Bert A. Frost - Senior Vice President, Sales, Distribution, and Market Development
Management
Yeah. So Tony and I did, as Tony said in his remarks, spent a week, a little over 10 days in Asia, we went to some other places. And the consistent message coming out of China for us was one of their going through a change. And as we've said in the past, each year seems to be a different economic year coming out of China. Incentives are different, subsidies are different, taxes are different production levels are different. And today they're really struggling trying to find their way and trying different steps in order to maintain profitability. Last year that step was record exports. We just don't see that going forward. It's unsustainable. And what they were doing last year was just sending product to the ports. Yantai where we revisited last year, there was probably 2 million tons, 2.5 million tons sitting in bags at the port ready for export unsold. What we're seeing as a transition to more market-based decisions is we've heard from several traders and participants, that until they sell those tons, they're not going to move them to the port. A great economic decision, which we think will prevent some of the low prices that were coming in last year. So economics are driving a lot of decisions on how they look at efficiencies, how they look at investments, how they're looking at shipments and this year, first quarter and into the second quarter the domestic market was much more profitable than the export market. And you saw a lot of producers pull away from the export market. So I think it's maturing and their understanding what their options are. In 2011, 2012 and 2013 when urea was over $400, everybody made money. It was an easy decision to participate and produce. That's no longer going to be the case for several of the high cost producers, those anthracite coal producers. And we think rationalization will continue. On the environmental front, all I can tell you is, it's dirty. And we drove through several places and several cities and both, Tony and I were amazed. You see the pictures in the newspapers; it's different in real life. And you almost could cut through it and you could see maybe a half a mile away. You drive by rivers; you drive by piles of garbage, that can't continue. Just as we had rivers burn in the 1960s and 1970s in Wisconsin and Lake Erie, we had to make the same kind of changes that they're going to have to make. They're going to have to change their effluent streams, they're going to have to capture some of these gas streams, and that will all come in with investment and environmental awareness will take place.