United States Steel Corporation (NYSE:X) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Curtis Woodworth: Okay. And then as a follow-up, could you provide updated CapEx guidance for this year and next year? And then just given the liquidity profile and your leverage is well below your target, what would prevent you from — you talked about the dividend — increasing the dividend or becoming more aggressive on buyback. Is it simply you’d like to get closer to the finish line with respect to Big River 2? Or how should we think about capital return ahead? Thanks very much.

David Burritt: A great question. You can imagine we’re talking about that every day because we’re so excited about the future. And we keep putting up good numbers, we keep generating cash flow. Obviously, we’re relooking this, as Jess said in her remarks. But I need to make sure we refer you to our capital allocation process, and we’re going to have a refresh on that, as Jess had indicated. So Jess maybe you just update the team on where we are on CapEx and how that fits into our capital allocation strategy. I know it’s in the deck, but I think it bears repeating because it’s serving us well.

Jessica Graziano: Sure. Thanks, Dave. And great question, Curt. Thank you. So let me take this in pieces here. So an update on 2023 capital spending. The CapEx is still going to run about $2.5 billion, which is consistent with the way we’ve been thinking about it even from the beginning of the year as we have a large slug, right, as you guys know, in the continued spend behind the strategic in-flight initiatives that we have. So you can assume that’s still coming in around $2.5 billion for this year. Now for next year, I’d like to be helpful. It’s still a little bit early for us to start underwriting those numbers. We’re just starting our own forecasting process, but let me talk about it broadly for next year in the way that we’re looking forward.

So we’ve got that last slug of strategic CapEx for our in-flights. Big River 2, obviously, being the biggest chunk. So let’s start with probably about $800 million of additional strategic CapEx next year in ’24. Early read on sustaining at this point is probably something in the neighborhood of $600 million to $700 million of CapEx. So let’s call it somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion for 2024. That’s sort of where we’re targeting right now. That’s obviously going to change as we get further along in our budgeting process. I think if I’m going to go that far very preliminarily, I’ll also go far enough to say to the next part of your question, right? We have come at it a few different ways with the notes I just shared, and there is a path for us next year to be positive free cash flow, right?

So just taking together, again, this last slug of capital that we have and thinking about our strategic initiatives continuing to, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, starts to really ring that cash register. Again, a path to positive free cash flow in 2024. So what does that mean from a capital allocation perspective? That’s optionality, right? We’re going to go back to checking our boxes in terms of prioritizing how we think about capital deployment. Super strong balance sheet to start. I mean, obviously, all of this funding that I’m talking about is prefunded on our balance sheet when you think about the strength of the cash and liquidity we have on hand right now. Then we’re focused on, to your point, focused on getting to the end of these initiatives, right?