Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Empresas Copec's Investor Meeting. Today's presentation is available on the company's investor relations website, investor.empresascopec.cl. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this presentation may include market outlooks and forward-looking statements, which are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Empresas Copec's management and on information currently available to the company. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions because they relate to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. Investors should understand that general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operating factors could also affect the future results of Empresas Copec and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. This presentation contains certain performance measures that have been adjusted with respect to IFRS definitions such as EBITDA. In this opportunity, questions will be received in written form.
If you have a question, please write it down in the Q&A session. Please be aware that your company's name should be visible for your question to be taken. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Rodrigo Huidobro, Chief Financial Officer of Empresas Copec. Please go ahead, sir.
Okay. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this conference call. Thank you for joining, where we will be talking about the Sucuriú project. This is one of the largest initiatives that has been announced ever by the company and its subsidiary companies, so we decided to make a special call to give you some more details about the project that we are launching. I'm joined here today, as you can see, by Gianfranco Truffello, CFO of Arauco, and Cristián Palacios, our Director of Investor Relations. So we will be a t the end of the presentation, we will be tackling any questions you might have. I will hand it over to Gianfranco, who will give you some facts and some details about the project itself.
Then I will take you on myself to give you some considerations from a consolidated standpoint, and we will end the conference with the questions that you might have. Thanks very much, and Gianfranco, please go ahead.
Okay. Thanks, Rodrigo. Here we have the presentation, and I will advance for the project, so we are very happy to have announced that the board of directors of Arauco and also Copec approved this week the largest project in the history of Arauco and Empresas Copec, and this is a project, Sucuriú, in Brazil. It's a new pulp mill, and I'm glad to give you some details about it. Starting with the capacity of the mill. This will be a 3.5 million tons of BHKP pulp. It's located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
Mato Grosso do Sul is located at the west of the state of São Paulo, as you can see there in the map, and the mill will be at 47 kilometers from the city of Inocência that is marked there in the map. As usual, in this big pulp project, we will generate a lot of clean energy, 400 megawatts. From that, we've consumed about 180 megawatts, and the rest will be sold in the Brazilian Interconnected System. And we expect to deliver the first bale in the last quarter of 2027. The investment involved, as has been announced, is $4.6 billion for inside the fence and some other small investments outside the fence.
That is equivalent to BRL 23, 25.3 billion at the exchange rate of that exchange rate, as I mentioned, this is a 3.5 million tons capacity mill. It will involve, at the peak of construction, about 14,000 new jobs during the construction of the mill, and once it start operation, it will involve 6,000 people, working not only in the mill, but also in other activities in forestry and logistics associated with the operation of this mill in Mato Grosso do Sul. For the operation of the mill, we will have an area of about 400,000 hectares of eucalyptus plantation that will supply this mill, in the long term.
One thing, very important to mention is that we chose to go with 100% proven technology. So, for the capacity that we wanted to achieve, we worked with the vendors with a design that involves two fiber lines and three drying machines. So, we will have a single recovery boiler, but since there was not proven technology for a digester the size of this capacity, we prefer to go with two digesters and then go into three drying machines. We will give you more security that the mill has a proven technology. And also, if we have any problem during operation, we will not have the whole mill going down 100%, but will allow us to operate at a different capacity.
Also, we will have three turbo generators for the 400 megawatts of capacity. The lime kilns, we won't be burning fuel oil. We will be only using a gasification based on chips, and we will have the part of fuel oil or gas only for option, if something goes wrong. We will have, of course, since it's the latest mill, the best-in-class in automation. We will not produce any solid waste that will be brought to a landfill. Also, we have secured very good environmental parameters that will allow us not only to comply with the Brazilian legislation, but also to have access to the best technology and to possibly apply to all of the green financing that we expect to get.
Regarding the vendor, the main line of production was awarded to Valmet. Valmet is a very recognized set of machines for pulp and paper, and we are very happy to be partnered with them because we have, of course, a good price and but also a guarantee of production for the complete mill and also the ramp-up. We, of course, this is an EPC construction project, so give us more security about the total price, and we have negotiated incentives and penalties regarding the failing or the better target of production that will align the incentives for this project that we expect to be very successful.
Regarding the diversification before and after the completion of the project, you can see first, in the upper part of the table, a graph showing the diversification by product. You can see there that, currently we have 55% of BHK, bleached kraft pulp, eucalyptus production. The rest is softwood, basically, divided in, the BSKP paper grade softwood, unbleached, that we produce in, in Constitución, 7%. We have dissolving pulp that we produce from, producing in Valdivia, and then we have fluff production that we have in, Argentina. After the project, we will go, of course, more concentrated to, eucalyptus pulp.
We will go up to 72%, still having a proportion of softwood, of course, and other niche products, but we will be concentrating in the growing part of the demand for pulp, which is eucalyptus, and very important, you can see the diversification of country of production. Now, currently, we have almost 80% of our production coming from the Chilean mills. Of course, we have the joint venture with Stora Enso in Uruguay, that produces 14% of our capacity, and then we have Argentina.
After the Sucuriú, we'll be more diversified, and we will have 47% of capacity in Brazil, and we all know that is the most competitive country in terms of production, but give us more security in the supply for our clients, since we're going to be producing in four different countries in the world. What, h ow will be our position in the short fiber landscape after the completion of the different projects that are announced? Of course, several is already started, but there's a project of Oji, our project in Sucuriú, and there's a project from CMPC, will be ranked in the top four in the market of hardwood, which is for us is very important to be a big player in the market that is growing.
This graph, it's very important, not because of trying to show the correlation between adding of capacity and the price of pulp, but just to show all the projects that have been developed since two thousand and six. The green bars are showing the projects that were constructed in Brazil. This is only showing a short fiber, and you can see that the projects have been every time bigger than the first one. But the most important thing here is that the gap that is gonna happen between Project Cerrado, Sucuriú is one of the biggest that we have in the history. So we expect to have good market conditions in the construction years in terms of the correlation between demand and supply, that will expect to have good pricing for that.
To mention the size of the project compared to the other projects, it's a very big project that give us very good economies of scale in terms of cash costs and also in terms of CapEx per ton. In this slide, we are showing the CapEx intensity of Sucuriú that is a little bit lower than $1,300. And this very well compared to other projects, and especially some projects out there that are expansions. The MAPA was an expansion, not a greenfield pulp mill. That is showing how good is our project in terms of the layout, in terms of the technology that we got, in terms of the negotiation that we obtained with Valmet.
And also, of course, compared to MAPA, it's not lower, but you have to remember that in MAPA, we have different conditions. We were building in the middle of the pandemic with all the inflation in construction costs, so all the restrictions that we had in Chile, especially in construction. And also, in Chile, you have seismic conditions. You have earthquake, so the construction normally is higher cost than it is in Brazil. Other good thing about this project is that there's a lot of experience of building projects in Brazil in terms of construction companies building there, and with very good results in terms of timing and budget in Brazil.
And also, this is an EPC contract, so it give us more comfort in the delivering of the price and the time of the project. The total investment, $4.6 billion, is divided more or less in how we expect to spend during the coming years. You can see that this year we have to pay some prepayments for the contract. We're talking about $200 million, that some of that we already spent or we are spending in the earthworks, the earth movements that we're already doing, that you can see the photograph there. And the biggest cash flows are coming in 2025, 2026, and 2027, and then the ramp-up also involves some payments that we have to be done.
The total is $4.6 billion. In terms of financing, our calculations are that with a CapEx of $4.6 billion and subtracting the equity, the maximum equity committed by Empresas Copec, and also subtracting the expected free cash flow that we could do in the three years of construction, about $300 million a year at normal pricing for Arauco, for the existing capacity and operations that we have. We have to finance probably $2.5 or $3 billion of extra debt. And we expect that we will obtain that with good financing alternatives like ECAs, multilaterals, of course, the bond issuance in the international markets and in the local markets. We have a lot of capacity and reach and experience in the market.
The last time we went to the market for international bond was five years ago, so we have. There's a lot of appetite for bonds of Arauco, and we are able to issue bonds up to 30 years. We have done in the past, so we expect to don't have any problem with that. Of course, we have to refinance amortizations that are due during the construction, and that is the normal thing that we do, and that could involve another $1.7 billion of refinancing that we have to do anyway, even if we don't have the project. But the good thing is that we have a lot of clean room ahead in terms of amortization in the long term.
So if you think about a new financing for 10 years, 15 years, there's a lot of space in between of getting amortizations allocated in those periods. Okay, so financing, that's more or less what we are thinking about, and we o f course, we are now getting in, and we have been discussing with banks and ECAs, and we will continue doing that more in a speedy way now that the project has been approved. And finally, just a takeaway. This project is very important for us for our long-term strategy. We will, we're willing to expand globally. We were looking at Brazil for a long time. We have been in Brazil for 20 years with the panel operation.
We have been planting eucalyptus for the last ten years with an existing land we had in Mato Grosso do Sul. So we have been preparing a lot for this project, and this help us maximize the value of the company and also the social, environmental, economical, responsible way, and continue to be pioneers in sustainability. We will increase our diversification by location, allowing us to produce in four different countries and a very competitive market like Brazil, which is most competitive in terms of cash flows.
And also, after the ramp-up of the mill, we will have extra volumes that will consolidate our position in the market as key players, and of course, we will get very good economies of scale and very low cash costs coming from Brazil that will allow us to improve our average cash costs. And as I mentioned, our long-term debt amortization profile give us the ability to use all those gaps that we have in financing in the medium to long term to put our amortizations in an easy way. Okay, so that's my presentation. I think you had some slides.
That's great. Thank you, Gianfranco, for these very interesting facts on the Sucuriú project.
I will add some comments from the consolidated and from the Copec parent company perspectives. We believe that the project Sucuriú fits in perfectly well with the strategy that we have announced for our growth going forward. As we have said in previous presentations, we have defined clear routes of growth for our two main business areas, forestry and energy. In energy, we are focused in energy transition, so our main subsidiaries there, Copec and Abastible, are taking steps in order to gradually move into other forms of energy, push electromobility. They are doing initiatives to venture capitals, and they're also exploring complementary business lines that may add value to their existing businesses, and in forestry, we have always said that we would be looking for opportunities of growth in those countries which present competitive advantages for the forestry business.
Brazil is clearly one of them. We prefer to build our projects bottom up. That means first of all securing lands and plantations and then going ahead to build the facilities. We have done so. As Gianfranco said, we have been buying and setting up plantations in this area in Brazil since more than 10 years ago. So in that way, we have been generating optionalities in order to build projects, and we believe that the time has come to build on those optionalities and therefore go ahead with the Sucuriú project. So it is a project that fits in very well with the strategy that we have previously announced, and which is our way to move forward. It is also in line with our sustainable investment and management model.
As we have always also presented in the past, we have a clear model for sustainability. We have our own metrics and goals, but beyond that, we believe that Empresas Copec is a company that is very differentiated in terms of sustainability because we think that sustainability is embedded in our business decisions, and not many companies can say that. As a matter of fact, as you know, Arauco is a net absorber of CO2. Arauco generates products, pulp, and wood products, which substitute other products which are less friendly with the environment.
And clearly, Sucuriú will come to boost Arauco's position in this regard, so it's also a contribution to the environment, and it will also generate social value as we look for in our business decisions. Thirdly, we believe that this is a project that even though it is a large project, probably the largest in the history of the company and its subsidiary companies, it can be financed within the boundaries and the restraints that we have set in our financing policies. As you well know, as we have announced and published since a few years ago, we have a financial policy which sets some restrictions. We aim to have a leverage in terms of net debt to EBITDA, which should be in the range of two to three times when measured on a five-year horizon.
This is important because we have a lot of our cash flow coming from a commodity business, and therefore, we look at long-term average in line with what rating agencies do, so in this five-year timeframe, we aim to be at two to three times net debt to EBITDA. Whenever we reach three point five times, we have forced ourselves to take some additional measures in order never to go up, never to surpass four or never to exceed four times EBITDA. Net debt to EBITDA. We believe, as I said, that we can finance this project at a consolidated level within these constraints, and therefore, we can potentially hold on to our investment grade as we would like to do, with the measures that we will detail in a while.
We have also set some limits for our net debt to equity. We aim to be below one time. And we have also set some considerations regarding the maturity of our debt, the liquidity levels, and the fact that our debt has to be in the functional currency of each of our business areas. All of those considerations should be met as we go ahead with the Sucuriú project, and therefore, we have decided to support Arauco in this decision, and go ahead with this project through our subsidiary company. In terms of the commitment that we have made as a parent company, we should be supporting the development of Project Sucuriú by contributing up to 1.2 billion in equity to Arauco within a timeframe of up to three years.
We believe that with that in mind, we should be able to meet the criteria that we have set in our financial policy, both at the consolidated level, and as Gianfranco said before, Arauco should also be pretty comfortable in terms of meeting their own goals in terms of financing. From the parent company perspective, we aim to finance this $1.2 billion equity contribution to Arauco via existing cash. We currently hold approximately $600 million in cash at the parent company level. Together with that, we aim to collect dividends from our other affiliate and associate companies. And finally, we should go ahead with a temporary reduction of our dividend policy during three years.
So, we should go ahead with the distribution of that dividends, which is going to be equivalent to 30% of net income generated in years 2024, 2025, and 2026. Thereafter, we aim to go back to our historical 40% dividend policy. So we should be cutting dividends for three years, and thereafter, going back to our historical policy, which has been in place for many, many years, with very few exceptions. At this point in time, we estimate that no other measures for financing the equity contribution to Arauco are deemed necessary, according to current projections and available information. Any additional actions will only be considered if strictly required to comply with the company's financing policy.
I repeat, according to current information, available information and projections, we estimate that no other measures will be required to finance the equity contribution to Arauco, other than the ones listed ahead, which are existing cash dividends and dividends to be received from other subsidiary companies and affiliate companies, and the temporary reduction of dividends paid out to our own shareholders. Having said all that, we are going to open it up for any questions you might have, either on the Sucuriú project itself or on the consolidated and parent company consolidations that I have just described. Thank you very much. Cristián, please, you can go ahead.
Thank you, Rodrigo. We have the first question coming from Rodrigo Carvalho, BTG Pactual, and also Agustín Palma, the same question from LarrainVial. Why you announce the project sooner than expected, which was year-end? And why you changed the size of the Sucuriú from two point five to three point five?
Well, good question. I mean, we initially thought of in the conceptual engineering about a mill of 2.5, because that is almost the size of the way that was delivered, the biggest mill. And when we started doing the detail engineering that we have been doing for more than a year, we thought that we could do a 2.8 million tons. Then we started negotiating with the vendors .
In the negotiation and figuring out different configurations of the mill, it came up that we could do a 3.5 million tons per year, and that was a very important step of an approval of the project. At the same time, we decided to do it earlier because there was no competition from other mills being negotiated at that time. We also decided it was a good timing to bring the two main vendors to the negotiation table here in Santiago, and we had a very successful negotiation in like two weeks. Since we got a handshake with one of them, we needed to have the board meeting approval in order to sign it with the main vendor.
That's what we decided to hurry up because we had very good numbers and very good negotiation with the vendors. If we had not reached the number we wanted to reach, probably we have delayed until further negotiation for the approval. But we got what we wanted, and that's why we decided to go out earlier in order to announce it and to start working on continue working on the project, because as you know, we have been doing the land, the land work and all the rest of the engineering. We have some work to do also, the balance of plant and things like that. For us, the earlier, the better.
Thank you. The next one comes from Jonathan Brandt at HSBC. Can you please provide more details on the expected unit cost, cash cost, and the ramp-up schedule? And also, where is the $1.2 billion equity income coming from?
Okay, the equity part, I think you already explained by Rodrigo, but in terms of cash costs, of course, this mill will be very competitive. It's a 3.5 million tons, state-of-the-art mill, so it will be very competitive, especially also for the wood cost in Brazil. As you know, the cycle of eucalyptus in Brazil is very short. The land is very flat, so harvesting is very efficient. And the size of mill, the technology, the consumption, that will give us a very competitive cash cost that will be very similar to the most modern mills that we have been developing in Brazil, and of course, lower than the ones that we have in Chile. That is expected to be very good.
We're thinking of probably lower than $120 per ton cash cost in the mill. Of course, when you compare to the Brazilians, the other competitors, so you have to be very careful what they consider cash costs. Depends on what you have internalized or done by subcontractors or OpEx. But we were going to be in the range, what we think is going to be the most competitive mill in the world.
Guilherme Rosito at Bank of America, would it make sense to look for a partner for Sucuriú to share risks and capitals?
At this point, we feel very comfortable with the project. We have done big projects by ourselves. We have a very good team in the project, in engineering, with a lot of experience, and at this time, we are not thinking of partners. We think we can do it alone. We have been in Brazil for more than twenty years, operating there, of course, not in pulp, but in panels. We have four mills in Brazil, so we have a good knowledge of the country. At this point of time, we're going alone. We don't think we need one partner. We have to check it afterwards, but we think we have the financial capacity, the experience, the team to deliver this mill by ourselves.
The next one from Alfonso Salazar at Scotiabank. What are the risks that you consider before pulling the trigger, in particular, future demand growth in China? What is the pulp price you consider in the future, and what level of ROIC do you expect to achieve?
Well, of course, every project has risk, and everything has to be taken into account. The CapEx of the project is one risk, and we think we have very good control on that based on the experience that we have, and also based on the EPC contract and the experience of constructing companies in Brazil. Of course, the price, something that you cannot, I mean, predict exactly, but we are basing our assumptions in the average prices that are conservative enough to give us room for future development in the price of pulp.
We have considered the supply curve of short fiber that has been flattening out as new project comes, and we are expecting, and let's say average price, we are not risking too much on price decreasing. But of course, the most important part here is being the most competitive mill in the world and give us a lot of room in terms of capacity closures if the price goes down at any time of the cycle. The IRR of the project, of course, we cannot disclose exact number, but it's a good enough IRR. It is double digits in real dollars, so for us, it's very good in terms of giving us the confidence to go ahead and invest this amount of money.
Can you provide more details on the production ramp-up schedule?
Yeah, the ramp-up schedule is expected more or less in 12 months. Of course, it depends how you measure it. If when you have, like, one month of full capacity or you reach a total amount of 3.5. We expect probably 12 months. There's experience with MAPA. And so we expect that after that, probably another 12 months to reach the optimum cash cost once we do the first shutdown of the mill after the ramp-up, and you optimize all the processes. Normally, it takes about 12 months to reach 100%.
The final question here, if you can comment on the amount of hectares needed for supplying this mill, and what should be the ownership structure of those hectares?
Yeah, as I mentioned, the total hectares, more or less, is 400,000 hectares to supply a mill of this size, with a rotation that is normally seven years in Brazil. We had our own land already, and we have been negotiating long-term leases with owners of land in Brazil, which is very normal for the operation in Brazil. Currently, we have about 66-67% of the land already contracted. We are doing, of course, leases every time then, and we have been planting for more than three years, and at a rate that is close to 55,000 hectares a year.
We are in order to be self-sufficient, probably not at the startup, because the mill is bigger than we have planned, but probably two years after the startup, we will be 100% self-sufficient with our own plantations in Brazil. We have been having a good experience in terms of mechanized plantations. And of course, we're going to apply all the knowledge in genetics and to have a good yield of the plantations that we are delivering in Mato Grosso do Sul.
Thank you, Gianfranco. Either of you want to go for final remarks?
Okay, no further questions, so thank you, Gianfranco, for your very clear presentation and very clear answers to the questions posed by the audience. Let me end up this call by just two invitations to you. Let me invite you to join us for our conference call on the third quarter results, which is going to take place during the first days of November, probably around the tenth of November, or somewhere around that. Be attentive, please, to the final date we publish on our website. And also an invitation to our twenty twenty-four Investor Day that we have scheduled for November the nineteenth. We are going to have some very interesting presentations on the company there and its different business lines. Of course, we're going to continue talking about Sucuriú there, and some other very interesting subjects.
You should have received an invitation by now. If not, please feel free to go into our website and register there. So more than invited for this Empresas Copec Investor Day, which is going to take place in two days, one presentations and the other one with a visit to MAPA in the south of Chile. More than welcome to join. Okay, so having said all that, we are ending this presentation. Thank you for joining today, and have a good afternoon. Goodbye.
Thank you. This does conclude today's presentation. You may disconnect now, and have a nice day.