LyondellBasell Industries N : Q1 2023 Earnings Call Webcast - replay available until May 28, 2023

LyondellBasell

1Q23 Earnings Call

April 28, 2023

Presenters

Peter Vanacker, Chief Executive Officer

Michael McMurray, Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer Ken Lane - Executive Vice President, Global Olefins & Polyolefins

Kim Foley - Executive Vice President, Intermediates & Derivatives & Refining Torkel Rhenman - Executive Vice President, Advanced Polymer Solutions David Kinney - Head of Investor Relations

Q&A Participants

Steve Byrne - Bank of America

Jeff Zekauskas - JPMorgan

Mike Sison - Wells Fargo

Duffy Fischer - Goldman Sachs

Josh Spector - UBS

David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank

Aleksey Yefremov - KeyBanc Capital Markets

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

Matthew Skowronski - Credit Suisse

Kevin McCarthy - Vertical Research Partners

Arun Viswanathan - RBC Capital Markets

Matthew Blair - TPH

Hassan Ahmed - Alembic Global

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the LyondellBasell teleconference. At the request of LyondellBasell, this conference is being recorded for instant replay purposes. Following today's presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. David Kinney, Head of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

David Kinney

Thank you, operator. Before we begin the discussion, I would like to point out that a slide presentation accompanies today's call and is available on our website at www.lyondellbasell.com/investorrelations. Today, we will be discussing our business results, while making reference to some forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. We believe the forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions and the alternative measures are useful to investors. Nonetheless, the forward-looking statements are subject to significant risk and uncertainty. We encourage you to learn more about the factors that could lead our actual results to differ by reviewing the cautionary statements in the presentation slides and our regulatory filings, which are also available on our Investor Relations website.

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Comments made on this call will be in regard to our underlying business results using non-GAAP financial measures, such as EBITDA and earnings per share, excluding identified items. Additional documents on our Investor website provide reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures, together with other disclosures, including the earnings release and our business results discussion.

A recording of this call will be available by telephone beginning at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time today until May 28th, by calling [phone] in the United States, and [phone] outside the United States. The access code for both numbers is 13735436.

Joining today's call will be Peter Vanacker, LyondellBasell's Chief Executive Officer; our CFO, Michael McMurray; Ken Lane, our Executive Vice President of Global Olefins and Polyolefins; Kim Foley, our EVP of Intermediates and Derivatives and Refining; and Torkel Rhenman, our EVP of Advanced Polymer Solutions. During today's call, we will focus on first quarter results, current market dynamics and our near-term outlook.

With that being said, I would now like to turn the call over to Peter.

Peter Vanacker

Thank you, David. Welcome to all of you. We appreciate you joining us today as we discuss our first quarter 2023 results.

We will begin on slide number 3, with our safety performance.

Our workforce continues to deliver excellent safety performance for the start of 2023. LyondellBasell's year-to-date incident rate for employees and contractors is 0.16, which continues to be below the rates seen in prior years. Safety will continue to be a fundamental part of our core values as we move forward with the implementation of our exciting, new strategy.

Let's turn to slide number 4 and review the new strategy that we launched last month at our Capital Markets Day. As you can see, much work was already underway.

Our strategy is built around three pillars. We're convinced that the successful implementation of our new strategy will increase our normalized EBITDA by $3 billion to $10 billion by 2027. This should ultimately result in a more profitable and sustainable growth engine for LyondellBasell. The three pillars for growing and upgrading our core; building a profitable Circular and Low Carbon Solutions business; and finally, stepping up our performance and culture.

In the grow in upgrading to core, we are focused on the areas of our portfolio, where we have leading positions and competitive advantages that are aligned with our long-term goals. We will reinvest to grow and improve upon those advantaged positions by leveraging our leading technologies to generate returns at scale.

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In the second pillar, we are committed to building a profitable, circular, and low-carbon solutions business that would enable our leadership in circularity and address the massive customer demand for these products and solutions in a profitable way. We expect this business will generate at least $1 billion of incremental EBITDA by 2030.

The third pillar of our strategy is to step up our performance and culture. Our company has a well-earned reputation for strong, operational excellence and cost leadership. Our goal is to build on these strengths to capture untapped value across the company through modest investments. We have established a value enhancement program that is prioritizing and delivering on these initiatives. Our value enhancement program is on track to deliver more than $750 million of recurring annual EBITDA by the end of 2025.

These three pillars do not stand alone. The pillars of our strategy are interconnected and reinforce each other. For example, we step up our performance and culture to create value. We will reinvest that value in growing and upgrading our core. Returns from a larger and more profitable core will be allocated to build a more sustainable Circular and Low Carbon Solutions business. And the cash generation from all these activities will continue to provide generous shareholder returns. Our strategy serves the needs of our customers, employees, investors, and society.

And we did not wait until our Capital Markets Day in March to start executing this strategy. Slide number 4 highlights our actions three pillars over the past year. As part of growing and upgrading the core, we announced in April 2022 that we would exit the refining business. We are now evaluating options to transform the facility to serve our long-term objectives, particularly around circular and low carbon solutions. Last April, we divested our Australian polypropylene business, and at our Capital Markets Day, we announced a strategic review for our ethylene oxide & derivatives business.

We are improving our focus with investments in businesses that fit with our long-term strategy. An example is the successful start-up of our new PO/TBA facility, the largest propylene oxide plant in the world, over the past month. This project was an enormous undertaking across two Houston area facilities. During the height of construction, we had a workforce of more than 3,000 people. This is the sixth PO/TBA plant built by LyondellBasell since inventing the technology in the 1960s. Our new plant doubles the scale of our prior plants, improves yields, increases product recovery, and incorporates hundreds of design improvements that save energy, reduce emissions, and lower costs. The net result is that we believe propylene oxide from our PO/TBA technology has a lower carbon footprint relative to the most widely used PO technologies. And our cost of production is the lowest in the world.

The new plant was producing on-spec products at rates of 70% or above within one month from start-up. I want to sincerely thank our team for all the hard work and dedication that went into this extremely successful launch of a new production capacity.

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The PO/TBA plant is just one example of how we are growing and upgrading our core businesses. Through our value enhancement program, our team is unlocking additional production volumes across our business portfolio through hundreds of initiatives to increase capacity and improve reliability.

In the second half of last year, we established our Circular and Low Carbon Solutions business unit to address the rapidly growing demand for circular and renewable products. Since that time, we have staffed up the organization and announced multiple acquisitions, partnerships, and other arrangements. Just this week, we announced that LyondellBasell will acquire the other half of our QCP mechanical recycling joint venture in Europe. This is another step forward in our work to achieve our sustainability goals. We are securing recycled and renewable feedstocks and building regional hubs to leverage our technologies and provide powerful advantages for our comprehensive business model.

Last December, we increased our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals to establish a leadership position within our industry by aligning with science-based climate guidance. As part of this, we set a goal to procure at least half of our global electricity from renewable sources by 2030. In just 10 months, we've announced agreements that will achieve 70% of our renewable power target, with approximately 1,100 megawatts of renewable generation capacity. The agreements will reduce LyondellBasell's greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 1.1 million tons, and that is nearly 15% of our 2020 scope 2 emissions.

We provide an in-depth look at our progress on sustainability with our newly published 2022 sustainability report. And as you know, that is available on our website. This report highlights how we can create substantial enterprise value through leadership in sustainability, which is core to our strategy of creating solutions for everyday sustainable living.

Our work to step-up performance and culture is the third pillar of our strategy. In October, we streamlined our organizational structure to improve line of sight with clear accountabilities and improved alignment across our commercial and manufacturing functions. And at our Capital Markets Day, Torkel described the work that is underway to transform our Advanced Polymer Solutions segment. In addition, we are leveraging the structure of our value enhancement program to drive commercial excellence and improve our customer focus.

Altogether, the three pillars of LyondellBasell's strategy are working side by side to form a growth engine that captures value and delivers a more profitable and sustainable portfolio of businesses.

Let's now turn to slide number 5 to discuss our financial performance.

During the first quarter, LyondellBasell's business portfolio delivered solid results, reflecting moderately improving market conditions. Earnings were $2.50 per share, more

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than 90% above our fourth quarter results. EBITDA was $1.5 billion, and we generated nearly $500 million in cash from operating activities. We ended the quarter with $1.8 billion of cash on hand and $5.8 billion of available liquidity. Our company generated 12% return on invested capital over the past 12 months.

The strength of our investment-grade balance sheet and our disciplined approach to capital allocation enable us to confidently move forward with our strategy, while continuing to provide attractive returns to shareholders through all stages of the business cycle.

With that, I will turn the call over to Michael first and then to each of our business leaders, who will describe our financial and segment results in more detail.

Michael McMurray

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide 6, and let me begin by describing how we are extending our track record of outstanding cash generation.

In the first quarter, LyondellBasell generated nearly $500 million of cash from operating activities that contributed toward a total of $5.1 billion over the last 12 months. Our cash balance was $1.8 billion at the end of the first quarter. Over the last four quarters, our team efficiently converted 89% of our EBITDA into cash.

During the first quarter, our cash conversion dipped to 35%, driven by increased sales volumes and additional inventory required to serve customers during our upcoming maintenance. Nonetheless, we expect to continue converting approximately 80% of EBITDA to cash over the longer term, as we have done in the past. We remain committed to delivering strong returns to our shareholders. Over the last 12 months, we returned $3.5 billion in the form of dividends and share repurchases.

Let's continue with slide 7, and review the details of our cash generation and allocation during the first quarter.

The LyondellBasell team remains focused on disciplined capital allocation to provide strong returns for our shareholders.

During the past four quarters, we returned 107% of free cash flow to our shareholders. This is well above the annual target of 70% that I shared with you at our Capital Markets Day. During the first quarter, we returned approximately $460 million to shareholders through our quarterly dividends and share repurchases.

First quarter capital expenditures were $352 million, approximately $120 million less than the fourth quarter. With the successful start-up of our world-scale PO/TBA plant, capital expenditures related to the construction of the plant will be replaced with growing cash generation. Our continued investments in maintenance and smaller growth projects remain within our plan of $1.6 billion for 2023.

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