Good afternoon, everybody. If everybody could just find their seats after lunch here. I have got a quick PSA for you. I am Chris Marangie, Co-Chief Investment Officer for Value at GAMCO Investors. On behalf of everyone at our firm, I want to welcome you and thank you for attending this conference. This is one of a series of conferences that we have on various areas of core competency.
Our firm was founded, established in 1977, in fact, as a research boutique. That is where we started. We have grown into a money manager with over $30 billion under management in separate accounts, mutual funds, including 100% U.S. Treasury money market fund, which is among the lowest cost in the industry. It really all starts with research.
One of our premier research analysts is Rosemarie here, who has been doing this for 45 years, including I don't know how many with our firm, but 14 with our firm. She has done a terrific job along with Wayne in putting on this conference. I want to turn it back over to her for a very interesting afternoon. Thank you once again.
I'm not sure I want to focus on the 44 years, but it is now my pleasure to introduce the Chemours Company. Chemours was spun off from DuPont in 2015 and has since operated as an independent entity. It trades under the symbol CC. Chemours is a global company with strong market positions in its largest category, Titanium Technologies, which sells TiO2, a white pigment used in multiple industries, including paper, coatings, and plastics.
Thermal and Specialized Solutions, the second largest category, sells refrigerant and propellants among other product lines. Advanced Performance Materials sells specialty solutions, membranes, resins, additives, and coatings to multiple industries. We appreciate having Shane Hostetter with us. Shane is Chemours' Chief Financial Officer since 2024. He joined Chemours after 13 years at Quaker Houghton, where he served as CFO since 2021.
Prior to Quaker, Shane, sorry, held several financial leadership roles at Pulse Electronics Corporation. He participated in this symposium in the past as part of Quaker, and it is a pleasure to have him back. Also with us is Brandon Ontjes, Vice President and Head of Strategy and Investor Relations. Brandon joined Chemours in 2016. Prior to his current role, he was Head of Finance for the company.
Chemours has 150 million shares outstanding, a stock price of $14.76. That was last night, for a market cap of $2.2 billion, net debt of $3.4 billion, for an enterprise value of $5.6 billion. I will now let Shane discuss the company's operations in the current environment, as well as its growth strategy. Shane.
Thank you all. If we can advance to the next slide, that would be great. I think there's a couple more slides. Yeah, the safe harbor. Keep going until the first presentation. Keep going. Thank you. Rosemarie did introduce both the three segments of Chemours, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into such.
As Rosemarie said, the TSS business, Thermal & Specialized Solutions side, the real nature of this business, as you think about, people believe here TSS and refrigerants, it's Freon, right? Freon is still a key component of ours, but we're really transitioning into an Opteon, which is our new low GWP blend a nd really focusing TSS on the refrigerants market. We're going to go deeper into each one of these segments to come, but I want to give an overview.
The TT business, Rosemarie talked about the TiO2, a pigment that creates whiteness in paint and plastics and laminates. We are the preeminent player there from a chlorine perspective and really have a cost competitive nature from manufacturing, which I'll get into in a second. The APM, or Advanced Performance Materials business, is a diversified group. You can see here the four names. Pretty much everybody knows the Teflon name, which I'll get into kind of where we use that now.
It's not necessarily in pots and pans. It's really more on the industrial side now. Other areas around Nafion, Viton, and Krytox, which is a lot of coatings, systematic membranes, and other areas. Getting on to the next slide, kind of giving a financial snapshot of each one of these businesses to kind of put a hold.
We have, in total, about $6 billion in sales and roughly about $800 million in EBITDA in the last year. That is broken up, as you see, for TSS, about $1.8 billion, titanium TT about $2.5 billion, and the APM about $1.3 billion. To note, the other areas here from an earnings perspective, TSS does have about a 31% EBITDA margin, and that is really based on the regulatory perspectives I will get into in a second that we are able to get those large EBITDA percentages.
The other sides, TT having about a 12% and APM having another 12% EBITDA margins. As you think about both of these businesses, really macroeconomically sensitive as we think about peak and trough cycles. Right now, we are looking at an elongated trough in TT, and that is really driving the low margins.
As we think about volumes coming through, some of that fixed cost absorption will really naturally increase both their margins. The other area, just to point out from a geographical breakout, we are about 45% domestic from a North America perspective, and then the rest split between Europe and Asia Pacific.
Getting into the business a little bit, the next slide goes into TSS. I kind of break the three businesses apart and really focus on TSS as a secular business. The interesting part, and I mentioned Opteon before, breaking this out, and you can see in the key end markets above, whether it is auto, whether it is commercial chillers, whether it is residential. Thinking each one of these differently.
The automotive market has now fully switched domestically and in Europe from Freon-based or other high global warming products to low global warming products, namely our Opteon blend. There is a bit of a duopoly in the automotive side between us and another competitor that has the same technology, which really is a nice competitive moat as you think about gaining access to this market.
The next area to really think about with the refrigerants is stationary and refrigerants in the commercial ends. Probably on the top of this building, there's a chiller. They have to progress into these low global warming products as well this year. The end producers, the OEMs, the carriers, the Tranes, they can sell their units with high global warming products this year domestically. Going from a production perspective, they can't produce any of them this year.
It's a big year for us as we think about transitioning from a regulatory perspective in TSS. As we look ahead, we've guided for 2025 growth in TSS with Opteon growth in the double digits. We've talked about the fourth quarter grew about 23%. We see at least that going into 2025 in the Opteon blends.
Another area that is within TSS on the next slide is another interesting technology that we believe is really a game-changing technology to resolve some issues in the data cooling side. If anybody knows, the current data centers are cooled mostly by air and water, with some of the next generations coming through, which is called direct-to-chip. It's steel plates on the actual chips to cool them from a global perspective. This technology is actually called two-phase immersion cooling.
What is that? Basically, the servers are immersed in liquid. It is self-contained in a fixed asset. It is purely circular. The dielectric fluid that we manufacture boils when the actual servers get hot and evaporates to a chiller, and then the chiller puts the actual fluid back in. It is fully circular.
What does this mean? It means not only can we resolve some of the heat issues with the next generation chips, the Blackwells, the Rubins that are coming through, but it also can save a significant amount of energy within these data centers, about 40% of their total energy saves. It utilizes a very limited amount of water, and space is really limited compared to this versus the huge racks of servers that are going through now. There are a lot of solutions here as you think about total cost of ownership, not only providing the solution for the heat exchange.
The next slide, kind of to round out TSS, I talked about the regulatory attributes of this business. What you can see here is it's not just a one-stop. It's going to continue as we think about more regulation around global warming as it relates to these refrigerants. We're really excited about the Opteon transition, but we're also investing in the next refrigerant that, as this steps down, and there's more requirements around global warming, so that as we think about just continuing to see growth in this attribute, we're continuing to invest in next generation refrigerants.
Getting into TiO2 and our TT business, here's a bit of a snapshot for that where we think about major segments, primarily in the coatings manufacturers. It's North American, about 40% of our business, with Asia and Europe being the other two larger areas.
I think if you know TiO2, it's in a bit of a trough area at the moment. We're eagerly awaiting some housing restarts as well as more domestic and Europe economic spursion. I think the big takeaway for TiO2 and our TT business is we're controlling what we can control.
We took out $140 million of cost last year, which is a total $190 million over the last two years, to really make sure we're optimizing the production and the manufacturing capabilities of this business. When volumes come back, we can utilize that renewed structure to really balance and think through how to grow those margins and grow those earnings. We're very excited about this business as well. Going into advanced performance materials in the next slide. Another slide.
I think the easiest way to kind of talk about this is we look at it between what we call performance solutions versus advanced materials. You can look at it at the bottom. Right now, advanced materials are roughly 60%, performance solutions about 40% of this business.
The performance solution side is really the emerging markets, whether it be we talked about Teflon branded for the semiconductor industry. We are the only domestic provider of the Teflon. It's called Teflon PFA, and it's utilized in the actual processing of the semiconductor nodes. The other areas that we're very intrigued in the performance solution side is EV batteries. We have a unique battery technology for the dry process for the cathode node basis. Other electronics focus. We also have some hydrogen assets within the performance solution side.
To note, we have delayed investment in those businesses as we put in forth Q3, just based on the market slide for green hydrogen. The other area is advanced materials. This is a lot of the legacy area for gaskets and things to that extent as we think about the actual industrialized PTFE and PFA that go into automotive, construction, households, et cetera. I would say, and I'll get into the strategy of the company, the corporate strategy in a little bit, but there's a pillar within the corporate strategies called portfolio optimization.
Really what that is meaning is looking at our portfolio from a return basis and thinking through and making sure all of these product lines are positioned correctly from a pricing perspective and a cost perspective, but also thinking through how to utilize and unlock value there.
I think in this advanced materials portfolio, there's a lot of that as we think about really making unique selections and decisions in this business. The next slide is just kind of a picture and really thinking through capital allocation for the company is very focused at the moment. We talked about a little bit of the debt that Rosemarie talked about that we have about $4 billion net, $3.5 billion of cash. We're levered up about 4.4 times.
Our capital allocation priorities are very focused on only strategic growth areas, first-mores, balancing that with debt paydown and liquidity management. When I put this picture up here, really we're very focused on that secular or the growth industries that we feel like are going to carry us forward in the next years, whether that be EV, semiconductor, or electronics.
Also helping grow the TSS side, whether it be in the Opteon or the next generation refrigerants businesses. Getting into the financials a little bit. Next slide. Keep going. The fourth quarter, we printed a very nice quarter, $1.4 billion of sales. As I think about adjusted EBITDA, we rounded out at about $179 million.
That exceeded consensus and expectations across each one of the businesses. It was really driven by good TSS growth, as you kind of see up here. The TSS business, specifically the Opteon refrigerants, grew 23% year over year and 14% in total for the year. It was also focused on the backs of really cost activities and really focusing on spend. As you think, you see TT adjusted EBITDA was up 20% in the quarter and 8% year over year.
That is really on the backs of these cost savings activities that I have talked about. APM similarly up 20%. The real focus here with APM is really on that portfolio management and thinking through whether the businesses in advanced materials are the attributes that we really want or is pricing or cost where we want to optimize.
Just thinking of the full year rounding out, Chemours had some tough times in the beginning part of 2024. There was a transition with management. I am new here. I have been here for eight months. Denise Dignam has been here for a year. We are really excited to have us in the standing leadership positions and everybody from an executive perspective to be fully filled out and turning the page into 2025 to fully execute our corporate strategy that we initiated in the third quarter of last year.
With that, I'm going to get into the corporate strategy a little bit on the next slide. There are four pillars of a strategy that we have entitled Pathway to Thrive. The first pillar of operational excellence, to note, we are initiating a cost-out program.
We've put $250 million of a target over the next three years. That's actually split with $125 million of cost-out this year, with that being run rate into 2026. We'll see some cost savings this year, but run rated into 2026 of $125 million. By business, we see that split half between TT and the rest between the other two businesses and the functions.
The next pillar enabling growth really is around commercial effectiveness and excellence and really sharing amongst the three businesses on how to really gain efficiency on gaining share and taking things through and making sure to do that at the right price. We are targeting above a 5% sales CAGR over the next three years.
The third one I talked about already, just to kind of hammer home about portfolio management and optimization of the asset footprint of this company. We initiated a strategic review of our European assets in the fourth quarter. That really is focused a lot on the APM side as they have the most heavy manufacturing footprint in Europe. We shut down two lines in APM already.
That was really on the backs of looking at, are they accretive and do we really want to spend capital to make sure that they're utilizing that side. It was quite clear that they were not strategic for us, as well as that it was accretive for us to shut them down. We continue to look through how to optimize that footprint and that portfolio to really create shareholder value.
The last pillar, one area which we have not touched on, which I know Rosemarie probably was going to ask questions on, will be the PFAS and legacy liability area. For those that do not know, Chemours was a spin from DuPont 10 years ago. With that, we did get the legacy and liabilities associated with the PFAS-related areas.
I felt it coming here, and Denise and I really wanted to see how we could be more transparent around these liabilities and really box them in a little bit on helping potential shareholders and shareholders think through how to believe them and see them in the future. We look at this in kind of four buckets for legacy liabilities.
One would be water-related areas. With that, we actually settled the majority of this bucket last year with the AFFF water district settlement. We settled that for about $600 million. That was our piece of it. As you think about that on a much broader scale, the 3Ms have $13 billion in this settlement. Yes, it's a big item for us.
We get past it, but we are still a little bit on the smaller end as it relates to some of this as well. The next kind of bucket I look at is the natural resources and related areas. That really, as you think about, is in the states that we operate. We operate in Ohio and Delaware, which we have already settled.
The three that remain to be settled are North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Jersey. Those are the three areas we are really focused on. People, it is in the news, there is a trial set for May as we think about this for New Jersey. That is really the next kind of step ahead. I know Rosemarie is probably going to have a question about that. I will talk about that a little bit when we get there.
The third bucket is personal injury. As we think about the personal injury side, there is a Daubert case coming up the latter part of this year, which really kind of starts. The Daubert case is something that would give you an idea of what the cases would look like going forward.
I would say between the states and between this, we're actively in discussions with the regulators and thinking through the best path forward for them, but also for us as we think about the negotiations of financial implications. We feel very strong that we can get to good settlements and good thoughts for the head. More to come there. The fourth bucket we just kind of talked about is property, which we believe is the minor area.
It's more kind of ancillary property to where we manufacture, where DuPont manufactured the PFAS and really property-related claims that probably is the least amount on this bucket. As we think about just dynamics in the third quarter, we talked about this, we bucketed them. We also talked that we believe when we materially pass these liabilities in the next several years.
That was big for us. I mean, that was the first time we've even talked about timing or how we have momentum in this. I really wanted to put that out as a stake in the sand to make sure that people understood we're looking at these, we're eagerly trying to mitigate them and get through to help get this perspective past us as a discount to our stock price.
Lastly, I just really wanted to update kind of we set that corporate strategy, what do we do in the fourth quarter and how's it progressing? Key takeaways here from the cost-out and operational excellence, I talked about the TT transformation whereby we got $140 million of cost last year.
We continue to optimize that. We initiated corporate reductions, we call it ZBB, which we have targeted on that. I think the takeaway here is we're getting off the ground running as it relates to the cost efforts, and we feel very good about the targets we put forward. The enabling growth on that side is we've talked about the double-digit area we got in Opteon last year, 23% growth in the quarter.
As I think about a key element to this enabling growth, we are expanding capacity in our Corpus Christi facility, which manufactures the Opteon brand. That is a key component to continue these growth initiatives and really came out of the expansion really successful and hitting 2025 running with really good production. The third one with portfolio management, we talked about where we did have a European asset strategic review announcement and the two lines that reduced.
Finally, strengthening the long term, coming out one area, the liabilities, we continue to negotiate. We settled Ohio, we settled AFFF last year. The other area coming out of the issues of the first quarter with former management, we did have controls and process-related issues that we had to remediate from an accounting perspective.
We fully mitigated the four material weaknesses by the end of the year, which was a key initiative of mine when I came on. All in all, just to kind of cap this off before I hand it over to Rosemarie for questions, really excited to be with Chemours, really excited to put '24 past us and look to really execute upon our strategy and really create value for this company going forward. I will stop there and hand it over to Rosemarie. Okay. Awesome. I would love to join them.
Thank you, first of all. Thank you for addressing the elephant in the room right off the bat. Just staying with that topic, Wayne may have a question, but I was regarding the total liability. You say $600 million, but somehow it sounds low. I do not think that was the.
Yeah, maybe I clarify. The $600 million was already settled, Rosemarie, right? I think a popular question is, hey, can you help me quantify the liabilities in total? Unfortunately, we cannot give a number. I mean, it would be unfortunately disadvantaged for us as we think about the legacy liabilities and negotiating settlements, etc. There is no public number for that. We do have an MOU with DuPont that was a $4 billion MOU to which we've spent about $2 billion on it to date. There is $2 billion left on that MOU, which we would split half and half for that.
What happens if eventually the cost is above that $2 million leftover? Is it going to be 100% your responsibility, or do you need to go back to DuPont and say, okay, hey, we want to change that system one more time?
Yeah, no, it's a good question, Rosemarie. Right now, it's $4 billion. What I would say is before we got into the MOU, we settled several cases, and we split those cases with DuPont. I think the precedent would be to say that not only now this MOU, I think there's good precedent there.
Following up still on that topic, you are still making PFAS. There are two main categories that have been regulated. There are another four small categories which have been regulated, but at a higher acceptable level. Can you talk about the difference between what you are making today versus what has been banned and why is it not going to be an issue going forward, I mean, in the future?
Yeah, sure. I think it's important to say, I mean, there's about 5,000 different PFAS components in the world on this side. Not everything is what you're talking about, where it's consumable in your body and that side, that's where you really get in trouble as you think about PFAS. We're really on the industrial side. It's really important to also say, I mean, the world can't operate without PFAS-oriented areas.
I mean, I have my iPad here, cannot be created. You have a microphone there. It's everywhere around you on this side. We're very much dedicated to science-based targets as it relates to the PFAS-oriented sides. We're a manufacturer of this. We believe in fluorinated chemistry. The fluorine-carbon bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, and you can't manufacture items without it. We're very much dedicated to it.
That said, the science-based targets, we work with the government, the EPA. We receive regulated permits. To this day, we just got a permit for our Teflon PFA manufacturing in West Virginia with coordination and compilation of that. We are dedicated to making sure that we are operating efficiently and within the standards that are set by the EPA.
All right, thank you. Maybe we will move on to another topic. The Titanium Technologies is your larger segment. Can you talk about the TiO2 environment currently, including demand, the competitive landscape, especially given China's substantial imports of cheap TiO2 into the U.S. and Europe?
Yeah, absolutely. One thing, I just want to make sure we bifurcate. Our technology is a chlorine-based technology versus you mentioned China, which is heavily sulfuric technology. There are two plays to play there on that side. We are very happy with the capacity we have and the footprint we have, both domestically and in Mexico.
Now, with that, as you think about just the landscape, obviously, the China capacity is one thing that's always been on everybody's mind. There is a lot of effort with the anti-dumping duties and tariffs around the world trying to mitigate some of the exports that are going on on that side. As you just go around the world, Europe obviously put in the 36% tariff on that side last year, which we are seeing some inroads and help with mitigating some of the exports with China.
If you look at it sequentially, it is going down. If you look at it year over year, it's a little bit more tougher of a comp. Now, there are other tariffs going in, whether that be in India or Brazil, which I think helps mitigate some of the other areas. There is a little bit of a, for lack of a better word, whack-a-mole going on right now.
You put a tariff in, and are they going through other avenues? That is what we're mitigating as we see. Though the capacity is there, we're going to control what we control. I talked about the cost-out programs of this company to make sure we're optimizing what we can control until the market comes back and until customers renew some of their inventory.
Any thoughts of reducing the amount of capacity that you have in order to deal with a shrunken industry, for example?
Obviously, we'll look at everything that creates value for our shareholders. Right now, we did reduce our capacity in 2023 by shutting down our Taiwan facility. We were able to absorb that capacity mainly in our Mexico facility in Altamira. That was a strategic area that has shown us a lot of good cost reductions and a lot of good optimization from an efficient capacity perspective. Right now, with that shutdown, we are pretty happy with our footprint and believe we are optimizing that and we could serve when demand comes back as well.
We are, sorry, there is a question from Wayne.
Option for data centers, it's very different. Are you the only ones with that technology? What are discussions like going with customers so far? What does the commercialization look like on that?
Shane, I didn't plant that question, just so you know.
No, it's a great question. We get that question quite often. As far as competitive landscape goes, two-phase immersion cooling, there is another product in the market that people point to. It's an old 3M product, but it's not the same type of product. The 3M product was actually a foam product that was applied to two-phase immersion cooling and [apply cut] applied to that via another process. We manufactured the Opteon molecule, this specific Opteon molecule for two-phase immersion. What's the difference and what's the benefit? What you see is really more corrosion on some of the other areas. Corrosion when you're immersed in fluids is not good from a server perspective. We've manufactured this molecule so that there's no corrosion issues and that it's fully self-contained.
3M has obviously publicly said that they're getting out of PFAS and getting out of this molecule. We will be the only individuals with this competitive dynamic and product online. We have said commercialization in 2026, end of 2026. Key steps there are obviously manufacturing footprint and supply, which we're hoping to discuss more transparently to shareholders in the months to come.
There is another question in the audience.
Just a quick question on titanium too. Will the recently announced Tronox shutdown in Europe have any material effect on the supply side?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the shutdown obviously is balancing their capacity and thinking through what the actual supply side looks like. At this point, I think people are asking a lot about capacity, whether it be in China or shutdowns in there. I don't see it as a significant impact to myself, to Chemours on this side. I think there's an opportunity here as we think about share in Europe. If only if I look ahead, I really am just thinking that it might be positives for us. The market, a lot of TBD on where capacity might go in China, to be honest with you.
Still on TiO2, you mentioned that you have lowered your own inventories and you are satisfied where you are. Can you talk about where the overall industry is? We are getting into the spring and summer season. Usually, there is a higher demand for coatings with a problem with high, well, a problem with high interest rates. Housing is not really that robust. Can you talk about what you see in this environment?
Yeah, sure. As I think about just overall demand and potential, obviously, we will see the seasonality come through in the spring demand in the second quarter, and we've indicated such. Now, do I think there's a restock or any of that such coming? I think customers are looking ahead and thinking through and maybe balancing strategic decisions based on where the market environment goes.
There's a lot of complexity and a lot of ambiguity going on right now. Though we're cautiously optimistic that we see a little bit of growth in the back half based on market conditions, we're going to see where we go. I don't see a major restock as we think about in the second quarter, though I do see customers' inventory still being maintained at a lower level. That restock could come in the future.
Are they buying mostly on an as-needed basis? Do you see that happening instead of building up inventory?
We do. Yeah, I think it's more on an as-needed basis versus building up security and inventory supply.
Do we still have any other questions from the audience? Yes, Keith?
Yeah, first of all, Shane, thank you for the overview. I think it's actually really interesting. On PFAS, by the way, I think it's also included in pretty much every space component.
Yes, absolutely.
It is pretty important. On the liabilities, though, one of the things you did not talk about, I think, was the potential European exposure. Could you help quantify for us what the European liability could be for the company and sort of where that is in the state and status? My understanding is that each country has its own element here. I am just curious what that is from your perspective.
Yeah, no, it's a great question, Keith. From a European perspective, it is. It's state by state, and it's mainly where we operate. When you think about where we operate, there's not a lot of individual areas. It's mainly focused on several key countries, Amsterdam being one of them as we think about the PFAS components there. We're in active discussions with those states. I think as you look at our public filings, we've done a lot to mitigate community efforts, whether it be activities in the community or resolving such.
The quantification of that is quite difficult because it's not like the federal level when you think about EPA or on the other side in the U.S. We have not put numbers out, but we feel like it's less than what we would see, far less what we see from a U.S. perspective. That's really the only quantification I can kind of give.
Very different litigation structure, very different regulatory structure. Exposure is typically a lot more contained, and it's more based on municipality. We have had some recent events with the Kitchen Gardens Reserve and things that are on our books as well.
Shane, we have run out of time. Again, I go off a board. Thank you very much for your really informative presentations. Brandon, thank you for joining us as well in contributing.
I just want to share, if you haven't seen the two-phase immersion cooling opportunity or the technology, it's on our website. There's a video that explains it; it's pretty exciting stuff.
All right. Looking forward to looking at it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Pleasure.