Earnings Labs

Tronox Holdings plc (TROX)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Sat, Feb 28, 2015

$9.76

-3.80%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Tronox Limited Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host Mr. Brennen Arndt, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Arndt, you may now begin.

Brennen Arndt

Management

Thank you, Bridget. Thank you and welcome everyone, to Tronox Limited's Fourth Quarter 2014 Conference Call and Webcast. With me today are Tom Casey, Chairman and CEO, and Kathy Harper, Senior Vice President and CFO. Tom will review our fourth quarter performance and provide an in depth discussion of the Alkali Chemicals acquisition we announced earlier this month. Kathy will report on our financial position as well as the financing of the Alkali acquisition. Tom will conclude our call with summary comments and we'll be pleased to then address your questions. We'll be using slides today as we move through the presentation. Those of you listening by Internet broadcast through our website should already have them. And for those of you listening by telephone, if you haven't already done so, you can access them on our website rather at tronox.com. Let me begin with a reminder that our discussion today will include certain statements that are forward-looking and subject to various risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the specific factors summarized in our 2014 Form 10-K, and other SEC filings. This information represents our best judgment based on today's information. However actual results may vary based on these risks and uncertainties. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. During the conference call, we will refer to certain non-U.S. GAAP financial terms that we use in the management of our business, including EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings of per diluted share. EBITDA represents net income before net interest expense, income tax and depreciation, depletion and amortization expense. Adjusted EBITDA represents EBITDA as further adjusted for non-cash, unusual and non-recurring items. Adjusted earnings per diluted share represent, EPS adjusted for unusual or non-recurring items on a fully diluted basis. A reconciliation is provided in our earnings release. One final comment, before we move into a review of the fourth quarter performance I want to address the timing of our earnings release and this morning's conference call. Their timing and that of our 10-K filing were essentially driven by three factors. Firstly, the time and resources during the last two months, we dedicated to the acquisition of Alkali Chemicals. Secondly, our time and resources focused on arranging the financing of that acquisition. And thirdly the timing of our external auditor sign off and issuance of their 2014 report. You may recall last May at our AGM we proposed the change in auditors to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was approved by our shareholders. PWC began our audit in May of last year and essentially did 12 months of work in seven. We want to thank them for their robust work in a very shorten time period in their first year of auditing Tronox. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Tom Casey for a review of our operating and financing performance.

Tom Casey

Management

Thanks Brennen and thank all of you on the call for your interest in Tronox. Our fourth quarter results came in essentially as we had expected. They reflected normal seasonally lighter demand and an industry where selling process in both pigment and mineral sands remain at trough levels. Despite these trough conditions however, in the fourth quarter we delivered $81 million of adjusted EBITDA on revenue of $400 million for a 20% EBITDA margin. For the full year 2014 we delivered $353 million of adjusted EBITDA on revenue of $1.737 billion, also producing a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin. This level of performance we believe continues to reflect the benefit of vertical integration and our resulting ability to deliver a higher level of adjusted EBITDA per metric ton of pigment sold than our non-integrated peers. And this performance was achieved before we received the revenue and almost a 100% margin from the sale of 30,000 metric tons of natural rutile and 60,000 metric tons of zircon that we will begin to sell when the Fairbreeze mine begin production. That will be incremental sales and incremental revenue and margin and so we're confident that, that will help us drive recovery at the second half of '15 or more fully in the first part of '16 when Fairbreeze is up and fully operational. In pigment, our revenue was $264 million and our adjusted EBITDA was $46 million, a $37 million improvement over the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA in the pigment sector was 17%. Lower feedstock selling prices contributed to greater margins in our pigment business and this will continue to happen as long as the pigment made from lower price feedstock is sold which is going to be five or six months after we buy that feedstock. In mineral sands, adjusted EBITDA margin…

Katherine Harper

Management

Thanks Tom. I’ll be reviewing -- begin with a review of the corporate and other segments and then move to major line items in our financial statement. Revenue in Corporate and other, which includes our electrolytic operations, was $30 million, compared to $31 million in the year-ago quarter. Corporate and other loss from operations of $20 million in the quarter, which has $15 million loss from operations in the prior year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in corporate and other was negative $23 million, which is principally related to corporate operations. Selling, general and administrative expenses for the Company in the fourth quarter were $54 million versus $50 million in the prior year quarter. Interest and debt expense net was $32 million versus $36 million in the year-ago quarter. We re-priced in this range. On December 31, 2014, gross consolidated debt was $2.4 billion and debt net of cash was $1.114 billion. For the quarter, capital expenditures were $81 million, and depreciation, depletion and amortization was $70 million. For the full year capital expenditures were $187 million, depreciation, depletion and amortization were $295 million. As you may have seen in our Form 10-K, our external auditors provided us with a clean opinion relating to our financial statements for 2014. However, management identified material weaknesses with respect with our internal control environment. Controls over information and communication with our South African Operations were not effective, which led to inadequate control over our calculation for crude royalty expense relating to our mining operations in Namakwa, South Africa. This resulted in adjustments to royalty expense and depreciation, depletion and amortization expense. Additionally, controls over logical access and segregation of duties within our SAP systems were inadequate at December 31. This did not result in any adjustments to our financial statements and related disclosure. We have…

Tom Casey

Management

Thanks very much, Kathy. So just to summarize before we open up for questions, the fourth quarter is a quarter that came in pretty much as we expected and reflect some trough conditions, seasonally lower volumes and as a result, those factors roll through the entire income statement. For us, we take note of the fact that in the fourth quarter we delivered $81 million of adjusted EBITDA and $400 million working at a 20% EBITDA margin. We think that this – and the same numbers are true for full year basis, as I mentioned $353 million on a $1.7 billion revenue also for 20% margins and we think this positions us extremely favorably relative to our competitors in the market. And as I mentioned also it comes before $90 million of revenue and almost that much of margin which will come when we open up Fairbreeze without a lot of extra effort on our part, just simply because they are co-products of the ilmenite that we'll be mining there. The Alkali Chemical acquisitions to summarize, we expect to close it this quarter. We expect it to be significantly accretive to earnings and free cash flow right from the closing. We are very excited about this business. We think it will substantially add to our financial strength and the stability of our financial results and particularly starting with $0.50 earnings per share accretion and $130 million of incremental operating cash flow. Kathy has already reviewed the financing structure. So we're confident that, that is under control and in hand. And again to repeat that our board has approved the 11 straight quarterly $0.25 dividend payable next month. So, with that operator, we'd be happy to answer any questions that anybody may have.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from John Roberts from UBS. Your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute your phone.

Tom Casey

Management

Operator, I can't hear anything.

Operator

Operator

Yes, it looks like he may have been disconnected. Our next question comes from Des Kilalea with RBC. Your line is open.

Des Kilalea

Analyst · RBC. Your line is open.

A couple of questions, but first looking at pigment, looking at just three different producing operations, are you finding material differences in sales prices between the U.S. Holland and Australia? And then also, looking at the zircon that you're going to be getting from Fairbreeze, are you currently selling all your zircon from the macro product stream right now? And are you taking material, the [indiscernible] stuff still across the country to KZN?

Tom Casey

Management

Hi Des, okay. There are three questions. Are there different prices in the regional markets in which we do business? The answer to that question is yes. The European and Asian market prices and the Latin American market prices are relatively closely bunched with the North American price staying somewhat higher. The question of whether or not we’re still moving product from the Namakwa sands to KZN for funding or for fueling the KZN slag smelters, the answer to that question is, yes. Obviously we’ll stop doing that when Fairbreeze comes on and starts producing. So that material will be available to be sold into the market if we’d like to. And the third question was what?

Des Kilalea

Analyst · RBC. Your line is open.

You are selling all.

Tom Casey

Management

Yes, we are selling all of our zircon right now. In fact we extended the northern mine in Australia, our Cooljarloo mine in Australia, and that amount of extended production essentially allowed us to match the production we had when Hillendale was coming in. And so when I look at 2016 or we look at 2016, we see this incremental Fairbreeze zircon in rutile production coming on top of production that was already relatively strong. So for example on our earnings release if you look at Page 6 and Page 7 of the release, we put in production and sales volumes statistics that show you that in 2014 we produced a 183,000 tons of zircon and sold a 195,000 tons of zircon. So we actually sold more than we produced.

Des Kilalea

Analyst · RBC. Your line is open.

Okay. Just a quick one before getting off. Are you seeing any evidence of a slowdown in Chinese [indiscernible] exports? We hear that some of the treatment comes in China might either be closing or being shut down because they’re not making money. Are you seeing any evidence of that?

Tom Casey

Management

We see the active exports coming down, but even more importantly perhaps I don’t know how much -- I don’t know whether this is confidential information but I'm told -- I have read various observers reports of the status of the Chinese market in which these observers have indicated that in between this year through ‘16 and maybe even into ‘17, somewhere between 1,200,000 tons production and 1,500,000 tons of production will be either shut down, mothballed, if its existence or if it’s under planning or under construction not be completed. So a very, very dramatic size of slowdown in the Chinese domestic market and that's because the Chinese price is simply not able to support the cash cost of operation until many of these smaller environmentally more or less rigorously managed environmental consequence plans are shutting down. So we expect, and as I said on the call, we think the market is going to turn the second half of this year. In part we see Huntsman taking a 100,000 tons of production out of Europe, and we see Chinese taking over 1 million tons of production out, either in business or plan. So this clearly -- this diminution in supply is material on a global level and its material on a regional level and we think it’s going to absolutely affect price.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I’m not showing any further questions at this time.

Tom Casey

Management

All right. Then thank you very much. We appreciate your interest and we’ll talk to you next quarter. Bye.