Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Thompson: Yes, sure. Thanks Michael for the question. Look, I think Trevor summed up the volume story really well. From a nitrogen standpoint overall, the market is quite constructive. Generally, we have seen supply constraints certainly in urea and ammonia around the world, playing a role the last several months. And that’s led to significant tightness in the market. I think much as Ken has described here this morning, just generally from an agriculture standpoint in North America, things are quite positive. From a nitrogen standpoint, I think as Jeff Tarsi would probably tell you, it’s a little bit early to call a good shift for next year. But we do still expect healthy corn planting and strong agricultural nitrogen demand next year.

I think just to double click a little bit on where things are in the market, certainly from an ammonia standpoint, on our Q2 call, we had articulated that we felt ammonia was fundamentally undervalued given the tightness in the market. And we have certainly seen things firm up here over the last several months, which really has been a supply driven event. And so ultimately, we have seen ammonia now come back into balance from a value on an end basis with urea and UAN. We do expect good fall applications here across the nitrogen complex as we move through the rest of Q4. And I think the setup looks pretty good peering into Q1 next year.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Richard Garchitorena from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Richard Garchitorena: Great. Thank you. So, I just wanted to circle back to potash demand, and to your expectations going forward? So, with 2024 basically about 57 million tons to 71 million tons of demand and then on the supply side, potentially, at least 1 million tons to 3 million more tons of supply from Eastern Europe, I guess sort of wanted to know your thought process in terms of how you think about the expansion plans, and when we should think about maybe you starting to move forward more quickly on the 14 million tons to 15 million tons target for mid cycle. And also just on that follow-up, is the CapEx guidance for say $2 billion to $2.5 billion going forward include any spin for growth, either in potash or nitrogen or is that essentially sustaining CapEx? Thank you.

Ken Seitz: Thanks for the questions Rich. So, yes, with respect to 2024 and our potash expansions, when we talk about the mid-cycle in our business, I mean we would say that that’s 14 million tons to 15 million tons of capacity that we have available to put into the market. And as it relates to 2024, yes, we expect demand to continue to grow. We expect it to continue to grow beyond 2024, of course. And as it grows, we are going to – we will maintain market share, we will continue to meet the needs of our customers. And as our customers are calling for volumes, we will get those volumes into the market. So, we absolutely believe that we are on a growth trajectory here and that we will be able to deploy our additional low-cost tons into the market.

As we talk about the $2 billion to $2.5 billion on the CapEx side, absolutely as we look at the investments that we are making in potash today, we feel comfortable with the volumes that we have had. Hence, we talked about the pause in deploying capital towards increasing expansion. This moment of course, we can return to an expansion trajectory with low CapEx to go beyond the 14 million tons to 15 million tons as we watch the market evolve, and as our customers are calling for those tons. But again for today, we feel comfortable with the investments we have made. Where we are deploying capital in potash is the ongoing work associated with automation, associated with predictive maintenance and that’s process controls. Of course, the automation work, in addition to having the big safety benefits has productivity benefits.

And we are in the process of realizing those benefits, actually as we speak, as we deploy automated mining machines in our five underground mines. So, certainly in that – part of that $500 million that we talked about investing CapEx, growing our business, part of that is in the automation work that we are doing in our potash network.