WestRock Company (NYSE:WRK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gabe Hajde: It does. It does. And then again, I apologize if it was addressed. But as you look across the system in terms of inventories, we on the outside world, we’re trying to understand where you’re at? And I know the destocking term has been thrown on quite a bit. Just where you’re at with inventories going into the heavy maintenance outage period in your Corrugated system specifically.

Alex Pease: Maybe I’ll take the internal inventory question, and then David will, I think, comment on how the market looks. So from an internal standpoint, I think we feel as though our inventory levels are looking quite good. We did take some higher inventory at Mahrt on the consumer side of the business as we were anticipating some potential disruption related to the labor issues that we’ve talked about. And then we also tend to take inventory as we’re planning for the maintenance downtown. So we did have inventories that were perhaps elevated, but not elevated beyond what our expectations were. David, do you want to comment on the market conditions?

David Sewell: I do. Maybe just one other comment. Alex mentioned Mahrt, and I did want to let you know that the contract was ratified yesterday, so our employees will be back to work as soon as administrative will be possible. So we feel great about that. That will certainly help us as we move forward on our productivity issues. And just the team has just done a great job ensuring that there was no disruption in our customer service. As far as overall customer inventories, I think destocking at our corrugated customers is largely behind us. I think it’s getting back to normalized levels. There’s a few here there, where maybe little bit elevated but as I mentioned earlier, it’s really global paper specifically even more so in the export market where they still have elevated inventory levels.

And I go back to last year when it was tight, I think there was a lot of ordering to make sure that they kept their customers secured with product. And so with a little bit of softness in the global economy, I think their customer orders were softer than they anticipated. So they’re still sitting on some elevated inventory levels, but they are working through that. And that’s why, as Alex mentioned, as we get toward the second half of the year, I think we’ll be — have more confidence in the normalization of where we’re at.

Gabe Hajde: Thank you.

Operator: Next question comes from Anthony Pettinari from Citi. Please go ahead.

Anthony Pettinari: Hi, good morning. David, just following up on that last point. When you look at your global paper export customers and you think about the inventory situation, would you draw any differentiation between Europe, Latin America, I guess Asia is maybe a bit smaller for you. And when you talk about normalization in the second half, is that calendar — second half calendar 2023, or is that your fiscal second half?

David Sewell: Yes, Anthony, thanks for that. It’s pretty consistent. You hit it. I mean, we export Latin America, Europe and to a smaller extent in Asia Pacific. It’s pretty consistent across all of those as far as kind of the levels of inventory that our customers are seeing. So I think — don’t think I could really classify one region’s ahead of another. It’s just been pretty consistent. I think our customers are telling us we were just really worried last year when the market was so tight, and then they just experienced a little bit of softness more so than they anticipated. So that will, I think, come back. And then Anthony, I apologize what the second part of your question was?