Terence P. Delaney - Vice President of Investor Relations and Planning
Analyst · Stanford Bernstein
Thank you Casey and thank you and good afternoon everyone and welcome to Sunoco's quarterly conference call, where we will be discussing the company's second quarter earnings that were reported last evening. With me today are Tom Hofmann, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Tom Harr, our Manager of Investor Relations. As part of today's call I would direct you to our website www.sunocoinc.com where we have posted a number of presentation slides. I'll be making reference to a number of them today to help highlight and supplement some of the commentary and statistics are included in our release. So if you haven't already done so I would suggest that you go there now and be ready to refer to them as I progress to my remarks. To start for purposes of facilitating a good discussion, I would refer you to the Safe Harbor statement referenced in slide 25, and as included in last night's earnings release. In the course of our remarks and the subsequent Q&A, we may be making some forward-looking statements. While we feel that the assumptions underlying these statements are reasonable, our company and our businesses are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which are highlighted there in slide 25. Now turning to the second quarter, Sunoco reported last night net income of $82 million which included two favorable special items. An $11 million after tax insurance recovery related to MTBE litigation and a $10 million settlement of this year's related to a state tax audit. Excluding these special items, Sunoco's net income as noted in slide 2 was $61 million or $0.52 a share. Our refining and supply segment earns $32 million, profitable and significantly improved from the $123 million loss in the first quarter of this year, despite a record rise in crude oil prices, continued weakness in gasoline demand and maintenance activity throughout our system. Our non-refining businesses contributed $47 million and the strength of logistics in Coke earnings as rising feedstock costs squeezed margins and profitability in retail marketing and chemicals. I'll come back to the non-refining business performance in a moment, but first let me address refining and supply, which as I said earned $32 million in the second quarter. As summarized in slide 4, while results were seasonally improved from the first quarter of this year, they none-the-less were far lower that the second quarter levels seen in the last years and those are Northeast and Mid-continent systems, realized margins were significantly lower than a year ago, particularly for gasoline and for bottom of the barrel products, due to the combination of the sharp rise in crude oil costs throughout the period and the impact of lower year-on-year gasoline demand. Operationally, crude unit utilization for the quarter was 84% of rated capacity and net refinery production was 76 million barrels, about 10 million barrels lower than what you would call our historical maximum levels due primarily to planned and unplanned maintenance activity. In those systems we also limited rate to time to optimize our crude and productions slate given the margin environment. Within this margin environment we were able to meaningfully increase our yield of distillate fuels versus other lower value products during the quarter. If you move now to slide 5, you will see our Northeast refining percentage yield of distillate was up with 37.8% in the second quarter versus 34.5% in the second quarter of last year, while the percentage yield of residual fuel decreased to a record level of 7.5% versus 9.1% in last year's second quarter. In the Mid-continent, two enlarged parts were another record quarter for jet fuel production at our Toledo refinery the distillate yield in the Mid-continent reached 40% of net production versus 31% in the second quarter of '07 while the yields for gasoline for which margins were significantly lower was pushed down to 42% versus 51% in the second quarter of last year. In the aggregate with the distillate values approximately $45 to $50 a barrel over residual fuels and $20 to $25 a barrel over gasoline, this yield shift related to these barrels which represented approximately 3 million barrels was significant contributor to refining and supply results that I would estimate as being about $75 million after-tax during the quarter, and what resulted in it... in what was otherwise a very difficult margin environment. If you move to slide6 to 9, we again lay out comparisons of the regional benchmark margins versus our realized refining margins. As a general comment, realizations in both systems were lower than the benchmarks due to higher cost of our actual crude purchases. The things like transportation, quality differentials and the timing impact of rising food prices, and lower margins on some of the bottom of barrel products not reflected in the benchmark margins. These variances were partial offset by the favorable changes in the production mix versus prior periods. The numbers are detailed in the slides, but let me make a few comments first about our crude cost. In the Northeast and there I think if you move to slide 6 and 7, you will see our actual crude acquisition cost were $5.81 a barrel more than the Dated Brent $1.25 above market we used. The primary reasons for the higher then benchmark costs were high marine transportation costs that were more $3 a barrel above the $1.25 in the market. And the timing impact of how we priced crude relative to a calendar day average benchmark which accounted for much of the rest of the delta. Related to that timing component, our foreign crude purchases are prized on five day like to when we take trade-off [ph] which means that the cost of crude purchases in late June are impacted by pricing into early July. In the second quarter of '08 the difference in pricing between the first five days of April and the first five days of July was about $40 a barrel; it's a very, very material difference versus a calendar average quarter benchmark. In the Mid-continent, as reflected on slides 8 and 9, our actual crude costs for the second quarter were approximately $3 a barrel, higher than the WTI plus $0.75 a barrel benchmark we used, mainly due to quality differentials; due to the continuing operating problems with up graders in Canada and strong demands for the Canadian Syncrude in crude. Prices relative to WTI again increased only approximately 60,000 barrels a day of Syncrude that we ran in Toledo during the quarter. Turning to the product side. Our second quarter margin realization versus benchmark crack spreads was negatively impacted particularly in the Mid-continent by the loan value of products whose pricing is not directly tied to crude oil and not in the benchmark, such as propane, residual fuel and a small amount of petroleum Coke produced in our Tulsa refinery. None-the-less, as discussed earlier, we did benefit in both the Northeast and Mid-continent from successful efforts to maximize the production of high margin distillate and minimize residual fuel and lower margin gasoline. Now let me to our non-refining businesses where the earnings contribution was $47 million in the quarter. If you turn to slide 10 and 11, I'll comment on each of these businesses individually. Retail marketing was breakeven in the quarter. Retail gasoline margins averaged $0.704 per gallon across the network, but we're significantly below breakeven for the first part of the quarter as wholesale prices rose through most of April and into May. Slide 10 shows that wholesale gasoline prices illustrated here by New York Harbor spot unleaded regular, rose by more than $1 a gallon from a low of $2.36 a gallon at the end of March to $3.40 a gallon on June 12, and this significantly squeezed retail gasoline margin during that period. In addition, we continued to see evidence of weaker gasoline demand in our network. Total gasoline sales line were about 3% lower than the second quarter of '07 with gasoline sales volumes at our company operated and dealer locations down similarly. In chemicals, we earned $3 million for the quarter, down from the $18 million earned in the first quarter of '08. As in retail marketing the rising crude oil prices led the sharp increases in feedstock costs for the business that proved difficult to fully pass on the customers. As illustrated in slide 10, prices for refinery grade propylene which is a primary market indicator of the feedstock cost for our polypropylene business and along with benzene is also a key feedstock for our phenol business, rose approximately $0.16 per pound from March to June with increases every month. Volumes were limited during the quarter due to combination of plant maintenance, feedstock availability constraint and continued weak economic conditions. If you now turn to slide 11, logistics in Coke again made very strong contributions. Logistics earned $21 million driven by another record quarter for Sunoco Logistics Partner LP. I think their earnings announcements in conference call a few weeks ago provided a good detailed discussion of its quarterly performance which was led again by another strong quarter in the Western Pipeline System. Sunoco Logistics Partners also announced an additional $0.04 per unit increase to its quarterly distribution with this increase the annualize cash flow to Sunoco from its GP and LP interest in Sunoco Logistics is now approximately $80 million annually. Coke, another good story earned $23 million for the quarter again reflecting a higher earnings base versus prior years from which we expect continued growth. Some updates on the growth efforts. First, the construction of our second Coke plant in Haverhill Ohio is now complete and we are in the start up phase for that facility, with full production rates expected by the fourth quarter and full power generation by year end. Regarding our other announced projects, instruction on the Granite City Illinois facility continues on schedule for targeted start up by the end of 2009 and we are in the final stages of permitting in Middletown Ohio, where we hope to begin construction later this year for a plant there. With respect to earnings guidance for the second... for 2008 with the completion of the second Haverhill project and the impact of higher coal prices for our June operations in the second half, we now expect the Coke business to earn approximately $110 to $115 million for full year 2008. As we get closer to the end of this year, we will have a better idea of our contracted coal prices for next year and we'll provide an update to our expected 2009 earnings for Sunoco at that time. Finishing out on non-refining discussion, corporate expenses were $11 million after-tax and net financing expenses were $7 million after-tax in the quarter. Corporate expenses reflect lower accruals for performance based incentive compensation, while financing expenses were up from the first quarter of this year primarily due to lower interest income. If we move now to the outlook, so far in the third quarter of '08 despite a decline in crude oil prices, refining margins and particularly gasoline margins have continued to be weak. I will say our operational focus for the third quarter will be to expand our slate light-sweet crude oil feed stocks to include a greater number of grades at traded prices lower than some of the West African crude's we typically purchased. As you can see if you look slide 13, we plan to significantly reduce purchases of Nigerian source crude in the third quarter to approximately 90,000 barrels a day versus historical levels of over 300,000 barrels a day. At the same time we will continue our efforts to optimize our product yield to maximize distillate production. In conjunction with this, while we have no major plant maintenance schedule for the balance of the year, we expect the crude utilization across our system will reflect economic run cuts consistent with the current challenging market conditions. In our non-refining businesses for the third quarter, margins in retail marketing have improved significantly in July and into August with a rapid decline in wholesale prices. These start costing chemicals, which tend to lag crude price changes should also moderate some later in the quarter. Coke and logistics should be comparable to second quarter levels. Financially, the balance sheet remains sound, as of June 30th, our net debt to capital ratio was 37% with approximately $200 million of cash on hand and $1.1 billion of unused revolver capacity, providing the flexibility to meet our requirements and execute our capital program for 2008. We expect our 2008 capital spending to be approximately $1.4 billion excluding any acquisitions by Sunoco or Sunoco Logistics, but including approximately $300 million of Sun-Coke Energy spending on its various growth projects. One last item of interests, we are continuing to evaluate our options with respect to the Tulsa refinery, including our potential sale, while we have nothing definitive to report at this time. We would expect this process and evaluation to be concluded later this year. So with that, I would now ask the moderator to open up the lines for any questions you might have. Question And Answer