SunCoke Energy, Inc.

please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Shantanu Agrawal. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us this morning to discuss Suncook Energy's first quarter 2021 results. With me today are Mike Rippey, President and Chairman and Allison Lawson, Interim Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Controller. Following management's prepared remarks, we'll open the call for Q&A. This conference call is being webcast live on the investor relations section of our website, and a replay will be available later today. If we don't get to your questions on the call today, please feel free to reach out to our investor relations team. Before I turn things over to Mike, let me remind you that the various remarks we make on today's call regarding future expectations constitute forward-looking statements. The cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements in our SEC filings apply to the remarks we make today. These documents are available on our website as are reconciliations to non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today's call. With that, I will now turn things over to Mike.

Thanks, Shantanu. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us this morning. Today, we announce Suncoke's first quarter results. And before I turn it over to Allison, who will review the results in detail, I want to discuss a few highlights. First on safety, I would like to thank all of my fellow Suncoke teammates, as well as congratulate them for their continued commitment and contributions. The dedication of our team is clearly visible to our excellent safety performance, where we achieved zero recordable injuries during the first quarter, a record for our company. On the coronavirus front, we continue to take all necessary measures to ensure the health and safety of our workforce and have implemented policies and procedures that follow the guidelines established by the CDC, OSHA, and local health and governmental authorities to protect our workforce and contractors. Turning to our results, in the quarter we are extremely pleased with the operational performance that our team delivered across both our coke and logistics segments. Our coke making operations returned to running at full capacity and our logistics operations saw significant uptick in volume. We achieved record setting first quarter results with adjusted EBITDA of 70.6 million, a 14% improvement over Q1 2020. We're also pleased with our initial performance in the foundry and export coke markets. Our products are well received, and we are excited about the possibilities in these markets in the future. We will continue to work on optimizing our production and growing our market participation for these products. A very encouraging development for our logistics segment this quarter was the signing of a new take-or-pay agreement to handle iron ore pellets at CNT. As we discussed in our last call, we successfully tested this product during the fourth quarter of last year, which has resulted in a take-or-pay agreement and a new product for our logistics business. Looking at our capital structure and deployment of cash in the first quarter, we reduced debt by $33 million during the quarter and continue to execute on our deleveraging initiative while also maintaining our $0.06 per share quarterly dividend. We are well on our way to achieving our long-term gross leverage target of three times or lower by the end of this year. Overall, very strong operational and financial performance in the first quarter provides a solid foundation to build on for the rest of the year. We now expect results at the top end of our 2021 guidance of $215 to $230 million. With that, I'll turn it over to Allison to review our first quarter earnings in detail. Allison?

Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Turning to slide four, our first quarter net income attributable to SXC was 20 cents per share, up 14 cents versus the prior year period, mainly driven by our logistics segment performance. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $70.6 million in the first quarter of 2021, up $8.5 million versus the first quarter of 2020. The increase was primarily due to approximately 1.1 million tons of higher throughput volumes at our logistics segment. Turning to the detailed adjusted EBITDA bridge on slide five. First quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA was higher by $8.5 million or 14% over the prior year period. Our Koch operations performed well this quarter, and results were reasonably consistent with the first quarter of 2020. The majority of the period-over-period increase in adjusted EBITDA was driven by our logistics segment as CMT saw a significant increase in coal export volumes driven by strong global demand and supportive APIQ pricing. When adding in slightly favorable results in corporate and other, we ended first quarter at $70.6 million of adjusted EBITDA. Turning to slide six to discuss our domestic Coke business performance in detail. First quarter adjusted EBITDA per ton was $61 on 1,038,000 sales tons. Our domestic Coke fleet ramped back up to full capacity utilization during the first quarter of 2021 after the volume turned down in the second half of 2020. Foundry and export sales complemented our long-term take-or-pay contracted sales and are expected to continue to do so for the rest of 2021. As a reminder, foundry tons do not replace blast furnace tons on a ton-for-ton basis. For example, due to differences in the production process, a single ton of foundry coke replaces approximately two tons of glass furnace coke, leading to lower coke production and sales in the current quarter as compared to the first quarter of 2020. Our coke plants continued their strong operational performance and disciplined cost management during the quarter while producing and selling new products. On the back of strong first quarter 2021 performance, we are on track to achieve our full year domestic Coke adjusted EBITDA per ton and production guidance. Moving to slide seven to discuss our logistics business. The logistics business generated $10.9 million of adjusted EBITDA during the first quarter of 2021 as compared to $3.3 million in the prior year period. The increase in adjusted EBITDA is primarily due to higher throughput volumes at CMT. Our logistics business handled 5.3 million tons of throughput volumes during the quarter as compared to 4.2 million tons during the prior year period. CMT handled 1.6 million more tons versus the prior year period, mainly driven by higher coal exports and iron ore. Increased global demand strong API2 index pricing and increasing natural gas prices have resulted in higher thermal coal exports from the US. We expect export volumes to remain strong in the second quarter. Although our domestic terminals volumes were lower compared to the first quarter of 2020, it was more than offset by lower operating costs resulting from the cost savings initiative implemented last year. Given our very strong first quarter 2021 results and looking at the API2 forward curve, we now expect to deliver at the higher end or possibly even exceed our logistics adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $20 million to $25 million. We expect to handle approximately 5 million tons of coal at CMT as compared to our original guidance of 4 million to 5 million tons along with 2.5 million to 3 million tons of other products for which the guidance remains unchanged. The volume guidance for our domestic coal terminals also remains unchanged at approximately 10.5 million tons. Turning to slide eight and our liquidity positions for Q1. As you can see from the chart, we ended the first quarter with a cash balance of approximately $54 million. Cash flow from operating activities generated close to $65 million due to strong operating performance and the timing of cash payments. We spent $20.1 million on CapEx during the quarter, which included some carryover payments from last year. We lowered our debt by $33 million during the quarter, with the majority of the reduction coming in the form of paydowns on our revolving credit facility. We expect additional V leveraging to continue over the balance of the year as we continue to make good progress managing our balance sheet. We also paid dividends worth $5.1 million at the rate of $0.06 per share during the quarter. In total, we ended the quarter with a strong liquidity position of approximately $386 million. With that, I will turn it back to Mike.

Thank you, Allison. Wrapping up on slide nine, as always, safety and operational performance is top of mind for our organization. We look to continue our exceptional safety performance demonstrated in the first quarter while focusing on successfully executing against our operating and capital plan in 2021. As I mentioned earlier, we are pleased with the progress we have made during the first quarter on our foundry and export coke growth initiatives, These additional sales enable our Coke fleet to run optimally at full capacity, and we'll continue to focus on further developing our customer base and participation in these markets. From our logistics business perspective, the new iron ore take-or-pay agreement is another step in the direction of revitalizing C&T as we continue our efforts to bring new products and customers. The uptick in coal exports underpinned by the revised take-or-pay contract provides a strong foundation to further build upon at CMT. We again made good progress on our well-established and well-balanced capital allocation goals. Continuing to bring down our debt balance is critical to stabilizing and strengthening our capital structure. We will continue to evaluate capital needs of the business, our capital structure, and the need to reward shareholders on a continuous basis, and we will make capital allocation decisions accordingly. Finally, as I stated earlier, continued strength in steel and coal export markets combined with our excellent first quarter results leads us to comfortably project all your results at the high end of our adjusted EBITDA guidance. We will provide further updates to the guidance as we have more clarity about the second half of the year in our next earnings call. With that, let's go ahead and open up the call for Q&A.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound or hash key. Please stand by. We compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Matthew Fields from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Hey, everyone. I just wanted to ask a few here on the business. What was the Foundry Coke volume in the first quarter?

Matthew, thanks for your question, but as we've indicated in the past, we don't intend to discuss specific volumes or price components of the foundry coke or export sales activities. As you can appreciate, I know particularly the foundry coke market is a smaller market, and to discuss in any detail our participation would not put us in a competitively good position. But I think it's worth noting, Matthew, that we set out on this Foundry initiative going back a little over a year. And as you can see in our first quarter results, we've exceeded in a very modest way our expectations for the Coke business. We came out of last year in a turndown position. And we're fortunate enough to have good weather and great operations. And we ran at full capacity in the first quarter. So the objective there was to allow us to continue to run full and to do so profitably. And I hope you can agree that we had a very nice first quarter in our Coke operation. So Foundry has gone exactly as we'd expected it to.

Absolutely. And then previously you guys have – In your slide deck, when you break down kind of the quarterly shipments and logistics, you've given a CMT EBITDA, like an EBITDA attributable to content specifically, and I think that's missing this quarter. Is that a departure from policy? Are you not going to provide that anymore, or is it just an oversight and you can give that to us?

No, it's not an oversight, Matthew. It's purposeful and similar to Foundry. As we're now repositioning CMT, we expect to be serving different customers, different markets over different time periods, different circumstances. So to discuss at any level of detail the profitability of CMT, again, given the competitive situation down there in the Gulf, might disadvantage us in the commercial markets where we have to compete every day.

All right, fair enough.

I'm afraid of going 0 for 3 here, but I'm... They're great questions, and I hope you can appreciate the necessity to protect ourselves commercially.

I understand. Maybe I'll ask it in a different way here. The iron ore take-or-pay contract, is that with a U.S. customer or a foreign customer?

It's with a U.S. customer.

Okay. Investment-grade rated customer?

I said all I'm going to say now. I probably already said too much because all I did was invite the next question.

All right. Fair enough. That's helpful. And then, you know, just sort of just going on the back of the guidance for cash flow for the year 80 to 100, maybe you're closer to the top end of that if you're sort of hitting the top end of everything else. That kind of implies, you know, close to $55 million of cash flow for the next three quarters, which gets you basically all the way paid off on the revolver by year end. Is that, you know, obviously things can happen and we don't know what the future holds, but is that kind of the plan if that's the cash you're generating for the rest of the year, kind of whittle down that revolver balance over the next three quarters as low as you can get it?

And here you thought you were going to go all for three. You're exactly right. So you've now gone one for three. And then the Hall of Fame, because you've added 333.

Perfect. I'll take it. All right. Well, thanks. Yeah. Thanks very much, and good luck with the rest of the year. Yep.

Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Lucas Ice from B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.

We'll try to do better than 333. But good job on the quarter. And first question, Mike, just to hone in a little bit on how the business is running versus your expectations. You talked about an update three months from now. In the meantime, comfortably upper end of your previous guidance range. And what I'm looking for in my first question is a little bit more color as to what's been driving the better than expected performance. Is it foundry coke? Is it export? Is it domestic customers coming back looking for more volumes on the back of the strength of the steel market? Just a little bit more color on that. I would appreciate it. Thank you.

Good question. Thanks, Lucas. The outperformance doesn't have to do with our volumes. We expected to run full, and we did. So whether it's our domestic customers, our export customers, or our foundry customers, we're meeting the expectations we've set out for ourselves with regard to all three of those markets. So outperformance really comes on the cost side. Our teams did absolutely a wonderful job here in the first quarter, and I'm very much appreciative of their hard work. Also, you can appreciate in the first quarter, we don't have a lot of outage work. We choose not to do outages in the first quarter because weather can really wreak havoc on those outages. Sometimes new outage work. It's necessary to reduce your production during that time frame, you know, reduce your electricity, your steam production during a time frame. And the work we did during the first quarter, albeit limited, had no impact on our production. So the teams had a wide open field from which to perform. And they took advantage of that opportunity. Certainly winter can present challenges for manufacturers like ourselves and This winter, with the exception of a few weeks, was relatively a mild one. So we had a little bit of wind at our back there, too. But I don't want to take anything away from the performance of the teams. They all performed at very, very high levels, and they exceeded our expectations for performance on the cost side.

Very helpful. Really appreciate that. I'll take this for a double. All right. And then just kind of looking ahead, there is another step down in your domestic coke minimums in 2022. And just looking for an update here, are there ongoing negotiations? Are you predominantly looking to uh, the export market, more founder coke business, um, on, on, as, as those minimums step down to just what's, what, what's your plan for that? I, I'm sure you can appreciate this is an important question for investors. Thank you.

That's an excellent question. And, uh, the answer is all three. Uh, it's premature to, uh, to comment as to, uh, which one of those alternatives will ultimately win out for 22 and beyond. But we are in discussions with our domestic customers. We continue to look to grow our export and our foundry coke business. Economics will drive that. Obviously, as we get closer to 22, we'll be providing updates as to the fruits of those labors. I think for now, you know, we had a 400,000-ton hole to fill, if you will, this year, and the year's not over yet, but we are running full, and expectations are for 21 we'll continue to do so. So we need to continue to build on those initiatives. That's where our future success lies.

Mike, just now you said for 21 expectations, was it 21 or 22?

21. We expect to run full in 21. We had 400,000 tons to fill, and we expect to be able to fill those tons in 21.

And for 2022, is there a concern that you may have to run at reduced utilization rates? If one of the three initiatives falls short, what would be the contingency plan for that?

Well, if those plans fall short, we'd obviously run at less than full capacity. It's not our intention or our desire or our goal to not run full next year. We believe quite strongly that we produce a very high-quality product, second to none in the market, whether it's the domestic market or the global market. Our Coke and its physical properties, its utilization and blast furnace is unrivaled. So we believe we've got a wonderful product. We believe we're a low-cost producer. And it will be my dying belief that low-cost producers of quality products should be able to run their facilities full. So it's my strong belief and my every intention to see our facilities run full, well-maintained, as you know. They're reliable, and customers appreciate these things.

Very helpful. Thank you, Mike. Not sure if this will count as a hit single or not, but appreciate your perspective. Last one from me. On the iron ore take or pay, probably strike out on this one, but can you give us a little bit more context around term, volume, Just a little bit more color for investors to appreciate the opportunity here. Thank you.

You're going to strike out in this one, Lucas, but you're still going to go to the Hall of Fame, too. So don't feel badly. But we, again, for commercial reasons, and I hope you can all appreciate the sensitivity, we're just not going to go into the specifics of these new agreements we're reaching as we revitalize CMT.

Understood. All right. Well, continued best of luck. I hope, you know, we'll see each other in the Hall of Fame shortly, and I'll turn it over. All the best. All right. Great. Thanks, Lucas.

Your next question comes from Linus Brett Hendrickson from the Nicomas Capital. Your line is open.

Hey, Mike. How's it going? Thanks for all your support here and the team. So you guys, you can't hear me, can you, right?

But you're pardon me. You're breaking up. We're not able to hear you.

Hang on one thing. Hey, Mike, can you hear me now?

Yeah, it's all clear. Thanks.

Good. The operator had trouble hearing me, too. Anyway, thanks for all the hard work. You said something to Lucas that reminded me of something I was mean to ask you. You know, you talked about the quality of your coke and coal. There's been more of the steel manufacturers and even some of the car manufacturers have been talking about, call it an environmentally more friendly coal. And could you just talk about where you guys might have an advantage there as they become, it seems like increasingly focused by the month on that. So talk about maybe where that creates an advantage and maybe how that fits into some of the comments on 22.

It's a good question, Brad. It's actually quite a complex question, but I'll try to be brief in my answer. The question really revolves around environmental performance and more particularly greenhouse gas emissions. I think our environmental record speaks for itself. You know, we're the max standard. No one's built a Coke battery in the United States utilizing technology other than ours since 1998, and that remains the case. You know, we don't have water discharges, and we combust the particulate matter in our co-production process and produce electricity and, uh, and steam. So environmentally, uh, you know, our process is the standard, uh, on the, that's the broader statement. Uh, the more focused question around greenhouse gas goes to, you know, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the production of steel. And the science is a bit complex here, but simply, uh, Our product, by its nature, is a very high strength product. CSR is the term you hear tossed around. And what that allows steelmakers to do is reduce the amount of coke in the furnace and remain able to support the burden inside of the blast furnace and substitute in other materials, whether it be natural gas or whether it be HVI. So our product specifically allows for less greenhouse gases to be produced thrown off in the production of iron. So we believe that we offer an environmentally friendly product both in the production of the product itself, that's the coke making, as well as it allows steel makers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in their iron making process.

There are no further questions at this time. Return the call back over to Mike Rippey.

Okay. Thank you all again for joining us in the call this morning and, of course, for your continued interest in Suncoke. And we look forward to discussing our results in the second quarter call. So thanks again. And, as always, if you have questions, Shantanu and team stand ready to answer them after the call. Thanks again.