John Sims
Analyst · Bank of America. Please state your question
Thank you Jean-Michel. I'm on slide nine. We generated $170 million in adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter well ahead of our outlook of $140 million to $150 million. We improved price and mix by $41 million, which was greater than our outlook because prices rose faster and at a greater rate in North America than what we had projected. Volume improved by $14 million due to strong seasonal demand in Latin America. In all regions, we had more orders than we could ship. Operations and costs were solid and improved by $2 million. This does include a favorable $10 million LIFO adjustment in North America, as well as a favorable $7 million in overhead benefits and environmental credits in Europe, which we had not included in our outlook. As Jean-Michel mentioned we successfully conducted two significant planned maintenance outages in Europe and in North America, and spent $24 million more on outages than we did in the third quarter. Input and transportation costs increased by $39 million, with rising costs for fiber energy, chemicals and transportation across all regions. Our solid performance in this quarter is a reflection of our talented and engaged regional teams. We've worked hard to meet customer needs and managed through significant global supply chain and pandemic challenges. Let's take a look at our regional results in Slide 10. Each of our regions performed well in the quarter demonstrating the strength of our low cost positions in our iconic brands. Nearly two- thirds of our earnings were outside of North America. Europe earned $27 million with a 9% EBITDA margin. Latin America earned $81 million with a 35% margin and North America earned 62% -- $62 million with a 13% margin. We conducted an extensive 10 year maintenance outage at our site out mill and a coal mill outage in Eastover, which is reflected in our European in North America EBITDA margins. If we had normalized the maintenance outages expenses over a year, Europe EBITDA margin margins would have been 12% and North America would have been 15%. Our strong earnings the margins reflect the realization of price increases. Volume improved in Europe and Latin America and remained strong in North America. Our commercial teams focused on strengthening our customer value proposition and their successful efforts are reflected in these results. The appendix contains additional details on our regional performance. Let's turn to Slide 11 to discuss uncoated freesheet industry conditions around the world. Global uncoated freesheet industry conditions continued to improve in the fourth quarter as they did throughout 2021 and remain quite favorable as we enter 2022. Uncoated freesheet demand continues to improve in all three regions. While industry supply is shrinking in Europe and North America, as competitors have shut down machine and converted capacity. Input and transportation costs remain elevated, and we expect costs for fiber chemicals and transportations continued to increase. However, our selling prices increased in the fourth quarter and will continue to increase in the first quarter as realized higher price increases throughout the quarter. Let's move to Slide 12 and review our first quarter outlook. In the first quarter, we expect to deliver an adjusted EBITDA of $180 million to $190 million and adjusted operating earnings per share of $1.70 to $1.90. We project price and mix to improve by $35 million to $40 million as we continue to realize price increases already communicated to our customers in all regions. We expect volume to decrease by $13 million to $18 million, reflecting seasonally weaker volume in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Typically the fourth quarter is our seasonally strongest quarter, is our seasonally weakest for shipments. We expect operations and cost improve by $18 million to $20 million. Fourth quarter results included $7 million in favorable adjustments in Europe and a $10 million favorable LIFO adjustment in North America that won't repeat in the first quarter. We expect input and transportation costs to increase by $18 million to 23 million, which is about half the improvement in price and mix. These increases will be driven by higher costs for fiber chemicals and transportation. We project maintenance outage expense to decrease by $31 million as we conduct fewer outages this quarter. Let's turn to Slide 13 for some additional 2022 guidance. So we have revised some of our 2022 selected financial guidance. We increased the outlook for capital spending by $18 million to fund high return and short payback costs without some projects. For example, will fund a wood yard productivity project in Brazil that will cost less than $3 million, but provide an expected internal rate of return of nearly 50%. We will also fund a project at our Eastover mill to upgrade the stock pump. That will cost a little more than a million and offer an expected IRR of nearly 40%. We have many other high return projects to further improve our low cost assets. And we'll look to fund these in the future. We have also given guidance on a projected income tax rate. U.S. tax regulations that changed in January, and we may no longer be able to claim the foreign tax credits for Brazilian earnings. We expect this change to increase our 2022 tax rate to 32% to 34%. I would also like to update you on the Svetogorsk project. In December our Board of Directors approved $15 million in capital spending for engineering work for the proposed new recovery boiler, which will replaced the two recovery boilers that are approaching end of life at our Svetogorsk mill. We expect that this new recovery boiler to reduce costs and improve reliability and increase production at this very low cost Russian mill. Let's turn to Slide 14 to discuss free cash flow. We remain focused on generating cash. We generated strong free cash flow in the fourth quarter, $162 million and we expect to drive strong cash flow in 2022. We intend to use cash generated from earnings, including some of the $180 million cash on hand at the beginning of the year to fund $107 million of capital spending. The $77 million time Georgetown and Riverdale inventory payments to International Paper and $72 million of one time and transition costs. We also intend to continue debt reduction. We're doing all this, positioning the company to begin returning cash to shareowners later this year. I will conclude my comments on Slide 15 with a review of our current debt structure. We launched Sylvamo with just over $1.5 billion in gross debt. We ended the third quarter at 2.8 times gross debt to adjusted EBITDA. And we ended the fourth quarter at 2.4 times gross debt to adjusted EBITDA. As we mentioned earlier, we paid down debt by $124 million in the quarter, in the fourth quarter, and we increased our cash position by $48 million. We also swapped $400 million of the floating rate debt for fixed rate. As you can see from the table, we don't have any significant debt maturities until 2027. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Jean-Michel.
Jean-Michel Ribiéras: Thanks, John. I'm on Slide 16. We are pleased with our performance in our first quarter as a standalone company. We are taking advantage of opportunities to enhance value for employees, customers and shareowners. Our major opportunity is capital allocation. We are now able to use the cash we generate to reinvest in our assets, and return cash to shareholders. Focus is another opportunity. We are now able to serve the best interest of our customer globally, and concentrate on being the supplier that customers value the most. We're also working to simplify our strategy and we will create long term value through our talented teams, the world's most iconic paper brands, and more customers in attractive locations. Most importantly, we are building the Sylvamo culture, one that is more agile, faster to act and with a more entrepreneurial spirit across our teams. As we have just become an independent company, our strategy would continue to further evolve with a commitment to increase value for all of our stakeholders. I'll wrapped up our prepared remarks on Slide 17. We are well positioned for continued success. Our promotion and operational excellence strategy and tactics will enable us to generate strong earnings and significant free cash flow. We will execute our plans and will increase capital spending to strengthen our low cost positions. We will continue to strengthen our balance sheet and prepare to begin returning cash to shareholders. In the near future we plan to initiate discussions with our Board of Directors. I could not be prouder of our employees' performance throughout 2021. We appreciate their commitment to working safely and taking care of customers. We are passionate about our employees, our customers and our shareowners. Sylvamo is off to a great start. We're committed to entrepreneurship and are confident in ability to drive strong results in 2022. With that, I will turn the call back to Hans.