Sylvamo Corporation (NYSE:SLVM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

George Staphos: Thanks. Hi, everybody. Again, two more questions more on volume, although I’ve got other stuff I do want to get to as well. So, I’ll come back. But Jean-Michel and John, so if you assume that imports are going to drop from 15% to 20% of consumption to 10% to 15% of consumption and the market consumption probably is going to be down because that’s the normal trend, that would suggest a fairly sizable drop in imports for this year in ’23 versus ’22. Am I missing something there in terms of how you’re evaluating it? And anything that’s giving you comfort, any sort of green shoot commentary from DCs or your customers that that’s happening? So that’s question number one. Question number two, again, on volume and trade flow.

Yes, China was locked down last year, but one of the things that, that also did, this is more on the freight side, is it prevented exports from China and from Southeast Asia. Now maybe we’re now seeing, with the reopening, those imports coming into North America, coming into Europe, but could there be further problems, if you will, from — and really relate what your customers are saying, from the opening of supply chains and what it might mean for supply that comes into markets that were, as you pointed out, really tight last year in Europe and North America, which was a good thing for you?

John Sims: Yes, George, I’m going to start off and then I know Jean-Michel probably want to weigh in. But when you look at the year for the full year for ’22 imports into North America represented 13% of demand. But most of that was the increase as we talked about in the second half of that year. So, when we look at our projections, and there’s a lot of moving parts on this. I mean, when we’re talking about somewhere between the 10% to 15%, we’re still seeing and projecting a potential increase of imports year-over-year into North America. Now be mindful that it is true that the cost of shipping from Asia into the U.S. has actually backed down to pre-pandemic levels. But there’s still extensive duties that are applied to both the Indonesia and the Chinese suppliers.

And as open — it backs up, the Chinese market opens back up, when you look at it from a pricing perspective, net pricing perspective, it’s still probably more advantageous for them to ship into China. The other thing we didn’t talk about a little bit, but some of the imports also came in from Europe. The European freight costs continue to be extremely high. So, I think when we look at our outlook and how we’re thinking about it, we do see and we’re projecting that we’re going to see some increase of imports into the U.S. But like, I think, we’re trying to allude to, it’s not going to be out of the norm than what we’ve seen before, and it’s manageable.

George Staphos: Okay. If I could sneak one in, just in terms of your guidance. So, the first quarter is well over $200 million in terms of EBITDA. Look, recognizing there’s lots of seasonality and certainly maintenance outages are lumpy, if I just annualize that, I would wind up with an EBITDA outlook that’s probably above your full year range. So, are you just trying to create or give yourself some cushion against the unknowables that occur in any year? Were there some specific things that you want us to remember in terms of the cadence of your EBITDA, the rest of the year? Thank you, guys.