Keith Harvey
Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead
Thanks, Neal. Before I share our outlook for 2025, I’d like to take a step back and talk for a moment about the business approach that has served us well for decades and how it’s setting us up for success in the future. First, we are focused on niche areas in our served markets that have very demanding applications and present significant barriers to entry. In those areas, we have built strong competitive positions through product differentiation and established longstanding relationships with blue-chip customers in those markets. In addition to ensuring quality, on-time delivery performance and continued strong customer satisfaction levels, maintaining our long-term customer relationships comes down to a strong understanding of our customers’ evolving needs. The mutual commitments we have made with our customers help to prioritize our business decisions. As demand for our products grows, our customers expect us to invest for additional capacities to meet their needs and, in turn, commit to us as a key long-term strategic supplier. These commitments support the investments we are continuing to make, such as upgrading our Warwick rolling mill to produce a greater mix of coated products to meet the needs of our Packaging customers and expanding capacity in our Trentwood rolling mill, which produces high-value-added flat-rolled products for Aerospace, High Strength and General Engineering applications. These are not small investments, so it has been crucial that we have a very good understanding of our customers’ needs, backed with mutually beneficial long-term agreements to secure the investments and ensure we deliver solid returns to our shareholders. Now let me explain how our business approach has influenced our investment decisions for 2025 and provide our outlook by end market application and on a consolidated basis. Starting on Slide 13, with Aero and High Strength, as I have mentioned in prior calls, commercial aircraft fundamentals remain very strong. Airline passenger miles and freight traffic continue to increase, driving the demand for new aircraft. Although our large airplane customers continue to work through supply chain challenges and recover from quality and labor issues that impacted deliveries in 2024, aircraft shipments are expected to increase in the high-single digits year-over-year in 2025. These OEMs hold years of aircraft backlog. In fact, the backlog is as strong as it’s ever been, with a high book-to-build ratio continuing into 2025. At Kaiser, we’re coming off a near-record year for conversion revenue in Aerospace and High Strength, even though we have been operating in a choppy environment, which has resulted in higher inventories at the OEMs. Despite strong demand, those inventories need to be worked through and will have a short-term impact on our shipments this year. So while our offerings in business jet, defense and space remain steady, we expect large commercial aircraft OEMs will enter a temporary phase of destocking that will lead to declines in our 2025 shipments and conversion revenue by approximately 5% to 7% year-over-year. Looking further out, we expect large commercial aircraft production rates to increase materially in 2026. This should align well with the additional 5% to 6% increase in capacity we expect to gain from our Phase 7 expansion at our Trentwood rolling mill, one of the very few rolling mills in the world qualified to supply heat-treated plate products for Aerospace and certain General Engineering applications. This investment is the start of our next major expansion at this facility and we are excited about the value creation potential it offers to our shareholders. This expansion is expected to be completed in the second half of 2025. Overall, the Aerospace and High Strength market will continue to provide a strong multiyear tailwind to our business. Let’s move on to Packaging on Slide 14. Members of our audience who have followed our story closely over the last several years since we re-entered the Packaging market are aware of the challenges we have faced along the way towards making our Warwick facility a major contributor to our business. I am proud of the tremendous work that has gotten us to where we are today and which will lead to a material improvement in our performance in 2025 and beyond. Our Warwick facility is one of a very select few domestic major aluminum rolling mills dedicated to the North American packaging industry. It is uniquely positioned as a long-term supplier of coated sheeted products into various beverage and food packaging applications, and we are investing to meet the increasing demand for these products. We are following the same playbook we have successfully executed in our other end market applications, where we focus on a very demanding niche portion of the market, deliver industry-leading products and services, and provide customers with a highly differentiated offering, all of which allow us to establish a strong market position and generate attractive returns for our investors. The investments we have made in Warwick are poised to transform our Packaging business and increase its margin profile. Our new roll coat line investment is in its final stages, both in terms of capital expenditures, as well as its readiness to deliver additional coated product. As we previously stated, the fourth roll coat line is a highly strategic project that we expect to convert approximately 25% of our existing capacity to higher margin value-added coated products. We are presently commissioning the new roll coat line and will begin customer qualification shortly thereafter. We expect to begin shipping coated product from this line in the second quarter of this year, with full production ramping through the remainder of the year. We’re also in the final stages of contract negotiations with customers for the remainder of the coating capacity this investment will generate and we now expect those multiyear agreements to be in place by the end of the first quarter this year. In anticipation of the completion of this project, in late 2024, we began to shift product availability towards a more coated-centric mix. This shift will result in total first half shipments being reduced temporarily as qualifications are completed and we begin shipments from the new line to customers. We expect shipments in the resulting higher-value mix to ramp slowly in the second quarter and then reach higher run rates in the second half of the year. As such, the benefit of our investment at Warwick will become more apparent in the second half of the year. To add context to that comment, for the full year, we expect shipments in Packaging to be up 3% to 5% year-over-year and expect conversion revenue to increase by 20% to 25% in 2025, with our numbers strongly skewed to the second half. As I have said before, we expect our investment in Warwick to yield 300 basis points to 400 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion to our consolidated business at full run rate. While we won’t guide quarter-to-quarter, we expect to see the full benefit run rate in the fourth quarter of this year and we believe it to be sustainable. We expect Packaging to be a meaningful driver of our long-term performance. The dynamics in the industry are extremely compelling. There is a solid long-term demand in both food and beverage packaging, a fair portion of which is being satisfied currently by imports. North American production is not currently sufficient to meet future demand, let alone current demand, particularly since some capacity has been reallocated towards other end markets. Including Automotive and Industrial. And we, of course, occupy a unique space in the market with our sole focus on Packaging at our Warwick facility. With strong secular growth expected in the 3% to 5% range annually, coupled with our longstanding customer relationships with multiyear contracts and a focus on higher margin value-added coated products, we are highly optimistic about our ability to drive strong results in our packaging end market applications. Turning to General Engineering on Slide 15, destocking appears to be over in long products. In fact, service center inventories for a certain of our long products are at lows not seen in over a decade. Shipments to start the year are encouraging and the ISM Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index moved into expansion territory in January for the first time since October of 2022, after 26 consecutive months of contraction. Plate product inventories remain elevated, but we expect these will even out by midyear. Our initial outlook for 2025 is for volumes and conversion revenue to be up 5% to 10% year-over-year. As noted, we expect Phase 7 to expand our capacity at Trentwood rolling mill and enable us to continue to meet the growing needs of our customers for General Engineering heat-treated plates. Finally, turning to Automotive on Slide 16, North American industry production is expected to be flat to down modestly in 2025 compared with last year. While we have some exposure to a softer demand environment, we do have favorable resets on various contracts in 2025. Also, although our shipments are likely to follow market production rates, we are skewed towards the SUV and light trucks segments, which should continue to outperform the general overall market. Again, we are focused on niche product categories with few competitors and a solid mix of higher value-added products. Due to these factors, we expect conversion revenue to be up 3% to 5% on 5% to 7% lower shipments over 2024, consistent with expected industry production. Turning to our summary outlook for 2025 on Slide 17, we expect our full year consolidated conversion revenue to increase 5% to 10% and EBITDA margin to be up 50 basis points to 100 basis points year-over-year. In line with the expected ramp of our new investments, we anticipate that we will see meaningful EBITDA and EBITDA margin uplift in the second half of the year with around 60% of full year EBITDA expected to come in in the second half prior to any changes we may make on accounting inventory valuations. Our assumptions include the market conditions and outlook described, the timing of our investments being brought online, and current market considerations on pricing and availability of scrap. Notably, our assumptions do not include potential impacts from recently announced tariffs, which we are evaluating across all of our businesses. Our balance sheet will also continue to strengthen as we move through the year, as will our steady pace of deleveraging and our shareholders will reap the additional benefits from the largest capital investment cycle in Kaiser’s recent history. Finally, I’m pleased to announce that we reached early agreement with our United Steelworkers represented employees at our newer cart alloy plant and Trentwood rolling mill, taking us to the end of the decade. Our existing contract expires in September, but as we have done many times in the past, our teams came together early on and worked on a mutually beneficial contract to ensure uninterrupted service to our customers. I’m extremely proud of the relationship we share with United Steelworkers and I want to thank everyone involved on another successful outcome for our employees, our company and for our customers. In summary, we expect to exit 2025 with strong tailwinds resulting from our strategic investments and strong market positions. As I said on our prior call, we expect 2025 to be a transformational year for the company and that expectation remains unchanged. I look forward to sharing our continued progress with you throughout the year. With that, I’ll now open the call to any questions you may have. Operator?