Fay West
Analyst · Clarksons Platou Securities. Please go ahead your line is open
Thanks Mike. Good morning everyone. Turning to slide four. As you can see, fourth quarter and full year EPS were $2.05 per share and $1.88 per share respectively and reflect the impact of recent tax reform. I’ll have more to say about this and other EPS impacts in a few slides, but the revaluation of our deferred tax items resulted in an income tax benefit attributable to SXC of approximately $125 million in the fourth quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $69.5 million. In 2017, CMT achieved record volumes, which resulted in the recognition of higher revenues throughout the year. Therefore, our deferred revenue recognition on take or pay volume shortfalls in the fourth quarter of 2017 was lower than the fourth quarter of 2016. Excluding these deferred revenue timing impacts, fourth quarter results were $7.3 million higher versus fourth quarter of 2016. On a full year basis, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of $234.7 million, which was at the very top end of our 2017 guidance range, and up significantly compared to 2016. Turning to slide five and looking at key tax reform items and the anticipated impact to SunCoke. On the left hand side of this chart, you can see that we've listed a few key provisions from the new tax code and the expected impact to SunCoke. Given that this legislation was enacted during 2017, we were required to revalue all U.S. deferred income tax assets and liabilities on our balance sheet from the previous corporate tax rate of 35% to the new tax rate of 21%. Based on the new 21% corporate tax rate, the revaluation of SXC’s deferred tax items resulted in a fourth quarter income tax benefit attributable to SXC of approximately $125 million. On the right side of the slide, you can see our projection of the expected average annual cash tax benefits to SXC, which is based on currently available information and management's assumption for future years. We do not anticipate a meaningful difference in our average cash taxes in the near term. This is primarily due to the expected timing of the utilization of tax credit. Prior to the changes in tax law, we were expecting to utilize the majority of our tax credits by the end of 2019. We now expect those tax benefits to extend beyond 2019, which offset the benefit of a lower corporate tax rate. However, in 2020 through 2027, we anticipate a meaningful cash tax benefit of approximately $15 million annually. This is driven primarily by the corporate rate cuts. Turning now to slide six and looking at our EPS loss for the quarter and the full year. Looking first at the quarter, Q4 2017 EPS of $2.05 per share was up significantly and was driven primarily by the $125 million income tax benefit attributable to SXC that I just discussed. This benefited EPS by $1.91 per share. You can also see that the $0.10 quarterly impact related to the timing of deferred revenue recognition was partially offset by improved results in Q4 of 2017. Full year EPS of $1.88 per share also includes the favorable impact of tax reform, as well as $0.17 benefit from higher adjusted EBITDA and the absence of impacts related to our 2016 coal mining divestiture. Partially offsetting these benefits were the impacts from our debt extinguishment activities in both 2016 and 2017. 2016 included $25 million gain from repurchasing debt at a significant discount to par, whereas 2017 includes the impact from our refinancing activities, including the write off of debt issuance cost. Turning now to our adjusted EBITDA performance on slide seven. Fourth quarter 2017 adjusted EBITDA was $69.5 million compared to $77.3 million in Q4 of 2016. Indiana Harbor, which continues its oven rebuild initiatives, was down $0.9 million when compared to 2016 due to an increase in O&M costs, which were offset partially by improved production from rebuild ovens. Excluding Indiana Harbor, the remainder of our coke assets were up slightly in 2017. Turning to our Logistics segment. Excluding the timing impact of our deferred revenue recognition, you can see that we were up nearly $5 million versus Q4 of 2016. This increase was driven largely by a significant increase in base volumes in the quarter and a slightly higher per ton rate on our base take or pay volumes in 2017. KRT was down $2.4 million due to lower volumes, which was driven by lower customer demand. When you add the $3 million benefit from our corporate and other segment, you can see that our fourth quarter 2017 results were up $7.3 million when excluding deferred revenue. Lastly, we had $15.1 million of lower deferred revenue recognized in Q4 2017 compared with Q4 2016. As a reminder, deferred revenue relates to take or pay shortfalls at our Convent facility and is recognized in adjusted EBITDA when it is recorded into GAAP revenue, typically at the end of each year. Because CMT posted record volumes in 2017, we incurred less take or pay volume shortfalls throughout the year, and instead recognized higher GAAP revenue and EBITDA on actual volumes during the year. This led to a lower revenue true up at the end of 2017 compared with 2016. Flipping to our full year adjusted EBITDA bridge on slide eight. We see that full year 2017 adjusted EBITDA was $234.7 million, up nearly $18 million or more than 8% compared to $217 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2016. Looking across our entire coke business, we were down slightly about 1.5%. Breaking that down further, Indiana Harbor was down $15.4 million compared with 2016, due mostly to two factors; first, we incurred higher O&M due to a greater number of oven rebuild taking place in 2017 compared with 2016; we also incurred additional cost to apply lessons learned to our original 2015 rebuild. These additional costs were contemplated in our 2017 guidance but nonetheless, impacted results when compared with 2016. The second impact to our 2017 Indiana Harbor results was production. As part of our plan, we anticipated lower production in 2017 as we rebuilt 20 more ovens this year than we did in 2016. As Mike mentioned, we also spent a bit of additional time in the fourth quarter completing the remainder of our 2017 oven rebuilds, which was not contemplated in our original guidance. This impacted volumes as we were not able to reap the increased productivity of our newly built ovens for as long as we had originally anticipated. Finally, in our 2017 business plan, we contemplated a certain degradation rate across our non-rebuild ovens. But in November and December, we experienced higher than expected degradation across our A battery and B battery ovens. Moving on, the rest of our coke making fleet was up $12.4 million or nearly 6% versus 2016. About $8 million of this increase was due to favorable operating performance. Yield outperformance contributed about $6.1 million of this increase and $2 million of the increase was from our Brazil Coke operation, which had a record production year. Also contributing to the year-over-year increase were $4.4 million of one-time benefits. Logistics was up $6.9 million based on significant improvement in CMT base volumes and a higher rate per ton. Also contributing to the increase was $1 million of incremental new business. Finally, our corporate and other segment was favorable by $13.8 million, which included $3.3 million benefit from our cost saving initiatives. Also contributing to the year-over-year favorability was the impact of coal mining operations, which were disclosed off in April 2016. Current year results for legacy coal were in line with expectations. All-in-all, we ended the year with adjusted EBITDA of $234.7 million. Turning to our domestic coke results on slide nine. As you can see from the chart, fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $39.6 million and adjusted EBITDA per ton was $41. Both metrics were up compared to the fourth quarter of 2016. On a full year basis, domestic coke adjusted EBITDA of $188.9 million and adjusted EBITDA per ton of $49 were both up at the top end of our guidance ranges. These figures include all of our domestic operations, including the EBITDA impact of Indiana Harbor results. Moving to the next slide. Our Logistics business generated $35.1 million of adjusted EBITDA during the fourth quarter. CMT contributed $29.5 million on significantly higher volume. We’ve seen continued stabilization of coal transloading market here in the U.S. with current API to pricing supporting healthy export margins. However, our KRT volumes were lower in the fourth quarter due to lower customer demand. On a full year basis, logistics delivered adjusted EBITDA of $70.8 million, up $6.9 million or nearly 11% from 2016. This improvement was due to record CMT volumes, the highest ever recorded at this facility, which also included new business, such as aggregates and Pet Coke. As we look at our capital allocation priorities on slide 11. During the year, we purchased 2.9 million SXCP units, which generated $2.3 million of additional cash for SXC in 2017. We also expect that these units will generate an additional $1.7 million of cash with the payment of SXCP’s recently declared fourth quarter distribution. In 2017, we also optimized our consolidated balance sheet by refinancing SXCP’s notes repaying SXC’s remaining notes outstanding and restructuring both revolvers. These actions meaningfully extended our debt maturities and provide us with significant flexibility moving forward, to execute our growth and capital allocation priorities. Turning to our capital deployment on slide 12. As you can see, we generated solid operating cash flow above our revised post debt refinancing guidance range of 128 to 143, which was driven by the strong operating performance I just highlighted. During the year, we also receive the final portion of our cash consideration from the 2016 redemption of our Brazil Coke preferred equity interest. CapEx of $75.6 million during the year was slightly below our $80 million guidance, and included about $29 million related to our Indiana Harbor oven rebuild initiative and $19 million related to our Granite City gas sharing project. As I just discussed, we repurchased 2.9 million units for $49 million in total and also declared four quarters of SXCP distributions during the year. All-in-all, we ended 2017 with a cash balance of $120 million and strong liquidity of nearly $350 million and our consolidated cash -- consolidated leverage was just below 3.8 times. I'll now hand the call back to Mike to discuss our 2018 outlook.