Olin Corporation (NYSE:OLN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Sutton: Yes. Absolutely. And I’ll just start with the two smaller businesses, right? So Epoxy is ending the year, adjusting its inventory, setting a bottom in, announcing price increase, and we have our two major initiatives that are going to help us much more in 2024 relative to 2023. We’re going to have a full year of benefits from the restructuring work that we’ve done. Our systems business has a lot of momentum. And like I said before, this recent quarter was the first one where the contribution profit — in systems exceeded the contribution profit in resin. So those things are working. We’re going to work to end this unfair trade that exists coming out of Asia as well. So that’s why Epoxy will step up. When you get to Winchester, there’s tremendous momentum in the military piece of that business.

And again, this most recent quarter, for the first time ever, military ammunition sales exceeded commercial sales. And we have a very long runway on military improvements, selling international ammunition, NATO-base-type countries and then also the next-generation squad weapon program, which is a lift over the next 10 years. We’ve said we’ll double that business in two years, and we are well on our way to doing that. On top of that, the focus on and momentum in target shooting looks favorable. We just made the White Flyer acquisition, and while not a major — a major one from a revenue standpoint, it’s highly profitable and we merge that up with our sports shooting ammunition. And then finally, you get to our chlor alkali powerhouse business.

I mean, we have this value accelerator initiative that we’re running that is going to be favorable for next year. And again, the fundamentals underlying that business are good. Every product, demand growth bigger than supply growth.

Hassan Ahmed: Perfect. Thank you so much, Todd.

Todd Slater: Yes.

Operator: The next question comes from Arun Viswanathan from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Arun Viswanathan: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Yes, thanks for all your comments. I think, it is quite helpful. So I just wanted to zero in on a couple of those comments on slide 4. You note that you’re taking some decisive action here. And I think that you’ve laid it out as maybe a $100 million impact. And then you’ve also commented on a better 2024. So when I think about the numbers and how those will evolve, it sounds like Q1 should be seasonally better than Q4 and also maybe less of that $100 million impact. And then Q2, you see the real inflection point from the actions you’ve taken. And so maybe that’s in the $350 million to $400 million range. And then you see maybe a little bit more improvement as well in Q3 and then seasonally softer in Q4.

Is that right? And maybe you can just relate that to the PCI, which, I guess, dropped to 11 in Q3. So maybe you go down into the mid-100s or high-100s in Q4 of 2023, but then you really see that rebound into the maybe $250 million level or above in Q2. Is that how you’re thinking about how the value accelerator initiative kind of plays out? Thanks.

Scott Sutton: Well, I would just say that, yes, later quarters in 2024 maybe are better than earlier ones. But just keep in mind, in Q1, we may still be running this initiative for part of the time, right? But no doubt, in order to make 2024 better than 2023, we have to have some quarters in the back — in the middle to back half of the year that are substantially better than where we are right now. So you’ll see an improvement in those.

Arun Viswanathan: And then just on capital allocation as a quick follow-up. You are doing the $600 million or so leverage free cash flow this year. So next year, I assume that that should be higher as well. Will that also be put mainly towards share repurchases or other activities we can expect?