Good evening, everyone. Thank you for taking time to join us for Indorama Ventures fourth quarter and full year 2022 analyst briefing. I'm Vikash Jalan, Vice President, Investor Relations and Planning. Joining me today is Mr. Aloke Lohia, our Group CEO, Mr. DK Agarwal, our Deputy CEO, and Christopher Kenneally, Executive President for Fibers Business. A quick disclaimer that this meeting is being recorded. A replay of this session will be available on our website after the meeting. We have made a few assumptions and estimates on the future trends in industry, trends in the business, which are based on our analysis and available information at this point in time. With that, I now invite Mr. Lohia to start and followed by Mr. Agarwal. Then we'll take your questions. Over to you, please, Mr. Lohia.
Thank you, Vikash. Welcome, ladies and gentle to our full year 42 discussion. Next slide, please. Let me start with the key macro trends that we have witnessed over the last 18 months. As we all know, the last 18 months have many aspects. I will share with you some of the key trends that impacted our performance, both on the positive and the negative side. As we know, the freight rates played very important part in our earnings first nine months, and then had a negative impact in quarter four. The volatile energy prices as well had huge cost implications on our business, and now we see that normalizing towards the... In the U.S. as well as coming close to normalizing in Europe.
The economic activity globally has picked up apart from in China. Now with the COVID lockdown easement, we believe that the upside coming from the Chinese opening up will help to bring our numbers back to normalized levels. Let me explain a bit more on what we have understood from the number crunching in the last three months that we have spent analyzing on our markets. Let me start with the often used word, destocking, for the time. What it means, the destocking for our business, for IVL business, is that starting in end 2021, there was a supply chain disruption. For various factors, including shipping, and therefore, many of our customers started building safety stocks and security stocks.
That got exaggerated in beginning 2022 with the Russian-Ukraine crisis and the spike in the price of crude oil. Therefore, the restocking or the stocking of security supply continued well into the first half of 2022. As we entered into the second half of 2022, the normalization of the supply chain started with the availability of ships, with the congestions easing at ports, as well as the availability of trucks and drivers for the last mile delivery. What was a remarkable period was the quarter four, when the price of crude oil dropped from 101 in the third quarter to $88 in the fourth quarter. With the fear of recession, with the interest rates rising, all corporates, including IVL, took the stance of destocking. The destocking is real. It does not impact the final consumer demand.
What it impacts is the factory order levels. Next, please. With that background, we get into our record 2022 performance with a core EBITDA of $2.28 billion, up 31% year-over-year. We continue with our mindset, the growth mindset. We did two successful acquisitions, Oxiteno in Brazil, Latin America, and the Vietnam packaging business. Both of these highlighted our ability to pick good assets, and the performance of these assets were above our expectation. With the rising interest rates, we also renewed our focus on our capital efficiency and optimizing certain fibers and CPAC portfolio assets. Plus, with agile exposure management, we had our net debt equity of 1.16, which was nearly the same as in the beginning of 2022. A strong DSCR of 2.54x .
We continue to tighten our operational excellence, that resulted in a operating cash flow generation of $2.2 billion. A cash conversion ratio of 98%. Our focus on cost was enhanced. Project Olympus has been ongoing now, being now in the third year, and has delivered substantial value with the annualized run rate efficiency in 2022 or up to 2022 of $449 million. We continue to work towards delivering accretive earnings for our shareholders, our dividend proposed for the fourth quarter is 40 satang, meaning a total dividend of 1.6 baht to our shareholders, yielding 3.9%. Next, please. The fourth quarter 2022 performance was a disappointment. It was a challenging quarter. Our EBITDA, our core EBITDA was of $264 million, down 43% year-on-year.
It is not unusual for the fourth quarter being a lean seasonal demand quarter for us. It got exaggerated by the rapid destocking, which I mentioned earlier. The recessionary sentiments and the crude drop by 12% in quarter four over quarter three. With capital efficiency in mind, and in order to not land up with any higher stocks than our sales, we lowered our operating rates to match sales volumes, resulting in price and margins decline in IVL performance. Lean exposure management to destock with preemptive reduction in output at 64% utilization rate, accelerated by the winter freeze in the U.S., adding to unplanned safe shutdowns. Our end consumer markets have demonstrated an established resiliency. The demand for our commodities and necessities continue to be robust. We have minimal exposure to durables.
Our global operations were impacted by high energy costs in 2022 and also in fourth quarter 2022. Now these are normalizing to sustainable levels as seen in the U.S. natural gas pricing and ethane pricing. The fourth quarter continued to benefit from the octane disparity. Therefore our MTBE performance was above par while putting pressure on our paraxylene and our PIA margins. Next, please. Let me summarize the event of quarter four from our reported EBITDA of $82 million to our quarterly run rate EBITDA of about $500 million. These are the components that were one-time impacts on our quarterly performance. This is to demonstrate that the underlying performance of the business remains strong and unimpacted. Our balance sheet remains strong.
Our growth mindset and our operational excellence, as well as focus on our people management continues to be the main drivers for IVL performance going forward. There are many components over here listed, and we have divided them into the three segments as well as what took place across IVL. Normalizing for inventory liquidation costs, normalizing for energy costs, for instance, normalizing for the 64% operating rate, we feel confident that our $500 million sort of EBITDA targets are intact, and they have been intact for the last two years. There are many ways we could have carved out this information and present it to you. This is one way we chose, just to keep it simple and easier to, for us to understand and explain. With that, I would like to now pass on next part of the presentation to Mr.
DK Agarwal who will take you through the segments as well as IVL as a whole. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mr. Lohia. Good evening, all of you, to take out time on Friday evening for this analyst presentation. If you can go to the next slide. During the course of this year, we made two successful and high-quality acquisition, as you know, Oxiteno in the IOD segment and Vietnam Packaging in CPET. These both acquisition have been very successful, has contributed an additional $227 million to our overall EBITDA. Actually, both have exceeded the expectations. On a nine months basis, the newly acquired Oxiteno business delivered a core EBITDA of $215 million, leading to an EBITDA of less than 5. As you remember, our target was about 6, this has really performed very well in spite of weak fourth quarter.
With Oxiteno, we unlocked more than $20 million of synergy benefits in 2022 and are on track to realize another $80 million in next three years. All the initiatives are in the pipeline. As you know, we created a clean team to unlock this value. I think the most important part is this acquisition accelerates the IOD business transformation into a specialty surfactant player with expanded biomass feed capability. Brazil has bio-ethylene availability, it makes us the largest nonionic surfactant producer in Americas. Our first ever acquisition in Vietnam in packaging also delivered satisfactory results. On an eight months basis, the deal contributed $12 million, exceeding our expectations as we expanded the sales volume to large customers leveraging IVL global relationship. This is our first investment in Vietnam.
We achieved 40% of our target annual cost saving of $3.5 million in the first year of operation. This now opportunity provides us the channel to diversify our business across the segments in a very fast developing new market of Vietnam. Let's go to the next. This is on impairment. We took a very strategic review of our footprint and decide to optimize by impairing few assets in Europe and one in Asia. The assets that are affected are in two categories. One is mobility fiber assets in Europe and one PTA asset in Asia, which falls in CPET. This has led to an impairment of $260 million, which has been accounted in the books, out of which only $7 million have cash implication and $253 million is non-cash. What is impact of this?
We expect a result that our ROCE will improve by 30 basis points because of this, and we'll see a $38 million upliftment in EBITDA, core EBITDA. This improvement comes from lower fixed cost as we are reducing manpower by 550 people, changing product mix towards positive contribution margin products, especially in Europe. As you know, Europe had the challenging circumstances of high energy costs. Let's talk a little bit about fiber. We are disappointed with our results of fiber and that expedited this review of assets. The recent situation in Europe, because of high energy price, has made costs very high in the region, making the mobility fiber assets incompetitive for certain product categories. We have reviewed these assets and their long-term positioning and decided to take impairment of few assets for $120 million.
In the combined PET, although our results were fantastic, we look at each investment separately. CPET asset in Asia, the PTA plant is of old technology and high-cost plant, having negative cash flow in past 2 years, and we took impairment of about $140 million in this. This is a total $260 million impairment, $253 non-cash and $7 million of cash. Let's go to the next slide. Let's look at the cash flow which Mr. Lohia was referring. Operating cash flow was very strong during the year to $2.2 billion, which was 98% of our core EBITDA conversion and which is very important.
In spite of poor performance in fourth quarter, our operating cash flow during fourth quarter was $494 million, which was 187% conversion of core EBITDA with better working capital management and destocking. During the year, our free cash flow generation was $1.57 billion, as you can see from this graph, after maintenance CapEx and finance cost. This was deployed in the strategic growth of the company and growth CapEx was $1.9 billion, which primarily included the acquisition of Oxiteno and Vietnam Packaging, investment into creating future readiness of IOD organization like S/4HANA project, adding recycling assets towards our stated target to reach 750 KT ton by 2025, and improving our operational platform through Project Olympus initiative, as we just discussed.
Our dividend policy remains intact with minimum 30% of net profit, which we are consistently following since our IPO in 2010. Even in fourth quarter 2022, today's board meeting, we have proposed a dividend of 40 satang, which will add up to total THB 1.6 for the year. Of course, this is subject to the shareholders' approval. If you see, there is a net increase in net debt of $512 million through our profile, expanded our equity base, and we reduced our net debt to equity by 5 basis points during the year. Entire acquisitions were actually managed by internal cash flow predominantly. Next slide. Updating on the Project Olympus, which we are very proud.
We have continued to achieve sustainable efficiency gain as part of our efforts to become a leaner organization by operational excellence, strengthen the P&L structure by removing cost and future-proof the business. As Mr. Lohiya mentioned, we unlocked a cumulative saving of $449 million at the end of last year, driven by operational excellence, procurement and supply chain initiatives. As you can see, operational excellence was the biggest driver, delivering $242 million efficiency gain through yield improvement, overall equipment effectiveness improvement, cost optimization and removal of bottlenecks. This was up $81 million from efficiency gain in this area versus the previous year. Along this side, we saw $100 million efficiency gain via procurement and supply chain, up $36 million year-on-year, driven by our competitive bidding process, our ability to leverage economy of scales, and cost efficiency from bringing some activities in-house.
You can see this continuous improvement drive of Olympus continues in the IVL. Let's go to the next. Our full year performance of 2022, as you can see, was $2.28 billion core EBITDA versus $1.74 billion in 2021, registering a year-on-year growth of 21%. As we just said, we had a disappointing fourth quarter and an EBITDA of $264 million, which was drop of 43% year-on-year. As explained by Mr. Lohia, fourth quarter was adversely impacted for key reasons: heavy destocking in all product categories beyond usual lean season due to normalization of supply chain and the vessel time reduced, cautious buying due to recession fear and drop in crude oil prices. Everybody was trying to destock because of the recession and the crude oil prices were dropping.
Our sales volume during fourth quarter was 3.3 million ton versus 3.7 million tons, which is a drop of 12% versus Q3, a significant drop. This production was reduced by 16% to further optimize year-end inventory, as we wanted to have lower inventory, leaving an operating rate of only 64%. However, earning reported by our major brand owners and customers indicate resilient and consumer demand of our products. This is purely one-off event of destocking, as Mr. Lohia was explaining. Let's go to the next slide. Now it is important to see the EBITDAs across different geographies.
It is clear that some regions outperformed others, some highlights, specifically on the regional level include Americas, which is our continues to remain our strongest region with benefit from strong earning from CPET being having an integrated platform, an IOD platform, in spite of high energy cost. As you know, because of Ukraine crisis, the U.S. energy cost also skyrocketed. Oxiteno contributed $215 million for nine months operation. America fourth quarter performance was impacted due to drop in volume by 11% quarter-on-quarter, caused by destocking, seasonal weakness in integrated downstream of IOD, especially in crop solutions and Texas freeze event impacting nearly 72,000 ton volume. Asian performed well for the year, supported by limited exposure to China. As you know, our exposure to China is limited. Strong integrated PET spreads due to heavy stocking, as Mr.
Lohia was explaining that the first six months we had a very strong demand, and fourth quarter, we had a destocking. The fourth quarter result was impacted due to significant drop in integrated PET spread and drop in lifestyle volumes and fibers. The integrated PET significantly margin dropped during the fourth quarter. European performance remained weak for the entire year 2022 due to high energy costs, lower operating rate and impact on PIA due to high octane. As we said, high octane resulted in the higher prices of mixed xylene, which impacted the business of PX and PIA. Fourth quarter also got impacted due to lower volume by 16% quarter-on-quarter and reduced import parity as you saw the drop in the freight cost was there. That impacted the European operations. Now if you look at each CPET.
Coming to CPET, which delivered strongly in 2022 at an EBITDA of $1.328 billion, driven by higher margins with supply chain tightness, reset of contracts in Western markets, negating the high cost, especially in Europe. As I mentioned, high mixed xylene prices due to octane shortage impacted our PIA and PX business negatively by $70 million, which were of course recovered in MTBE and IOD. As supply chain normalized with reduction in the vessel cycle time, the heavy destocking happened across product line, aggravated with the fear of drop in oil prices and a hike in interest rate. The sales volume dropped in fourth quarter in CPET by 10%. However, the production was reduced by 13% to manage the year-end inventories, which improved our operating cash flow.
Despite the severe decline in PET volume this quarter, it is reassuring to note that fundamental consumer demand remains intact as evident by the stable volume and revenue performance of our FMCG customers like Coke and Pepsi. I mean, they reported very good results. The resilient performance of our packaging business in fourth quarter also reinforces resilient end product demand. As I mentioned during the fourth quarter, the industry integrated PET spread dropped from $294- $190 per ton in fourth quarter due to destocking and poor operating rate in the industry. The CPET EBITDA as a combination of lower volume and poor spread resulted in a decline in EBITDA of 49% quarter-on-quarter to $136 million in fourth quarter 2022.
Our specialty PET business also got impacted, as I mentioned, due to high MX prices and slowdown in housing, construction and coating markets, where 50% of the PIA demand comes from. What do we see in first quarter? We see destocking normalizing and improvement in our sales volume, as we said in February. The management is also focusing on value pricing over volumes to improve the profitability. Our recycling investment is at the core of focus of IVL to meet the commitment of 750,000 tons capacity by 2025. This certainly gives us as a preferred supplier with our brand owners like PepsiCo. We have also formed a dedicated focus group to invest in new technologies to meet our 2030 sustainability vision of having 25% feedstock by renewables and circular sources. That's about the CPET.
Let's do the next one. Looking over to IOD. As you can see, IOD registered a record EBITDA of $730 million in 2022, versus $377 million in 2021, registering a growth of 94%. As you know that this vertical has been made in last few years. We have made two successful M&As in this vertical, leveraging on shale gas advantage in North America and emerging as largest nonionic surfactant producer in the region. I have no doubt this paves the way for growth in other regions as the market remains fragmented. IOD vertical is on track to parallel our success in CPET by consolidating the industry, leveraging on innovation and customer intimacy, which has come with these two acquisition.
The ethylene crack margins continued to remain weak in fourth quarter, with high ethane costs because of the gas prices as well as, you know, the COVID lockdown, as the PE derivative demand was very poor. In light of minimal spreads, management decided to bring forward a plant turnaround of the Lake Charles site, reducing production in fourth quarter. In addition, the Texas freeze event in December further reduced ethylene production volume. Asian benchmark integrated MEG spreads continued to be under pressure as zero-COVID policy of China continued in fourth quarter and lockdown dampened China's downstream polyester demand. MTBE, the star of the year, margins got normalized in fourth quarter 2022. Seasonally, however, remaining at high level due to strong octane value. MTBE today in the first quarter has continued to remain strong with high premium of MTBE over gasoline.
Continued shortage of octane and lower price of butane will keep MTBE margin stronger, as indicated by the forward curve of the commodities. Our Oxiteno acquisition has done well, and while continuing to be long-term bullish on the growth and profitability aspects of the downstream business, we did see a slower fourth quarter 2022 due to significant down stocking by our customer. Destocking impacts were largely visible in home and personal care, crop solutions and coating markets. This destocking happened across all the areas. In addition, the normalization of freight rate impacted import parity of commodity chemicals, reducing both volumes and spreads. We have seen improved demand in the first quarter as we sit in February with restocking, achieving 90% of the normalized volume.
IOD in the fourth quarter downstream also had a one-time $10 million inventory loss, which is part of this core EBITDA because of significant drop in palm kernel oil price. As you know, palm kernel oil is imported from Malaysia and Indonesia and goes to Brazil. There was a rapid drop in the PX price, this was one-time inventory loss. Next. As I mentioned, the fiber was a disappointment. The fiber segment achieved core EBITDA of $212 million in 2022, a decline of 21% year-on-year. Lifestyle core EBITDA of $74 million, declined 43% year-on-year. Lifestyle fiber segment showed lower core EBITDA, mainly due to market slowdown in China with high downstream inventory amid COVID lockdowns. In Europe, we had the increase in utility costs, which impacted the performance.
Hygiene fiber segment ended 2022 with a core EBITDA of $79 million. Volume were down 13% due to softer demands in wipes post-COVID, and also lower volumes in Russia because of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Mobility fiber EBITDA at $53 million showed a 4% year-on-year growth. Volume declined 10% in line with the reduced vehicular OEM tires demand and significant cost increase in utility and energy prices. Management shown a good agility in managing price increases during the period despite heightened volatility. Replacement tire demand for light vehicles are steady. Q4, if you look at particularly in the fibers, continued to see the weakness due to destocking and poor margins in Lifestyle due to lower polyester operating rate in China, as we mentioned. Sales volume quarter-on-quarter declined by 18% in fiber division.
Production was reduced by 23% to minimize the year-end inventory as we did in different other segments. Q1 2023, as we said, we see the revival of demand on restocking and China reopening should benefit this vertical. As you know, the Chinese GDP growth is expected to increase from 3%-5% forecasted for 2023, which is a $18 trillion economy. Let's go to the next slide. Now look at the volumes, which is very important for you to see quarter by quarter what happened. Sales volume during fourth quarter dropped by 450 KT, which is quarter-on-quarter reduction of 12% due to destocking in various segments, as we just discussed. Production was reduced by 16% to manage year-end inventories.
Now we are almost at the end of February, so far we have seen definite signs of recovery in volume across all of our three businesses. Our estimate is the total sales volume across IVL returned to around 3.6 million tons in the 1st quarter of 2023, which is very close to 3rd quarter of 2022. Which is a similar level as to the 3rd quarter of 2022. This is in spite of lower production volume in Europe in fiber and CPET due to poor economics. If you see, we have not shown any increase in Europe because of the economics. Particularly, we are importing PTA instead of producing PTA fully there. However, the recent drop in gas prices will help to revive the production economics in Europe, we'll talk about this outlook for our businesses towards the end of the presentation.
This gives you some highlights about the volumes. Go to the next slide. We remain committed, as Mr. Lohia said, to our financial discipline, which is clearly visible on this slide. We have a liquidity of $2.4 billion, which includes cash and cash in, under management, plus unutilized committed banking lines. Our debt service coverage ratio was at 2.54x , showing prudent management of our yearly debt payment. The repayment obligations, which you are seeing on the right-hand side of the graph, are well spread out, leveraging on our banking relationships and debt market globally. The debenture maturities will be refinanced on maturity, creating more liquidity and a strong DSCR.
Globally interest rate, as you all know, went much higher in 2022, though our cost went up by only 76 basis point, only due to limited exposure debts to floating rate, which is 37% in the end of 2022. 63% remains fixed. Of course, we expect interest rate will further move up in 2023, and we may see an increase in interest cost by about $70 million-$80 million, which is small in relation to the continuously rising rates that we see globally today. I mean, this fixed interest rate has certainly helped IVL. Our forex risk is minimal and managed by maintaining a natural hedge portfolio and matching foreign currency assets with the same foreign currency liabilities.
Last but not least, which is very important, our sustainability-linked debt is 20%, which by end of March 2023 will be 27% based on committed line of funding of $500 million. The sustainability-linked debts are cheaper as well as a longer tenure. Our dividend policy is very consistent. You can see the historical dividend speed we pay every quarter, which also shows the strength of our business model and strong visibility of cash flow generation. The board has recommended today a final dividend of 40 satang, making annual dividend of 1.6 Thai baht per share. This year would be record dividend and gives yield of close to 3.9%, which is much higher than 10-year government bond yield of 2.6%. The next. Nothing.
If you see, looking ahead to 2023, there are several signs of recovery that indicate a potential favorable outlook for markets in the global macroeconomic situation and positive factors for IVL. Let's talk about what are those. China household saving is sitting on JPY 12 trillion. The expected GDP growth forecast to increase from 3%-5%, resulting into increased demand across all product categories. We saw this pent-up demand coming into regions as they opened up, what we call is a revenge spending. The normalization of inventory levels will further improve demand due to restocking. We expect our sales volume in 2023 to grow from 14.7 million- 15.4 million, supported by organic growth and new expansion projects in pipeline.
Particularly in India, we are adding a PET line, which is be operational by March, as well as fiber assets. The situation in Europe energy market has become more balanced. As you saw, the energy has come down, which will benefit us by $83 million net of mark-to-market loss because of the hedged situation. We expect to see normalizing price for U.S. natural gas and ethane, which would bring back the shale gas advantage. This will improve MEG and ethylene crack margin as marginally witnessed in first two months. We already see those improvements in the first two months. Alongside these external developments, we'll continue to take decisive action to ensure we have the best platform to support our future growth. Continuing our laser focus on cost management via Project Olympus, we continue to deliver the value.
Pursuing performance improvement through our footprint optimization, which you saw, guided by our strategic review. This gives you something about 2023 outlook. This wraps up my presentation, and we'll be willing to take your questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Aggarwal. We can take up the questions, and you can, either raise your hand or you can also type your questions in the chat box.
Can we go?
Yeah, Khun Komsan, do you have a question? Please go ahead. We can hear you.
Yes. Thank you for the presentation. I have a few questions to ask.
Yeah, please go ahead.
All right. The first one is, can you give us an estimate of the benefit of the gas price collapse for this year versus last year? The second one is, can you give some guideline in terms of the potential incremental EBITDA from MTBE if the margins stay at this level throughout in 2023? The third one is, what is the result of the West PET negotiation for this year versus last year? Are we expecting the margin will it be the same or better? The last one, I think you mentioned that U.S. cracker margins seem to be improving. Can you quantify or add color on that if, say, U.S. cracker margin staying at $0.09 per gallon is things like that.
Thank you, Khun Komsan . I'll take all four of your questions. The gas impact I just mentioned, the impact is $542 million, we had adverse impact in 2022, which was basically recovered from enhanced margin. This had $86 million gain due to gas hedging. It was net of that. Today, based on the forward curve, we have a $183 million gain after taking the loss on hedged quantity. We continue to have the hedging in place, our benefit will be $183 million. We believe the gas prices are quite low, we are locking in this outstanding benefit which we may have. Coming to MTBE, if we can bring the MTBE slide.
You know, MTBE was very strong last year, 2022. You can see here there are three columns. What is the Brent? This is prices. Gasoline minus Brent, US MTBE minus gasoline, and US MTBE prices in a spread. In 2022, as you can see, full year, the spreads were quite high, particularly in the second quarter because of octane shortage. Based on the forward curve, you can see here that as we speak in February, the gasoline is. As you know, the gasoline crack margins are high. They are at $255 per ton. The premium of MTBE over gasoline is $223 means the octane is pretty short in the first quarter, and $585 per ton versus $371 in the first quarter.
I won't tell you that second quarter will be $884 or anything. If you see the forward curve, which shows again second quarter peak coming up, because normally butane becomes cheaper in second quarter. Up to winters, butane gets blended in gasoline, and you can see the average is $636 per ton. I won't say any incremental EBITDA, but today octane is short in U.S. and we have actually, we were supposed to take a turnaround. We just took a turnaround in the first quarter for seven days, and we expect the full production in the remaining part of the year. That would be my guideline on MTBE. West PET negotiation has been quite good.
You know, basically in U.S. and Mexico, we have raw material linked contracts, which is actually 12.5% of the total volume, but they contribute nearly 35% of the integrated PET EBITDA, and they are at a slightly better prices than last year. Roughly to give you. However, in Europe, because of the European situation, right now the volumes in Europe are only raw material linked 10%. The 90% are on the spot basis. You can see a premium here that what shows that average 2022 premium over the benchmark was $280, $260 per ton. We think this premium will narrow down, but if you see 2017-20 22, it's $247 per ton. As Mr.
Leong was mentioning, freight will certainly have impact in the Europe, the US-Mexico, which is rock solid on the integrated spreads. Coming to the U.S. Cracker, let's go. I think let's understand what happened in the cracker. You know, in Ukraine crisis resulted in very high gas prices. You can see here in second quarter, third quarter, resulted into high ethane cost. As the Europe energy situation normalized, the energy prices have collapsed. You can see, which has resulted into better crack margin. You can see from first quarter, they're about $0.09-$0. 10 per pound. Today, Still there is a surplus capacity, but as the China opens up, PE derivative demands goes up, and gas is likely to hold on to these levels because now the European situation is easing out.
The forward curve in Europe also shows that energy is gonna be cheap. We think this crack margins will certainly improve depending on how the Chinese demand shapes up. I hope that answered your question, all the four questions.
Yes, it did. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Komsan. Ken Pang from Credit Suisse, I can see that you've asked a question in the chat box. I'll read out for you. Can you please repeat which assets you made the impairment? That's number one. Does it mean that the operations are mothballed? You exited those assets completely or not?
If you can go to the impairment slide. As I mentioned, there is fiber assets and there is PET assets or PTA assets. Fiber assets, basically, we have shrink the footprint and we have rationalized low profitability products. Particularly, there are four assets in the airbag yarn field, on the tire cord side, on the lifestyle side. We have actually shrink the footprint. One side, particularly in France, we have fully impaired, but we will still run three to four years, which may be basically used for recycling assets. That is the fiber side. On the PTA side, which you see $140 million is mothballing the site by 1st quarter of 2024.
This is a high cost PTA asset, and it is better to buy today PTA at a much cheaper prices than make it. This has been causing a negative cash flow. Total non-cash impairment is $253, and $7 million is cash, which includes severance and the redundancy to be paid over 2023, 2024. I hope that answered your questions.
Okay. Ken Pang, you can ask if you have any follow-up question. In the meantime, I'll pick Mayank. I can see that you have raised your hand. Can you ask your question?
Yeah.
Yeah. Please go ahead.
Thanks for that. The first question was more related to your point around destocking. Can you just give us a rough idea in terms of in each geography, what is the level of inventory days are you carrying at your end, and what is your sense at the customer level, the number of inventory days versus normal that you might have seen?
Yeah. Mayank, that was the question only or only one question?
Yeah, that was one. The second question was more related to.
Inventory
... impairment side of things as well as Oxiteno. You had earlier highlighted during Oxiteno acquisition that one of the U.S. assets of Oxiteno is something that would bring in extra synergies for you. Can you just talk about where are we on that in terms of the run-up of the Oxiteno assets in U.S. and how much more incremental EBITDA you expect for 2023? The last point was on impairments. Are you expecting any further impairments to happen for 2023, or you think a lot of that cleanup is done right now?
Very good. The destocking. If you can show the vessel chart. The destocking of course happened due to the lead time of the rail car. It happened across Western Europe, United States, as well as in Asia. Our finished goods inventory, we keep around 18- 20 days. To show you the gravity of destocking, on the left-hand side, you can see the cycle time of the vessel. That, you know, all capacity depends on how much cycle capacity, which was a 40 days reduction. This means people who were buying PET, everything landed up into their godown, and they had to cut this. As Mr. Lohia was explaining, people were keeping safety stock because nobody wanted to be stock out, as happened in first quarter, second quarter, third quarter.
That was a quantum of reduction of the transit. Even on the right-hand side in the United States, where the rail car, the most of the movement is rail car. The rail car, the speeds were increased. Lot of rationalization happened, and that reduced by five to six days in U.S. system also. Shipping as well as rail car both destocked heavily, and that also impacted into the other business segments. On your Oxiteno synergy, you know, this Pasadena asset is close located to Clear Lake, Texas, where we were buying the ethylene oxide, purified ethylene oxide from a supplier, which contract has terminated by end of this last year. We already unlocked $20 million of synergy benefit in 2022 in cross-selling the SG&A reduction as well as the innovation integration.
We are having to have another $80 million in next three years. This EO supply captive itself will unlock about $17 million-$18 million annually. The Pasadena asset is performing very well with asset utilization of nearly 85%-90%. Third question was on further impairment. We don't have any further impairment coming in. We took a very strategic view of all the asset portfolio and to understand the long-term demand competitiveness. As you can see, predominantly it was in Europe fiber assets and PTA asset, which was very old asset in Asia. We don't expect any further impairments. Hopefully, Mayank, that answered you.
Yeah, just a follow-up. That's very clear on some of the points, especially on destocking. If you can go back to that slide. If we look at it, I think, we are still not back to 2019 levels in terms of some of the shipping times. Do you expect-
Shall I?
further destocking for the rest of the year?
I think it has come to a nearly end. First quarter has some lag over. Actually, if you see the Shanghai Freight Index, it has come significantly lower. We have a slide on Shanghai Freight Index, if we can bring in. Actually, freights have come down and most of the destocking will get completed in the first quarter, even if something is left out. That would be the next. You can see this Shanghai index, which we were talking. Freight rates, you can see pre-pandemic level. At increased oil prices, the operating costs of the ships are high, so it has really bottomed out now, freight rates, which is a good indicator of the situation, you know.
On an annual basis now across various geographies, what are the run rates that we should expect for 2023 for global business?
The volume I gave you, let us give the operating rate exactly. At 70. Yeah, Mayank, let me give you the exact numbers. I don't want to go wrong on that. You know, first quarter you can see 76%, but overall, I think the year should be 78%-80%. We'll give you the exact numbers. Yeah, go ahead, Mayank.
Okay. I'm not sorry. I think you have those numbers. I think the last question I would just present was more about the U.S. contracts on PET. You did touch a bit earlier on that. Can you just explain a bit more of how much you expect considering freight rates have come down as well as there's a bit more normal market now? How much is the increase in your contract pricing and volumes for 2023?
Yes. You know, in U.S. and Mexico, I'm talking of both markets, 90% of the contracts are raw material linked. This means you pass through raw material and the integrated PTA, PET spread over last year, if I remember correctly, is $9-$10 improvement. You can say same as last year, but slightly better than that. Europe of course is only about 12%. The remaining is on the spot basis, which will be guided by the import parity. European, that's why you can see our European operating rates we are keeping low.
Any more questions?
Seem to be 80%.
Mayank, the operating rate for 23 is expected to be 80%. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Mayank.
Thank you.
Sumedh from JP Morgan, I can see you have a question. You can please go ahead.
Yeah, sure. First, thank you so much for the detailed presentation. I have two questions. Firstly, just a general question on the PET market. How are you seeing the market today? I mean, last year spreads were around $300+ and now we are below $200. Any guidance on that would be useful. My second question I'll ask after you.
Okay. If I can come to the spread slide, Vikash. Certainly last year, the PET spreads in the first half as we were telling you, supply chain shortage resulted into a very strong integrated spread. As you can see, $293, $289. It started from fourth quarter of 2021, actually. You will have to split this integrated spread in PET and PTA. We are a big buyer of PTA now. Dark blue shows you the PTA. You can see that as we speak today, it is already at $212. If you see, PET has $142, while PTA has dropped to $70. We are a buyer of PTA, we look at more at integrated in Asia. In Asia, we basically look at PET more, $142.
To give you a guidance that, what is the market condition, I think depends a lot on China open up. China had a negative growth of PET domestic last year because of lockdowns. We think that China will be very strongly coming back. As I was just telling you that so much savings of household is there, and the research shows that there's a lot of spending which is going to come from China, which basically benefits our necessity business because PET is necessity even if you travel or you go to dining or everything. We are not in durable goods. We are in necessity, and which will get first slice. Difficult to guide, but it won't be second quarter, third quarter, I can tell you that.
It will be wrong to say that we'll have the same second quarter, third quarter, that shortage. yes, it is already showing a increasing trend as you can see in the first two months. demand remains strong. Our customers have shown resiliency. PepsiCo gave very strong results, even in spite of price increases they made. it also shows the inelasticity of to the price increases. as you were saying that being in a necessity business, now with the price increases they have done, they are focusing on volumes. we feel very positive about PET as a category.
Understand. Thank you for that. Just my second question based on your M&A strategy. Again, I think, obviously the subsidy that were required in second quarter were announced like a few months back, I think probably was May of 2021. Are we expecting something where you kind of go back to market and look for new business?
As Mr. Lohia once mentioned, we are always a growth company. Right now we don't have anything in pipeline, as I mentioned. There are certainly IOD business has become very strong business for us. You can see with the EBITDAs what we have done. We have a good headroom to grow, nothing in pipeline at present. Growth will be the focus for the company, particularly in IOD business, which is highly fragmented business. As you can see, we have a very limited presence in India. We have very limited presence in Asia Pacific region, and in Australia we have. There are opportunities in this business. PET, we are already organically expanding, India 200,000 ton capacity soon coming up. Nigeria we're going to expand. Those organic will be coming up.
Naturally, we can't do major acquisition in PET, because of antitrust issues. IOD certainly gives us a lot of platform to grow the business, but nothing in pipeline right now.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sumedh. This slide just shows you the volume growth from 14.7- 15.4, what we are planning. The organic assets will give up to 14.8, as you can see. In IOD. We have assumed lower MEG production, but if MEG contribution margin goes up, then MEG will certainly have a ramp up of the production. We assumed in 2023 that MEG wasn't improving, but now we see with the gas prices coming, it can bump up. You have Oxiteno full year for one quarter, and then India PET expansion and full operation of recycling projects will give 200,000. The fiber new projects, U.S., India, will be another 200,000. This is an Indian expansion, so that is what we are estimating, 15.4 million tons production.
As I mentioned, this reduced PTA production in Europe is considered here because it's better to buy PTA right now rather than make, you know.
If I may add one more question. Can you please tell us again the advantage of or benefit of the lower gas prices? I missed them the first time.
Lower gas prices. Okay. Can we go to the gas price?
Mm-hmm.
Last year, average gas price in United States was very high because of the European gas prices, right? The natural gas, LNG, was getting exported from U.S. You can see here that 2022 average was $6.63. Now it's dropped to $2.71, $2.50. The advantage, one is in the conversion cost because we use a lot of gas. The net advantage versus 2022 is $183 million. This is net of mark-to-market loss because we continue to hedge. Today, we are hedging for 2024 also, so to make sure that we are not exposed to the volatility in the gas. The second benefit of lower natural gas prices is on the crack margins, because ethane goes down as the natural gas goes down. If you can go to the crack margin slide.
With that, basically the crack margin goes up. Although today, the polyethylene prices haven't bounced back because of the Chinese demand. It has dual benefit. One in the ethylene crack margins. As you can see on the in this slide, that crack margins in 2021 were nearly $700 per ton. On the left-hand side, you see when the gas prices were very high in second quarter, third quarter, ethane was high, the crack margins were very low. As a result, actually in fourth quarter, we did not run Lake Charles. Now we are running Lake Charles at 80% capacity utilization. You can see the green line, the January, which is improving, the spot and NTP, which is a contract price, U.S. NTP, as the gas prices drop.
Now, of course, there's an overhang of the capacity in United States, but as the Chinese demand for polyethylene kicks in, U.S. shale gas advantage is very strong, which will also. The MEG, because MEG, China is the biggest importer. This will also benefit in the MEG integrated margins. If you can go to the MEG slide, which can also give you some advantage to look at it, what is happening in the MEG. You know, the MEG. This you see here that U.S. integrated MEG margin in third quarter and fourth quarter were very low because of high ethylene costs and high ethane costs. Only $220 and $258. Naphtha-based crackers were $101 and $77, versus if you take five years average was $500 per ton.
As the gas prices reduce, ethane prices reduce, that margin has gone up to $375, $377, which shows the shale gas advantage, which you see on the right-hand side in the dark blue. What is the shale? Higher is the crude oil price, shale gas advantage becomes stronger. What will be the crude oil price? As China opens up, if the mobility increases, the crude will be upwards. There is a recession fear, we are not speculating on the oil price here, this is based on $84 a crude oil right now. Hopefully that explained you, Sumedh.
Yes. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Sumedh. I can see one question here, which is on the hedging position and price of the natural gas in 2023 in U.S. and EU. We've shown that slide. Probably we can show that 1 more time.
Can you show that slide?
Yeah.
We are, we have this mark-to-market loss at present, and you saw $185 million gain netting of the gas losses on the mark-to-market. The average price hedged, you have the average price hedged exactly? Basically, you can see that on these gas prices, 290, 340, we are hedged about 47% in Europe and about 40% in America. Now, since the prices have dropped, we are hedging aggressively to lock in this $183 million gain. You know, that translated into gain in 2022 also, as you can see, $85 million. It's a continuous hedging process, and that gives you the details. Yeah.
Thank you. There's one more question from Kiatnakin Asset Management. They're asking, what's the guidance for EBITDA contribution on Oxiteno in 2023, and how much did it contribute in the fourth quarter?
If you can go to the Oxiteno slide. As I said, we have to look at the full year was to nine months contributed $215 million. Of course, we had the peaks and troughs. Fourth quarter, Oxiteno downstream was weaker, and the sales dropped by nearly 19% due to destocking. Normally in Brazil, the fourth quarter is crop solutions demand is weaker. This is seasonal. Second quarter, third quarter is the strongest. I'm told that Brazil is going to have crop, the record crop this year. We are, as I've just mentioned in my presentation to you, first quarter volume are already on 90% normalized. It was more impact of destocking in all the areas like home and personal care. We talked about the crop solutions and coatings.
There is no structural change in the demand of our products, and in first quarter, we are already seeing recovery back. We had a PKO loss one time of $10 million because of rapid drop in the palm kernel oil price, which dropped from $2,000- $900 per ton. You know, there is a transit inventory in, which is actually taken as a core EBITDA here.
Thank you. I don't see any more questions here. Anyone, if you have any more questions, you can ask it now.
Just one more thing. This is Sumed again. Have we reported any realized hedging gains or losses in the, in this, 2022?
I think, Sumedh, you got the question. This mark-to-market has to be accounted in the earnings. The non-control. There are two types of hedging: effective and ineffective hedging. $28 million is realized as a P&L. $23 million, which was effective, is under the non-controlled NCI, which goes into the share capital, just to give you a number on that.
Yeah, Sumedh, you're asking the mark-to-market gains in the hedging gains in 2022, right?
Yes.
Yeah. in 2022
For 2022 it was all realized because that was realized.
That's 88, $85 million gain, in 2022.
Yeah. 2023 also MTM loss, which I'm showing, $57.28 is accounted as a P&L already in this year.
Sorry, I'm confused now. 85 is the realized and 57 is unrealized.
Yes. $57 is mark-to-market unrealized as on 31st December. Okay? Under the accounting policy, if it is ineffective hedging or effective hedging, you have to account as a P&L. $28 million of that has been accounted as P&L items already, which is ineffective in the last year's P&L.
Understand. May I check which lines does it come in terms of in the income statement?
It is in the core EBITDA.
It's in other income, okay.
It will be part of the utility cost.
Utility cost
the COGS normally.
Oh, okay. Thank you.
Okay. We don't have any more questions. Maybe, this is a Friday evening, thank you very much. We take this opportunity to invite all of you, on first of March. It's our annual Capital Markets Day event we are doing next week. Please do come in person. We'll be having Mr. Aloke Lohia, our Group CEO, Mr. Aggarwal. Alistair from the U.S. will be joining online, Chris Kenneally will be speaking. See you on first March. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for joining.