ArcelorMittal S.A. (MT) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

May 5, 2022 9:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Daniel Fairclough

Good afternoon, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to ArcelorMittal's First Quarter '22 Analyst and Investor Call. This is Daniel Fairclough from the ArcelorMittal Investor Relations team, and I'm joined on this call today by our CFO, Genuino Christino. Genuino and I are here to answer your questions on the first quarter results, which we published this morning alongside the presentation with detailed speaker notes on our website.

Today's call, which is being recorded, is scheduled to last up to 45 minutes. [Operator Instructions]

Before we begin the Q&A session, I'd like to hand over to Genuino for some brief opening remarks.

Genuino Christino

Thank you, Daniel, and good morning and good afternoon to everyone on the call. I will spend a minute or so with some very brief opening remarks. I will let our numbers do the talking mostly. So we are consistently posting strong operating results. This is the fourth successive quarter with EBITDA over $5 billion, demonstrating the strength of the business and our diversification. Yet again, an excellent contribution from JV and associates, contributing 14% of net income.

Book value is -- per share is -- book value of the JVs reaching $12 billion. These are very material business that represent important cornerstones of our global business.

Strong net income, $4.1 billion with EPS of $4.28. And here, I would also highlight that this is the highest EPS, more than a decade. Clearly, the benefits of our share buyback starts to become very visible on our reported numbers.

Value creation, book value is up again to a $57 per share, with trailing ROE of 36%. Equally important is strong free cash flow generation. So the company delivered $1.5 billion of free cash flow in first quarter, and this is despite a $2 billion investment in working capital. We continue to bring down our net debt despite investments in working capital and despite returning cash to shareholders, that’s a record low.

Our confidence in our outlook allows for the announcement of an additional $1 billion buyback, bringing the total up to now to $2 billion. And if we look back a little bit, if you go back to September 2020. And by the time we complete this extra $1 billion, we will have distributed $9.5 billion to shareholders.

We are focused on the consistent execution of our strategy. And I think today’s results and update is a clear illustration of the progress we are like on our front.