Graphic Packaging Holding Company (NYSE:GPK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Steve Scherger: And Ghansham, good morning, it’s Steve. Just to add to Mike’s points there. We’ve also said kind of a low watermark in May of this year, we’ve seen month-to-month sequential modest improvement. And so the combination of the comps that Mike was talking about Q2 – 3 last year, and then Q4 being more modest and then month-to-month kind of sequential modest improvement gives us confidence that Q3 may look a little bit like Q2, probably down a bit, but Q4 should inflect based upon what we’re in. So those are the fact patterns that we’re monitoring that give us confidence in the statement.

Ghansham Panjabi: Okay, perfect. Thanks so much.

Operator: We now turn to Mark Weintraub with Seaport Research Partners. Your line is open.

Mark Weintraub: Thank you. First just want to follow-up. You may mention of resets, etcetera, and how that’s been affecting your repricing, etcetera. Can you give us any color as to how much more of that might there to be comps – might there be to come? And how that might impact 2024 recognizing, no there could be other real-time happening as well?

Mike Doss: Mark, so our, as you know, tend to be anywhere between, call it, North America 2 to 5 years in duration. And so those things have a fairly long tail associated with them. And we’re not going to give you an absolute percentage there right now kind of what we work through, but there is still meaningful contracts that are out there that will be addressed in the next 12 to 24 months.

Mark Weintraub: Okay. And I assume it’s fair to speculate that given the comment you made about things being up $350 million to $500 million and only coming back $20 to date in some of the substrates that there would be potentially significant upside bias on the ones that are resetting?

Mike Doss: Well, we have to go back and get that – get those resets. That’s exactly right, and that’s what we’ve in fact been doing.

Mark Weintraub: Okay. And just on Slide 9, I think there was a mention of unplanned downtime in second quarter. Could you kind of walk through a little bit what happened there? How big an impact that had on your business profitability as well? And is that always at this point?

Mike Doss: Yes, I’ll just add a little bit and Steve can talk a little bit more around some of the financial implications associated. But what really – if you take a step back and you look at the first half of this year, Mark, we have now dealt with 80% of our planned maintenance staff coverage for the year. So those are behind us. And as you know, when you take these mills down, 1,500 to 2,000 contractors on your property, they are quite expensive, and then you’ve got the lost production that goes along with that as well. In addition to that, in the second quarter, we talked roughly 30,000 tons, we will call market downtime just to mention our supply with our demand, what we were seeing and really controlling our working capital and specifically our inventories.

In addition, in the month of July here through the month of July, which is now August 1 today, we took an additional 80,000 tons of market downtime, really focused on our inventories and matching our supply and our demand. The timing of that is actually quite good relative to the – of July break and some of the other things that are going on there, our employees actually appreciate that. Of course, we prefer to be busy. We prefer to have those orders. But if we need to take downtime, we wanted to be able to do that. And that’s all reflected in the guidance that you see and the results that we posted here in the first half of the year.

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