Olin Corporation (NYSE:OLN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: Our next question will come from Frank Mitsch with Fermium Research.

Frank Mitsch: I wanted to follow-up on Winchester. Obviously, Russia came out of the market as a supplier midyear. So I would have thought that the supply side wouldn’t have been an issue, but you’ve obviously been making adjustments there. What has been the impact of Russia coming out of the market that you’ve seen so far. And obviously, the expectation is they’ll be out of the market for a while as well. So wouldn’t that bode well down the line?

Brett Flaugher: Frank, this is Brett. You’re correct. It should. What we’re seeing right now is, I think it’s been since May of last year, that we saw any imports come into the country from Russia. However, we continue to see some inventory that’s out in the marketplace across a couple of different calibers of ammunition. So we do anticipate that to sell through. It’s taken a little bit longer than we expected, but we should benefit when that gets always sold through.

Frank Mitsch: Got you. Got you. Okay. And then if — a follow-up on chlor alkali. Obviously, it was impressive that you kept the fourth quarter relatively flat profitability-wise in the third quarter. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect in terms of profitability between the upstream doing pretty well in the downstream, not doing so well. So I was wondering if you could kind of walk through the third quarter to the fourth quarter in terms of upstream versus downstream profitability and what your near-term outlook is. If you could parse the Chlor Alkali segment in that fashion?

Scott Sutton : Yes. I mean this is Scott and Patrick may add to it. I mean we assume when you say upstream, you mean close to the ECU and downstream, you mean some of the derivative chains like coordinated organics and vinyls. Is that right?

Frank Mitsch: Correct, correct.

Patrick Schumacher : Okay. So when you asked the question, I was thinking you were talking about Epoxy as the downstream because we don’t really use that terminology within our chlor alkali business. So can you just reframe your question, I’ll have the — now that I kind of know what direction you’re heading.

Frank Mitsch: I assume that there’s some analysis of the profitability of caustic soda and the profitability of EDC and the profitability of coordinated organic, profitability of merchant chlorine and so on that you’re doing internally, although I do understand that you’re probably moving molecules up and down. So can you speak to the strength? I — my assumption is that the ECU, chlorine and caustic was the more stable and the bigger part of the profitability in the downstream. But I’m just curious as to how you would parse that.

Patrick Schumacher : Sure. Yes, as we’ve been talking about for, I think, 3 quarters now, that downstream chlorine chain, specifically through vinyls. EDC and VCM has been weak. That weaker downstream in that vinyl chain. And that has overall set caused us to set our run rates or operating rates to the chlorine side of the ECU because of weakness downstream in those PVC — in that PVC chain. And we continue to do that today, and we’re going to do that until things start to improve. Upstream within chlorine. We’ve talked about elemental chlorine, and that ratchet goes one way and those prices remain very strong.

Operator: Our next question will come from Jeffrey Zekauskas with JP Morgan.

Jeffrey Zekauskas : When you look at public data for caustic prices, maybe caustic prices were a short ton in November. It’s a little hard to see where they are today. Are they at ? Or what’s been the move in caustic prices from, say, November to today? And can you account for the reasons for the movement.

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