Ramaco Resources, Inc. (NASDAQ:METC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ramaco Resources, Inc. (NASDAQ:METC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 8, 2023

Operator: Welcome to the Ramaco Resources Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on the listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the call over to Jeremy Sussman, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Jeremy Sussman: Thank you. On behalf of Ramaco Resources, I would like to welcome all of you to our third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With me this morning is Randall Atkins, our Chairman and CEO; and Chris Blanchard, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we start, I would like to share our normal cautionary statement. Certain items discussed on today’s call constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent Ramaco’s expectations concerning future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are outside of Ramaco’s control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statements speaks only as of the date on which it is made, and except as required by law, Ramaco does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. I’d also like to remind you that you can find a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures that we plan to discuss today in our press release, which can be viewed on our website, www.ramacoresources.com. Lastly, I’d encourage everyone on this call to go on to our website and download today’s investor presentation. With that said, let me introduce our Chairman and CEO, Randall Atkins.

Randall Atkins: Thanks, Jeremy. Good morning everyone, and thanks for joining the call. We have a lot of positive developments to unpack this morning since we spoke in August. From the time we started Ramaco, we have generally been somewhat idiosyncratic within our industry. For over five years before we went public in 2017, we were investing in developing geologically-advantaged coal reserves. During most of that time, a majority of the industry was in bankruptcy, and certainly not aggressively buying greenfield coal reserves to develop from scratch. Since then, we continue to invest heavily in a rapid expansion of our business and in production growth. Many of our peers have moved in another direction. They were essentially letting their own reserves to flee without investing in new replacement tonnage.

To prove the point, over the last couple of years, we’ve invested almost a quarter of a billion dollars in growth capital for production and acquisition. For a young company in this space, that is a meaningful number. And I wanted to highlight this background because our third quarter essentially reflects the results of this differentiated growth platform. In simple terms, this quarter in almost one fell swoop, we went from being a 3 million to a 4 million tonne per annum company. And of course, we’re not done in terms of production growth. To step back and frame this a little differently, over the past years we’ve done or tried to do several things at once. We have invested to grow production, we have paid off debt, and we still have made substantial shareholder distributions.

This year we paid down over $50 million or over 50% of our term debt. At the same time, we have grown production by 55% from 2.2 million tons in 2021 to 3.4 million tons this year. Lastly, we made shareholder equity distributions, capital distributions, of total of $160 million, which include cash dividends and the value of the tracking stock. We have been fortunate that our shareholders have seen the positive results of this. Our stock price rose by 38% this quarter and by 320% over the past three years. We also have had a total shareholder return over that same period of 450%. We are now hopefully getting started down the right track. And turning to Q3, as a result of this quarter’s sales surge, we grew EBITDA by over 50% from the second quarter.

This was in spite of a decline in margins caused by lower index pricing. Also, based on Q3 earnings, we expect to reduce our overall term debt down to just $50 million by year end. For reference, our total debt at this point in 2022 was $125 million. Because of both stronger than anticipated third quarter shipments and increased overseas customer demand, we recently increased guidance on our 2023 coal shipments. We also continue to enjoy a working capital benefit over the next few quarters as we expect to continue to reduce and sell down existing inventory as we did in the third quarter. Switching gears to operations, I want to compliment the work the operating team has done in developing the two deep mine sections at the Berwind Mine. In the last couple of months, the Berwind Mine produced an annualized run rate of a half million tons per year.

Cash costs were roughly $80 per ton from both deep mine sections. If this trend continues, we expect Berwind to be among the highest margin and lowest low vol metallurgic, largest low vol metallurgical mine complexes in the country. Moving to sales and marketing, we took what we thought was a prudent approach to our 2024 domestic sales business. We have now committed 1.3 million tons of coal to North American customers next year at an average price of $167 per ton and an additional 200,000 tons for export price against index. To compliment our sales group, this appears to be the highest 2024 sales price figure of our public peers. And as a backdrop, when the domestic steel mills came out in early July, we declined the locking business at what we felt was then a low price near the bottom of the cycle.

We have basically decided instead to pivot to increasing the size of our 24 export business to roughly 70% of anticipated production. And while we march on the path to increasing our production to roughly 7 million tons over the next few years, I would note that we could continue to produce at our current 4 million to 4.5 million ton level for the foreseeable future, largely only from maintenance CapEx. I feel we are advantaged to be in this position since the market at this point is very settled, unsettled, with a number of worldwide macro factors dominating the headlines and little clarity in near term economic direction. On 2024 production, we will be providing formal guidance after our December board meeting next month. But next year, we plan to preserve some optionality to either increase or maintain production levels, depending on how we see the market’s development.

I’d now like to turn to an update on our Western operations in Wyoming. I am pleased to report that last month overall mine development commenced at the Rare Earth, Brook mine. We have been working to test from only core samples over the past years. We began meaningful mine development a few weeks ago with an initial goal to obtain larger quantities of material for testing. We will now be moving into a phase of extensive sequential testing of the metallurgic and chemical compositions of the multiple areas of material. This will help us determine the overall nature and extent of the deposit. We’ve now established that the mine has an extremely large unconventional Rare Earth deposit. The figures of its size will no doubt increase as we do more core testing over both larger areas and at deeper depths.

NETL, our partner, has told us that this mine may be geologically unique from almost any deposit they have examined. The challenge for us from here is to perform an overall assessment of the optimal extraction, recovery, and separation techniques, which can then be used to estimate the mine’s economics. We will be doing this with our consultants at SRK and with NETL. We will also be working on some novel technologies in this area with other national labs, and we will continually update our progress on this project as it goes forward. On the carbon products front, I want to highlight two exciting areas we are focused on involving work at our iCAM Research Center in Wyoming. As many of you may have seen, China recently decided to both regulate and restrict the export of graphite used for EV batteries and a host of other electronic applications.

Opportunistically, Ramaco’ multi-year development of a revolutionary electrochemical process for conversion of coal to synthetic graphite has now assumed added strategic importance. Our work on this innovative technology has been done pursuant to our creative partnership with Oak Ridge National Labs. We have also recently filed an application with the DOE to build a continuous pilot plant using this technology for conversion of the bituminous coal from Ramaco’s Berwind Mine into synthetic graphite. Also, we have developed a low-cost process with comprehensive intellectual property rights for the production of activated carbon fiber monoliths to be used for direct air capture and other filtering applications. This quarter, we established in-house melt-blowing capability at the iCAM to produce the monoliths and activate them in large quantities.

We look forward to updating on the commercialization of these activities going forward. And I’d like to finish by reflecting that I believe we were at an inflection point for Ramaco. Over the past couple of years, we have spent seven times more toward production growth and capital acquisitions than we have done compared to paying dividends. Importantly, at this point, I would anticipate in 2024 that we will be returning substantially more to shareholders in cash dividend alone than we are currently expecting to spend on growth capital for production or M&A. And with that, I’d like to turn the floor over to the rest of our team to discuss finances, operations, and markets. So Jeremy, please start with a rundown of our financial metrics and markets.

Jeremy Sussman: Thank you, Randy. As you noted, we enjoyed a strong third quarter, especially in light of weaker markets and coal pricing throughout much of the quarter. Specifically, flat U.S. East Coast indices sell roughly 5% in Q3 versus Q2. Despite this decline, Q3 net income grew more than 150% versus Q2 to $19.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA grew by more than 50% to $45 million. During the third quarter, adjusted EBITDA benefited by $3 million received from insurance claims proceeds in connection with the Berwind mine outage in mid-2022 and $8 million received in connection with the Elk Creek silo failure in late 2018. The combined net income impact was $8 million. I would note that Elk Creek insurance proceeds are not reflected in our cash balance as of September 30.

I would also note that the company received a tax refund of $11.8 million in September, which is reflected in our Q3 cash figure. Turning to our key metrics, the largest variance relative to Q2 was on volume. The company shipped one million tons of coal, which achieves its previous guidance of reaching a rateable annualized sales run rate of roughly 4 million tons. This figure was up 39% from Q2, as we had been previously shipping at a roughly 3 million ton per annum run rate. The increase to 4 million tons per annum is the culmination of a multi-year investment in taking the Elk Creek plant capacity from 2 million to 3 million tons per year, as well as the ramp up at our Berwind mine that Randy touched upon. Average realized price in Q3 fell 4% versus Q2 to $157 per ton, in line with the declining coal indices.

Production was down 18% versus Q2 to 719,000 tons, and cash cost increased 5% to $114 per ton. This was largely on the back of the two-week paid vacation taken in July at Elk Creek due to high inventory levels, which have since come down substantially. After a disappointing second quarter, we applaud both railroad’s efforts in the third quarter, which allowed us to ship at a 4 million ton per annum run rate in meaningfully reduced inventory. We anticipate that this trend will continue. Looking ahead, we are refining a number of areas related to our 2023 guidance. First, we now expect to produce 3.1 million to 3.4 million tons, with the midpoint unchanged from prior guidance. We expect to sell 3.25 to 3.5 million tons, which is unchanged from our mid-October update, where we increased 2023 sales expectations on the back of both strong Q3 results and increased overseas demand.

I would note that we now have 3.3 million tons contracted, including 2.9 million tons, at an average fixed price of $173 per ton in the balanced price of index. We have increased cost guidance to $108 to $112 per ton versus the high end of the previous range of $102 to $108 per ton. The increase is largely due to continued inflationary pressures that the industry is facing, as witnessed by the majority of our peers, also increasing cost guidance, in some cases substantially, just in the past month or so. Lastly, we have tightened the range on CapEx, SG&A, and DD&A, which you will see in our guidance tables. The increase in CapEx is largely related to the timing of payments. We would anticipate 2024 CapEx to be down meaningfully versus 2023, and will update you all on this front after the 2024 budget is approved by the board.

Moving to the balance sheet, the company has liquidity of $98 million as of September 30th, double the $49 million level as of year-end 2022. I would remind everyone that liquidity has doubled despite the substantial year-to-date debt repayments which Randy went through earlier. We would also expect to continue to pay down debt in 2024, and if current prices hold, we would also anticipate being in a net cash position next year. While this concludes my financial remarks, I’m now going to give a brief sales and marketing update. Since Randy and I both touched upon our sales commitments, I’m going to focus more on the market itself. Despite challenging conditions in July and August, the metallurgical coal markets began to substantially improve in September.

U.S. high-vol prices are $60 per ton higher today compared to the middle of August. This is despite the fact that European steel demand remains subdued, and the U.S. endured almost a two-month-long strike at the major automakers. The good news is that on the supply side, there is muted production globally with major downward production revisions from large players in Australia, the U.S., and Canada. These three countries collectively account for roughly 75% of seaborn metallurgical coal supply. In our opinion, the reason for these continual production disappointments is simple. The majority of coal companies are not reinvesting in a depleting asset base in large part due to financing and ESG pressures. Global Met Coal CapEx is a fraction of what it has historically been, despite very strong and growing Asian demand.

On that front, India has now surpassed China as the largest importing country of seaborn met coal. This is important for two reasons. First, India has very limited domestic supply of metallurgical coal, and thus is reliant on imports for substantially all of its high-quality met coal. Second, steel demand has been extremely strong this year in India. Specifically, September saw Indian steel production of 18% year-over-year, bringing the total year-to-date increase to up 12% year-over-year. India is not the only bright spot. Indonesia is set to bring online roughly 20 million tons of metallurgical coal capacity, which began to ramp up earlier this year. To put this in some context, this figure is larger than the entire United States annual coal production.

Jason and his team have continued to do an excellent job placing tons into both new and existing customers. This is increasingly in Asia, where the majority of near-term demand exists, and specifically to those two markets I just mentioned. The bottom line is that in terms of the overall market, while demand remains relatively kept in the U.S. and Europe, we are increasingly encouraged by both continued supply constraints and increased Asian demand. In addition, we saw a number of high-cost operations either close or mercurially cut their workforce when the Australian benchmark price fell into the load of mid $200 per ton range earlier this summer. This tells us that the cost curve has meaningfully steepened in recent years on the back of high global inflation.

Amid this supply-demand backdrop, we see a market where we expect prices to remain above historical levels for the foreseeable future. With that said, I would now like to turn the call over to our Chief Operating Officer, Chris Blanchard.

Chris Blanchard: Thank you, Jeremy, and good morning, everyone. Operationally, it’s nice to talk about positive steps and milestones despite all the challenges that are inherent to the industry. Randy and Jeremy both mentioned the Berwind mine ramp up, and I’ll touch on that in more detail. But first, I wanted to start with a comment on Ramaco’s safety performance. We are extremely proud of our team at the Elk Creek Preparation Plant for having earned a Sentinel Safety Award for the second consecutive year for the performance in 2022. Annually, only six coal operations and of those, only two preparation plants are recognized across the entire nation. To win as the best large preparation plant in the nation two years in a row is not a fluke.

As a company, we salute the daily effort that goes towards safety and compliance from all our employees. Turning to the production and sales step change, during the third quarter, we completed the final pieces of the Elk Creek Plant throughput upgrade. As we had previously updated, the plant reached higher feed rates late in the second quarter, but additional frost floatation sales and clean coal storage options did not come on until September. At this time, all contemplated upgrades have been completed, and we are operating at our higher feed rates of roughly three million annual clean times much more consistently. This throughput ramp, coupled with an extended vacation period in July, allowed us to dramatically lower the raw coal stockpile levels at Elk Creek, which had been built due to the delays on the project.

We anticipate that one of mine coal inventories will be brought to normal levels during the first quarter of 2024. At the same time, we expect additional production increases at Elk Creek to coincide with the exhaustion of the raw coal surplus in 2024. As Jeremy and Randy have both mentioned, we’ll discuss more concrete guidance on the 2024 metrics later this year. At our Maben operation, we have settled into a comfortable production cadence of roughly 250,000 annual tons that is somewhat above our initial expectations. Now that the initial surface mining spread and the Highwall Miner have reached their steady state, we are turning to additional areas to permit and mine by these low cost methods. We will also explore more detailed mine planning regarding the future underground operations and potential preparation facilities.

Most of the coal from Maben is now being processed and sold through our Berwind plant. As the mines at Berwind continue to grow, we may look to expand that Maben’s operations and reduce our logistics costs there accordingly. Finally, turning to the Berwind complex, we are now running two super sections at the Berwind mine in the Pocahontas number four seam. During these first few months, we’ve been able to meet our budget targets for production for the mine. We believe that current production levels are not only sustainable, but there is some room for continued improvement in produced tons and additional cost productions as the mine progresses from a least coal position onto our own coal. In the near future, we plan to construct additional air shafts at Berwind next year, which will enhance ventilation in the mine and allow the start-up of the third section if the low vol market dictates that we should do this.

Also, as the Berwind mine continues to grow, the wind-down of the smaller mines, which we started during 2022, continues. The Triple S surface mine is now idled, and our Triad number two mine is completing its last few months of its reserves. Ultimately, the equipment and infrastructure from the Triad mine will be used to minimize growth capital associated with the third section at Berwind. We continue to evaluate the rest of the small feeder mines into the Berwind complex and will work to quickly pivot production as conditions and markets drive us. This now concludes management’s prepared remarks, and I would like to return the call to the operator for the question and answer portion of the call. Operator, please open the line up for questions.

Operator: Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Lucas Pipes: Thank you very much, Operator. Good morning, everyone. I will keep my comments to minimum, and that is a good job on the 2024 contract. And I’ll go over to the questions, but on those 2024 domestic contracts, it would be really great to get some perspective on the quality mix there. Is it kind of your standard quality? Is it maybe a little bit more on the higher end spectrum? We would appreciate your thoughts on that. Thank you.

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Q&A Session

Randall Atkins: Yes, thanks, Lucas. I’ll take that. So, it’s pretty similar to our overall mix. And frankly, I’d say about 30% of what we’ve committed is kind of a low vol, mid vol, and about 70% is high vol. As Randy noted, we’re kind of working on refining the 2024 budget as we speak, but certainly in terms of the overall high vol mix, it’ll come in probably a little less than kind of two-thirds. So overall, I mean, certainly kudos to Jason and his team for a job well done.

Lucas Pipes: Great, yes. Good job, Jason. My second question, Randy, you mentioned in your prepared remarks that I don’t have your exact wording down here, but you said something along the lines of this is kind of you had a pivotal moment as you transition more towards capital returns. I think that was the essence. And I wondered if you can speak to that. I think there are also targets for the debt reduction in 2024, so kind of trying to put it all together. How much of free cash flow should investors anticipate going towards kind of the balance sheet for additional flexibility? How much should go back in the form of dividends or buybacks? We’d appreciate if you could maybe put some additional details around that. Thank you very much.

Randall Atkins: Sure. Thanks Lucas. So I think when I tried to highlight is we’ve been trying to do a couple of things at the same time. I mean, we’ve been trying to grow, obviously spending a great deal of CapEx, quarter of a billion dollars over the last few years. We’ve been trying to pay down debt, which we’ve done, and we’ve gotten it down to about $50 million in term debt that remains. And then we’ve also, of course, been trying to do distributions, which inclusive of both the cash flow event as well as the value of the tracking stock, which we did that summer, it’s been a pretty nice return. I think it’s about 160 million bucks. So moving forward, I think the bulk of our growth CapEx from current projects is in the rearview.

So as we look to 2024 and out, unless and until we started another large scale development project, we are going to have road CapEx that will be below the level that we anticipate paying out in dividends, cash dividends. And as far as further types of capital distributions in terms of stock buybacks or anything of that nature, we will have to see. We’ve always left the door open to that. We’ve also indicated that we wanted to get a certain level of cash on the balance sheet before we started considering that. We’re certainly going to be in a cash build position here over the next few years. So that’s certainly something that we hope we’ll be able to get to here. But I find ourselves, frankly, in a pretty good position where we’re starting to somewhat reap the benefits of what we’ve sowed, where we don’t really have to spend too much more on growth CapEx. And indeed, as I indicated, we could pretty much maintain the same level of production just from maintenance CapEx going forward, which at 4 to 4.5 million tons is not a fairly tidy amount of production.

So I hope that addressed most of what your question was asking.

Lucas Pipes: That’s helpful. Thank you, Randy for that. I’ll squeeze one more operational one in. A few moving pieces on the cost side during the third quarter and then I think also into year end. But as you look into 2024, what’s a good way to think about it kind of on a normalized level? Thank you for any color you can provide.

Randall Atkins: When you say think about it, which cost are you specific?

Lucas Pipes: The production cost per ton on the metallurgic side.

Randall Atkins: Yes, I’ll take that, Lucas. So yes, I mean, just taking a step back for a second in Q3, obviously overall cash costs were $114 a ton. But really, I’d say that the bulk of the increase or, frankly, all of the increase was driven by the – we took an extra week’s vacation, paid vacation at Elk Creek. And in July to reduce inventory, which we certainly have done. So if I think about sort of August and September costs, which are normal kind of non holiday months, those cash costs averaged about $103 per ton to put that into some context. Now, obviously in Q4, you’ve got two months that have a week’s holiday, and so that it’s got to take that into account. But as I kind of think about next year, obviously we are going through the kind of the budget sort of as we speak on the negative side, there certainly continued labor and inflationary pressure.

I think given the comments of our peers and just the overall economy, that’s not a surprise. But that should be offset by stronger production from a full year of the Berwind mine producing at two sections and a full year of the Elk Creek prep plan and at kind of 3 million tons per annum. So we’ll give some more refined guidance, certainly after the budget is baked. But hopefully that gives you a little bit of kind of context, kind of where we’re coming from and where we hope to go.

Lucas Pipes: Thank you. So, with low $100 becomes seem reasonable with these puts and takes?

Randall Atkins: I mean, that’s certainly where we were in August and September. So I would hope that that’s repeatable, especially with positive variances that we talked about. But again, you’ve got some inflationary pressures. So, we’ll come out and kind of get you guys some more refined numbers over the next month or so.

Chris Blanchard: Yes, I think, Lucas, we’ve got a pretty good handle on where we can control ourselves, what we have, as I alluded to, it’s a fairly murky economic environment we’re operating in today. So, we’re not quite sure where a few pivots may go that would externally draw costs. But hopefully we’ll be able to get some general thoughts on that that we’ll be able to articulate to the market here within the next month or two.

Lucas Pipes: Gentlemen, I really appreciate all the color and continue best of luck.

Chris Blanchard: Thank you, Lucas.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our next question from the line of Nathan Martin with The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Nathan Martin: Thanks operator. Good morning guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just one quick one for clarification on the cash cost, the telephone guidance, the 108 to 112 for the full year. Is that still the way you guys expect the frame and your expectations for the fourth quarter as well?

Jeremy Sussman: Yes, I mean, so I think, obviously, Nate, at the midpoint, I think the answer is yes. Obviously, with the range you can get kind of lower than that in the fourth quarter and even a little bit higher. I just remind you that fourth quarter always is kind of the – one with the most variability with the two weeks worth of paid vacations, of course, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. So hopefully that answers the question.

Nathan Martin: Yes, perfect, Jeremy. Appreciate that. And then, maybe just sticking with the full year 2023 guidance per second on the sale side, as you guys mentioned, that seems to imply shipments of around 800,000 tons at the low end and a million at the high end or maybe the million plus. So kind of what gets you to the higher low end of the range? Is it the ability to move more inventory as you guys seem to anticipate? Just would be great to get your thoughts there too.

Randall Atkins: Yes, I think we’ve got a nominal amount of open tonnage that’s left for the year, Nate, which we’re going to try and obviously push out before the year end. You know, there’s the normal variables of making sure we can get the sales across the line with the rails, et cetera. But I think that’s the primary variability.

Nathan Martin: Perfect, thanks, Randy. And then, maybe sticking with the stock policy just real quickly. And then Chris mentioned, hopefully getting to normalize levels, maybe the first quarter next year. If you’re down to maybe 900,000 tons plus or minus, what’s kind of normal there for you guys for help?