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Archer-Daniels-Midland Company (ADM)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 2, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Archer Daniels Midland Company Second Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode to prevent background noise. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Mark Schweitzer, Vice President-Investor Relations for Archer Daniels Midland Company. Mr. Schweitzer, you may begin.

Mark D. Schweitzer - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning and welcome to ADM's second quarter earnings webcast. Starting tomorrow, a replay of today's webcast will be available at adm.com. For those following the presentation, please turn to slide two. The company's Safe Harbor statement, which says that some of our comments constitute forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views and estimates of future economic circumstances, industry conditions, company performance and financial results. These statements are based on many assumptions and factors that are subject to risk and uncertainties. ADM has provided additional information in its response on file with the SEC concerning assumptions and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in this presentation, and you should carefully review the assumptions and factors in our SEC reports. To the extent permitted under applicable law, ADM assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events. On today's webcast, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Juan Luciano, will provide an overview of the quarter. Our Chief Financial Officer, Ray Young, will review the financial highlights and corporate results. Then, Juan will review the drivers of our performance in the quarter, provide an update on our scorecard, and discuss our forward look. Finally, they will take your questions. Please turn to slide three. I will now turn the call over to Juan. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. This morning, we'll report the second quarter adjusted earnings per share of $0.41. Our adjusted segment operating profit was $573 million. After a challenging start of the year, general market conditions began to turn at the end of the second quarter, providing us with improved opportunities for the second half of…

Operator

Operator

Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now conduct the question-and-answer session. And our first question comes from the line of Adam Samuelson with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Adam Samuelson - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I guess, first, I would like to talk about the second half opportunity; and, Juan, you laid out some thoughts on drivers of better performance particularly in Ag Services. And I'm just trying to think about some of the range of outcomes or some of the key – the bigger variables in that Ag Services outlook as we think about, I guess, the fourth quarter specifically. Is it the export cadence of corn and soy trying to find – go through the ports at the same time? Is it farmers selling? Is it the magnitude of carries in the corn and the wheat market? Other factors that help band some of the kind of the bigger opportunities or the risks there. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. Yeah. Thank you, Adam. So, as I said before, the outlook for U.S. exports is much better, and current elevation margins are much higher than the last two quarters. Export elevation margins are likely to continue higher in the back of the year. So, as you said, demand continues to be strong, and the U.S. is competitive now for the future months. We also are seeing with carries and basis gains that have returned to the market, we expect in the same area that destination marketing continue to increase for us, the impact of that. And we expect an even more impact in 2017. Milling volumes normally gets into our high season in Q3, so we expect another pickup from there. And general transportation results are expected to improve on increased loads and higher freight rates. We expect southbound volume probably increase in the range of 30% in Q3. So, all-in-all, we're optimistic by the picture we're seeing in Ag Services after many months of subdued performance, if you will.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ann Duignan with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Thomas Simonitsch - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Management

Good morning. This is Tom Simonitsch on for Ann. Could you discuss your expectations for U.S. ethanol exports for the remainder of 2016? In particular, given that China has been a major importer year-to-date, if China were to stop importing ethanol, are there other markets you would expect to absorb U.S. production? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Our expectation for net exports is in the range of 850 million to 900 million gallons. And obviously, China is the second largest market of ethanol in the world. And we have seen there – both in China and in India, the export – the imports picking up and that have been a boost obviously for U.S. exports. Your concerns are probably given by the change in corn policy in China and to what extent that will reduce the imports. We believe in that range, in the 850 million to 900 million gallons. We continue to see other markets coming on again strongly like India; we believe China may or may not reduce there. We believe Canada will be there. We believe Mexico will join. So, in general, we feel strongly about it and we could argue China may dedicate some of that corn to make ethanol, but also there are questions about the quality of those reserves and how much of that can actually be turned into ethanol. So, again, when we look at the forecast and without having a significant amount of China exports in the second half, we believe into the – in the 850 million to 900 million gallon range for net exports for the U.S.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Evan Morris with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Evan Morris - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Good morning, everyone. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Evan.

Evan Morris - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Just – I guess just following on Adam's question, and I just had a follow-up, just on the optimism at the second half, I mean, there's been a lot of moving pieces, lot of volatility in the first half and your views kind of changed as you moved through the year. So, just getting a sense, as your level of optimism now about the back half of the year today relative to, let's say, a month ago, what's changed? And within that, should – you talked about a favorable third quarter, should profits be up year-over-year? If you can kind of just sort of frame your outlook where it is today versus a month ago. And some of your – just your broader expectations. Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. It's Ray here. I mean, the way we kind of look at this year, second half compared to let's say, the second half of last year, I mean, there are several variables that have moved in our favor. And first of all, the U.S. dollar actually has stabilized compared to where we were last year. In fact, you've seen that relative to other crop growing regions, the dollar has actually become a lot more competitive. And that's a favorable factor for Ag Services as we look towards exports in the back half of the year. And frankly, that's been reflected in terms of elevation margins, forward elevations margins that we're seeing right now compared to what we saw last year. And secondly, if you recall last year, there was this overhang regarding Argentina, you remember? And we went into second half of the year, there was a lot of concern that with the change in the government, that there was going to be a…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Driscoll with Citi. Your line is open.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

Great. Thank you and good morning. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, David. Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Good morning, David.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

I wanted to ask a little bit more about Wilmar and just kind of what's going on right there. Juan, I think, you're on the board, or one of you guys are on the board over there, and I'm just curious as to kind of the risk management failure over there, and has it been corrected? I believe this relates to soybeans. And business, as you guys know, extremely well. So, I'm just curious on what's going on. The question specifically then relates to is this like a third-quarter effect only, would their losses kind of persist into other quarters? And then are some – are there – were there opportunities in the second quarter in terms of crushing margins that ADM might have been able to lock in that could be a big offset to these problems that Wilmar is going to generate in the P&L in the third quarter? Thank you. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Thank you, David. So, yes. I am in the board of Wilmar. Listen, the significant loss was triggered by extremely volatile movements in soybean future prices and board crush margins in Q2 caused by you know rapidly evolving crop conditions in Argentina. The Wilmar risk management to the extent that I can comment on that, I mean, they're going to be releasing earnings next week. So, I need to be prudent here. But the Wilmar risk management process include having the risk limits and loss limits and having stop losses on positions like every risk company and with the abrupt movements in prices, these stop losses were triggered in Q2. Without going into the details of their performance, we do believe this being a one-off situation, and if you think about Wilmar, they participate in a very – I mean they are a very large crusher, and they participate in a very volatile part of the world, this is their first quarterly loss since their IPO in 2006. So, this – it's not that this is a common occurrence and as unfortunate as it is, we do believe that hopefully it's a one-off. But again, I will relate you to their earnings call that is going to happen in – I think in August 12. Regarding the – our ability to offset some of these with Q3 performance in Oilseeds, obviously, this is $100 million delta in Q3, which is difficult. We are optimistic about our Oilseeds performance in the second half and we believe that for – the U.S. will be a center stage for exports during the second half of the year. So, at this point in time, we believe that Oilseeds will be able to have very good performance in Q3 even despite the $100 million that you will have to adjust for the Wilmar impact.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Broker

Really appreciate the comments. Thank you. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: You're welcome.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Farha Aslam with Stephens, Inc. Your line is open.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

Hi. Good morning. Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Good morning. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Farha.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

My question focuses on Ag Services. There's been a lot of volatility in the grain markets. So, could you kind of help us benchmark what's that earnings range and earnings on a normal year we should think about Ag Services? And going forward, what are the key drivers of just fundamental growth in that business? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Farha. I think, you described it correctly. Given the last couple of years that we have with a lot of volatility, I will probably refrain from issuing a statement on the range until we see us going through this more normalized conditions, if you will. We certainly are very optimistic for the second half of the year in Ag Services with several components. As I talked a little bit about exports, and we feel very confident about that. We have a big book on already with strong elevation margins. We see strong demand continues and the combination of strong demand with certainly large crops in the U.S. will bode well for Ag Services in order to be able to handle a lot of grain. Wheat carries are there. And I think with a little bit of softening of the – on the dollar plus the big crops, the U.S. is competitive in soybeans, is competitive in – certainly is competitive in corn, is competitive in soybeans. And it's getting competitive in wheat. So, I think that bodes very well for our Ag Services business. So...

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Kenneth Zaslow with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

United States

Hey. Good morning, everyone. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Ken.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

United States

Can I take a picture of kind of like 2017 and beyond? And if I think about the increased protein consumption out there, I think about increased chicken production, hog production, cattle production, increased soybean meal demand, can you make a case that your soy – your crush margin outlook should actually be structurally higher going to 2017? And how are you positioned to take advantage of that? Or are you not positioned to take the advantage of that? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I think we are, Ken. I – we tend to agree with you. We think that with the growth rates that there are out there and it can continue to tighten capacity until the point in which it makes sense to start expanding capacity. So, we believe in growing margins going forward and we believe that we are in excellent position to do that. You heard me saying several times about our flex capacity and how we have added to our plans, the ability to crush more soybeans and we have done that in several parts of the world, not only in North America, but also in Europe. And there has been the bottlenecks; we reported this quarter, record soybean crush in both Europe and North America, and that's the fruits basically of our operational excellence effort in which every plant has been able to turn a little bit more of a bigger output as the market demand. So, we think we are very well-positioned and we think that the market requires that. So, we tend to agree with you. We think that 2017 and forward could be good years for us.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Moskow with Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Robert Moskow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi. I was hoping you'd kind of give us a sense on that subject about where forward crush margins are today in the second half. You said they had come down from very high levels. Would you consider those forward margins better than average, average? How would you describe them? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I think at this point in time in the U.S., the plants are running at the mid-80%s capacity. And we believe that the margins are solid margins, strong margins for North America. So, without giving you any specific numbers, it comes down from an exceptional position, if you will, but we still believe that they are strong. The global customer have not come to the market that aggressively yet, so at this point in time, I will say our export book trails a little bit the one of last year, but we believe that that's going to be corrected so...

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Larson with Buckingham Research. Your line is open.

Eric Larson - The Buckingham Research Group, Inc.

Management

Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got two questions, both pretty brief. Third quarter, Ag Services. We've all seen the USDA export numbers that they have for this crop year which we only have, what, 4 weeks left or 4.5 weeks. And it seems like, I don't know if we get that all shipped in this quarter, but it seems like on a sequential quarterly basis, we should see an improvement in your Ag Services business. Whether you get to a year-over-year positive in Q3 is questionable, but would you expect to start seeing some improvement in Q3 with majority mostly in Q4 for the year? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, Eric, we expect Q3 to be significantly better than the quarters that we've been posting in Ag Services and certainly with the potential for Q4 obviously to be even bigger. But we will see the improvement already in Q3, and I will say it should be a strong improvement.

Eric Larson - The Buckingham Research Group, Inc.

Management

Okay. Good. And then,Juan, one of the things that's actually been a bit of a surprise to me, really, I think, it started in the fourth quarter last year, can you give us a little flavor for the soft seed business? I think in Q4 last year, it was about a negative $50 million operating profit swing in soft seeds, which was a big number, and it continues to be pretty soft. Can you talk about the quinoa side of it for a minute? And does that have a chance of coming back and that would be a, I would think, as good an improvement in your oil seed crush or in your oil seed profits for the second half as probably anything else? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes. It's been weak so far, as you referred to, Eric. And – but you know, at this point in time, Canada is looking at a very good crop and with China having drawn down some of the oil stocks, we think that a good story may be brewing now there for Canadian crush business. So, we have become recently more positive about that business, and the perspective of that business for the second half.

Eric Larson - The Buckingham Research Group, Inc.

Management

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Kenneth Zaslow with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

United States

Just a quick follow-up. Can you talk about your progress? When you talk about the ethanol options that you have, can you give us a wide range of what you're looking at and what the timing is of that? Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Ken, it's Ray here. Yes, as we indicated, we've already done management presentations to some potential interested parties. We've been very open-minded in terms of what alternatives we would consider, whether it be a sale, whether it be joint ventures, whether it be some other structures there. We're going to evaluate all these options. We expect first indications back to us in the month of August, and we'll look at what makes sense from a value maximization perspective for our company here.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

United States

Is there an option that you'd actually want to keep more of the business than you previously expected given the progression of the ethanol margins? Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: If we get fair value for the assets, I think that's highly unlikely.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

United States

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Piken with Cleveland Research. Your line is open.

Michael Stuart Henry - Cleveland Research Co. LLC

Management

Hi. This is Mike Henry in for Mike Piken. Thank you for the question. Going back to ethanol, just curious if you guys could give some color on the current run rate or capacity that you were utilizing during the second quarter, what that should look like going forward, and any commentary on what level you would potentially bring capacity back online or run production a little bit harder. And then just second question, if you could give some more color around the biodiesel impact in the second half on timing and the potential for that to provide some incremental upside in Oilseeds? Thank you. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes, Mike. So the issue with when you think about the ethanol industry when we came into the Q2 in April, ethanol inventories were basically very high, running about 8% above last year. So, obviously, going into the driving season, we took some shutdowns. And at the end of July, inventories are about 3.4% above last year. So a more normal, if you will, inventory situation. So, at this point in time, we will continue to titrate that, whether we run for yield as I describe sometimes or we run for volume. I think that given the volatility of the ethanol results, we'd probably always keep an eye on running for yield. But we probably don't see the need right now to slow down like we did in Q2 where we took a hit for the volume that we didn't move, so. Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: On the question regarding just the timing effects, I've indicated in prior calls that in the Oilseeds division, we normally have some level of timing effects. In this quarter, it was really related to soft seeds and biodiesel. In the past, I've indicated this normal range. It could be anywhere up to $40 million to $50 million, plus or minus. And so in this particular quarter, it was more of a negative timing effect that we expect to reverse out in the second half of this year. So we didn't call out a number. It's within our normal ranges. So it's within the normal $40 million to $50 million type of number that we would normally have.

Michael Stuart Henry - Cleveland Research Co. LLC

Management

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Moskow with Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Robert Moskow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi. Juan and Ray, can you comment a little bit more about the legacy businesses in the WFSI division and what's causing the underperformance? And I think you said that there were slower-than-expected revenue synergies. Was it in that division? And if so, can you explain why? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes. So some of the legacy businesses, one of the businesses is, for example, hydrocolloids. Hydrocolloids go like about half of it to food applications and that continues to go really well, but about half of it goes to drilling fluids. And as you can read, the industry has basically reduced significantly the drilling in the U.S., so that market has been significantly impacted. So nothing to do with our food strategy, if you will, but it happens that we report it in that segment. The second is related to fibers, the fibers market. It has a little bit of overcapacity, so prices have been soft there, and we have some more competition. And one of the businesses that we are acquired, SCI, have had some issues with the inventory that we needed to write off or sell it at a discount because they may not have been in the greatest of conditions. So all those three things basically impacted the WFSI business. On the other hand, WILD Flavors is growing significantly and it's going to post growth of about 20% year-over-year basically on innovation that is happening at the customer level. So when we talked about the revenue synergies being a little bit slow, it's because obviously, first of all, you need to think about how to combine all these products into a new solution. And then you create the prototypes and then you present those to the customer and customers create a marketing campaign and also look at the potential for that product and look at the stability of those products. So that approval process takes a little bit longer, especially in some of the companies that are very much focusing nowadays on cost and productivity. And they may not have that many people to take care of this product. So that's why we tried to ramp up a little bit more the cost synergies to make sure we don't fall behind in our promises. But, as I've said, the WILD Flavors business is going strong and having again probably a 20% increase in profits versus already a record year like it was 2015. So we are extremely proud of the business. Robert Moskow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from the line of Farha Aslam with Stephens, Inc. Your line is open.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

Hi. Thanks for taking the follow-up. It relates to sweeteners and starches. Do you think that the profits you're seeing in that business are sustainable going into next year? And could you discuss your shifting of the grind to higher value-added products? Is there any measures we can put against that? Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes, Farha. I wouldn't like to describe a number or talking about the number for 2017, but certainly, the dynamics at this point in time in the industry calls for a little bit of a continuation of the supply-demand fundamentals we see now. Certainly, exports to Mexico have been better than expected certainly. There has been a flattening of the secular decline of the U.S. domestic market, if you will. And what we continue to do, which we like and it bodes well for the future of the business is we continue to introduce new products. And some of these products are more at the developmental stage, if you will, but some you can see in the press releases that we continue to launch these products. At this point in time, I cannot give you top of my head something that you could look at to track the progression of that portfolio. But traditionally, five years ago, we look at trying to replace 10% of the grind, if you will, just in case hydrocolloids (53:25) were going to decline 2% per year, which is nothing happened. So we haven't needed to bring all those products, but we have all those developments. And as we're trying to sell up our capacity and bring products that got higher margins, we continue to introduce some of that. So, probably, we will get together with our businesses and we will try to come up with some kind of indication that at least you can track on the progress of that initiatives. We haven't done it, as I said, because of the strength of sweeteners and starches. We didn't feel that we needed to communicate anything of that. Ray G. Young - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: One thing to note, Farha, is we have purchased the remaining interest in Eaststarch. That is something different and that is an increment compared to where we were before. So that clearly is a positive. And as we indicated in prior calls, the Eaststarch acquisition was about $0.04 per share accretive to our overall earnings going forward.

Farha Aslam - Stephens, Inc.

Management

That's helpful. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

That was our last question. I turn the call back over to Juan Luciano for closing remarks. Juan Ricardo Luciano - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. Slide 15 notes some of the upcoming investor events where we will be participating. As always, please feel free to follow up with Mark if you have any other questions. Have a good day and thanks for your time and interest in ADM.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.