Celanese Corporation (CE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Celanese Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder this conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to hand the call over to Brandon Ayache Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Brandon Ayache

Thank you Darren. Welcome to the Celanese Corporation second quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Brandon Ayache, Vice President of Investor Relations. With me today on the call are Lori Ryerkerk, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; and Scott Richardson, Chief Financial Officer. Celanese distributed its second quarter earnings release via Business Wire and posted the prepared comments on our Investor Relations website yesterday afternoon.

As a reminder, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures today. You can find definitions of these measures, as well as reconciliations to the comparable GAAP measures on our website. Today's presentation will also include forward-looking statements. Please review the cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements, which can be found at the end of both press release and prepared comments. Form 8-K reports containing all of these materials have also been submitted to the SEC. As we published our prepared comments yesterday, we'll go ahead and go directly to questions.

Darren, please go ahead and open up the line for questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions] Our first questions come from the line of Ghansham Panjabi with Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Ghansham Panjabi

Hey, guys. Good morning. I guess first off, Lori in your prepared comments you had some comments about China and some of the trends that you saw in 3Q. I was just hoping, you could give us a little bit more color in terms of how things are evolving at that point in context of all the chatter about stimulus, et cetera. Are you starting to see any signs of that permeating through to your business?

Lori Ryerkerk

Thank you, Ghansham. When we look at China, it's been a difficult year in China, clearly, as we've seen depressed demand consistent with the rest of the world but probably more pronounced in China. I think what we see different now as we start moving through the year, we saw some signs of it early in 2Q, already is despite lower demand conditions, conditions especially for the Acetyl Chain seem a bit tighter. And the reason I say that is when we saw some unexpected outages in the second quarter and here really in July, we did see pretty rapid price response to those outages, which suggests that there's not a lot of spare inventory or spare capacity in that area. And if you look at utilization for acetyls for China – for global asset it's around 90% about the same in China. So again, that suggests to us that although demand hasn't recovered significantly, there is enough demand matches with the supply that we are in a place where we can see some price movement up as we see supply growing.