So much of cement is going to ready mixed that’s not as sensitive to weather for example as asphalt and paving is and you should see a pretty steady cadence to the cement shipments. Obviously, you’re going to see s different pricing construct early in the year in that business, so. I hope that gives you a sense of the rhythm on how we think that’s going to work, Phil?
Phil Ng: Should we expect it to be up or kind of flattish to like aggregates, on the shipment side.
Ward Nye: Obviously, we’re not giving shipment guidance, but we talked about the fact that it’s a sold-out market and we sold 4.2 million tons last year, so. I’ll put it this way, Phil. We’re selling everything we make in that marketplace.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Dudas with Vertical Research Partners. Your line is now open.
Michael Dudas: Good morning, Ward, Jim and Jennifer. Ward, maybe for Jim, if you could discuss. So you talk about.
Ward Nye: Mike, I’m sorry to interrupt you. You need to you need to lean in to hear you better. It’s hard to hear you.
Michael Dudas: Can you hear me now?
Ward Nye: Yes, sir, much better.
Michael Dudas: Can you talk about capital allocation for 2023. Any shift given that you’ve assimilated the acquisition from 2021 and maybe how cash flows trending, working capital use because of revenues improving and the capital expenditures you’re thinking for 2023, any shift amongst the three buckets that we should be thinking about?
Ward Nye: Yes, let me take the front end of that and talk about priorities. Jim will come back and give you some specifics on what different elements of that are looking like. What I would say is this. If you go back in time, you recall, 2021 was the year of large transactions for us, the largest transactions from a cash perspective the company has ever done. 2022 was largely a year in that dimension of integrating businesses, making sure they were looking, feeling and acting like Martin Marietta businesses, making sure we had the price increases then and putting ourselves in a position that we could de-lever our balance sheet. So if you recall, we like to be in a two to two and a half times position net debt-to-EBITDA through a cycle.
We’re at the top end of that right now. Obviously, if we look at where we think we would be at year end, absent M&A, we will be considerably lower in that we think from a cash-flow perspective and otherwise this can be very attractive. So to answer your question directly. Have our priorities changed? No. We want to continue growing this business. We want to continue to invest in the upstream business. Part of what I believe we’ve done too, now with the coast-to-coast business, is we have even served to de-risk M&A going forward more. And what I mean by that is most of the places in which we want to grow in large measure, we have a footprint today, which means the integration that we’re going to have going forward gets to be integration done with people who work for our business, who understand our culture, who understand our operating philosophy and who understand our commercial philosophy as well.
Now, Jim will take you through some of the other questions you had relative to capex and otherwise in cash flow, and I think what you’ll find is we have a series of very high class problems that we need to worry about. So, Jim?
