Methanex Corporation (NASDAQ:MEOH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Joel Jackson: Well, good morning. A couple of questions, short-term and then I’ll do a long-term. I’ll do short-term first. Just looking at some of your guidance for Q4, can you say, if you expect Q4 EBITDA to be higher? You said, everything will be higher. Will it be higher than Q4 of ’22. And when you gave your price guidance of $310 to $320, it looks like you’re using a higher discount rate than Q3. And then would you be having some inventory bills in Q4, like you normally do?

Rich Sumner: Okay. So, the Q4, I haven’t done that comparison. Our reference was in comparison to Q3, Joel, for higher pricing and higher produced sales. As it relates to the discount rate, we don’t expect a big difference in the discount rate. So maybe, we can take that one offline. And then inventory bill, yes, we do — we have seen a number of quarters here with inventory bills on our produced sales. So, we probably — accounting’s accounting, but we would expect that at some point, we’ll also be seeing a benefit of pulling through produced sales as well. So hopefully, that answers a bit of context to the quarter for you.

Joel Jackson: Okay. And then my longer-term question —

Rich Sumner: Does that help?

Joel Jackson: Yes. That’s why I asked ’24. That’s a clearly longer-term now.

Rich Sumner: Yes, yes.

Joel Jackson: If you look at the production for ’24, can you give about like off a base of little more than 6.5? Can we talk about what you expect for 2024? So, I would imagine you expect G3 could ramp across Q1. You have almost near production there next year. I would imagine you switch over from Atlas to Titan, but there might be a hiccup there. Would you lose some tonnes — would you be running both plants overlapping for a month, or would you lose some tonnes on a ramp-down and a ramp-up? Any other changes in New Zealand or anywhere else with better gas in Chile? Like, should we expect 2 million tonnes more in production next year, 1.5 million tonnes? Can you just give us some ideas?

Rich Sumner: Yes. We will update our guidance formally towards the end of this year, but I’ll — maybe, I’ll give you some kind of preliminary thoughts there. We are — we will, for Chile, like I said, we’ll be operating two plants at full rates at least until April of next year. So already, we’ve got those gas contracts in place today, and we’ll be working on the similar contracts for next year. This is the first time in a very long time that we’ve operated two plants at full rates. So, we’re really excited about that. And we’ll be working on replicating that out in the — for the summer month period for next year. So, I would expect, when we were at 800 to 900 this year that number will be higher for Chile. For Trinidad, we will — we are going to be working — the gas contracts are working simultaneously.

So, we will be trying to — I don’t expect a lot of overlap there, but we will try — it will be kind of an idling and then a start-up of Titan. So, you can do the numbers on how that change happens. And then I think the big one will be also G3. Intention here is obviously to start up around the end of the year, but it will take time before our G3 actually works through our inventory flow. So, you probably got a 45-day to 70-day inventory bill before G3 starts kind of coming through the earnings. Egypt, we would expect similar results — we’ve been operating at high rates and New Zealand, we’ll update our guidance today. It’s at 1.3 million tonnes to 1.4 million tonnes, and we’ll be — that’s probably a similar level we would be at. But we’ll update it more formally, and we also have to factor and schedule turnarounds as well.