Aleksey Yefremov : Thanks, Steve. And second question on M&A. How does your pipeline look today — do you find more or fewer attractive deals? And how will you characterize your kind of level of engagement on M&A right now?
Steve Bender: Yeah. So there’s always an active dialogue amongst ourselves and others for opportunities in the market, both on the materials side as well as on the building products side. it’s all about really looking for the right kind of value opportunity that we see in the marketplace. But I would say there’s still a good number of opportunities deploy capital. It’s just about finding the right value-added opportunity for both parties, obviously.
Aleksey Yefremov : Thanks a lot, Steve.
Steve Bender: You’re welcome.
Operator: Thank you. One moment please. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. You may proceed.
Kevin McCarthy: Yes. Good morning. Just a follow-up on PVC. We’ve seen the export prices come up appreciably over the last three to four weeks. Can you speak to what is driving that? How sustainable do you think the move might be? And do you think it will be enough for PVC producers to raise the US domestic contract price in August, I believe you and others have a proposed increase on the table there?
Albert Chao: So Kevin, there are a number of Asian producers that really are at either the bottom end or very near the bottom end from a margin perspective. And as you can see from our remarks, we see a number that have really lowered operating rates because of the margin challenges they’re facing with their feedstocks. If you use Brent as a benchmark in the mid-80s, those producers are seeing margin challenges, and that really is supportive of that driver for rising prices in the market. And I think as we see the seasonal strength in Q3 and the price announcements by ourselves and frankly, others for August for PVC, my comments about the strength we’re seeing in even at this more muted level for building products continues to pull vinyl through into the construction markets, not only here in the North American market, but elsewhere.
Kevin McCarthy: That’s helpful. And then as a second question, Albert, I would appreciate any updated thoughts you might have on China. Generally speaking, we’ve seen demand from China languish across many commodity chemical markets. In the markets where you compete, are you seeing any signs of improvement there following recent efforts to stimulate or for that matter, any improvement on the supply side dynamics in China?
Albert Chao: China is the elephant in the room. It has the largest capacity produce many of the chemicals and plastics as well as one of the largest market for it, and as we all know that China did not recover much since the Chinese New Year, people expected after coming out of the pandemic. And the economy is still quite weak. As a result, polymers and chemical market prices has dropped a lot and impact global prices as well. Not only that, they used to import products and now they’re being exporting products. So all that impacted global prices for those products. And as we’re aware that the economy, especially for unemployment for young people has been quite surprisingly high, and recently, the Chinese Government have made a statement, they are coming up with policies to stimulate, but those statement has not come out with concrete actions, specific action plans yet.
But I think with Chinese — I presume leadership in China as they said very well the issues. And the central government is still quite well off. They have a lot of buyer power to do things. So we believe that over time, the Chinese economy will improve and they talk about targeted 5% GDP growth for the near term coming years. So time will tell, but the meantime, as Steve mentioned, the spot price has really bottomed out in China. We see coupled with some planned issues with turnaround all that, that there the prices have started moving up the last several weeks. We hope that will be sustained, especially during the third quarter, which is usually a busy quarter. So time will tell, but we think China should improve over time.
Kevin McCarthy: Very good. Thank you so much.
Albert Chao: You’re, welcome.
Operator: Thank you. One moment, please. Our next call comes from the line of Michael Leithead from Barclays. You may proceed.
