Hassan Ahmed: Understood. Understood. And let me sort of take another stab at just sort of the market environment, right, particularly as it pertains to, call it, seasonality, inventory levels and the like. I mean in terms of your Q4 results and the weakness over there, you guys talked about pronounced seasonality, particularly in Asia and Europe, right? Which kind of surprised me a little bit keeping in mind how severe the “destock” has been, right? I mean, as I sort of sit there and listen to some of the other companies, some of the other companies are talking about the lack of seasonality in Q4 because of how destocking started, call it, in the back half of 2022 and carried on through most of 2023. So what I’m trying to understand is, what on the inventory side and the demand side is cyclical versus secular, right?
I mean, I think that coming out of the lockdowns with COVID and the like, maybe people overbought. And I mean, have buying patterns — with China the way it’s looking, with Europe the way it’s looking, have buying patterns at least for the foreseeable future changed relative to history?
Frank Bozich: I think the simple answer is yes. And in particular in Europe and what I would say is in China or in Asia in general, what we’re seeing is consumer behavior changing significantly and that changing buyer patterns as it relates to building and construction applications as well as consumer durables, in particular in those two areas. And against that backdrop of lower consumer demand, you have continued capacity additions in Asia in some of these chemistries. So it’s a changing — I do think demand patterns and demand has certainly changed over the past several quarters. That’s — well, to answer the question simply.
Hassan Ahmed: Fair enough. Thank you so much, Frank.
Frank Bozich: Sure.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Laurence Alexander at Jefferies.
Laurence Alexander: Good morning. Two quick ones. First, can you characterize the mix effects you’re seeing as volumes start to improve? Are your higher margin products rebounding first? Or should we expect as we go into Q2 and Q3 a bit of a drag on mix?
Frank Bozich: So, we are seeing the more formulated solutions being more resilient and the volume improvement being more significant in those than in the more commodity-based polymer type products. So the simple answer is yes.
Laurence Alexander: And secondly, just in terms of now that you’re seeing sort of markets revert to baseload demand, can you give us a sense for just how much of the volume hit in retrospect was just the destock? So if your volumes were down 7%, is the kind of new run rate down 3% year-over-year? Can you give some sense so we can try and think about what the cadence of the bounce may be just to adjust from the destocking environment to the underlying demand environment?
David Stasse: Well, I think this goes back to the question I think that David asked or Frank. I can’t recall. Right now, it’s difficult to pinpoint that because I’m not sure — in the first two months of the quarter, we’re seeing a solid volume improvement after a very low volume in Q4. So it’s difficult for us to unpack how much of that is actually volume shift from Q4 into Q1 and do the arithmetic that you’re looking for. So I think we need to get through Q1, see — or begin to see March orders, and then we’ll be able to see more effectively — when we see the Q2 order book begin to develop, we’ll have a better understanding of what that is.
Laurence Alexander: Okay, great. Thank you.
Operator: And this concludes today’s question-and-answer session and today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
