SunCoke Energy, Inc. (NYSE:SXC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Nathan Martin: Okay. That’s fair. And then maybe specifically at CMT, you guys talked about the weak commodity markets, weak coal exports. Just curious, did you hit your coal take-or-pay minimum during the first quarter from a volume perspective? Can you remind us, is that looked at on a quarterly basis? Or is that annual? Because I think it’s 4 million tons annually. And then great just get your thoughts on how you view export coal demand in here over the next few quarters? And how do you expect your API2 price adjustment to trend and maybe if we use this first quarter result as a baseline?

Shantanu Agrawal: Yes. So on the take or pay it’s an annual take or pay, Nathan. So I mean, obviously, you can see we don’t provide like kind of coal tons separately. The total CMT did 1.8 million tons which is kind of pretty much in line and what kind of our expectation was. And we do expect to hit the take-or-pay minimum for the full year, for this year. Again, going back to kind of what the expectation for the volumes and the price of the API2 is, I mean, if you look at the futures, API2 look pretty decent, right? I mean, it’s kind of come back from the lows. But it can move pretty quickly as we have seen in the past, right? Like kind of it can move $10, $20, $30 in a matter of a couple of days. And there is some – our profitability, as you know, is derived from that.

So it’s hard to predict, right? What we have put in the guidance, I think we feel pretty good about it. The long run outlook of the CMT terminal remains pretty attractive. And that’s why we really like having this terminal. And as in the past, it has performed really well, and we continue to believe in this terminal.

Nathan Martin: Thanks for that, Shantanu. Maybe just shifting over to the Domestic Coke segment real quickly. EBITDA per ton looks like came in above your full year guidance range. Maybe can you talk about the drivers behind that outperformance?

Shantanu Agrawal: So Q1 normally is one of the quarters where we don’t have a lot of outages. We are just coming out of the winter, just trying to kind of get back our facility to run really well in Q2 and Q3. And this quarter, except the first couple of weeks of January, the weather was pretty good as well and it helped us kind of perform really well. On top of that, we talk about kind of higher blast coke sales volume in Q1. And that is actually timing of that, and that is the spot blast coke sales volume timing where it was unusually front-loaded in Q1 versus the previous year. So that helped our Q1 to be really, really good in terms of domestic coke performance. For the rest of the year, I think, as we reaffirm our domestic coke EBITDA guidance of $238 million to $248 million, it kind of tells you that we expect to run kind of as expected as we announced when we came about our guidance initially and we kind of are on track to meet that guidance.

Nathan Martin: Okay, I appreciate that color. Just to make sure I followed correctly. You said the spot last coke sales volumes were kind of front loaded, so more in the first quarter than maybe typical. So if that’s true, how do we think about maybe the mix, the sales mix in 2Q, 3Q, 4Q? Again, as you allude to, the adjusted EBITDA per ton is going to need to come down, obviously, just to within your full year guidance. But is there any kind of additional planned maintenance in any given quarter that could pressure EBITDA per ton maybe in 3Q or 4Q, just for instance, or any sales mix or headwind, tailwind we should be thinking about?

Shantanu Agrawal: No. I mean, there’s obviously, as I mentioned, there was no outages in Q1. So we expect to have outages and not expect, we have planned outages in Q3 and Q4 of the year, right? So that will impact our performance during that time. And kind of from our contracted sales perspective, it’s kind of pretty ratably laid out. And then spot coke, if first quarter was heavily loaded, obviously, like the rest of the year would kind of even out based on that, as we said, we have 650,000 equivalent blast and foundry cokes tons to sell, and that just laid out for the year, it’s just heavily loaded in the first quarter. So it’s going to be lower in the rest half of the year.

Nathan Martin: Got it. I appreciate those comments. I’ll leave it there. Best of luck in the second quarter. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We have a follow-up question with Lucas Pipes with B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.

Lucas Pipes: Thank you so much, operator. Thank you so much for taking my follow-up question. I wondered if you could maybe give us a little bit of an update on to kind of the size of the North American blast furnace coke market. There’s been the idling at Granite City. There have been some other changes on the utilization rate of the blast furnace fleet. Obviously, there are changes if you look out in the years ahead, as discussed earlier. But kind of what’s the status quo? Where would you put the size of the market today? Thank you.

Shantanu Agrawal: Lucas, I mean, apart from the Granite City idling, things haven’t really changed that much in the North American market, right? I mean, there is obviously a lot of announced EAF capacity coming online in the future in two, three, four years. But as we sit here today and you kind of think about versus the last two, three years, apart from the Granite City blast furnace shut down, the utilization or the coke demand hasn’t changed as a whole in the North America.

Lucas Pipes: Okay. Okay. So what’s the market size, roughly?

Shantanu Agrawal: It’s roughly, kind of, as we have said in our earnings deck, it’s around 8.5 million to 10 million tons of coke what is kind of being produced in the U.S. – in the North American market.

Lucas Pipes: Got it. So this would include Algoma and Dofasco and Stelco up in Canada?

Shantanu Agrawal: Correct. Correct.

Lucas Pipes: And so kind of fair to say you have, what kind of 50%, 40% of the market today?

Shantanu Agrawal: We say we have roughly 30%, 35% to 40% of the market because we only sell 3.6 million tons of contracted capacity, right?

Lucas Pipes: Got it. Yes, and then you sell some other blast furnace coke in North America as well, right, on a spot basis?