Olivier Jarrault
Chief Executive Officer
Yes. It’s a good question. I mean, you know, our 2018 was as you said a record earnings year for us. And we are – we think that the business, I mean, MC business is very well-positioned in 2019 to again perform and give a very good financial performance, right. But I think to answer your question its good to maybe look at what really happened in 2018 and how we see the market going in early 2019. So, we have in 2018, we have had that you noted strong sales. We -- I talked about improved plant utilization. We had as you know a pretty favorable set of – could I say, favorable currencies environment especially the Mexican pesos and the Brazilian money. And we had a fairly stable and favorable macro economic condition. We saw, if you look back what we talked about end of Q3 and again in this quarter we saw some increases in our publication rights, PMC sale, especially in the second half of 2018 across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific driven by some specific orders, especially in North America. We don’t know if those orders will repeat or not in 2019. In addition, we saw in 2018 which I noted at the end of the third quarter, we saw an increase in our tissue grades PMC sales especially in North America but also in Europe and Asia Pacific related to several specific new machines started. Once again, we’re going to see them at the same level in 2019, we still don’t know yet. So, as we enter in 2019 if I look at the overall macroeconomic data, right, we know that overall growth ended around 3.7% in 2018, estimated to continue in 2019, but definitely I think at a slower pace than 2018. However, there are significant, how could I say, uncertainty, there’s no secret that the Chinese economy is slowing down in 2019. It did slowdown in 2018 already. We have trade ongoing – trade negotiations between China and the U.S. We have the undefined nature of Brexit. We have all those political uncertainties in several countries in Europe, such as France with the gilet jaunes, Germany with a Chancellor [ph] and so on. Only South America is actually improving. So, those issues may have an impact on the global economy growth and our MC markets during 2019. However, its very important for me to note that we continue however to believe that during the next five years the paper and paperboard production will continue to increase as we recently published by RISI at about 1% to 1.5% per year, right, about 1.4% actually if I could read. So now if I look at strictly at the PMC market if you were going into 2019, let me share with you my view, right, our view on the PMC market globally. So, the U.S. PMC market which is our largest market seems to be more or less stable due to packaging and tissues grades consumption, increases, offsetting, more or less decline in publication grades consumption especially in newsprint. Switching to Canada, the Canadian PMC market will continue to shrink. We think that mainly due to continued publication grades consumption decline especially once again in newsprint. We switch to Brazil, the PMC market will be essentially flat we believe due to favorable economic conditions but with the slowdown of export of pulp grades to China. If you look at Europe, the European PMC market will continue to drop as a result of growth in the packaging grades consumption with machines conversions from printing and writing to packaging machines that however as I already mentioned last quarter consumed less PMC than publication machine. And then if you switch to Asia-Pacific, the Southeast Asia PMC market will be more or less stable with China PMC market we know that, it will keep on shrinking as a result of lower Chinese production of packaging grades due to environmental issues and what we’re hearing about ongoing restrictions on imported recycled fiber. So when you look at, if you put that into consideration, we think that PMC business is well-positioned to relatively keep the same level of sale and deliver good financial performance ahead of the range of 180 to 195, at 195, 205. As a result I would say, the combined effects of volume, a little bit of labor inflation or material inflations and as I just noted some product mix. So, we will – one thing for sure that we’ll deliver a good performance. We will continue, a very important point for us from the strategy standpoint we will continue our technical and service levels focus on packaging and tissue grades as we’re clearly in the leadership position, while of course continuing to manage the decrease in publication grades. Our product innovation and technology leadership and our focus on providing superior value to our customers, talking about cost effective solutions, I’m talking about top level – top service levels in terms of one-time deliver, in terms of lead time. I’m talking about our quality levels will be best to resist against market pressure and we’ll enable us to maintain our global leader position in the market, right. That’s our view for 2019.