Bill Peterson: Okay. Yes, thanks for those insights. On the general engineering, it’s nice to see the improvement in the business that you’re expecting. I guess I’m trying to understand what you’re seeing in the segment that gives you confidence. Is there anything to call out general industrial improvement semiconductors? I mean perhaps you could speak to the visibility you have considering, especially 90 days ago, you are more confident about aero and now you’re less. So, just any visibility would be helpful on this segment.
Keith Harvey: Yes. And I’ll preface the comment on aero, Bill. I mean we’ve just moved down from the up 1% to 2% to just flat year-over-year. And I’ll remind everyone last year was the best year we’ve had, probably since 2019 and it actually even exceeded 2019. So it’s at a pretty good level. But then back to your point about general engineering, we’ve talked about it for years that we track inventory levels at our service centers and certain products, and we’ve got canaries in the coal mine that help us understand where we are in certain phases of the markets. And I can tell you, we’ve been tracking. We’ve gone through like 14-months of destocking, one of our key product lines, which has been our rod and bar products, in the extrusion side of business.
Well, for the first time in March, we actually saw inventories begin to rise again. And that really gets into my comment in the notes we made that, look, we believe destocking has ended and albeit while we’re at a lower pace than perhaps we were a year and a half ago, I believe that the supply and demand are in sync at this point and we saw some fairly solid numbers for the first quarter. So I believe that bodes well going forward for the balance of the year, typically has always done that. And then the same comments I made on packaging. We have been talking about destocking on the food pack side of our business. It was pretty important. We had gone through about 12-months on the beverage side and we anticipated that we would be ending in the destocking in the first quarter on that — on those products.
And indeed we did see destocking in it and we could have sold more. We not had the outages that I discussed. So those two big markets the destocking is ended. And so we’re seeing a rebound that gives us really good confidence for the balance of the year. And you mentioned one other market that we traditionally comment on and that’s the semiconductor, and we have been in a destock mode on semiconductors? Well, I wouldn’t say that we’ve seen that demand tremendously improve, but we are seeing green shoots of that improving. And that’s helpful for us, especially as we have to marry up the our general engineering and our aerospace and our sheet and plate business. So, I think that’s going to improve as we go forward. But certainly, we saw it on the rod and bar segment.
So that’s some of the data behind our outlook for general engineering.
Bill Peterson: Okay. That’s helpful. And if I can sneak in one more. CapEx is a little bit light in the first quarter. I guess how should we think about the trajectory here in the second quarter and the back half of the year?
Neal West: Hey, Bill. It’s Neal. Yes, definitely the first quarter was lighter to anticipate. We thought the quarters would be a little bit more equally spread but we now see that the second quarter will really be the highest spend of the year for CapEx, and then the last two quarters of the year kind of back normalizing to probably equal to the way the first quarter was. So really look at the second quarter is where we’re going to have the big spend as we get that roll coat line to contractors and all that paid as they start delivering and a lot of their completions.
Bill Peterson: Okay. Thanks for that additional color.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Keith Harvey for closing comments.
Keith Harvey: All right. Thanks Maria, and thanks everyone for being with us today. I look forward to updating you on our second quarter 2024 results, when we meet again in July. Have a good day.
Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
