think we sold only a few thousand tons that we had the commitments to the US, but we have no reason to sell in the U.S. at this point. Brazil very healthy. India needs product. China, there’s still inventory. Contract in India is going to be soon. Contract in China, I honestly don’t know. I don’t think anybody is in a rush at this point since like I said, there are healthy markets to sell in. In terms of India, even though I said, it’s very soon. We’re in no rush because we don’t have any product left for the first quarter. So we don’t mind if it takes a few more weeks. But I think that it will be relatively soon, because I think India needs products.

I hope that gives a little color

Aviram Lahav: I would maybe — maybe Ben, just to add one thing, if you look at few things, first of all the price of commodities, agricultural commodities, they are high and they remain high. You couple it with the reduction that happened in fertilizer prices. Both the sentiment that’s being tracked by Purdue among others and also the affordability for the farmers is much better and if you couple it with the fact that some of them in certain areas have omitted to commit fertilizers, then it — you have the ingredients that will make quantity wise 2023 maybe significantly more robust than 2022. So, you have more quantity, somewhat lower prices that we’ve used before and ultimately this should pick up closer to the agricultural season, to the height of the agricultural seasons if it makes sense to you.

Ben Theurer: That’s perfect. Thank you very much for that clarification. And then the other question really just more long-term strategic and if we take a look at the cadence and if we were to just exclude the 2022 for a moment, it’s a very abnormal year as it’s been described. When we take a look at the cadence of growth of EBITDA over the last couple of years from what we had pre-pandemic particularly the specialty business basically expect it to be close to double where it was prior to the pandemic, if we think about what you need to achieve your 2027 targets you’ve laid out just a few months ago. Is it fair to assume that just as markets continue to work out that with the assets you have and the focus you have and the investments you do organically that’s enough to achieve the targets or should we think of the need to add on a little bit on the M&A side to really drive this business to the profile you’re looking for in about three, four years’ time.

Raviv Zoller: Well, thanks for that question. I think the way to model it and again we gave the numbers in our five year plan that we presented, like we doubled in the last five months, we’re looking to double in the last five years, sorry. We’re looking to double in the next five years. In terms of profit margin, the profit margins that are reflective of the long term business or more like the profit margins in 2021 than they are in 2022, but the double digit growth in specialty sales will continue and there will be some margin incremental increase every year, of course, there will be some movements that are not controllable, but over the long run there’ll be some margin expansion in the specialties businesses. So if you model special — if you model specialty phosphates and the growing solutions based on middle double-digit margins with the sales growth that we’ve seen in the past, you will get to the numbers.