But we're kicking off this afternoon session is arguably the world's most influential lithium producer. The last month's been very busy for Albemarle, obviously, navigating this dynamic and the lower lithium price environment and trying to balance growth opportunities with prudence. Albemarle also, of course, has bromine and catalyst businesses. Please join us in welcoming Kent Masters, the CEO of Albemarle. We'll do a fireside chat. We have an app, as you guys know. Please submit your questions, and we'll be happy to weave them into the conversation. Okay, Kent, so I mean, what makes lithium prices rebound here, you know, and do you think that lithium or spodumene will fare better this year? What do all these different scenarios mean for you operationally?
Well, I'm not sure I can answer when they'll rebound or, I mean, think what drives that will be a supply-demand balance and how demand looks out through the balance of the year and then how much volume comes out as a result of the current pricing environment that we're seeing. So we're seeing volume come out now. It's come out slower than we had anticipated, and we have to see how that happens. So that's where that, you know, supply-demand fits. And if we get a little more growth and a little less supply, we think prices will bounce.
Talking about if enough supply has come out of the market or not, you know, we've seen Greenbushes, your partners, have, have cutbacks on production recently. You talked about last week, some cuts to Wodgina utilization rates. You know, we're seeing some other things happen in the space. Oh, Arcadium knocked down Mt Cattlin . Do you think enough production has come out of the market and lepidolite's blurry, but or do you think more has to come out?
I think more has to come out, and I think it's happening. It's a matter of... It's a little slower. I think probably you can't turn on a dime. People have been holding in there, and we'll see. I think the real driver is gonna be the higher cost supply in China. That's a pretty big volume and, typically lepidolite-based, and we'll just have to see how that comes out.
And so let's talk about that, right? So, you know, you've got cost curve support levels, which are a big question in the industry. There's a lot of blurriness with new African supply from spodumene we've seen in the last couple of years, Chinese lepidolite, different mines. You can say lepidolite, but it's lots of mines at different cost bases. Some are integrated, some not. So, you know, what sense do you have where kind of the cost curve is?
Well, as you said, it's a lot of mines, a lot of conversion across that cost curve, so it's a lot of different pieces. But there are big chunks in there that are somewhere between $10 and $20 that will, from a lepidolite standpoint, and as prices drop, those will—we believe those will come out of the market, and that's where the biggest chunk is. There's other pieces. I mean, what we've turned back at Wodgina and Greenbushes is pretty small, and those are like turndowns that can come back immediately. Once you shut down a plant, it's more difficult to get it back.
To remember, you can submit questions on the app if I didn't mention that a few minutes ago. I think I did. I mean, it was an interesting decision, right? Here's Greenbushes, it's the best mine out there, it's ultra-low cost, and the partners decided to lower production. You know, it's an interesting decision, it makes sense. But what is that a commentary on where, you know, the best asset in this commodity is taking downtime, you know, to help balance the market?
Well, I think it's... We haven't cut back our take from Greenbushes, but our partner has, and so we've adjusted the mine as part of that. Historically, we would've, if they would've cut back, we would have taken their volume, and this time we haven't, we haven't done that. So I think it's a matter of having integrated players trying to manage through the supply chain. When you have a resource and conversion all the way into the end market, I think you're seeing the integrated players trying to manage through that.
Okay, we'll come back to Greenbushes a little bit later. One thing I wanted to talk about was, so here we are, and we're trying to figure out, you know, what you should do operationally and what's really become apparent more so in the last bunch of months is really, you know, how limited visibility there is in the industry, it seems like. Like, across the battery and lithium supply chain, a lot of different players and industry players are relying on one or two data source providers for inventory information or things like that. Like, how reliable, how much data do you have available to you to make these decisions? How reliable is the data you have?
Well, it's never reliable enough, and we do a lot—we don't take anything off the shelf and just kinda trust that. We either, we stress-test it, we pressure-test it with our customers, with other suppliers, people in the market, both on a global basis and locally with teams that we have, and we've got to build better capability to do that. So I, I agree that industry data is not very good, and even after we go through it and add our knowledge and all the information we have in talking to the industry players, we adjust that for us, and that's a proprietary model. We spend a lot of time and a lot of effort on that. We, we need better information, and we need more time and effort on it as well.
How might you be able to build better capability for visibility?
I think it's about having people on the ground locally and talking to all the people in the supply chain. So customers, suppliers, cathode makers, battery makers, OEMs, all the way through to the mine and understanding and piecing all that together. And we've historically had that information, but maybe we put a little too much weight on one piece of it versus another. And it's just about getting better at managing all the data that's out there and adjusting it for what you know and what you think you don't know.
Then just specifically on what's going on in the industry, like, it does seem like there's been, you know, further downstream, a lot of inventory in the system, the battery supply chain, the EV supply chain. So how is that impacting kind of a lack of restocking we've seen of carbonate, hydroxide, spodumene the last little while?
So that's one that it's difficult to know once it goes downstream into a battery and into a car, exactly where it sits. So we anticipate. Look, we're looking at EV growth in the mid-30s this year. That's how we see EV growth, and we're forecasting lithium growth to be in the mid-20s. So there's probably 8 points or so difference between that, the majority of that's inventory. There's a couple of other pieces, but the majority of that is inventory. So we see it takes, it's about an 8-point drag on the market.
Do you think the industry is at a point where maybe we need to have a little more pain for a little while to maybe cut a little more production, cut some projects out? You took some pain by slowing down or even maybe stopping Kings Mountain, other than permitting in the U.S. Mega-Flex plant. We just see more supply come out of the 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028 view to maybe move on to the next leg of growth or leg of attractiveness for the industry?
Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, near term, the price in the market today, and if you just were to forecast that out, that does not justify reinvestment. So I think you'll see projects come out down the road. Now, that's when the market is already forecast to be short, so that's just gonna make that more difficult, but that's the dynamic that's happening. If it stays... If pricing stays where it is, I just don't think there's a business case for a Western conversion supply chain.
Like, four or five years ago, when we had the last kinda end of the downturn, what Albemarle was able to do was you acquired the control of Wodgina. You were able to basically keep it offline for, I don't know, a year or two years, or delay it a year or two to help balance the market. But then, you know, Wodgina, the market was smaller, Wodgina was pretty big. It doesn't feel like those levers are available to you now as maybe they were four or five years ago. Is that fair?
Well, the market's much bigger now, so it's, you have to be careful that it's growing 20%, 30% a year. So every... It's, it's a different business than it was then, and that it may not give you the same levers, but I think if you... What you're gonna see, it's the pieces that are at the high cost that are gonna come out and be forced out by the pricing, 'cause people are operating below cash cost, and they can't do that for very long. And there's a- it's probably a lot of smaller pieces and maybe a couple of big chunks within China that, that come out and solve that problem.
Okay, the other question is, that's so topical among investors is lithium prices, lithium price indices. We've seen a lot of fragmentation, right? There's futures exchanges, new ones, there's different benchmarks. There seems to be a lack of liquidity in all, in many of them. Like, how is that changing how you look at the business, your discussion with customers, maybe pricing mechanisms, how they might change in future contract discussions?
Yeah, look, it's an immature market, and the lithium business is immature. It's only been through a whatever you wanna call it, cycle and a half, maybe two. And the futures exchanges are even more immature, so, but we need those to allow customers to hedge, allow producers to hedge, so you know what you can, you can get certainty in your business. So we, we need those, but they're immature at the moment. We need some that are less China-oriented because almost everything is about... China dominates this market. We need Western indices that will come... We believe prices will bifurcate between China and, say, North America, but call it the West. And we need, we need financial markets that, that indicate that, and people can buy and sell on those bases.
But we're a ways away from that, but they, they have to move forward and mature, and that'll take some of the volatility out of the industry.
Okay, so I got a question on the app that I want to ask. So it's: how do you see the EV supply chain developing in North America to be competitive?
Yeah, well, the supply chain, so meaning I'm gonna talk about the critical minerals and particularly lithium. It's a challenge at the moment. The current pricing, we, I talked about how we're below reinvestment rates. That's particularly challenging in the West 'cause capital intensity for conversion is higher. You still need resource somewhere in the world to feed that. We have a mine at Kings Mountain, and we continue to work on that, but we're kind of slow-playing it. We're doing the permitting work, but not everything else, given the current pricing environment. And we had the conversion project on the books that would have been fed by Kings Mountain, which we've now pushed out. So I think it's challenged at the moment, and we need price recovery in order to support that.
Do you think policy in the States, IRA or whatever, is good enough right now to incentivize the investment needed?
The IRA by itself does not... I don't think it, I don't think it's good enough because it, it, it's not working, and it's not set the pricing difference between China and North America yet. Everyone wants IRA-compliant material at the moment, but there's not a lot of it out there. But that's what everyone wants, but the pricing hasn't changed on that at the moment. So we think it will. It just needs some time to mature in the marketplace.
And then, I mean, like, sentiment in the U.S. for EV is much different than sentiment... You go over to China, you know, there's EVs everywhere. In the U.S., it's still, you can't get away from every few days, another article written in some paper how EV hurts, doesn't want them. They're too expensive. I mean, how does the sentiment change in the U.S. to help push demand that way?
Look, it's the U.S. is a small part of the global picture, so the overall part, it's not really driving it, but it is important for a North American supply chain and frankly, for the U.S. or the West to have an automotive supply chain. I mean, ultimately, those will be EVs, and I think the U.S. has to react to that. So I think it, it's a challenge at the moment, but IRA is not enough on its own. It's just, it's not doing it.
Okay, let's transition to talking more about Albemarle as a company, as opposed to sort of the macro things that you're dealing with. So I think, you know, what's been very topical the last little while is sort of, you know, how you're managing, again, growth opportunities, the last mile of some of your projects, especially Kemerton in Australia, with trying to, you know, maintain a decent balance sheet. So maybe you could talk about and you announced the other week, you know, what you were doing with CapEx or in January, actually, with CapEx. But what would make you take pause and decide to really slow down this last mile capital to, you know, really preserve the balance sheet this year?
Yeah. So what we're, and the cuts we made, what we're trying to do is thread a needle between the efficiency of the capital that we're spending. So you said last mile projects. So we have projects that are very near finish, and if we were to stop them, it'd be very inefficient from a capital project standpoint, and then to restart them later would be very costly. So ultimately, our cost position would be more difficult. And we believe in the long-term growth profile of this business. We think that we need those projects to preserve our growth in the latter part of the decade. So we're trying to thread the needle there and just cut those efficiencies, the projects that it's efficient to cut.
That got us to the 1617 that we're talking about. We've taken other costs. We've taken people out of the organization. We're doing things to focus on cash to kind of bolster the balance sheet. We've restructured our credit agreement, so we have a little more flexibility. That's what we're trying to do to get through this period. It allows us to be efficient and preserve our growth profile. If we can't do that, we'll have to get... it's more draconian from a CapEx standpoint and very inefficient from those future projects.
Can you elaborate on some of the OpEx levers that you're pulling also? And also, is there some potential down the road with your Talison and Greenbushes partners to maybe make those operations more efficient too, from an OpEx point of view?
Look, there's an opportunity to make every operation we have more efficient. So we took $300 million out of our from a productivity standpoint last year. We'll target to do that again, of something like that, and then we'll become more mature as a mining organization. We rely on our partners to help us with that. There's efficiency there, but that $300 million I talked about was just primarily in our conversion operations and across the balance of our business between specialties, energy storage, and Ketjen. But we've got a culture of driving cost out of the business, and as we grow, that just all of those new projects and new plants create new productivity opportunities. So that, that's a big part of our structure and how we operate.
I mean, what's been also very topical has been what's happening at Greenbushes and Talison, right? Greenbushes and Talison. So, maybe you can talk about that. So the distributions didn't occur to yourself in January, and the partners are trying to figure out what it will look like. Maybe you can comment on what you can on that so far.
Yeah, well, it's complicated 'cause there are three partners, and I think we're all aligned on what we want to happen. We just need to make that happen through a joint venture that between the three of us, we completely control that. So it's just getting alignment and producing and curtailing CapEx in a joint venture. That's probably more difficult than doing it in our direct operation. So there's just a little lag there. Probably not as efficient as we should be as being able to pivot within the joint venture, but we're working with our partners to become more efficient at that.
If I recall, at the Greenbushes JV level, there's AUD 600 million or AUD 700 million of net debt at, according to IGO, who reported that at the Greenbushes level, AUD of net debt-
Yep.
which I think is a normal level. So it's, it's the balance sheet for the JV is okay, right?
Oh, the balance sheet for the JV is fine.
Okay, so when do you think you'll be able to update the market on, you know, what distributions might look like in the short term?
Well, I'm not sure we would plan to do that until our next quarterly earnings. I'm not... I mean, it, we're working on driving all of those pieces through the business, but that's something we would do at our, either, I would, I don't think we would do it before quarterly earnings.
Okay, fair enough. So I had a question from the app, more of a macro question, but it does relate to Kemerton. So, I mean, why are all... The question is: Why are all the new lithium hydroxide plants outside China struggling to reach capacity?
I think China's good at this. I mean, we've built a number of facilities in China and operated, and there's a machine in China that's just very good at this. In Australia, for Kemerton, our case specifically, we executed that during COVID, and we probably underestimated just the workforce. Just take COVID aside, just the chemical processing workforce, people that were skilled in chemical processing capability in Australia and to start up those plants without help. So we've gotten help now. We can bring people in. We bring teams from China, we bring engineering from the U.S. to support that. I think we just underestimated the workforce.
We've had to now, now we're going back, and we're training the workforce kind of more or less from scratch for chemical processing, going back to fundamentals, and then we're starting to get momentum around that and building that up. So Kemerton's operating, the Kemerton one's operating at about half rates, and we're making not qualified product, on-spec material. We still have to finally get the, not have the final qualification tick from a couple of our customers, but we're producing on-spec material that meet our customers' specifications at about 50% rates, and we think we'll be able to accelerate there. And then Train 2, all the lessons we've learned from 1, we can apply to Train 2. We expect that to go much faster, but, you know, we have to, we have to prove that.
So, going back, if we think of going to 2025, when you finish up Kemerton and most of your capital spend, would you expect 2025 would be really close to maintenance capital kind of level if you can kind of, if things don't improve in the market or maybe have a little bit of spending for permitting Kings Mountain a little bit?
I mean, it depends on the market.
Right.
But if you say the market stays flat, then we'll have much more flexibility in 2025. It'll be above maintenance capital, but not much. We can cut that pretty much without affecting too much of the assets that are near finished. We don't have that issue of the inefficiency of cutting a program. This would be about cutting things that are more for the future. But we'll have that flexibility in 2025.
Fair enough. Okay, the other thing that I want to talk to you about is what we're really hearing in the industry is kind of a change in how feedstock might work. So maybe the future of some brine production would be, say, Argentina, where it's harder to make technical, battery-grade carbonate. Maybe the world shifts to more technical-grade carbonate at the brine producer site, and it's upgraded to battery-grade later on. Or maybe we stop shipping spodumene around the world, and we ship lithium sulfate. I mean, can you talk about discussions that might be happening around feedstock changes and how that might change your strategy, or if anything?
Well, yeah, you hear those conversations. I don't think anyone's really done that. I mean, the upgrading carbonate, technical grade is not new. We do that with Silver Peak carbonate at Kings Mountain today, so we convert that to battery-grade hydroxide at Kings Mountain. So we've been doing that for a long time, and I think that's a well-worn path. It adds cost 'cause it's another step, and you've bifurcated the supply chain. But it does add cost, but it's another way to do it. Sulfate would be, I would say, a similar answer. If you can work out where you break it, you'd have to dry it to ship it. There's a bit of inefficiency around that, but you're shipping more condensed material, more dense material when you're...
In terms of lithium, if you ship that around the world, you leave tailings. Most of the tailings in a jurisdiction that's used to that, as opposed to one that doesn't like that. So Europe, North America, for example. So I think, look, it's a credible strategy, but there's a lot, there's a lot of detail that has to be worked out about it. No one's really done that yet.
So you talked about last week or the week before, sorry, it was last week? Two weeks ago. Maybe just you wanted to talk about maybe exploring non-core asset sales. Now, I mean, obviously, the catalysts business you've been looking at-
Sorry, what did you... Oh, non, non-core.
No, sorry, non-core asset sales. Sorry.
Yep.
You've talked about before for years, maybe trying to sell Ketjen or Catalyst. So is it non-core assets to you just really the catalyst business?
Well, not, I'd say non-core assets is just part of us trying to make our balance sheet a little bit stronger. So there's a number of investments we've made we don't see strategic anymore, so we'll clear those out. We've done a couple of those in the last few months. And Ketjen is the big one about that. So we've kind of decided. We felt like Ketjen need to go through a turnaround program, and we're kind of right in the middle of that. We're trying to manage it like as if we were a private equity company. So we've kind of carved it out of the broader part of Albemarle. We've allowed them more degrees of freedom strategically. We've let them, they've set up their own incentive programs, and I think we're on a good path.
Now, we kind of want to see three years of the right level of EBITDA before we go through that process again. Now, we could do it sooner if there's interest, but we're just trying to optimize that. We felt the last time we went through that, we didn't get the price that we liked, and we thought it was a great asset. We didn't want to sell it at a discount, and I think that's still our view.
Would you look at maybe selling some of the smaller stakes you have in some, lithium or spodumene developers?
I think we will look at that, but, I mean, you know, it depends on where we get to, well, from a price and how, where we are from a market standpoint. If we still want to develop new resources, putting a stake in a small resource upfront, a small stake upfront, learning and growing that is still a strategy we would like to follow. We think that's the way to get lower cost resources without paying a fortune for them, for the future supply. But we have to be able to afford that, and I would say today, you know, with prices stay where they are, that's not something we'll be able to do. But if the prices recover, we would go back to that.
I want to preserve optionality by keeping them, again, if I have that flexibility.
You're still gonna complete some permanent activities at Kings Mountain, right? The U.S. spodumene play, asset you have. What would make you restart Kings Mountain and Richburg, the U.S. Mega-Flex plant? What would make... Like, what has to happen for that to get restarted?
I mean, I have to have a view of investment economics, right? That we see that, and it's difficult to see that with the prices today. I'd like to see an indicator where they come back and we see that, and that supply chain in North America really is developing. I think that's gonna be a key for us, but frankly, when we do the math on the projects, they don't give us good returns at the moment.
So you just see OEM plans, that's what you're talking, like high level, that sort of investment?
Yep.
Okay. So obviously, we saw your competitor in Chile and Brine, SQM, come to a settlement with Codelco and Corfo. You have leases out to 2043 or 2044, 2043? 2043. Are you engaging discussions with Codelco, or it's 20 years to now, see you then, or, you know, what's it like?
Well, I think first is we wanna, we wanna let SQM and Codelco do their, finish their deal. They did a MOU.
Correct.
Right? So they don't have a deal yet, so we wanna wait and see that. We're not in a rush to do it because we do have the 2043, but you know, once we see what they have, and when then we may have conversations. It allows us to get more resource, more brine and a partnership and can operate what we have on our own. I mean, if it's a win-win, we would look to execute on something like that. We don't know what that looks like yet, and we're not in a big rush, but I think first we want to see SQM and Codelco finish what they put out, see what it really looks like, and then we'll take our view then.
I mean, I think what's happened in the space in general is investors have really started to value lithium producers as mining companies and giving you mining stock valuations, which probably isn't fair. What has to happen, do you think, to get back your specialty chemicals multiple?
Well, I think we have to stabilize the volatility in the market, or at least in our P&L to some degree. Look, it's all the things that we do. We have the world-class resources. We think we're as good as anyone at building conversion assets, and we've done that on multiple continents around the world. So we think we're very capable of building out and supporting this energy transition as a company and with the strategy that we have. But we have to stabilize the pricing that flows through our P&L. It can't go from $80 to $12 in a year and expect the market to give us specialty chemical returns.
Ken, I realized you were gonna read some opening remarks. Did you wanna maybe finish the presentation with the opening remarks, make them closing remarks or not?
No, I think, I mean, we've gotten into it.
Yeah.
If you want me, I'll close if you want. Where are we?
I can give you a question. I have a question, for closing question, or we're good? Okay.
Yeah, I'm fine.
Okay. What do you think investors... Sorry, Meredith. What do you think investors most... Like, what's most underappreciated about Albemarle right now? The company, the stock, what do you think people just don't give you credit for that they should?
Look, I think our biggest issue is the volatility that's in, that flows through the P&L. I'm not sure people appreciate the breadth of our resources, the cost position, the diversity across multiple geographies around that. The capability we built to build conversion assets around the world, the technical work that we do with our customers, understanding what the materials will be of the future, and then building the supply chain to do that, whether that's salts or lithium metals or sulfide for sulfidic separators. I think there's a broad range of products that we sell today and that we work on to develop future supply chains.
I think what we have to tell that story a little better from a technical capability perspective, but the most important thing we have to do is try and take all the volatility out of our P&L.
Thanks, Kent. Appreciate it. Thanks.
Okay.
Thank you very much.