International Paper Company (NYSE:IP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

You have a lot less capital employed to generate the revenue line. So if you like 20% EBITDA margins here, low to mid-teens, get you the same return on invested capital. So it’s a different capital structure. And we have $1.5 billion business for revenue basis there. So in the regions that we’re in, we have pretty significant positions like the Iberian Peninsula, Morocco, we’re a leader. We’re significant in Italy and France. So I think long term, it fits IP and it gives us some growth factors in the packaging business that obviously is most of our company now.

George Staphos: Understood. My follow on question just for the fluff pulp business, the machine closures that you announced, how quickly will that benefit the results within GCF? And in your longer-term outlook and your view that it’s still got opportunities to create value. What effect, if any, how have you thought about perhaps some of the, I mean, it’s come up in the past and calls the potential from eucalyptus based fluff, which there seems to be a bit more interesting again. How much does that take from the market as a market grow sufficiently so that you can keep growing and take advantage of all the commercial opportunities you have. Thank you, gentlemen.

Clay Ellis: Hey, George. This is Clay Ellis. I’ll be happy to try to take a stab at your questions. Good morning. Yes, I think the machine closures will occur in the fourth quarter. We’ll have some residual personnel calls that extend into the first quarter of next year as we train and move folks around in that. But overall, that will mostly be complete in the first quarter. So I think that we’ll see the benefits immediately and the benefits will ramp as you go through ‘24. And we still have, at Riegelwood, we will have a little bit of optimization work to do, very minimal cost that will have a big payback in getting our cost per ton optimized there. That will all happen early in ‘24. You’re going to — your comment on short fiber or eucalyptus, it’s fluff.

So eucalyptus fluff has been out, I think, most of this decade, seven, eight years. It’s been in the market and been a pretty relatively small amount of the market hasn’t had significant growth. To your point, there’s interest and concern, and I think there always has been. I think as prices create, when prices got high and supply chains were constrained last year, there were probably more interest in it at that point about how do we look at a short fiber differently or more seriously. Again, we have that baked in. We think that the long-term view of fluff pulp and the growth is consistent in the future as it has been in the past. Long fiber has, is a reason why it’s 90 plus percent of the market, and we think it will relatively stay in that range, and so does it materially change our view or outlook of the future.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Weiintraub from Seaport Research.

Mark Weiintraub: Good morning. A few follow-ons, if I could just a clarification really, and hopefully I’m not splitting hairs here, but first on that question on the bridge for EBITDA for the fourth quarter, you gave us very specific numbers and if I just take the 590 you had in the third quarter, and I think there was basically $117 million difference from what you, the numbers you provided for 4Q guidance, that puts me in the upper 400 as opposed to just more generically in the 400s, is that fair?

Tim Nicholls: Yes, that’s fair, Mark.

Mark Weiintraub: Okay. And then second on the Orange, so the $140 million, does that primarily show up in 2024 as well? Or does it start to show up in the fourth quarter? And maybe just related to that. Is Orange down now or when does that get closed?