CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Christopher Parkinson: And just as a quick follow-up. Just given the fact that European production still is favoring imported ammonia and you’ve also seen less production out of Trinidad. And you’ve even seen some facilities in Europe be reluctant to restart holistically just because of the current pricing environment, which I thought was a bit odd. But just, are you at all surprised, and I apologize for the short-term question, are you at all surprised that the market on the downstream side hasn’t ultimately been a little bit tighter even if it’s still relatively earlier in the year. If you could just say the additional in that framework, it would be very helpful? Thank you.

Tony Will: Yeah. So I would say by historical standards, we’re very happy with where the ammonia pricing is. Arguably, it’s a good value out there in the market today. I would say some of this goes back to the point that Bert mentioned earlier, which is a little bit of reduction of economic activity. We’ve also seen a reduced demand on ammonia going into industrial applications. So that certainly had somewhat of an impact on it. But look, by any standard other than a period of time last year, the ammonia market that we’re looking at right now is absolutely phenomenal.

Bert Frost: And I would say the same for the upgraded products. The market mono historical standard is tight and some of the dynamics that we talked about earlier with these purchasing delays has pushed product in the open market with an India, tender delay as well. So all this incentivizes just as higher prices were probably limiting some demand. These attractive prices are going to incentivize demand, incentivize seed populations, as well as applications and application rates, not only in the United States but in other countries as well. So I say we’re fairly prosaic about the market today and the market going forward.

Christopher Parkinson: Thank you so much.

Operator: We now have a question from Joel Jackson from BMO Capital Markets. Joel, please go ahead.

Joel Jackson: Hi, good morning. Maybe following a bit on risk here. It seems like ammonia has been trading with the marginal cost curve, marginal cost for months and months and urea is not, in fact, there’s a negative margins, right, to upgrade from ammonia. Can you talk about that? And is that really sustainable? And Bert, Tony, have you seen this before because I don’t think I’ve seen this before in a long time. It’s lasted for this many months?

Bert Frost: I think with where the market is today on ammonia, because ammonia is utilized in the initial production of some of these products, and some of the plants that have been down can like ours and Billingham in the UK can import ammonia and run the upgraded products operates differentially, and where we are in urea, for example, you do have additional urea that has come on stream, and you’ve got some delays in the purchase of the Egyptians, the Algerian, the Nigerians have been moving product into Europe at just under that marginal cost of production. However, for ammonia, why is trading a little bit differently, some of that ammonia and you need the production to make the DEF, to make the products that require CO2 in Europe. So it’s a little bit of two different process.

Chris Bohn: I mean, I think the ammonia S&D is tighter than the urea, one for the points that Bert just mentioned, one is the additional urea plants, upgrade plants that have come on this past year. And then additionally, just the reluctance right now, purchasing prior to the application season. But I think the expectation is you start to see that tighten up as well.

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