Methanex Corporation (NASDAQ:MEOH) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Laurence Alexander: And if I may just one follow-up on that and then one structural question. With respect to the kind of the frontier [ph] expectations, I remember when the first industrial boiler discussions happened, a lot of it was about kind of the need for clear policy at the federal level to sort of force or trigger kind of the adoption at the larger sites. Did that policy ever gel or is the absence of that sort of why you’re seeing sort of the shift in demand to mostly being these small applications?

Rich Sumner: What happened there was that industrial sites, large industrial sites, got connected to the gas grid, right? So they needed to reduce down their power by coal and we saw a lot of those, as much as possible, those industrial sites got more connected to gas and we’re using that as an alternative versus methanol. And so methanol is actually being developed more in spaces, where connecting to gas is unavailable and it tends to be in smaller industry or residential commercial applications. So policy didn’t change.

Operator: Your next question is from the line of Steve Hansen with Raymond James. This is a follow-up. Your line is open.

Steven Hansen: Oh, yeah, thanks for that. Just a quick follow-up. I wanted to circle back on the supply picture, Rich. I think you referenced the Malaysian facility coming on, G3, of course. But I don’t think you referenced anything out of Iran this year. Just wondering if you’ve got sort of a view specifically on those facilities that have been sort of used about for some time and whether they’re going to be contributing it all to an incremental supply this year. Thanks.

Rich Sumner: Thanks, Steve. Yeah, so for Iran, it’s obviously getting information out of Iran and understanding what’s going on there is often opaque. So we rely mainly on what we hear in the market as well as what we see on trade close. The news in the market that potentially the Iran [ph] plant started production sometime this year. We have seen some supply in the winter greater than what we’ve seen previous years, but we think that’s more based on weather. It’s been a warmer weather than a lot of new supply coming out of new assets. It’s something we continue to watch. When we think about Iran, we think the structural constraints are going to be the same, which is under sanctions environment you have, it’s difficult to operate these plants.

A lot of them have been built with local EPC resources, difficult to run from a technical perspective, and the gas grid is constrained for a big part of the year. So, I think, we will watch to see what happens when the winter ends, and we see potentially more gas availability, and it will tell us whether we see any new incremental supply coming from new plants. But we think those structural constraints are there and they’re going to continue. So, we don’t factor in a big amount of net supply coming out of Iran, irregardless of whether plants startup.

Steven Hansen: That’s helpful. And just the obvious follow-on question is, I know G3 is just turning on, so it’s probably a bit premature, but when do you start scoping the next facility? Presumably, that’s probably already happening. But when does the actual thought of hard dollars going into the ground start to enter the equation? Are we talking 3 years out, 5 years out? How do you think about that longer-term? Thanks.

Rich Sumner: So, the phases for us we’ll be looking at doing commercial work to really explore our options, and it’ll be partly commercial, partly technical, looking at our different options that are available. That’s where we are today. That process will then be narrowed down into which are the ones you want to progress. Then, we would talk about a pre-feed, which would be really still fairly limited capital. And then the next step is to move into a feed, which you start spending more money, but still, I don’t think is the capital you’re talking about. You don’t get there until you reach a final investment decision. So we’re always away from a final investment decision where you start turning it to spend meaningful capital on a new project.

Operator: Your next question is a follow-up from the line of Josh Spector with UBS. Your line is open.

Joshua Spector: Yeah, thanks. Just a quick one to clarify. When you were talking about the kind of guide or the walk to first quarter, you said slightly higher sequentially. I guess pricing up is up a decent amount. Understanding G3 is probably not in the math until second quarter, but Egypt was down last quarter. I guess what’s offsetting that when you’re expecting Egypt to start. Is it a big cost of the repair or maintenance associated with it or something else which limits your first quarter increase?

Rich Sumner: Yeah. I think it’s really we’re going to be building inventory through the first quarter rather than seeing that product flowing through sales. So I think really when we look at our inventory as we bring G3 and Egypt up, our overall produced sales for Q1 are looking really similar to Q4. And really it’s about price. So I think when we look at quarter-over-quarter, it’s more of a price story than seeing that incremental. And then when we get to Q2 is where you start to see kind of what we would call the run rate production coming through the actual sales. And that’s why we kind of point to Q2 as being more indicative of our run rate and cash flow capability with all our assets running.

Joshua Spector: Okay. Thank you.

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

Rich Sumner: All right. Well, thank you for your questions and interest in our company. We hope you’ll join us in April, when we update you on our first quarter results.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

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