Methanex Corporation (NASDAQ:MEOH) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rich Sumner: Yes. So thanks, Nelson. The — for sure, the momentum or the interest in methanol is growing, and that’s — and the interest in low carbon methanol is growing. But today, you’re right, we do produce a small amount of green methanol for — through renewable natural gas, but that’s not in — we’re not selling that into the marine sector today. It’s actually into the traditional chemical and it’s a small contract. We are looking to procure more renewable natural gas as a supply opportunity for the marine sector. It’s the prices that — for renewable natural gas is pretty high. We’re also looking at other ways to deliver cost competitive low carbon methanol, and we’re looking at ways we can do that with our existing assets.

And so one of the things we’re looking at as an example is using renewable hydrogen and CO2 as a direct feed into our assets and doing that where there’s incentives and regulatory support to do that. Some guys might be one of the locations we’ll be looking at. So those are some of the things that we are progressing. And of course, we’re progressing that to be able to bring that to the marine market to offer cost-competitive low carbon. I think the industry is still in a period of discovery. And these types of investments require — they would require longer-term offtakes and agreements, but we’re seeing interest there, and we’re pursuing it. So I’m hoping we’ll have more to talk about as we progress through our low carbon solutions team.

Q – Nelson Ng: Great. Thanks for the color. And then just one last question I had was — it relates to your balance sheet. So assuming G3 is completed and running smoothly next quarter, from a liquidity perspective, how much of a cash buffer do you plan to maintain afterwards? Because I know in the past, it was around $200 million to $300 million. So I’m not sure whether your cash buffer needs would change after G3 is completed?

Rich Sumner: We don’t see that changing. Just our structure for cash and how we move cash to fund the business, we need a certain amount of cash. And so we’re not going to be changing that. Of course, a lot of times they can depend on methanol prices and we can’t run it lower, but 300 is an efficient and comfortable number for us. Don’t see that changing

Q – Nelson Ng: Great. Thanks. I’ll leave it there.

Operator: And we have a follow-up question from Joel Jackson of BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Joel Jackson: Hey Rich, I don’t really want to beat a dead horse, and it’s because I’m getting so much incoming on this question for the last 30 minutes, and it’s coming back to about the similar EBITDA in Q2 versus Q1. I think people are struggling to understand, you’re seeing that have similar volume right now and maybe some of the higher pricing. And you’ve spoken of cost tailwinds on this call you said that the overhedged position for G3 you resolve that in Q1, so you’ll have that problem. It seems that most of you did $150 million in EBITDA in Q2 of last year at a lower price deck and similar volume, I think is there something what has described what the offsets are? Sorry, go ahead.

Rich Sumner: Yeah, yeah. I will. I think we must have describe this properly before. But in Q1, we had a bigger price move up, it was around $25 a tonne. When we have that type of price move in a quarter, we get a bit of a tailwind on our cost structure because what’s coming through on our costs for both produced and purchased inventory reflects a price that was lower from the previous quarter. So there’s a bit of a tailwind and that we thought through Q1 that we won’t get that same level of tailwind through Q2, because we’re in like we’re talking about a price move that might be $5 a tonne, $10 a tonne or something like that. So I think that’s the missing piece mainly. And I’d probably maybe we cannot follow on current conversations about that if there’s any.

Joel Jackson: So can you give us an order of magnitude of what was — what you’re saying is in Q1 you had some inventory write-up on your purchased methanol. Can you give us — I think you’re saying that, can you give us a bit of an estimate of what that was in Q1 versus what normally — not normal what it was in Q1?

Rich Sumner: I think this is more of what is the cost to produce inventory in the fourth quarter and the cost of byproduct in the fourth quarter versus the first quarter, which is reflected in the higher methanol price. So I think it’s just typical flows of how things work as we move through pricing through quarter-to-quarter. And I think that has probably a $10 million to $20 million positive impact on Q1 that we won’t see as much of in Q2.

Joel Jackson: Okay. I’ll definitely look there on this afternoon. Thanks a lot.

Rich Sumner: Yes.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Rich Sumner.

Rich Sumner: Okay. Well, thank you everyone for your questions and interest in our company. And we hope you will join us in July when we update you on our second quarter results.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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