Mike Bless
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. David, your line is open
Thanks, Pete. Thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon. We appreciate your time. As always, if we could just flip to Page 3 please, I will take you through a quick rundown of the last couple of months. At first, the plan to continue to operate without any interruption, most importantly, the safety performance has been really good across the whole company during the last couple of months and we are really pleased and proud of this achievement. Running these plants safely and sustainably is always more challenging in an environment that’s different than people are accustomed to. Even the daily scheduling and execution of the work needs to be done consistent with our health and safety protocols and human nature says that simply people are at risk of focusing on too many other things versus the job at hand in a complex environment like we are dealing with today. All that means is that we will continue to remain vigilant everyday and the bottom line, with the health environment at all the locations remains under control. That said, we have got no intention at all to throttle back in the foreseeable future on any of the protocols we put in place back in March and April. And in fact, as you would expect, we are prepared at any time to tighten things up as the public health situation near any of our operations dictates. In just a couple of minutes, Pete is going to give you some detail on the industry balance pricing and other fundamentals, but let me just make a couple of quick comments now on what we are seeing directly on the ground. Our end-markets in the U.S. have continued to improve over the summer and into the fall. Most of the sectors are near or even above their levels of January and February, obviously before the impact of the health crisis. For example, the automotive and durable goods and machinery markets have fully recovered. This is all consistent with the data that you have seen more broadly. Packaging and consumer sectors have remained quite strong. Construction, on the other hand, has a bit further to go with residential quite strong and relatively weaker activity on the commercial side. In Europe, we are seeing more or less the same trends yet as you have seen the general recovery is behind that of the U.S. It goes without saying that all of this is at risk to development on the public health situation over the coming months. Looking at our own specific customers, we see similar trends. If you take our six largest value-adding product customers, for example, that group has broad exposure to automotive, to construction, to communications amongst other sectors. As we previously told you, the daily sales rate for that group of customers was down 35% in Q2 over Q1. In Q3, it was up 45% over Q2. And thus far, order rates for October and November are up a further 10% versus Q3. So we’re now moving at a rate that’s up 60% over the Q2 low and actually up 5% over the first quarter. You obviously had some degradation towards the end of the first quarter as the pandemic began to have effect. Moving along, our third quarter financial performance came in as we expected as we forecast the lower realized metal prices, coupled with higher seasonal power prices drove the vast majority of the drop in quarter-to-quarter EBITDA. As you well know, our sales contracts are priced on a two to three-month lag and in that context, the realized cash LME during the quarter was $1,550 per ton. As I said, seasonal power prices were higher as usual over the summer. More than the rest of the decline in EBITDA came from our decision to start catching up on the relining of cells at the Kentucky plants. As you’ll recall, we ceased all relining activity at these plants during the first few months of the pandemic and a variety of other items taken all together actually improved profit a bit. The financial picture, of course, is much stronger at current commodity prices, and Craig will go into detail on all of this in just a couple of minutes. Let me just make some remarks about Mt. Holly. You have obviously seen the warn notice we were regrettably fourth to issued last week. We were shocked to see the South Carolina Court’s ruling in the litigation between the city of Goose Creek and Santee Cooper. We talked to you about this, of course, over the year. First, our analysis indicated that Goose Creek had every right under both federal and state law to form a utility and to serve Mt. Holly. And then FERC agreed fully in its order issued in August, and importantly, the determination in its order said it was made with reference to both federal and state law. Lastly, the actual hearing in front of the judge strongly suggested, in our opinion, that Goose Creek’s position with the correct one. When the court’s order was finally issued 2 weeks ago, it said regrettably, the opposite. The city has asked the judge to reconsider the ruling, and if that’s not granted, Goose Creek has informed us that they plan to appeal. The city has told us they will ask the court to move quickly, but the appeal process would likely take at least a year to fully play out. Just to go back and most of you that have been following the company know all this, but as a reminder under the arrangements we have had over the last couple of years, Mt. Holly has been buying 75% of its electric power requirements from the competitive wholesale market and 25% from Santee Cooper’s on resources. Mt. Holly also paid Santee Cooper transmission fees for the power brought in from the third parties. The third-party rate for the 75% of the plants power requirement is very competitive, as we have said. It’s frankly just on par with what we pay at the Kentucky plants. The 25% we buy from Santee Cooper is regrettably the killer; it comes at 2x the delivered price of the third-party power and, thus, the weighted average price is simply uncompetitive. The evidence that the market price is competitive can easily be seen in the status of the Kentucky plants. As you know, we’ve doubled the capacity of Hawesville and added filling capacity at Sebree during the last two years; total investment of over $100 billion. And at 100% market power and at full capacity, Mt. Holly’s cost structure and revenue profile would be actually superior to that of the Kentucky plants. Regrettably, the opposite, of course, is true at the current blended power price. Just to give you a sense, Mt. Holly’s year-to-date 9-month EBITDA has been a $10 million loss and the plants will also be unprofitable in the fourth quarter. Looking at next year, importantly, the loss would be worse. On the 1 year, the average metal price, of course, should be higher, at least if you look at today’s forward prices, but this is much more than overcome by the requirement to begin relining cells even to maintain production at 50% of capacity. As you know, due to the uncompetitive power price, we haven’t relined any cells at Mt. Holly for over four years. Over the last several weeks, we have been in direct discussions with Santee Cooper and we are also speaking with all the relevant constituencies, including local, state and federal authorities. We are really hopeful now that all the parties can come together and find a common sensible solution that’s there at all. First and foremost, this includes no harm done to any other Santee Cooper customer. At stake here are 300 direct jobs and 600 to 700 additional jobs currently supported by the plant, along with half a billion of annual economic activity in South Carolina. That’s with the plant at current hot capacity. So achievement of that competitive price would allow us to restart the second potline and rebuild alignments and continuously operating, which, as I said, needs a rebuild. We would not only preserve the current jobs, but of course, it would add a further 300 jobs and an additional 600 to 700 support jobs, and then you’d get to realize the full billion dollar annual economic impact in South Carolina. It’s obviously a complex situation, but one that can truly be solved overnight with a rational logical approach. And with that, I will turn it back to Pete.