Unipar Carbocloro SA

BOVESPA:UNIP6

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Operator]

[Interpreted]

Good afternoon, and welcome to Unipar's 2023 Q1 Earnings Conference. Joining us today are CEO, Mauricio Russomanno; CFO and IRO, Marco Rabello; and the IR team. This event is being recorded and all participants will be in listen-only mode during the presentation. The slide deck may be downloaded at the MZiQ platform and via the company's website at ir.unipar.com. Slide selection will be controlled by each participant individually. And the audio of the conference will be available for replay of the company's website after its conclusion. Following the presentation, we'll begin the Q&A session. Questions may be sent via webcast and will be answered over the course of the session or after its conclusion by the IR team.

Before we proceed, we'd like to remind you that any statement made during this conference relative to Unipar's business prospects, projections, operating and financial targets are based on the company's management's beliefs and assumptions as well as currently available information. Forward-looking statements are no guarantee of performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, seen as they refer to future events and therefore, rely on circumstances that may or may not materialize.

Investors and analysts must understand that general conditions, the state of the industry and other operating factors may affect Unipar's future earnings and lead to results that differ materially from those expressed in such statements. Now I'd like to turn it over to Mauricio Russomanno, who will begin the presentation. Mauricio, you may proceed.

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our conference. Let's go over our Q1 2023 operating and financial results. I'd like to start by giving you an overview of the company's performance, then I'll be turning over to our CFO, Marco Rabello, who will go into our financial details. On Slide 3, I start by shedding light on our continued operating performances at our plants. Our intensive investments and the carefulness we've had with maintenance improvements and updates we've made have led us to an outstanding level with solid and positive results. Our capacity utilization in Q1 averaged at 84%, which was even higher than what we reported in Q4 2022 despite the adverse scenario and the impact of the downward cycle that was produced by the change in prices and market demand. We've continued our pace of development and investments with clear directions in structure for our initiatives and projects, prioritizing our results and good alignment across every level of the company. We're still focused on our strategy that's grounded on 5 pillars: sustainable growth, operational excellence, competitiveness, teamwork and culture and sustainability. That's what we are paving the future with. We are still on a journey focusing on one of the pillars of our strategy, sustainable growth, and that's across every dimension, financial, environmental, social responsibility, health, safety, institutional relations or public affairs, communication and governance.

Now looking at market prices, our performance is in keeping with what we have been saying in the last months, we are going through a cycle of fluctuation of prices that's very significant. During this quarter, the international price of caustic soda decreased by 20% compared to the last quarter of 2022 and increased by 7% over Q1 2022. In the PVC market, in turn, we had the opposite scenario. International prices reversed their downward trend, growing by 18% versus Q4 2022. And even in the face of this market fluctuation, which is something the industry already expects seeing as this is a cyclical market, we still must pay attention to Brazil's economy and the world economy at large, which is also showing signs of a slowdown and that may cause impacts for the industry at large. Once again, our resilience and ability to handle adversities have set us apart with our strategic planning and our long-term view for the future. We're able to maintain our sales volumes and our operating performance at excellent levels, meeting our clients' demands quickly and reliably. And attesting to the stability and consistent results we've delivered, we continue to keep our installed capacity utilization above 80% and our COGS in keeping with previous quarters. We are still adhering to our goal or meeting our goal of being closer and closer to our clients, seeking new markets and industries guided by the purpose of being reliable and every relationship we established.

Another accomplishment that was very important this quarter and that should be well received in the PVC market, as we have been approved by the Brazilian Association of Tactical Standards to develop projects and build structural walls made of PVC panels filled with concrete. PVC buildings will be another tool in our fight to reduce the housing deficit seen as this is a module -- modular type of construction that reduces execution time and reduces waste as well.

Now along our sustainable growth pillar, we are adhering to our schedule of expanding our Santo Andre plant. Our Artemisia project, which in April, received its electrolytic furnace is going within schedule and is set to begin operations later in Q2 this year.

Another highlight is the development of building in our unit at the petrochemical station of Camaçari in the State of Bahia. We ended Q1 with 28% of the plant's preassembly having been concluded. And it's important to remember that this is the first greenfield project within our geographic expansion here at Unipar. The new plant was designed with the most modern, safest and most eco-efficient technology for chloride production, which will allow us to optimize energy consumption as well as the consumption of other resources. This entire process is yet another step to make us more reliable and to ensure the availability of our products in different locations. Another front that we should highlight is our own production of renewable energy, a priority for the Unipar Group. According to our plan to convert our energy source -- this quarter, we have started our JV with Atlas Renewable, which involves opening a solar farm in the state of Minas Gerais with installed capacity for 155 megawatts.

It's important to remember that in addition to that, we have 2 other JVs which are planned to start operating by the end of 2023. These JVs are in partnership with AES and include 2 wind farms, one in the state of Rio Grande do Norte and another one in Bahia. Once all 3 farms are operative, we'll have 462 megawatt of renewable green energy available for us. These are 2 structuring high-impact projects for the company, both in terms of economic return and sustainability. They will ensure access to electricity, price predictability lower costs due to tax reductions, a reduced carbon footprint, green hydrogen production and new green products. By 2025, 100% of all of the energy supplying our plants in Brazil will be sourced from renewable sources with 80% being self-produced and 20% coming from long-term contracts.

Now looking at the future, Unipar still has the ambition of doubling in size over the next 10 years and expanding to other areas of the world. To meet these goals, we have a strategy based on 5 pillars, which we will continue to adhere to by keeping discipline and diligence in implementing them. That way, we'll be confident that -- we are confident that we will generate value consistently and sustainable -- sustainably to all our stakeholders.

I will now turn the conference to Marco Rabello, our CFO, for our financial highlights.

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Thank you, Mauricio. Good afternoon, everyone. So moving on to Slide 10. Our net revenue was reported at BRL 1.568 billion, up 9% over Q4 of last year. This was largely a result of an increased sales volume and also the rebound in PVC prices during this period. Argentina's and Brazil's share in all quarters was -- has been essentially the same as you can see in the next slide. As for how the revenue was distributed per type of product, we saw continued continuity in the shares for soda PVC and chlorine and derivatives in the last few quarters.

Moving on to Slide 11, we have our COGS for Q1 '23 at BRL 955 million, whose increase over previous quarters was negligible. However, it should be reminded that over Q1 of last year, there's been a decrease in sales volume, which leads us to the -- to say that there's been an increase in prices of raw material versus the beginning of 2022.

In Slide 12, we see that our EBITDA during this quarter came to BRL 490 million this quarter, a 71% increase over Q4 2022. A highlight here was the increased sales volume and rebound in PVC prices, which led us to an EBITDA margin of 31%, 11 percentage points higher than in Q4 2022. Here, we'd like to clarify that our operation in Argentina, which is characterized as a hyperinflationary economy is very often adhering to IAS 29, the international standard for accounting reporting. During this quarter, the application of IAS 29 and the exchange variation against the Argentine peso led to a negative effect of BRL 35.4 million on our EBITDA. This is a result of the combination of inflation indexing and the results accountings with the opposite result in -- with the opposite effect on our financial results as well as the difference between converting the results to reais considering the exchange rate at the end of the period, at the reported period and the conversion using the average exchange rate for the period at large. In the same slide, we see a net profit of BRL 253 million in Q1 '23, up 71% versus Q4 and showing improvements in our operating results. Now on to the debt information on Slide 13. Our net debt is BRL 19 million with no huge number of maturities in any specific year. We have not had any significant shifts in our gross debt when compared to December 2022 and also saw significant liquidity against this period.

Now moving on to Slide 14. We show that the company's cash is still robust at BRL 1.4 billion with a cash -- operating cash generation that's very robust at BRL 440 million, which is enough to be significant obligations such as corporate income tax social contribution and CapEx, which include the investments in our expansion of our Santo Andre plant and also our new plant in Camaçari. Unipar stock, which is negotiated at B3 under UNIP6 have devalued by 14.7% in the last 12 months, whereas it's small caps index that UNIP6 is part of devalued by 28%. Unipar's market cap is currently BRL 7 billion. Lastly, we continue to see 2023 as a challenging year, and we're paying close attention to the scenario in terms of margins and prices as well as inflation and instability in Argentina's economy so that we can continue to be resilient in our results and sustainability/governance practices.

We will now open the floor for questions. If we can't answer all our questions via webcast right now, our IR team will reach out later with the answer.

[Operator]

Thank you, Marco. We will now open the floor for questions. The questions will be answered in the order that they received. So please wait while we pull for questions.

Our first question comes from [indiscernible].

Congratulations on the company's results. How many actions do you have in treasury before the next repurchase?

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Currently, we have 340 stocks in treasury. As you may have observed or noticed, we just approved our fourth asset repurchase program, and it should remain active for the next 18 months, making the most of the good market shifts and continue to add value to our shareholders.

[Operator]

-- next question from Francesco Di Tomaso, -- could you explain more clearly what the definition of the payout time seeing is there's huge shifts along the year?

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Well, our policy and in practice, we follow the 25% of net profit payout plus extraordinary dividend payments. Last year, 2022, with the payment now in May, BRL 198 million. We ultimately paid more than 100% of our net revenue with investments so that we could also pay dividends, but we were highly focused on a suitable CapEx, very balanced for the year and also extremely strong cash generation. So it didn't make sense to keep the company's accounts even more robust than it already is. We chose to rather distribute the dividends to you -- our shareholders. So we -- because all of that we paid more than 100% of our profit. But the -- you feel practice is 25% plus 20% as we said earlier.

[Operator]

Thank you Marco. Next question, Luciano Centeno. The purpose of having our plants using over 100% renewable energy, do you plan to have partnerships with Tucano and AES Brazil? Or could Unipar invest alone on this effort?

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Good afternoon, Luciano, thank you for your question. Well, we have 2 strategies. We have our self-production, our own production. And with these 3 farms I mentioned during the presentation, we should come to 80% of our current demand with renewable energy. And the extra 20% have been hired in the market. of renewable market. So we have a long-term renewable energy contract that's already in force. With that, we have the 100%. As the new plants enter into operation, such as our Camaçari plant, we will either go to the market to secure that energy or we will produce it ourselves according to the conditions at the time. So if it makes sense economically, we will build new farms. And if it doesn't, we will obtain that in the free market.

[Operator]

Thank you, Mauricio. We're pulling for further questions. We have another question from Francesco. What policies and changes generate the most for you? Would be the bottleneck for the company, raw material or products?

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Thank you for your question. Here is Mauricio. Well, you asked about our policies. Well, since we acquired Solvay in 2016 we started a project, first of all, to integrate all our plants. And then as of late 2018, a program to increase our plant reliability. They were already at a significant level, but we obviously wanted to improve that. And the plants that came with that acquisition, we felt offered a lot of room for improvement. So some of those policies began back then and are still in effect, but they include some reliability programs. So what do we do? Every year, we look at our available assets. What's their production capacity -- close to plant's nominal capacity. So after that review, we improve our assets, we do maintenance and technological updates as well with new technology suites that we've either acquired or that has been developed by our engineering team. There's another front for improvements within the company, which is the maintenance department. Now how does this work? Every year, we seek for new ways to develop our maintenance activities in a preventative way. So before any event emerges, that's what we do. So we're able to plan well, calculate how much we'll spend in spare parts. And 2 years ago, we've also begun to introduce artificial intelligence to help us understand the operative cycle of every piece of equipment. So we have started that in Santo Andre. We are expanding that to Bahia Blanca. And with that, we have been maximizing, so to speak, every time that we have for maintenance. And there's also a third level, which we call Formula 1 project here in the company, which asks the question, can we do maintenance more quickly than before? So we changed many of our assumptions that we had for maintenance. For example, we already had a set of equipment pieces that we had for maintenance. So when we open a coring furnace, of course, we will want to replace the parts that need to with spare parts and those that need to be repaired, we take those to the shop, and those will be used in the next maintenance session that any furnace will require. So with that, I mean, this is one of the steps that we took. And that allowed us to really optimize our maintenance time. This is one example of how every quarter we are improving the availability of our production capacity as well as our predictability.

There are other initiatives to help reduce or shorten the time that have to do with variable cost, and that's another variable that's important to make us more competitive. We have a number of projects to improve our processes, improve our losses, improve our technology and our replacements. And with that, in the last few years, we have seen very good indicators of variable costs within the company. This has also helped us improve our operating results.

What was his second question? I think I answered all of it. All right, he asked us what's the bottleneck for the company today?

Well, right now and following this period of operating improvements, I think our most significant bottleneck is market demand. We have to really pay attention to how that will -- this will develop. Late last year in this first quarter, market demand has decreased significantly when compared to 1 year ago. So this is now our most significant bottleneck. We now have available production capacity. We have raw material. We have sales capacity. And in the recent past, we have produced much larger volumes.

[Operator]

Thank you, Mauricio. We have another question from Luciano Centeno. You have the ambition to double in size in the next 10 years. Is that directly related to the main industries, such as chlorine caustic code and PVC? Or can we believe that other areas are coming up?

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Well, we have 3 major areas for growth. The first of them is within our current business, caustic soda and chlorine. This is the easy market for us to grow in, because we know how operations work. We know the market. We have great relationships with both supply -- suppliers and clients in the areas we operate in. So this is the most obvious and quickest area for us to grow in and our expansion in Santo Andre and our plant in Camaçari are 2 examples of that.

So First of all, our focus is to increase our operations and our footprint and the areas we already operate in. There's a second dimension, which is to look at adjacent products within our same chain. So downstream caustic soda, chlorine and eventually PVC products -- product chains. These are markets that we know and a technology that's not far away from what we already have. And there's a third dimension, which would be new products and new areas we don't currently operate in. This could involve building a new project from the ground up or acquiring a new product such as what we did when we entered into the PVC market. We already worked in caustic soda and chlorine and took a step toward PVC.

[Operator]

All right. Thank you. And please hold while we pull for more questions.

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Demand ] in general. This added to a problem of scarcity for caustic soda because once you stop producing PVC also stop producing caustic soda. So those prices also increased over the last year. Now what happened to PVC prices in the meantime? They begin to go down even though demand was also declining. So what happened during Q1. Prices leveled off again because there was a lack of PVC. So there was inventory replenishment early in the quarter, and this was also very abrupt, which led to a lack of enough availability of PVC across the value chain, which pushed PVC prices up early this year. Now with caustic soda on the other hand, the slowdown that hit construction -- civil construction first began to spread to other industries worldwide.

Bear in mind that caustic soda is used to produce pulp and paper, in the mining industry, hygiene and sanitation. I mean it's a product that's used in a wide range of applications. So it takes some time for the industry at large to start lowering its demand, which began to happen. So caustic soda prices began to drop this quarter. And the supply began to increase. There was a surplus of soda in inventories across the world.

[Operator]

Well, we have 2 more questions from Carlos Alberto De Padua. He says congratulations on your results and the presentation. First question, how could the company be impacted by Argentina's current situation.

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Would you like me to answer one at a time?

Okay. Thank you for your first question, Carlos. So right now, the company is actually benefiting from Argentina situation, and that's because of the following phenomenon. When we look at how the country's macroeconomic situation is unfolding. And I will look at one index, which is inflation. In the first quarter of the last year, the average was about 3% inflation in Q1. In the second half of the year, that rose to 5% a month. Now in Q1 2023, that's at about 7% a month. So there is one topic which is the acceleration and inflation, and that leads people to respond by using their money as soon as they get paid. And people are sure of only one thing tomorrow, things will be more expensive than they are today. And depending on where they work or what industry they're in, it might take 2 to 3 months to get an adjustment. So there's a rush to pay your bills and whatever is left after you've done paying your bills and purchased your stables, everyone in the country will acquire goods that are important to them. And that's either via civil construction. I mean, they're remodeling, buying land or building and the land that they own or buying assets that may be useful or which they may exchange for money later on. This has led to an increase in PVC use for small construction work, renovation -- home renovations and the like. And this has increased sales in Argentina. So the -- that country's federal government, one of the initiatives that they've taken was to move forward with -- with construction by the government. And we have elections at the end of this year. So since late last year and early this year, government construction has been a huge point of investment.

In this sense, the entire situation in Argentina has actually worked to the company's favor.

[Operator]

The second question, Carlos asks is, does the company think about increasing the availability of its plans considering that other industries, for example, in pulp and paper can maintain average annual efficiency of as high as 95%, even when they need at least -- they need maintenance stoppages even after 2 months.

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

I've talked about this before, Carlos, but we are constantly trying to increase our plant's availability. And that's for a few reasons, so that we have more flexibility and that we can better manage our costs and optimize and more importantly, to keep our manufacturing station at a better position to operate in general. So when you compare those 95% to us, you need to think about what your basis for comparison is because when we do that, we're talking about the availability in nominal terms, not excluding maintenance shutdowns or any other scheduled event within the company. So we have to see if we are measuring that indicator against what you have as a reference over the same basis for comparison. And also, our assets, as I said before, are not only undergoing preventative maintenance work. But sometimes -- the word eludes me right now. But we are also subject to maintenance shutdowns in our suppliers. For example, both in Santo Andre and Bahia Blanca are ethylene suppliers, whenever they have maintenance shutdowns we need to stop as well. So it's not that our plants do not have availability, but we need to stop. I mean, we supply the market. The market doesn't know necessarily that we are stopping for maintenance. If someone else within our chain is stopping for maintenance, but that affects our line and it has its consequences.

[Operator]

Thank you, Mauricio. We have a question from Osvaldo Ramos Mateos.

Could you tell us why does Unipar not adopt the policy of paying JSCP to maximize shareholders' returns?

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Thank you for your questions. Obviously, JSCP is something that the market uses. We look at our production to maximize our value to shareholders. But in the last few years, making profit available to use as the basis of dividend payments has not been a limitation so far. Our limits were also connected to the company's financial liquidity as compared to the robust obligations it had to meet, which is why in the last year, we ultimately had a payout using 100% of our profits and using part of the investment funds that we had set out earlier. So even though interest over capital over our own capital -- dividends -- sharing dividends to shareholders that way is more equitable regardless of whether they're individuals or companies. But this is -- this will always be in the company's -- on the company's radar. Thank you, Marco. Any other question?

[Operator]

Actually, we have another question about dividends. How many times does the company plan to distribute dividends? Is there the possibility of some sort of bonus being added to that?

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

In 2023, as we said earlier, is still -- this is still a question we are looking at the industry at the countries we operate in and also at global events. We still don't have plans of sharing dividends throughout the year 2023. Obviously, that will depend on how our results perform on our cash generation and obviously, approval from the Board for other dividend-sharing events. For now, we do not have any plans for that. We only expect to be able to do that after we learn the full year results at the end of the year. But there's no extra provision for that. It should be said that -- and even though this has been a significant CapEx this year. And it's different from 2022 in terms of cash generation. The company is also working on its capital structure so that we have a more -- a debt level that's more suitable to our payments of interest and even the currency so that in addition to a significant investment that will generate value for our shareholders, this will hurt and affect the company's cash position a lot less, and we'll continue to have funds available for further dividend payments in future years. Thank you, Marco.

[Operator]

We have 2 questions about Argentina, one from Rodrigo from Paulo Jose. Rodrigo says, is there any loss for the company from repatriating the money that was generated in Argentina. And Paulo asks, I'd like to understand whether there's any challenge in sending profits to Argentina's plant from Argentina's plant to Brazil.

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Well, thank you for the 2 of you for your questions.

Well, let's state, first of all, that Argentina is -- Argentina's plant has generated cash for some time, contributing to Unipar's results at large. We have a program for recurrent investments to our current plant in Argentina and also to invest in future plants in Argentina. So not necessarily we are recurrently bringing every -- all the cash that's generated in Argentina to Brazil. We did bring in funds from Argentina to Brazil some time ago because of substantial dividends that we're paying at around November of last year. So there's no impediment to bringing funds from Argentina to Brazil. Now because of this -- the economic situation and because of the amount of U.S. dollars that you have there and not necessarily because of inflation and the exchange rate you have greater interest from foreign investors in exchanging pesos for dollars. So naturally, depending on the time and volume, some sort of penalty if you change pesos into U.S. dollars and bring those to Brazil, but that's not necessarily an impediment. The penalty will obviously depend on the time you do that. In Unipar's case, we have strong cash generation in Brazil in both of our plants here. So we don't need to repatriate the cash generated in Argentina to Brazil. But that cash exists, and we return to it whenever we need to.

[Operator]

Thank you, Marco. We have a few more questions to pull for.

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Good afternoon. This is Marco Rabello speaking again. Naturally, there are a few questions that seem repetitive about chlorine, caustic soda and prices. Mauricio has explained all of that very well at the beginning of the Q&A. So we're not answering these new questions because we understand these have been well answered. And if not, you can ask our IR team about Braskem there are some questions here about Unipar may be participating in the purchase of Braskem this topic specifically is something that the company has nothing to report as of right now.

[Operator]

Thank you Marco. We have another question from Alan Aoki from Compass. He asks, what was the intention behind your movement of rescuing BRL 700 million in financial investments to keep that in cash.

[Antonio Marco Campos Rabello, executive]

Thank you for your question, Alan. I see that you are a close reader of our financial statement. So thank you for your question. First of all, Unipar's financial management has been concerned about market movements to better protect and especially increased the company's profits and the returns on the company's cash. There were changes in ruling in terms of market caps of fixed income securities and also discussions early this year about private credit because many questions began to struggle late last year and early this year, which had an impact on the market caps of few -- of these companies' assets. So we made a few movements in between our applications, moving funds from a few specific funds to other applications with banks, CDIs and CDBs. Not going into detail here, but ultimately, the funds you mentioned are still invested and are still generating additional funds for the company, but moving from a specific fund to a direct application in a financial institution and forces us to reclassify that from cash and cash equivalents, notably because of the liquidity involved in investing in that specific security or bond.

Well, we have gone over every topic raised by our questions. So with that, we will now conclude our Q&A session. I will now turn over back to Mauricio for his final remarks.

[Mauricio Russomanno, executive]

Well, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us in our earnings call. If you need any clarification, please reach out to our Investor Relations team or even to me or Marco Rabello. Before we conclude, I'd like to say special thanks to our collaborators and employees who build Unipar every day. Our results were very positive in this first quarter of the year, and we will continue to leading the company as diligently and with the same discipline and responsibility that we've had so far. This is the best way to overcome the adversities that come up in this challenging scenario that we're seeing in 2023. Once again, thank you, everyone, for joining, and we'll see you next time.

[Statements in English on this transcript were

spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]