So as we look at this year, we see that this segment is going to have a pretty substantial tailwind in raw material and energy. And we’re not trying to be too optimistic about this. If we just use the — where raw materials have already come down in VAM, PVOH and PX for the first quarter of this year and think about the energy off of the natural gas forward curve for the year, that’s actually quite a bit more spread tailwind than what we would have thought last year of that $100 million because of the higher altitude. So that’s part of it. And again, that shows up as a step up as you move into the second quarter. There’s a bit of it that flows through in the first quarter, but most of that is in the second quarter through the fourth. With Fibers, much shorter cleaner story, which is you had a lot of challenges in inflation here as well, both especially in energy and the market, the customers have moved to being worried about security and supply.
So you’ve been very successful in increasing prices last year as well as contractually securing much higher prices this year to make sure that margins are back to sustainable levels to support our customers. And that’s $275 million outlook to earnings this year, which is a significant step-up in fact, enough to offset the spread normalization in chemical intermediates that we expect this year. And then A&P will have modest spread improvement as well, but not as much because they managed spread quite well last year, so they have less upside this year. So you put it all together, that’s a lot of spread improvement and a lot of it flows in sequentially into the second quarter. So that’s a big step up. The third segment is volume and mix, and this is more of a mix of what happens with the economy versus what’s in our control.
Destocking at some point is going to end. We’re assuming right now that it predominantly ends by the end of this quarter for durables and B&C. And so you get a step up of demand going from destocking levels, which are pretty severe to something less than that. In the stable markets, we can see moving past that some amount of growth from those markets. Importantly, innovation is something in our control, and we’ve had a lot of success last year despite our challenges in the economy and securing a lot of new business wins that are going to help this year. And again, that doesn’t really happen during destocking. So you got to wait to get that past you to start seeing some of that benefit. And then, of course, there’s China recovery. But we’re being very conservative in not assuming much of that in our sort of outlook that we’ve provided until we see more proof of it.
So the bottom line is there’s a lot of step-up across these three factors. Many of it is in our control. But as you look at the guidance we gave you for the year, given the outlook for the first quarter, I think it’s appropriate to sort of look at the lower half of that guidance for how we’re going to perform until we get past this quarter and have more insight on all these factors.
Operator: Our next question today comes from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.
David Begleiter : Mark, just on Fibers, can you talk to the sustainability of this higher level of earnings going forward?
