TROX - NYSE

Good morning, and welcome to the Tronox Holdings First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call and Webcast. My name is Brika, and I will be your event specialist running today's call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. And after the speakers’ remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I will now turn the conference call over to Jennifer Guenther, Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of Investor Relations and Financial Planning to begin today's call. So Jennifer, please go ahead when you are ready.

Thank you, Brika and welcome to our first quarter 2023 conference call and webcast. Turning to slide 2. On our call today are John Romano and Jean-François Turgeon, Co-Chief Executive Officers; and John Srivisal, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We will be using slides as we move through today's call. You can access the presentation on our website at investor.tronox.com. Moving to slide 3. A friendly reminder that comments made on this call and the information provided in our presentation and on our website 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 SEC filings. This information represents our best judgment based on what we know today. 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-US GAAP financial terms that we use in the management of our business and believe are useful to investors in evaluating the company's performance. Reconciliations to their nearest US GAAP terms are provided in our earnings release and in the appendix of the accompanying presentation. Additionally, please note that all financial comparisons made during the call are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Moving to slide 4. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to John Romano. John?

Thanks, Jennifer, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start the call today with a brief summary on Tronox for anyone who may be a little bit newer to our story. We're the world's largest vertically integrated TiO2 producer with nine pigment plants, six mines and five upgrading facilities across six continents. Our sales are fairly evenly distributed across the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific, and our 1.1 million tons of pigment capacity supports our well-balanced space of approximately 1,200 customers globally. Our vertically integrated business model supplies about 85% of our internal feedstock needs at full effective capacity and this ensures consistent and secure supply for our customers. In addition to TiO2, we also generate significant value as the world's second largest producer of zircon with approximately 300,000 tons of capacity. Our strategy is focused on positioning Tronox as the advantaged global TiO2 leaders through the production of safe quality low-cost sustainable tons. So now let's turn to slide 5. In the first quarter, we saw the recovery from the fourth quarter trough levels we predicted and guided on our fourth quarter earnings call. Sequentially, TiO2 volumes improved 14% within our previously guided range or average TiO2 selling prices improved 1% from the fourth quarter or 3% compared to the prior year despite 30% lower volumes year-over-year. As we emphasized to our investors over the last few years, we have continued to transform our business and our first quarter performance is a demonstration of that. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of a $146 million exceeding the top end of our guided range by $16 million. And we delivered adjusted EBITDA margins of 20.6% above the high teens range we previously anticipated. Our outperformance was due to several factors including favorable exchange rates relative to our assumptions mainly on the South African rand and the Australian dollar, prudent cost and discretionary spend management and the sale of lower cost inventory in the quarter versus what we anticipated. We're proud of the team's focus this quarter and despite the continued macroeconomic challenges we face our team continues to step up and deliver. We also wanted to provide a brief update on the fourth quarter events we spoke about last quarter. We're happy to report that our upgrading operations at K

Thank you, JF. Turning to slide 11. We ended the year with total debt of $2.7 billion. Our net leverage at the end of the year was 3.3 times on a trailing 12-month basis. In the first quarter, we amended and extended our interest rate swaps such that approximately 77% of our interest rates are fixed through 2024, approximately 68% are fixed from 2024 through 2028, aligning with the maturity of our term loan. Our balance sheet remained strong with no near-term significant maturities until 2028 and no financial covenants under term loan or bonds. Total available liquidity as of March 31 was $432 million, including $115 million in cash and cash equivalents, which is well distributed across our global operations. Capital expenditures totaled $93 million in the quarter. Approximately 40% of this was for maintenance and safety capital and 60% was for strategic growth projects. Depreciation, depletion and amortization expense was $71 million for the quarter. As John mentioned earlier, our free cash flow was a use of $172 million. This was due to inventory build for the reasons JF outlined, higher accounts receivable owing to our improved sales and lower accounts payable. In the first quarter, we declared a $0.125 dividend per share that we paid in the second quarter. This equates to $0.50 per share on an annualized basis. Moving to slide 12. At Tronox, we employ a robust bottoms-up analysis of our markets, operations and the risk and opportunities in developing our forecast. Based on this in our current view, we anticipate second quarter adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of a $160 million to a $170 million. We are forecasting TiO2 volumes will increase in the mid to high-teens range from Q1 and assume zircon volumes improved by approximately 15,000 tons, now that K

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question we have comes from David Begleiter from Deutsche Bank. You may proceed with your question David.

Hi. Good morning. John, JF the sequential increase in Q2 versus Q1 is about $19 million at the midpoint. Is that a little bit less than normal seasonality? And if so why is that?

Understood. And just one last thing. On the Atlas mining operations can you quantify the impact this year and what the tailwind might be for next year if that were to resume or return to more normal operations?

Hey, David, it's John Srivisal. Thanks for that question. And as JF mentioned, Atlas -- if Atlas had been up and running for the full year it would be an additional $70 million to $90 million of benefit for the year. Approximately $25 million to $30 million of that was impacted Q1. We do see a similar impact to Q2. And as we ramp up Atlas and get more productions and costs improve we'll see that improve throughout the year.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. We now have Josh Spector of UBS. Your line is open, Josh.

Yes. Joshua, I made a comment specific to that on the last call and that we thought it was appropriate to follow it up because we're still comfortable with the comment that we made last quarter with regards to how the business is developing. So that was really an add-on just kind of a follow-up to what we said last quarter as opposed to strict guidance.

And not only zircon volume growth, but there'll be TiO2 growth in that as well. So when we start to think about the comps, we made reference into where our comps were for this quarter. But the third quarter comps is going to be a lot easier because the third quarter of last year was significantly down. So again when we made reference to the recession case it's in the range of that. Again, we're not providing guidance on Q3, but we're confident that we're moving in the direction of the recovery as we've outlined over the last couple of quarters.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question is from Duffy Fischer of Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Yeah. Good morning. Question just around your comments on pricing being flat to down. Is that a mix issue where you called out Latin America and Europe, or you actually think the physical prices will be down in those regions and it will drag down your printed price?

Yeah, Duffy. So look there will be some movement in pricing in Middle East. And that is largely driven with some of the areas where we're competing against the Chinese. So in Latin America, it's the same thing. So there is some mix, but there is some price movement as well. And we talk a lot about what's happening with the Chinese their price is still significantly lower than ours. There are areas where we're competing more directly with them, and we're selectively determining how and when we make those adjustments to price. But there is actually price movement on the downside in Latin America, and in the Middle East and there's also some mix issues there as well. But again, we're talking about - we said flat to slightly up in the first quarter and we ended up at 1% up and we're talking flat to slightly down in the second quarter. So there's not a lot of movement there which reinforces what we've been talking about around the stability of our business around some of the programs we've put in place around margin stability initiatives in our commercial group.

Okay. And then because the numbers aren't out yet, but if you had to guess what do you think the Chinese net exports have been year-to-date versus last year? Are they up down or flat?

They are up. And when we think about what they have -- so we did get on months and we don't have April's yet. But obviously we do have March's. And March was -- it depends on which number you pull out but somewhere in the $155 range. It wasn't up significantly sequentially. One of the bigger areas obviously is Europe. So you saw Europe exports go down a bit, but a lot of that had to do with some of the more significant exports you had earlier in the year that were dropping off. So we get the question a lot about what's happening with China and China is something -- we see them as a competitor. And that's why we're focusing on our cost. Our volumes are recovering. India is another example. We talked a little bit about volumes that have pulled back. Our expectations for India in 2023 is year-over-year, we're going to have a 25% increase and 2022 was a good year. So we're selectively managing as I mentioned previously on how we're dealing with price against the Chinese, but we feel confident that we're going to continue to be able to grow our business in line with the projections that we put out.

Great. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. We now have John McNulty of BMO Capital Markets. You may proceed.

Yeah. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, the first one was it sounds like you had lower cost inventory working through in the first quarter than what you expected. I guess, one how did that happen? And then two, I guess, I'm a little bit confused as to why your margins in 2Q are expected to be in the high-teens after something in the low 20s in the first quarter despite you having -- you're going to be running the assets obviously a lot harder with volumes improving quarter-over-quarter by mid to upper teens. So I guess, can you help us to understand that as well.

Yeah. And can you -- I'm sorry can you go ahead and rephrase the first part of your question again I apologize.

Yeah. No, sure. The first part I think you had said in the prepared remarks that you had lower cost inventory running through the P&L when you saw Q1 through. I guess, how did that happen, like what drove that?

Okay. So a lot of that was zircon. So we referenced that we have had orders that were well in excess of what we could actually ship. And because Atlas was off, we would have expected that we would have been able to ship more material out of Atlas. So we actually were able to reposition some of our inventory out of South Africa, which is lower cost inventory to fill some of the gap that we had for what would have historically been expected to come out or what we had projected would have come out of Australia. So that was that. And then I mean we've also got some inventory position on TiO2 in some of our other locations that during the pandemic we moved around that was at lower cost. So those are the two pieces that when we reference lower cost inventory that was what was causing that.

Yeah. And just hopping back to the margin question, the reason why we are seeing a decline is mix. As mentioned, we expect TiO2 to grow in the mid to high-teens range and that is growing faster than our zircon sales. So as you know zircon gives a higher contribution to the bottom line and that's impacting the margin.

Got it. Okay. Thanks very much for the color.

Thank you. We now have John Roberts with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Thank you. Just one question. One of the biggest changes you can make to achieve your carbon reduction targets. I'm thinking electrifying the mining operations and maybe using hydrogen to heat the conversion facilities? And can any of that happen by 2030 since those are -- those would be longer type projects?

John thanks for the question. This is Jennifer. So great question. If you look at our footprint from a GHG perspective, if you total like the coke, anthracite coal, natural gas and total electricity, they drive 95% of our emissions. You saw us announced last year the solar project in South Africa with Solar Group that will significantly reduce our global emissions due to the significant amount of GHG emissions that come just from the smelting operations in South Africa. So shifting 40% of our electricity to renewables there will impact our global GHG emissions by reducing them by 13%. So we're focused on the areas around electricity, natural gas. Obviously to get to the further target the 2050 we will have to look at newer technology and those projects are underway, but we are focused on the interim on energy reduction and renewables.

Thank you.

Thank you. We now have Mike Leithead of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Yes. I mean, if you think about it from the standpoint of where we are at the stage 2, we're buying -- Jazan is making slag. It's not running at the rate that we need it. So, we have an interest in trying to figure out how we can continue to work with that asset to get more volume out of it. We're not making significant progress, as we would have thought over the last five years. But I mean, what we can tell you at this particular point in time is, that the Option Agreement does expire May the 10th. We're in discussions with them and we're looking to see, if there's an opportunity, which would allow us to come up with a path forward on extending that agreement. not the TSA, but the Option Agreement to buy the asset.

Got it.

TSA is – sorry, about that.

That's, super helpful. Thank you. And then just on I guess tying to about your working capital. I think this year you talked about a $150 million working capital build and part of that is related to Jazan. I guess, how much of that is just slag purchases that you're obligated to buy, that you don't expect to sell through just given where your pigment operations are this year?

It's about 30% of that build.

Got it. Thank you.

We now have Matthew DeYoe of Bank of America.

Good morning.. If I wanted to just parse out the $114 million headwind from production costs year-over-year. I think it was Slide 9. It seem like Atlas is $25 million to $30 million. Could you kind of walk through the rest of that? How much was the fire, how much was inflation. So then as we look at 2Q, kind of where does this headwind go? It seems like we know Atlas remains, but the K

Yes. The primary drivers of that relate to just general absorption at the mines and pigment sites, as well as just higher costs from a process chemical side.

And on Atlas, I think we -- I don't know if we've said it, we'll repeat it, if we did. But Atlas was $70 million to $90 million for the year. And when we think about how much that cost is going to impact us throughout the year, call it $25 million to $30 million in Q1 and Q2 and it's going to start ramping down in the second half of the year. When you say ramping down, the haul road opens. So it's not the -- it's not shipping the material. It's the actual higher cost material that's going to be working through its way, in the pigment that we're selling.

And on K

Okay. And so, I guess if I were to hone in on some of the non-core based inflation. Where do you kind of expect that to shake out, for the rest of the year or at least trend?

So for the rest of the year, I mean overall, we haven't seen the significant decline that we would have liked for the rest of the year, or experienced in Q1. We do expect it to be down overall about 2% to 3%. And it really depends on which material you're looking at. We are seeing the biggest increases in electricity, also to a lesser extent anthracite, chlorine, caustic and lime. But we are seeing some benefits as well. The biggest area obviously will -- is natural gas, particularly in the UK, as well as sulfur and sulfuric acid.

Thank you. We now have Jeff

Thanks very much. When you look back to 2022, how much did the global TiO2 industry contract or expand in volumes?

High single digits.

Contraction?

Yes.

And what's your expectation for the industry as a whole this year?

It's hard to speak specific to the industry but I would say relatively flat. When we think about the first and second quarter of last year they were strong. Third and fourth were extremely weak. We're seeing the recovery in the first and the second quarter and we would expect to see that in the third. So it's almost kind of the inverse pattern of what we saw last year but probably not as exaggerated in the fourth quarter as it was in the first quarter of last year.

Okay. At the beginning of the call you mentioned that you might have a new interest in rare earth, rare earth production. How much capital would be devoted to that or might be devoted to that in some kind of range?

Yes. So Jeff, what we've said historically, I think on the last couple of calls that the rare earth side of this it's not really new for us. It's new in that it historically was a waste stream and now we're converting that into a revenue stream. So I think we disclosed last year, it was around $40 million. That 62% increase in the first quarter is kind of significant compared to where we were ramping up last quarter. So think about $40 million. This year it's about $50 million. And when we talk about investing, we mentioned also that that was going to be something that would be self-funding. That's a relatively high-margin business. So it's something that we're continuing to explore. There's lots of interest in it. And because we're a miner, we actually mine rare earths and we're looking at how we might be able to extract something that we think might be a natural extension of our current business.

Than you, so much.

Thank you. We now have Hassan Ahmed of Alembic Global. Please proceed, sir.

Good morning, John and JF. I just wanted to revisit some of the comments made on the call about the bridge to second quarter earnings. Look, I mean, if I sit there and think about Q4 to Q1, you guys reported $33 million of higher EBITDA sequentially, right? And now Q1 to Q2, you guys are guiding towards, if you would have hit the high end of your guided to range, $24 million. So, I guess, the momentum sort of slows down a bit. But I'm just trying to sort of understand, the commentary suggests otherwise, meaning Q4 to Q1 compared with Q1 to Q2, your TiO2 volumes will show better -- higher sort of percentage growth. Your zircon volumes will be up as well. K

Yeah. I think, a lot of it relates to -- first of all, our beef in Q1 was -- a big part of that was currency and so we don't see that impact as much Q1 and Q2. And secondly, as we mentioned, we do have some unfavorable product mixes less -- more TiO2, but less zircon generally being sold. And some of that zircon is at lower margin than we expected in Q1, which was what John commented about on the selling lower cost inventory in Q1 versus Q2. And then secondly we do have higher costs. In particular, as I mentioned, electricity is a big part as South Africa in particular moves in the cooler months. We are seeing a very significant increase, not just from the pricing, but just surcharge for the wintertime.

And, Hassan, I think the other piece, when we think about the volume pickup, right? So I think in the comments and I even made the point, we feel pretty good about where we are in the TiO2 volume in that guide. We are seeing some pickup in China, right? China is probably not our best margin area. So there's also a mix on the margin on where we're actually picking up the volume. So, not to say that it's all margin challenge, but some of that volume specifically in China is probably on the lower end of that margin wheel.

Understood. And as a follow-up, I just wanted to sort of get the lay of the land, what you guys are seeing out in China in particular. I mean, it just seems that, at least through the course of Q1, I mean, there was some noise around the Chinese sort of government intervention with regards to TiO2 producers, essentially causing some of these producers to like very efficiently implement price hikes. So where are we there? Is capacity ramping up there? Are those, sort of, government interventions still in place?

So, look, those comments -- again, we actually made that comment. I think at your conference is when we first started to pick that up. We've seen something as recently this week, the South China Morning Post posted a very similar article around the central government talking about not continuing to support these local governments with additional loans. So how does that impact pricing? We are still seeing price increases announced in China in the first quarter. They were stickier than they were -- have been historically on kind of a recovery. So the fact of the matter is, have we seen any companies going bankrupt in our business, at least in the TiO2 space over the course of the last several months, the answer is no, but they continue to report the same information. So, I mean, at some point in time, I would expect that happens, but it's still yet to be seen. There're still a lot of commentary out there supporting what we referenced earlier.

Very helpful. Thank you so much, Guys.

Thank you. We now have Vincent Andrews of Morgan Stanley. You may proceed.

Hi. This is Turner Hinrichs on for Vincent. Thank you for taking my question.

Hello.

Yes. Hi. So before the fire, flood and the cutback in spend, you were targeting a savings run rate of about $150 million to $200 million per ton by the end of 2023 from your newTRON program. How close do you think you can get to that number exiting 2023 now that you've got more confidence around Atlas being closer to normal by mid-2023.

So we've disclosed previously that we have experienced savings in newTRON about $20 million in 2021 an additional $30 million in 2022 expect another $20 million in 2023. And -- we do expect to achieve some more savings through some of the things that JF mentioned like advanced process control and TOIS. So that's, kind of, our guidance right now. It doesn't -- it's primarily related to Project newTRON so nothing related to the K

Yes Atlas is -- wasn't part of newTRON.

Okay. Got it. Got it. Thank you for the clarity. Just another one. It would be interesting to hear about cost dynamics for chlorine in light of the sustained inflation. Specifically, I mean, could you quantify the benefit or detriment you would see from an incremental change in chlorine prices? And how is your appetite for strategic actions around chlorine if costs continue to inflate?

So look chlorine, I think, has been an issue for us in the US. We have nine TiO2 plants. The large majority of those are chloride. So we have purpose-built plants. We have companies that have -- we actually have one of our facilities in Saudi Arabia where we have our own chlorine facility. So from the strategic perspective, we continue to look at options on what we might need to do long-term depending upon what happens in the market. We've got good relationships with our suppliers. We saw a significant increase in 2022. Pricing in 2021 has gone up slightly. We're going to continue to evaluate that as we move forward. So it's definitely a focal point for us but that's predominantly in the US.

All right. Thanks for the color.

Thank you. Our final question from the line comes from Roger Spitz of Bank of America.

Thank you. Good morning. In Q2, 2023 is that expected to be a working capital further outflow? And do you have a quantum for that?

On a net basis we -- as I mentioned we do expect to recover throughout the rest of the year. Q2 is roughly neutral-ish.

We're selling that. And to JF's point that's a recent development where we're starting to export that caustic.

And do you have an annual volume of the classic you're able to sell to the market?

Well if you think about -- caustic is about 1.1 ton of caustic production of chlorine. So depending upon the run rate that we're running that asset that asset runs about 130,000 tonnes a year. So somewhere probably in the 30,000 to 40,000 tons per year depending upon how we're running the asset.

Great. And lastly when you said flake, you're actually not selling the typical commercial grade 50-50 caustic and water at least not outside Saudi Arabia. You're actually evaporating it all the way to solid caustic and selling it?

Yeah. Good. Thank you very much.