Mark Weintraub: So maybe just to follow on that. So basically, you have now the investments whereas before maybe they hadn’t been made, in terms of being able to deliver what it needs to be in the last couple of years, you’ve made those investments so now are in a different place. Is that why the outcome should be expected to be different? And then maybe if you could just following up on the — what percentage of contracts or volume? Do you think it’s now been repositioned versus is still in process?
William Hamic: Yes, that’s a tough one to answer in terms of percentage. I would certainly say it’s more than 1/4 has not been renegotiated, probably a little more than 1/3, but the hard thing about that is every — in many cases, local customers, that’s a constant discussion around value and what products they’re buying. So that’s 35% of our mix. I would say that never goes away. That’s a constant. So I’m really talking about the 65% that’s left over. There’s still a good portion out there that we’ll have to come to a value equation with the customers.
Mark Sutton: And Mark, just to add to the area you were probing on market position and share. Part of the way we addressed some of the demand environment in the past was in different regions, and Tom mentioned it, it really matters in the region, not on average. In different regions, we had the assets. We just didn’t have the plants running more than 5 days a week. So we asked employees to run a 6-day, and in most cases, they really enjoyed that. They didn’t mind doing it and it was increased income and all that. And then if you get enough to where it’s sustainable, maybe you add an entire shift, and then you invest in new plant equipment because if there — you already have the capacity, you just need people to run it. And we did that for quite a while.
What changed a bit, though, during the 2021, ’22 period, and the workforce started to turn over, that’s not a great assumption anymore that you can tackle that incremental growth with your assets by adding people or asking the people you have to work a little more hours. And so that’s just the reality of the manufacturing workforce out there for us. So if I had to do over, I wish I would have spent much more in physical plant equipment in ’18, ’19 and ’20, we were finishing some mill investments with an eye toward getting into plant equipment investments in a big way in the box business, and we got caught a bit there with a change in the workforce. So we’re working both on getting our new labor up to speed and putting physically new equipment and upgrading the old equipment, some of the legacy IP box plants that were pre — the big acquisitions we made are really old and some of the equipment is still running, but it may be running at 80% of its design capacity.
So all of that is part of being able to address the market by region, by kind of metropolitan market. And so that’s why I feel good about our ability to do this. We hadn’t made all of those physical investments in the past. We did it with our employee teams working different schedules, and it worked for a while. It’s not the sustainable way to do it now.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Matthew McKellar from RBC Capital Markets.
Matthew McKellar: First, to follow up on one of Mike Roxland’s questions. Is your NBSK mill and Grand Prairie core for IP over the longer term, given your greater focus on fluff?
Clay Ellis: Matthew, this is Clay Ellis. I think our NBSK mill is a strategic mill. We do have a very strong customer base on that mill. Obviously, it goes into tissue, but we also have a lot of both fluff customers and NBSK customers being the same. So it creates a bundled value there. And so it’s a good — it’s a very good mill, as Mark mentioned in the comments. We like it. It provides value. It is not in our core of fluff, but we think of it differently being NBSK in that market and the contract relationships that we have, we think of it a bit differently than more of the commodity SBSK. So it’s a good mill, but we like it. It’s not absolutely core to what we do, but it provides value.
Matthew McKellar: Great. Just one more for me. I was wondering if you could provide an update on your process to identify a successor for the CEO position and what we should be expecting in terms of a time line there?
Mark Sutton: Good question, Matt. Nothing new to report. Our Board is working very deliberately on the process that we announced, that we would undergo back in September. And I can say we’re closer to a decision now than we were in September, but there’s no time line to report, but we are making really good progress and our Boards putting a lot of effort into it. It’s obviously an important decision, and they’re taking it very, very seriously. So as we get closer and we have something tangible to report, we will be out with that information.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Gabe Hajde from Wells Fargo.
Gabrial Hajde: I’m going to try to take one more stab because I feel like I need to wash myself of the past 10 years of knowledge that I feel like I’ve acquired. What we heard from one of your peers as well as yourself is that maybe you’re trying to decouple yourselves from index-based pricing. And if, in fact, that is the case, maybe the outlook that you gave us for Q1 and the $68 million of positive benefit that you’re talking about, maybe that’s associated with renegotiating maybe half of those national contracts that I think Tom Hamic referenced. And if, in fact, that is the case or maybe pass differently, if the price that’s being pushed in the marketplace right now has been reflected on the January 19 publication, would that, in any way, change the guidance that you’re giving us today for Q1?
