David Graziosi
Analyst · Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.
Tim, good morning. It's a couple of things. On the tax side, understanding the late enactment of the US legislation, we have been planning leading up to that. So, we had positioned ourselves in such a way – with the team here to be able to realize the permanent benefit, right? You have the reduction in the tax rate. Given the late breaking news on that, as you know, as you prepare quarterly estimates, you don't have the ability to assume certain things, one of them being a change in legislation. So, with our normal process, our quarterly tax estimates, we filed and pay taxes on that basis. Having said that, several weeks later in the quarter, as the legislation was enacted, we executed the initiatives that Larry and I mentioned to accelerate, frankly, expenditures into 2017, so you have effectively a use of cash for the taxes, effectively prepaying 2018, but we also secured the permanent benefit in the reduction in the rate. So, as we move into 2018, that prepayment will be utilized against our 2018 cash tax obligations. So, as we said, if you combine the cash tax forecast for 2018 and the prepayment from last year, you can start use that as a base for run rate with the new legislation in place. So, I would think about it in the context of – we've talked about effective rate plus or minus in the 38% level. That's now 25% and our cash tax rate accordingly is reduced. The simple metric we would think about is anything over $500 million of EBITDA, you would apply 25% type of cash tax rate against that for modeling purposes. The balance of the cash flow for the year, we certainly were fortunate with favorable market conditions last year. Heavy sales, as you know. The way that the quarter broke, we had a number of cash usage in terms of receivables, payables et cetera. We expect, as we move into this year – Larry provided the guidance on sales flow this year that we're going to make – continue to make certain investments in terms of operating working capital to be able to meet market demand. So, we do and have assumed some level of working capital usage in 2018 to meet market demand conditions as they're currently laid out. Beyond that, and I would tell you overall, we feel pretty good about positioning relative to our broader capability to produce and meet market demand. So, the midpoint of, call it, 575 [ph], we're, obviously, going to work to do better on that. But that's at least our starting point this year, given the visibility that we have.