Good morning, and welcome to Crown Holdings fourth quarter 2021 conference call. Your lines have been placed on a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Kevin Clothier, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Sir, you may begin.
Thank you, Eunice, and good morning. With me on today's call is Tim Donahue, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tom Kelly, our retiring CFO. If you don't already have the earnings release, it is available on our website at crowncork.com. On this call, as in the earnings release, we will be making a number of forward-looking statements. Actual results could vary materially from such statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to vary is contained in the press release and in our SEC filings, including Form 10-K for the 2020 filing and subsequent filings. The company recorded a loss in the quarter of $7.95 a share compared to earnings $1.12 in the prior year quarter.
The loss includes charges to fully settle the U.K. pension plan and premiums paid to retire $1.7 billion in notes related to the sale of the Tinplate business. As a result of the sale of the European Tinplate business, all periods have been restated as required, and the results of the business are reported in discontinued operations. Adjusted earnings per share increased to $1.66 in the quarter compared to $1.50 in 2020. Net sales in the quarter were up 24% from prior year, primarily due to the pass-through of higher raw material costs and increased beverage can and transit volumes.
Segment income was $357 million in the quarter, compared to $358 million in prior year, as the benefit from higher unit volumes were offset by inflationary pressures and the effects of a stronger dollar. We purchased $950 million of stock in 2021 and returned an additional $105 million to shareholders from quarterly dividends. We have repurchased an additional $150 million of stock so far in 2022, and we expect again to return at least $1 billion to shareholders in 2022. As outlined in the release, we currently estimate first quarter 2021 adjusted earnings of between $1.80 and $1.90 per share, and full-year adjusted earnings of between $8 and $8.20 per share.
The first quarter estimate assumes no recovery of overhead costs or lost profits from the Bowling Green plant, which was damaged by the tornado in December. The full-year estimate does, however, assume all losses from Bowling Green will be recovered from the timely collection of insurance proceeds throughout the year. These estimates assume exchange rates at current levels, equity earnings between $40 million-$45 million, and a full-year tax rate between 24%-25%. We currently estimate 2022 full-year free cash flow of approximately $400 million, with approximately $1 billion of capital spending. Dividends to non-controlling interest are expected to be approximately $125 million. EBITDA, as defined, is expected to be $2 billion in 2022, up from $1.782 billion in 2021 and $1.5 billion in 2020.
An increase of 33% in two years. We expect net leverage for 2022 to remain between 3x-3.5x , compared to 3.2x in 2021. We had a great year in 2021 and are well-positioned for the future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tim.
Thank you, Kevin, and good morning to everybody. Our continued best wishes for the health and safety to all of you and your families. Before reviewing the operating performance for the fourth quarter, we again express our appreciation to the global Crown team for their continued efforts in overcoming the many challenges of the past two years to continually serve our customers well. While we know many of you are vaccinated and boosted, we ask that those of you who are not that you consider the data which shows that hospitalization rates among the unvaccinated are almost 10 x higher than among the vaccinated. Our recommendation is that you please get vaccinated, get boosted, and remain safe. As previously announced, and in advance of his retirement, Tom Kelly stepped down as the company's Chief Financial Officer on January 1st.
It's been my pleasure to work alongside Tom for more than 25 years. A professional of the utmost integrity, the company has benefited from his counsel, and we are grateful for the strong financial position created under Tom's stewardship, establishing a strong foundation for continued future growth. On behalf of the entire Crown family, I want to thank Tom for his leadership and dedication and wish him and his family much happiness in retirement. Just a few words from Tom now before we begin. Tom?
Thank you, Tim. It's been my pleasure working with you and the entire Crown team over these many years. Kevin, congratulations again, and best of luck in your new position and responsibilities. To those of you in the investment community, it's been a pleasure working with all of you during my time at Crown. Tim.
Thank you, Tom, and, congratulations again. As described in, last night's earnings release, 2021 was an outstanding year for the company. Record performances in earnings per share, segment income, and EBITDA were achieved. As Kevin described, we believe 2022 will be even better. With beverage can demand continuing to outweigh supply in most global markets, we continue to invest for future growth with approximately 20 billion units of beverage can capacity having already been commercialized or announced for commercial startup between 2020 through the end of 2022. Included within our third quarter earnings release in October, we outlined numerous achievements in our sustainability journey. We have since announced new global recycling rate goals to increase the circularity of the aluminum beverage can.
The aluminum beverage can is already the most recycled beverage package in the world, and we are committed to achieving even higher recycling rates to boost recycled content. In the fourth quarter, demand remained strong across all businesses and geographies. Reported revenues increased 24% from higher beverage, food, and transit volumes, coupled with the pass-through of higher raw material costs. Fourth quarter segment income was in line with the prior year as higher volumes offset unfavorable currency and higher costs. In Americas Beverage, demand continued to outweigh supply, as evidenced by as many as 15 billion can units being imported into the United States during 2021. To meet the growing demand, we completed construction on four production lines across the segment in 2021, and we'll commercialize an additional seven lines in 2022 and 2023.
In North America, unit volumes advanced 6% in the quarter and 9% for the full year. In early December, our newest plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, took a direct hit from an EF3-rated tornado, resulting in the immediate curtailment of operations at the plant. An unfortunate situation given how tight the market is with both production capacity and on-site inventory lost, but we expect operations to resume in March. Income in the fourth quarter still healthy at 15%, but down to the prior year due to the lost productivity and sales at Bowling Green, inflationary cost increases, and a strong prior year comp.
Looking ahead to 2022, we expect earnings in this segment to again expand double digits, although that will be weighted toward the back half of the year due to the timing of our contractual PPI pass-throughs and timing related to insurance recoveries for Bowling Green. Unit volumes in European Beverage advanced 14% in the fourth quarter and 12% for the full year, with strong volumes noted across Mediterranean and Middle East operations. As expected, segment income declined in the fourth quarter due to inflationary cost pressures for materials, freight, and utilities more than offsetting the benefit of volume gains. We expect 2022 will remain challenging in this segment and are taking actions to implement price increases to properly recover material and non-material cost increases as contracts renew.
Underlying demand for aluminum beverage cans is growing, and we believe our contractual price cost recovery program will largely be completed over the next two years. Sales unit volumes in Asia Pacific advanced 12% during the fourth quarter and 6% for the year as the hard lockdowns imposed across the region over much of the third quarter eased and economies reopened during the fourth quarter. During the third quarter of 2021, we began operations at a new beverage can facility in Vung Tau, Vietnam, and in the fourth quarter on a second line in the Hanoi, Vietnam plant. Additionally, during the third quarter of 2022, we expect to commercialize another beverage can line in Phnom Penh, increasing our production footprint to six lines across three plants in Cambodia.
Income growth in this segment is expected to be modest in 2022 as volume growth and improved efficiencies arising from more normal production patterns are expected to offset higher raw material costs. Sales in Transit Packaging advanced 32% in the fourth quarter, with segment income up 28% on the back of 16% weighted average volume gain. Almost every product category was up double digits, including plastic strapping, film, protective equipment, tooling, and service. For the year, segment income was up $64 million or 25%, and we expect further gains in 2022 from improved equipment deliveries and an ultimate easing of supply chain pressures. Fourth quarter demand was strong in North American food, offsetting cost inflation and shipment timing in the beverage can making equipment business.
During 2021, we expanded two-piece food can production capacity with the completion of a new plant in Dubuque, Iowa, and the addition of a new line to the Hanover, Pennsylvania plant. We expect significant improvement in earnings in 2022 from higher food can volumes, higher equipment deliveries, and the contractual pass-through of cost inflation. In summary, a busy and productive year in 2021. We completed the divestiture of the European Tinplate assets, reduced pension obligations, and importantly, commercialized significant new beverage and food can capacity in 2021. Despite the challenges in our European business, our outlook for 2022 is strong, and we expect estimated EBITDA of $2 billion, up 12% over 2021. We also reaffirm the 2025 EBITDA estimate of at least $2.5 billion provided during the May Investor Day.
With leverage within our reported range and the elimination of $3 billion in pension liabilities, our balance sheet is strong. Generating solid cash flow, we continue to invest in our businesses for future growth and again expect to return more than $1 billion to shareholders in 2022. We see that there are many of you in the queue, so before we open the call to questions, we ask that you limit yourselves to two questions so that we may get to as many of you as possible. With that, Eunice, we're now ready to open the call to questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. One moment, please, while we wait for the first question. Our first question is from the line of Angel Castillo of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. Maybe just to start out, I just wanted to ask, I guess, what you're seeing in terms of the volumes by region for, you know, as you think about that 9% for 2022, and also how should we think about kind of the cadence throughout the quarters as well.
Probably a little too early to talk about the first quarter, only January behind us. Thinking about volume for next year, I think in total, we, you know, as we say in the release, we're gonna be up 9%, perhaps a little more than 9%. We expect double digit growth in Asia. I think in the Americas segment, we expect double digit growth with both North America and Brazil being very strong. In Europe, currently we are capacity constrained, and we expect volume growth in Europe to be flatter, perhaps up 0.5% for the year.
Got it. That's very helpful. You know, as we think about the Bowling Green incident and just, you know, maybe where that might have impacted inventory, as you think about that double-digit in North America, any sense for maybe how much of an impact there may be in terms of volume, you know, and just kind of how you feel about your inventory heading into the year?
Yeah, it's a good question. So I think, you know, it's one plant. We'll begin to bring the plant back up early next month, bring the first line back up, get the second line going after that. You know, it's a new factory, and I don't wanna say we're gonna have to go through learning curve again, but we're certainly gonna have to as we bring the lines up, we're gonna have to debug the equipment, and these are not guys that have been in the system for 30 years making cans. They've been making cans for six to 12 months now. So it's not necessarily second nature to them. So there's some retraining and some learning curve to get back through.
We will lose capacity out of Bowling Green for the full year from what we might have originally expected, even as we bring the lines back up. Having said that, it's one plant in a system, and it doesn't change our estimate of double-digit growth in North America for the year. I will tell you that. To your question, it certainly did not help our inventory position. As you're well aware, the market is extremely tight. The industry is, I don't wanna say we're all hand to mouth, but the market's very tight and we are still importing cans. We will import cans to service customers and obviously to overcome the Bowling Green challenge.
Our inventories are a little lower right now than we would have liked, and that will cause some strain on the system as we get through the first two quarters of the year.
Appreciate the color. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Christopher Parkinson of Mizuho. Your line is now open.
Hi, this is Harris Fein sitting in for Chris. Can you please just speak to the transportation and logistics challenges that you are seeing across geographies, how they've evolved in 1Q thus far versus 4Q, and what your base case expectations are for the balance of the year? Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, it's perhaps Europe is the most challenging, and certain markets in Europe are more challenging than others. I don't think I see any necessary. Currently, I don't see any overwhelming challenges as it relates to transportation of our finished goods to customers. There are some issues certainly on the transportation side with raw materials, especially raw materials that are on container ships. That continues to be somewhat challenging in that it's there still are numerous delays, and the time on water considering the delay once they arrive at the port to unload is still a little longer than we like. We, like others, are managing through it at this point.
Regarding Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam versus your prior commentary, is there any other insight that you can give as to how that situation has evolved and how that plays into the $2 billion EBITDA guidance?
Yeah. Listen, I think that we're gonna have a real strong performance in Asia. We've had growth each year for as long as I can remember, with the exception of last year which was slightly down only because of severe shutdowns due to the virus. We had growth this year in Asia. We probably expect even, you know, significant growth, double digits next year. Only because it appears that for most of the countries, they're beginning to evolve towards treating the pandemic as endemic as opposed to pandemic and we're all learning how to live with it. I think that currently it feels like in Southeast Asia, especially the big markets for us, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, are all wide open right now.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mike Roxland of Truist Securities. Your line is now open.
Thanks very much. Congrats, Tom, on your retirement, and best of luck in your future endeavors.
Thank you, Mike.
Congrats, Kevin, on your new role as well.
Thanks, Mike.
One quick question, just to kick it off. Tom, between the current supply chain logistics issues and obviously your inventories are not where you would like, how do you think about inventory levels coming out the other side? Now if this is being viewed as more of an endemic, things aren't open again, do you think you'll start to carry higher levels of inventory in case conditions revert or conditions worsen? Do you think if once we get past this, whether it be six months from now, 12 months from now, do you think you'll be carrying higher levels of inventory going forward?
Well, you know, depending on who you ask in the company, you're gonna get a different answer. Let's, you know, if you talk to our manufacturing folks, they'd love to be able to carry higher inventories.
I think the situation is, even as we get past the Bowling Green restart and we're back to full production, we're not going to have the luxury to carry higher inventories because demand is so strong in almost all the markets where we operate. We are constantly trying, and others in our industry, trying to get more capacity in as quick as possible, to service growing demand, for a variety of products, that our customers are offering to consumers.
I don't know if we or anybody else is gonna have the ability to grow inventories for the next several years, just given that demand is so strong and we expect demand to remain strong. In the absence of over-committing capital to any one region, and I don't think we're going to overcommit capital. We're gonna be fairly responsible as to how we deploy capital into each of the markets we operate in.
Got it. Thank you. One, just one quick follow-up. You just mentioned or it was mentioned earlier about some of the cost recovery mechanisms you're pursuing with your European customers. Can you talk about some of the actions you've taken? You mentioned a two-year horizon to try to correct these. What have you done thus far? How have those conversations proceeded? And obviously realizing that every contract is different and that every contract comes up for renewal at different times, wondering what the feedback's been, what the progress has been thus far.
Yeah. Europe has been different. The convention for commercial contract pass-through is just different in Europe compared to North America for some time. We've been trying to move in a direction where more of the raw material risk is transferred in our contracts to our customers who have ultimate pricing power to the consumer. That will take some time. I think the good news is, you know, the market remains tight in Europe. There is certainly a growing shift to cans in Europe, as we've seen in North America. The customers need cans. We are in the early stages of this.
As contracts renew over the next two years, you know, as we said, a variety of contracts renew over the next two years. We expect largely to complete this through the end of 2023, going into 2024.
Got it. Good luck in the quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Michael Leithead of Barclays. Your line is now open.
Great. Thanks. Good morning, guys. First question on Americas Beverage. Tim, can you maybe unpack the moving pieces in the quarter between North and South America, and then how you think about that regional split in terms of earnings growth for 2022 as well? Is there differences between how fast each region should kind of get that price catch-up that you mentioned? Thanks.
I don't have it. I'll ask you to follow up with Tom and Kevin. I don't have all of the volume numbers in front of me. Off the top of my head, we had really good growth in North America. We had good growth in Mexico. Brazil was a bit more modest, just given how cool and wet the season is, and perhaps the economy is a little softer there now. You know, certainly long term, we still remain exceptionally bullish for cans in the Brazilian market. We don't ever get too excited about short-term or near-term challenges in the Brazilian market. It's proven to be exceptionally resilient over time. I think that you know, most of the PPI recovery that we'll have will come through in Q2 and Q3.
Largely by the end of Q3, we'll have that back in North America. You know, you should expect to see that the Americas Beverage segment will probably have a decline in segment income in Q1 related to last year, just due to the fact that the PPI is largely recovered in Q2 and Q3, and we're not gonna recover any of the Bowling Green hit. We're not gonna be allowed to record the recovery of the Bowling Green hit until later in the year. You know, for the full year, it's gonna be another strong performance in the segment from an income perspective.
Great. That's super helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up for Kevin. Can you just speak to the level of share repurchases that you're currently incorporating in your 2022 full year EPS trends?
Yeah, Michael. You know, we're looking at spending close to $1 billion in shares at a, you know, we've assumed an average share price of around $120.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of George Staphos of Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for all the details. Kevin, again, congratulations. Tom, congratulations to you. It's been a pleasure working with you over the years. You know, I have one shorter-term question and one longer-term question. Tim and Tom and Kevin, I don't know, perhaps I missed it, if you actually called out what the impact of the tornado in Bowling Green was either or including the recovery or cost, the damage, and kind of the pinwheel effect it had on the network in 4Q, and in turn, you know, what the negative is, round numbers, for 1Q.
Yeah. You want a round number for 1 Q, think about $20 million, George. That doesn't mean-
Okay.
that Bowling Green contributes $20 million per quarter.
Understood.
The entire stress on the system.
Yep.
It's the incremental cost that we're going to incur that ultimately we recover from the insurance company, but the incremental costs we incur to try to continue to service customers or existing business.
Right. For 4Q, was it comparable?
No, it's not that big, but you know, on the order of maybe $7 million. We had a lot of inventory in the plant, which was lost. Think about $7 million. I was gonna say $5 million-$10 million, but maybe 7-ish. We don't have an exact number, but part of the problem we had, we probably had 80million-100 million units of inventory on site, which was lost. I'm not sure how much of that would have been sold through the end of the month, but a significant portion. Yeah, unfortunate.
No, I appreciate it, Tim. Again, thankfully, no one was hurt from what we could see in the release. Strategically, the longer-term question, you know, you are reinvesting in the food can business. Machinery is also something that's been, you know, core to Crown for many, many years. Can you help us understand if perhaps at some point you'll be disclosing more data on these businesses which you have in the other segment? In particular, on machinery, strategically, how does it help you, do you think, operate? Is there a way that you use it strategically again in a go-to-market from a commercial standpoint in the beverage can sector? Thanks, and good luck in the quarter, guys.
Thanks, George. So on the beverage can making equipment business that's based out of the U.K., we acquired that business, you know, a little over 25 years ago, and we've grown it substantially since then. I think, you know, for many of the pieces within a beverage can line, we believe that our equipment is the leading industry standard for so many of those pieces. You know, strategically, you know, as you think about the tremendous growth that the industry is experiencing right now, there are a couple bottlenecks to assuring that growth. One of them is securing or procuring enough aluminum, and the other is procuring the equipment on time.
Having our own equipment business, you know, we're able to get in line and get the slots with our own equipment producer, to assure that we can get equipment, installed, as necessary to meet the growth demands of our customers. You know, I'm hesitant to remark on any other strategic advantages. Just, you know, it's one thing to talk about strategy. It's another to disclose strategy. I don't think it's helpful to the company or to our shareholders long term if I talk too much about certain elements of strategy.
It has proven to be a very helpful business to be in, from the standpoint of not only getting equipment on time, but also helping the equipment supplier, our equipment supplier, and in turn, the other equipment suppliers understand the growing technical needs of our business, higher speed, lighter weights, better color transformation, just a variety of things that our knowledge of the can business helping an equipment manufacturer make equipment that's more appropriate for a business that's rapidly transforming over the last decade or two. As it relates disclosing more information on the remaining food and aerosol can business and equipment, we'll see where we get to on that.
Okay. Thanks very much, Tim.
Thank you, George.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Ghansham Panjabi of Baird. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Tom, just wanna echo the congrats on your retirement. I'm sure you'll miss these calls going forward.
Thank you, Ghansham.
Absolutely. Yeah, I guess first off, on the 9% volume growth assumption for 2022 off, you know, 79 billion base, that implies about 8 billion cans and, you know, maybe $800+ million or so in sales. What do you estimate the operating leverage to be for the new additions based on how operating leverage kind of shook out for 2021 with the 9% growth you saw last year? I know there's a lot of moving parts. And just, you know, I guess I'm just trying to bridge the $220 million or so EBITDA differential between 2021 and 2022. Maybe you can break out some of those moving parts.
Ghansham, I think if you got $220 million of EBITDA growth, and perhaps half of that is in the global beverage business, and half of that is in between transit, food and equipment, and the equipment businesses. We're gonna have a fairly strong equipment performance in 2022. Transit's gonna do better, and food and aerosol are gonna do better on the back of PPI recovery, which was particularly acute in those businesses over the back half of 2021, combined with significant own-made two-piece food can volumes. We've been short two-piece food can capacity for a few years now, and we've been sourcing cans either from our former sister operations in Europe and/or competitors here in the United States.
We'll make our own cans, significantly transferring profits that were recorded somewhere else to our own books in the future. That would be the split. If I said half of it's in global beverage, you know Europe's going to be down, so much of that growth will be in the Americas segment, as we alluded to earlier.
Okay, thank you. Then in terms of your comments on Europe being, you know, somewhat capacity constrained, you know, you're spending $1 billion in CapEx in 2022. Your main competitor is spending 2x that, including projects in Europe. You know, I guess, as it relates to your sort of footprint in Europe, how should we think about the evolution of CapEx towards that region going forward?
Yeah, I think that certainly within the $1 billion number, Ghansham, there's a significant piece of that $1 billion that's Europe. We have yet to announce those locations for other reasons. But we're not sitting on our hands in Europe. We just haven't announced those projects yet.
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Ghansham.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Mark Wilde of Bank of Montreal . Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning, Tim and Tom and Kevin. Tom, I'll just add my congratulations to you. I've really enjoyed working with you. Tim, first question I have on the Transit Packaging business, do you see kind of an acceleration in the underlying growth there just driven by the push to reduce labor and increase automation that we're seeing in a lot of industries?
The short answer is absolutely. I neglected to mention in my prepared remarks that it was perhaps 16% weighted average volume growth in this year's fourth quarter compared to 2020, which was against an easy comp. If we go back to 2019, if we compare it to 2019, we were up 8% weighted average volume over 2019. This is, you know, as we've described for you, we're not investing a lot of money in transit. We're just running those assets harder. This is all organic volume, but automation absolutely.
We see it everywhere, and nowhere do we see it more prevalent than in the transit business where companies want to automate the back end of their manufacturing process. From the point at which they stop manufacturing the product, how they ultimately transfer the end of manufacturing through packing, warehousing, distribution, automation is rapidly expanding. I'll just say it that way.
How many years of runway you think that might have? I mean, could that be a kind of an easily three to five year runway?
I think the answer. Well, you know, three to five years is a long time. Why don't we just say, yeah, I could say easily three years. What I will tell you is when we bought the business, and even through the end of 2020, our backlog in equipment and tooling was about $80 million-$85 million. We are over $200 million in backlog right now.
Yeah, that's helpful.
So I think this is-
The other question.
Yeah. I, Mark, I don't. You know, given everything that's going on with labor, the shortage of labor cost escalation, I think that this is here with us to stay.
Yeah. Okay. Tim, could you also just give us the, kind of, two or three, kind of, key points that are gonna help you increase the recycling and recovery rate on beverage cans?
I think we're going to have to work on collection, right? It all comes down to collection. We know in the States, just take the United States, for example, the states that have deposit programs, collection rates are much higher than in states that don't have them. We know in countries which are less economically advantaged than the United States, recycling rates are exceptionally high. We're going to have to have greater collection programs, perhaps driven by more deposits in more states. We're gonna have to have potentially extended producer responsibility to get there. The big focus will be on the United States. We know the rates are quite high in Latin America.
The rates are higher than the United States, certainly in Europe and growing. But we do need to get the U.S. rate up. You know, at 50%, it's shameful. Given the value that aluminum has in the recycling stream, and given the circularity and nature of aluminum and the physical property of aluminum, where it's not degraded and it can come back as a food container very rapidly, that rate needs to increase.
Okay. That's helpful. I'll turn it over.
Thank you, Mark.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Phil Ng of Jefferies. Your line is now open.
Phil? Eunice, why don't we move on to the next one?
Sure. The next one is from the line of Anthony Pettinari of Citi. Your line is now open, Anthony.
Good morning, and congrats to Tom and Kevin. Tom, thanks for all the help over the years.
Thank you, Anthony.
You know, bev can demand looks, you know, obviously quite strong globally. I'm just wondering, when you look at the supply-demand balance, is it possible to kind of go through your regions and maybe characterize which markets are maybe sort of uncomfortably tight where you're, you know, importing cans or would expect to import cans in 2022, versus markets where, you know, supply-demand is maybe a bit more balanced. You know, I don't know if there's any regions where supply-demand is maybe looser than you'd like. I'm just wondering if you could talk about sort of the relative state of the supply-demand balance in your big regions.
Anthony, I think I don't know depending on who you are, whether you characterize it as uncomfortable or comfortable. I would say that every market that we operate in, with the exception of China and the Middle East, is oversold. Perhaps Southeast Asia as a market is not oversold in 2022, but we're oversold. We're fully sold out in China. Well, the market might be in the 75% range, but we're fully sold out in China. The Middle East, there is slack, and the Middle East is the one area where we have cans available to import to other markets as we're short. You know, the United States will continue to be oversold for the next couple of years, at least.
Europe, again, exceptionally tight, if not oversold in every market. We're tight in Southeast Asia. You know, Brazil might be a little loose for the first, you know, six or nine months this year. When I say a little, I mean a couple%. I don't mean much. Again, this is a short-term issue that we've seen in Brazil before, with the economy and/or weather from time to time. This is nothing to be concerned of long term in Brazil. This is a market that's exceptionally healthy for future can growth.
Okay. That's very helpful. Then, you know, Tim, we're two years into the pandemic. You know, when you look back at your business from a big picture perspective, do you think the pandemic was sort of net benefit to bev can demand, was it neutral or negative? If the pandemic was a net benefit, do you view it as maybe kind of a structural accelerator, or was it sort of a one-time thing? You know, is there any risk that maybe you give back some of that growth or growth decelerates maybe, you know, later this year or next year? Just wondering kind of big picture thoughts on that.
Yeah. You know, I think as you point out, the disruption caused by COVID, all the other things associated with that, if you wanna blame inflation and the supply chain partially on COVID, one thing I think consumer behavior has changed. I guess what I would tell you is my view is that it's more permanent or structural in nature, that the consumer behavior has changed. I think certainly at home consumption has increased over the last two years, whether it be for beverage cans and/or food cans. I do believe that is a change to consumer behavior.
I think if you look at the experience, even as the economies have reopened and restaurants and bars have reopened, the cost to eat out or consume outside the home and the experience of eating out and consuming outside of the home is not as good an experience as it used to be. It's a different experience now. Service is lousy. The cost is prohibitive for most people. I think the at home consumption change is a consumer behavior that's perhaps more permanent than we would've thought a year ago. I think that'll benefit the can, whether it's a steel food can or an aluminum beverage can for years to come.
Okay. That's very helpful. I'll turn it over.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have Philip Ng on the line again from Jefferies. Your line is now open, Philip.
Go ahead, Phil.
Good morning. It's actually John, Tim. How you doing?
Hi. How are you doing, John?
I apologize you guys couldn't hear me before, but I did want to extend my gratitude to Tim for all the insights. I'm sorry, for Tom, for all the insights that he's been able to provide for us over the years and really looking forward to working with Kevin going forward. I just kinda wanted to touch on the imports. I mean, it sounds like Crown, you're expecting to be sold out, you know, through 2023. I mean, for the industry, the data that came out this morning showed like December down about 37% year-over-year in terms of U.S. imports, which is still, you know, 2x to 3x pre-pandemic levels.
Obviously we're early in the year, but do you think we can get back to more normalized imports into the U.S. or you still see the capacity, you know, continuing to be extremely tight and needing, you know, outside imports to supplement the current demand levels?
Yeah. I wouldn't read too much into imports in December being lower. It's a softer part of the season, right? I don't, you know, as I sit here, I think if the industry brought in 15 billion or 16 billion units in 2021, I can't sit here and tell you I think we're gonna bring in that level of units in 2022, but I'll bet you it's at least 10 billion units that'll come into the market in 2022. Listen, we as a company and I believe others in our industry are still turning away business. There's not enough capacity in the market.
The consumer to marketing companies, whether they're the large established marketing companies or new upstart companies, are increasingly introducing and promoting their products in recyclable aluminum as opposed to PET. You know, we all know the reasons from a sustainability standpoint why everybody would like to use aluminum as opposed to PET. You know, our efforts at Crown and throughout the industry to try to get more capacity in so that we can service them. I think imports are gonna continue to be strong for the next couple of years.
Understood. Just to pivot a little bit to the new capacity that you have coming on, have you experienced any delays in timing just because of all the, you know, broadly speaking, supply chain disruptions, you know, in terms of projects you have coming online in 2022? Could you just maybe quantify when and how much capacity the newly announced Cambodia line will add?
I think we get the new line in Cambodia up in the third quarter, and it'll be sized initially for about 700 million units. Supply chain delays, I think the only significant. I mean, listen, some of the equipment is out pretty long right now. We've tried to be thoughtful in terms of understanding our needs for the future and placing our orders such that we have equipment when we need to start installing so we can get up and running. I think the only real one problem, we had one issue, and we may have talked about it before. Construction steel early on was challenging, but I think we're through that right now.
Okay, excellent. I'll turn it over. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Gabe Hajde of Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open.
Thanks for taking the question. Good morning, Tom.
Good morning.
Congrats. Kevin, look forward to working with you. Morning, Tim.
Thanks, Gabe.
I know typically, Tim, you're fairly reticent to kind of preview the forward year. You did so on the Q3 call, and you kind of told us $2 billion in EBITDA. You're reaffirming that today despite what I would say would be, you know, some FX headwinds. Obviously, I mean, I think you're expecting to get whole on Bowling Green, but just some, you know, ripple effects from that through the chain. Can you talk about whether it's material availability, I don't know, aluminum, magnesium or risks that would put you below that or I don't know, you know, things that you're thinking about that keep you up at night at this point?
Oh, you just wanna throw cold water on a nice blanket, don't you? Anyway. No, seriously, I think. Listen, there's always something that can go wrong, Gabe. I think we've got a lot of momentum. As we've described to you, we know the first quarter is gonna be a little softer in the Americas Beverage. That's just a timing issue related around PPI contract recoveries and Bowling Green recovery, but the year is gonna be really strong. Your point as to Bowling Green and/or currency well taken from the third quarter until now. Obviously there's some other things that have moved more towards our favor in the interim.
I think on balance, we still feel as comfortable today as we felt in October, despite some of the other minor things going on. I think I'm not so concerned right now about magnesium. I think general metal supply for some others may be a concern. You know, metal is tight globally. When I say metal, I mean aluminum. Aluminum is tight globally. If you wanna get real worried, I mean, you know, Russia invades the Ukraine, and they shut down the gas supply to Western Europe. Okay, you can come up with all kinds of scenarios that you want, but right now we feel pretty good.
No, that was more meant to be, quite honestly, a congratulatory, like, Hey, you guys were able to overcome some of this stuff. A quick point of clarification. You mentioned, Tim, not wanting to park capital where it doesn't need to be, continuing to be disciplined. Was that a reference more? 'Cause it was in the context of inventory. Was that more of a working capital comment, or was that something where you're still trying to be mindful, as you always would be, in terms of more permanent capital and capacity? I guess, if I could, the working capital number I think was $536 million or something like that, use of capital, but it's had other uses. Any view for what that number could look like for 2022?
Thank you.
I'll let Kevin come back on the second part of that. My comment was purely around inventory levels when we come out of the so-called demand explosion that we've had. I don't think we're gonna be out of the demand explosion for a couple of years, at least. We're not going to have the ability to build inventory unless we were willing to put more capital in perhaps than we need long term. You know, as we sit here today, we would hope, and all of us would hope, that just-in-time inventory theories or strategies would soften a little bit, and we'd have more buffer inventories, if you will, in the future.
We may have that, or people may wanna strive to that, but I think economics are gonna lead us right back to just-in-time, in the future. I don't think we wanna be sitting on the long side of capacity if that were to happen, in four or five years. Kevin, you wanna deal with the other part?
Yes. Sure. Thanks, Tim. Gabe, yeah, in terms of working capital, we're probably looking, you know, as we invest in new plants and add capacity, we're gonna need to add working capital as we do that. We're looking at, you know, probably at least $100 million of a working capital build. You know, it's something that we, you know, look to limit as much as possible, but as we see it today, it's in that neighborhood of $100 million.
Appreciate it. Good luck, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Arun Viswanathan of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks for all the help, Tom, and congrats, Kevin, to you as well. Look forward to working together. I guess my first question is just on Europe. You noted that you have a potential two-year cost recovery trajectory. Could you just describe the contracting process there? You know, a couple of years ago when we were going through this in North America, it was characterized as a sold-out market and really an opportunity to bring up the returns that had lagged for a little while into the mid-teens level. Would you say that there's a similar opportunity now in Europe, or how would you characterize that market?
I think the market in Europe is similarly tight as North America was a couple of years ago, and we would expect it to remain tight or get tighter in certain regions. You know, from time to time, we've been satisfied with our margin profile in Europe, and at other times we haven't. I would characterize our efforts over the next two years largely around ensuring the contract provisions allow us to fully recover our costs. We only have one chance to get it, and that's from our customer. The customer has the ultimate pricing power of the consumer, and if there's going to be inflation, the consumer needs to pay for that. Nobody in the supply chain can afford to pay for that.
I would characterize our efforts largely around fairly recovering our costs, which would imply a margin expansion from fourth quarter levels, but may only imply margin recovery back to levels where we were previously satisfied.
Got it. Thanks for that. Just real quickly on Transit Packaging. We've seen a nice recovery there. Would you say that the business is fully recovered from COVID and industrial weakness? What inning are we in that? If not, do you expect kind of continued EBITDA growth? I know you're guiding to 2022 EBITDA growth, but you'd expect EBITDA growth in 2023 as well. Is that right?
The answer is we would expect EBITDA growth in 2022 and 2023, yes. Largely recovered from COVID. I think the only remaining headwind around COVID, if you will, if you wanna blame supply chain pressures on COVID, would be supply chain. There's still some tightness for you know, circuit boards, motors, things like that, which are delaying shipment of some of the equipment that we have in the equipment business.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Adam Josephson of KeyBanc. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Tom, let me add my congratulations as well. It's been a real pleasure working with you.
You too.
Everything you've done over the years. You know, you sold obviously 80% of your European business last year. You're adding pretty significant capacity in the U.S. Can you talk about what your thoughts are about, you know, how core U.S. food cans are to the company versus Europe? Just also help us with how much capacity you're adding in the U.S. relative to your existing capacity base.
If you go through the third line and including the third line in Owatonna, which will come up, you know, third quarter of 2022, you add that to the line in Hanover and Dubuque, you know, probably expanding our two-piece food can capacity 35% in North America. And as I said, Adam, we've been procuring cans from our former sister company in Europe for the most part, and some others from competitors here. You know, while we own the business, we have a responsibility to run that business as well as we can and to serve our customers as well as we can. You know, in a lot of cases, these are family-owned businesses which really rely on their suppliers, and we don't take that responsibility lightly.
We're trying to provide to them quality products as economically as we can. That's a great responsibility they put on us, and it's incumbent upon us to meet that demand. Now, I said, while we own the business, we're a packaging company, whether we make a beverage package, a food package or Transit Packaging, we're a packaging company. What we're trying to do is run an organization which allows us to generate returns and return as much value to shareholders as possible. Some of the other businesses which are really good businesses generate a lot of cash and allow us to fund growth and return significant value to shareholders. You know, I don't wanna describe one business as more core than the other.
I think they're all core when you consider how much growth or how much cash flow, how much income growth, and how much cash flow we can get from those businesses.
Just one follow-up to that, Tim. You mentioned that you think both steel food cans and aluminum beverage cans have been beneficiaries, both short-term and longer term from the pandemic. Do you think business has benefited structurally any more than the other?
Probably from the pandemic, I would say food cans because beverage cans, while they've benefited from the pandemic, the other big benefit in beverage cans has been the whole sustainability push, where retailers and big CPGs understand they have to move more towards aluminum from plastic. They just can't check the box on sustainability anymore. They've got to have real programs to demonstrate from an ESG perspective that they're serious, and they understand aluminum is the right move.
Yep, no, understood. Just one last one on North America beverage, Tim. Can you just talk about which categories you're seeing grow the most quickly? I mean, there's been a lot about hard seltzers slowing, and I appreciate your exposure there is not overly substantial. But just talk about what you experienced by category in the fourth quarter, and then what your expectations are for this year in terms of where you expect perhaps the bulk of your growth and/or the industry's growth to come from and why.
I think energy drink. You know, as you say, the exposure we have to spiked seltzers is rather limited. Carbonated flavored waters and energy drinks and teas probably being the biggest growth on a percentage basis, obviously off much lower bases than CSD, but we continue to see growth in CSD and aluminum as well. That's obviously off a much bigger base. In terms of units, CSD perhaps larger in terms of percentage, flavored water, flavored sparkling water and energy drinks.
Thanks a lot, Tim.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our final question is from the line of Silke Kueck of JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning. It's Silke Kueck for JPMorgan. When you repair the Bowling Green plant, will it come back online at the same capacity, like around 2.5 billion cans? Or do you think you can bring it back at a larger size? Like, can you bottleneck it while you're tinkering with the plant?
No, the plant is. It's a good question. The plant is sized appropriately to produce 2.4 billion-2.5 billion units per year, depending on size proliferation and changeovers throughout the year. We'll bring it back to that rated capacity. As I said earlier in the prepared remarks or in an answer to a question, I'm not sure, it'll take us some time to, as we bring the lines back up, to debug the equipment and get through the learning curve with the employees. I will say that the employee group we had in Bowling Green came through learning curve exceptionally well, so we're hopeful that they'll come through the restart well also.
Thank you.
Okay. Well, thank you very much. Eunice, I think that concludes the call today. We thank everybody for joining us, and we'll talk to you again in April. Bye now.
Thank you. That concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.