John Sims
Analyst · BoA Securities. You may begin.
Yes. Thank you, George. And I think when we -- our focus is as we keep saying is to generate cash. And so, we want to be very judicious in the capital that we spend, but also the engine of our cash is our low-cost assets, as well as our customer relationships and our people, of course, but this is a key focus. Now if you look at the average of our capital when we do this, we'd really go back to pre-2016, because it was '16, after that '17, '18, '19, capital was pulled back. And we would say that we -- that was underinvested in the paper business -- in our business during that time period. Both in the forest, we saw it down in Brazil, and also in our facilities. But if you look at the period prior to 2016, we're spending essentially pretty much on average what we've spent back then on per facility basis, with the exception of inflation. You have to -- in 2016 dollars, you have to inflate it and there was quite a bit of inflation, the last two years that we've seen in the maintenance spending. So, I guess the short answer to your question is, yes, I think the range that we talked about earlier the $175 million to $190 million for maintenance, regulatory and forestry is probably -- what we feel is the appropriate number going forward. We didn't mention this, but -- so I'm going to -- George, I'm going take a little extra time. But I think it's good to point out why we are increasing spending in forestry down in Brazil. So, we are increasing by 10%. And it's really because of what I said earlier, back in 2019, '20 and '21, we underinvested in our forestry in Brazil. And then, we also -- which means that we typically have 80% of our wood that we consume is our own forest, and 20%, we have to go out in much more expensive outside market to get the wood, because we underinvested. Not only that, but we also -- there were forest fires. There was some insect damage. We are now probably approaching 70%, and that actually 10% is a big deal from a cost perspective for us. And so, we're going to be investing more in the forestry to replant land that we have, that we own or through our partnerships that we've been -- we hadn't been adequately sustaining, and so we're spending that to go forward. But again, because of the rotations of the wood, six to seven years, we really won't see the benefit of that until out in the future, but that's the other reason why we're increasing our spending.