Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Ternium Third Quarter 2019 Results Conference Call. And at this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sebastián Martí. Please go ahead. Sebastián Martí: Good morning and thank you for joining us today. My name is Sebastián Martí, and I am Ternium’s Investor Relations Director. Ternium issued a press release yesterday detailing its results for the third quarter and first nine months of 2019. This call is complementary to that presentation. Joining me today are Mr. Máximo Vedoya, Ternium’s CEO; and Mr. Pablo Brizzio, Ternium CFO, who will discuss Ternium’s business environment and performance. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will open up the call to your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking information and that actual results may vary from those expressed or implied. Factors that could affect results are contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and on page two in today’s webcast presentation. With that, I will turn the call over to Mr. Vedoya. Máximo Vedoya: Thank you, Sebastián, and good morning to everyone, and thank you very much for participating in our conference call. As usual, I will go through some highlights of our business and Pablo will describe our performance in the third quarter, while he goes through a webcast presentation. At the end we will have a Q&A session. We reported a good EBITDA level in the third quarter with 16% margin. This was higher than what we had expected on the last conference call, in part, because we had best results in Argentina and Pablo will go through the details of this during the webcast presentation. In the first nine months of 2019, Ternium EBITDA was $1.3 billion with a 16% EBITDA margin equivalent to a EBITDA per ton of $130. The good operation -- operating performance Ternium show in this first nine months of the year translated in earning per ADS of $2.53. Free cash generating has also been strong reaching $513 million in the first nine months of this year. Net debt decreased to $1.5 billion as of the end of September or just 0.9 times last 12 months EBITDA. Even though CapEx more than doubled to $748 million from the first nine months of the year as we develop our expansion project at Pesqueria facility in Mexico. The work in Pesqueria are progressing well as we continue to expect the hot rolling mill to begin operations by the end of next year. Turning to our business in Mexico. We had a good performance in this market during the third quarter. As expected we were able to increase our shipments in the country which reached 1.6 million tons in the quarter. The Mexican has not change much from our last conference call, construction sector remain soft and shipments to Industrial customers have been relatively stable. Shipments in this markets are going to decrease in the fourth quarter mainly due to seasonality. Now about steel prices, one our last conference call, the expected prices in the NAFTA region to recover as they were bottoming out at the time and they did so briefly. But then resume a downward trend and reach new lows in October. Steel prices are now at levels still back in 2016 when cost of the main raw materials were lower than where they are today, a difficult environment for the steel industry. On the positive side, talks in the value chains are not high and many steel companies in the region have recently announced prices increases, a trend that may finally take steel prices to more reasonable levels. We in Ternium are well-positioned for adverse price environment like this today. Our integrated facility in Mexico are base in electric arc furnaces operating a mix of the iron scrub consuming energy that we produce with natural gas purchased at very convenient prices. I now know that were mined from our own mining operations in the country. These are very competitive facilities that can sustain good profitability in all kind of environments. Regarding our non-integrate facility in Mexico, this facility rely in apart on slab provided from our Brazilian mill. The production of slabs in Brazil is currently having some pressure on margins as a result of weak global slab price environment and prices of raw material particularly iron ore. In addition, local slab sales are currently weak as low expectations in Brazil are taking longer to materialize than expected. We are adjusting the Brazilian mills production level to achieve an overall lower production cost, minimizing the use of iron ore pellets and purchased of external coke, as well as deploying other cost cutting initiatives. In the fourth quarter, slab shipments to third-party are going to decrease a bit more, mainly due to lower slap sales and the lower production I have just mentioned. Let’s review Argentina now. The scenario is in Argentina change materially from our expectations on last quarter’s conference call. Following August primary elections, there was a significant fluctuation of the country main macro macroeconomic variables with a 26 exchange rate devaluation and an increase in inflation in the third quarter. This volatility affected did Argentina steel market demand, and as a result, our shipments did not continue recovering in the third quarter of 2019 as they did in the second quarter. In this scenario, we expect shipments to remain at low level in the last quarter of the year as well. We have already adjusted our facility in Argentina to a low -- a lower level of demand and we continue to adapt this operation to the incremental increased level of uncertainty, Argentina’s economy is going through. Next step in this market will be a change of government administration in December to have a better view of 2020, we will need to wait until the new government introduces a new set of policy to tackle the current economic situation. So wrapping up, we are currently in a challenging price environment that could begin to slowly turn better. In the mean time, we are working fast to adapt the economy to the current situation. The first quarter -- the fourth quarter of this year will show a lower margin than the third quarter. But, all-in-all, we expect to report a good full 2019 and I am cautiously optimistic regarding 2020 in if this price recovery get some grip over the following months. I will stop here and asks Pablo to go ahead with the comment regarding the results of the third quarter. Thank you.