Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (NYSE:SQM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question will from Lucas Ferreira of JPMorgan.

Lucas Ferreira: So my question is about the ramp-up to 210,000 in Salar de Atacama. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I had the view that these could be done faster than the end of 2024. And so, if I’m right, are you seeing any bottlenecks in both the Carmen plant or in terms of yields and extraction there in Salar de Atacama? Are you kind of considering maybe slowing down that depending on the market demand? And so how you see the pace of growth towards 210,000? And then my second question is regarding the SPN market. So, if you have any views on prices going forward. We started to see sort of a rebound in fertilizer prices, depending on the type of fertilizers. But in the case of SPN, if you see already sort of a bottom for prices, you should have any expectation for prices in the second half of the year? Thank you.

Carlos Díaz: Okay. Regarding your first question, Lucas, we are fully working to expand our capacity in Chile and to reach as soon as possible the 210,000. We’re focusing in different areas, I mean improving our quality to getting the best product for the market, increasing the yields in order to get more production with less resources. We’re on the schedule on that, and we expect to have the capacity next year. At the same time, we are working to expand our capacity on lithium hydroxide, and we expect to run the full line in the last quarter of this year and immediately start to expanding the capacity in order to reaching the 100,000 metric tons as we have been planned for the year ’25, ’26.

Pablo Altimiras: Okay. Pablo Altimiras speaking. Well, regarding to the SPN questions, well, you know that the first semester, the demand has been lower than what happened last year at the same period. The reason is because uncertainty, high prices of fertilizers and also some weather difficult conditions in some markets. We expect the demand will start growing in the second half of the year. So we will see more demand. So that means that we should be able to increase our volumes. However, regarding to prices, we see that we will continue start seeing some price decrease that also will help also to the sales increase and demand increase. But we expect to start seeing some decrease on prices.

Operator: That concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Irina Axenova for any closing remarks.

Irina Axenova: Thank you for joining our call today. And we’re looking forward to having you on our next call. Have a great day, everyone. Bye.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.