Okay, great. We'll go ahead and get started. My name is Mike Leithead. I head up the U.S. Chemicals and Packaging Sector here at Barclays. Very pleased to have DuPont management here with us today. We have Ed Breen, who frankly probably doesn't need much of an introduction, Executive Chairman and CEO, Lori Koch, CFO. To start off, I'm gonna run through a few of these ARS questions. If you just wanna grab clickers, we'll fire through these fairly quickly. Question one, do you currently own this stock? Overweight, market weight, underweight, no. Unfortunately, Ed can't be hammering the one button.
That means there's opportunity here. Question two, what is your general bias for the stock right now? Positive, negative, neutral. Okay. Next question. In your opinion, through cycle EPS growth for DuPont will be above, in line, or below peers? Okay, most people say above. Next question. In your opinion, what should DuPont do with the excess cash? Bolt -on M&A, larger M&A, share repurchases, dividends, pay down, or internal investment. Always ask you guys this question before.
It's just great to see those.
Okay. Share repurchase is number one, bolt- on M&A two. Next question. In your opinion, what multiple of $3.3 EPS should DuPont trade at? Okay. Most people say 16-18. Next question. What do you see as the most significant share price headwind facing DuPont? Core growth, margins, CapEx deployment, or execution strategy. We have one more after this, and then we're onto the real questions. Core growth and execution, distant 2nd. Last question around ESG. Does ESG play an active role in your decision-making process? Yes, it's a positive factor. No. Yes, it's a negative consideration. No, it doesn't play any role today. No, but we plan to incorporate it. Okay. No, does not play much of a role as of right now. Great. Well, that kind of sums up some of the ARS questions.
Ed, Lori, happy to have you guys here, to kind of dive into the business a little bit. Maybe just kind of start off big picture, to level set for people in the room. DuPont touches a lot of end markets, a lot of different regions. Can you just kind of do a quick tour around the world where you're seeing in terms of growth outlook so far this quarter as you see the lay of the land?
Yeah. Maybe first we'll go by our business mix. We're roughly a third Electronics, about a third between Protection and industrial site markets, and then the rest is roughly split between Water and next gen automotive, which is primarily the EV play that we have. They're kind of a scale of the book ones, right? Electronics is the weaker side of the portfolio right now in the short term. Longer term, we believe it's one of our out-step growth engines. For now, it's working through some destocking generally in the consumer-driven spaces. PCs, smartphones affecting both our, Interconnect business and our Semiconductor business. We see Q1 and Q2 kind of down in that generally mid-teen range from a go-forward perspective.
Then as we turn the quarter into the second half, seeing a return to growth again as we get inventory out of the channel, and as we get demand smooth again, primarily within the Asia Pacific region. A lot of our electronics business obviously is centered within Asia Pacific. It's positive that the China reopening is starting to happen. Again, our belief is that initially the reopening will favor more of the essential plays. So the food and the clothing, and then it eventually move into more of the discretionary spend, which impacts our portfolio. We're still very bullish overall on China as the market continues a nice position and to be able to be competitive and deliver outsized growth. On the other side, we continue to see nice strength in water and EV.
Those two pieces combined are about 25% of our revenue. As I had mentioned, they'll continue to grow through the cycle. Water, obviously, everybody without access to clean water. We've got this broad technology toolkit to address the need for clean water. We continue to be really excited about that space. The EV opportunity for us is very robust. Last year, we delivered growth from a volume perspective in excess of auto builds, and we'll expect that again this year as we continue to grow the EV portion of our portfolio. It's about $200 million in revenue of the roundly billion and a half of overall auto exposure, and it has significant growth. For example, our adhesives business had roundly 60% volume growth last year on the EV play. Really nice performance there.
I think there's still continued demand that's pent up in the auto space. It is one market as you look at full year expectations, that does see growth overall. Those in the middle, kind of the industrial, we generally see performing alongside. You know, there's puts and takes with the net overall industrial protection portfolio. But in general, it's kind of in the middle between the Electronics being weaker and a lot of strength in water and EV, and then the industrial protection sort of in the middle.
I think, by the way, overall, if you lump together everything Lori said, it's really a portfolio we've now put together that about half of it should grow nicely above GDP through a cycle. Electronics, as always, now we're in a couple quarters here of destocking, but generally, that will outgrow GDP, and certainly our semi play in that will. We normally outgrow the semi market by 200-300 basis points. You gotta have that piece. You got the water piece Lori mentioned, you got next generational of it. You take different sub pieces and add it up, 50% will outgrow GDP, the other 50% will grow GDP or industrial production. Yeah. I think we're at a really nice mix now. By the way, significantly took the cyclicality out of the business with the last big portfolio move we made to divest the M&M business.
Maybe tying into that, I think one area, and you've talked about it before, but it's coming out of the fourth quarter that's increasingly refined, is sort of your focus on five growth pillars overall. Can you maybe just kind of talk about, with this portfolio, just the opportunities you see there and kinda why from the outside, those five growth pillars are, kinda fits best with DuPont's portfolio strategy and kinda where you wanna drive the company?
The key growth pillars are electronics, which is the largest, and protection, which comprises mainly within W&P, both on the shelter side and on the personal protection side. Water, general industrial, and next gen automotive. The tie that binds them all together is how we go to market. They all have very specific technologies that we deliver through enhanced application development. Obviously, they don't play in similar end markets, but how they play and compete in their own end markets is very similar with application development off of our core technology base. That's the bread and butter of DuPont. That's what helps us enable the outsized growth in the markets that we compete in, to Ed's earlier point in semi.
Over the long term, semi's a great business to be, obviously, with all the investment that's going in the U.S. I think the trajectory is still from a semi CapEx perspective and new fabs being added to be in that mid to high single-digit range, will perform in advance of that by about 200-300 basis points, just given our portfolio and our customer relationships are more in those advanced node spaces, and also more biased towards those higher growth areas. Longer term, it's a great place to be. The pillars that we will continue to invest appropriately in those pillars as well, so it's not peanut butter across the applications.
We look and say, where are our peers from a benchmark perspective, from both an R&D and a capital perspective, and that informs our investment decisions within the company. Same thing from an M&A perspective. There's certain pieces of the portfolio that are gonna deliver outsized growth, that's where you will see us making our M&A bets as well.
Great. On M&A, Ed, there's obviously been a lot of portfolio changes over the past three years or so. Outside of Delrin, we'll get to Delrin in a second, is there any other kind of major changes you'd expect, or are we kinda talking about bolt-ons or adjacencies around that?
Well, to correct you on one thing, there's been a lot of portfolio for seven years. The first three more so than the last three. The last three were kind of quiet, so. By the way, just to punctuate that, it feels good to kind of be near the end. Having said that, to your question, I will put there's always something you do when you have a portfolio. I mean, we've touched literally like 30 markets, with some of these core technologies. You know, but you're not gonna see anything big.
We're done with the big moves. Delrin will be probably the biggest thing to get done in 2023. It looks like we'll be ready to go. We're ready with all the material, so we can move fast. It looks like we're potentially gonna go at the beginning of the second quarter to really go market it. We think we've got strategic interest. It's a really good business, by the way. There's not a lot of competitive landscape out there, so there's not gonna be antitrust issues anywhere. We think strategic interest, private equity interest, and, you know, we could consummate a deal pretty quickly once we go.
That's why we haven't been in a rush. The financing markets are not wonderful. You can't put the leverage on it you would've. We're just waiting it out to improve a little bit. You know, back, I'm glad at least some investors, I think it was number two, said, "We don't mind you doing bolt-on M&A." We are doing a ton of share repurchase, so we're not letting you down there on your number one. You know, we'll look at things, I'd say, what size of like a Lear.
It's something that really strategically fits in the pillars Lori just talked about. By the way, I think some attributes I don't mind sharing, it would be on the higher growth end above GDP. It would have to have the real core technology that adds into something we do or builds on something. I think Lear is a great example of it, fit perfectly in with some new technologies and electronics, and it's really helped us with our customers to have more tools in that toolkit. It's things like that we'll look at.
Great. Maybe just on Delrin, the timing's helpful, but for folks who maybe aren't as familiar, can you just remind us kind of the sizing of the business? Or I guess to the degree that you've kind of publicly stated around EBITDA generation or just so people can get a broad sense of the level of proceeds they could kind of help model?
Yeah. It's around a $500 million business on the top line, and it has EBITDA margins in the high 20s. If you look at the portfolio that originally was being scoped to be divested, it was all of the M&M business, which Delrin was a piece of. Subsequently, when we consummated the deal with Celanese for antitrust reasons, we pulled Delrin out. In that portfolio, it was at the high, very high end. Margin profile. It's a great business.
It's also auto exposed, it's auto- exposed in the sense that it's not in the engine, it's in the body of the car. If you think about your seatbelt clip, that red thing that you clip into is Delrin. You know, it's kind of agnostic to the engine type. If eventually ICE starts to give share to EV, it doesn't matter from this perspective for them. It's been a nice secular growth market.
Great. On the balance sheet, I think at the end of the year, I don't know, 1.2 x leverage, something like that. Obviously there's some mixed responses around buybacks or bolt- on M&A. When you pro forma for everything, Delrin proceeds, I mean, what's kind of the right leverage ratio you'd like to get this business to? Again, maybe it's not a year-end 2023 number, but just kind of steady state, where should kind of the right.
Well, we've always targeted 2.75x. I'm in no rush to get there, by the way. I mean, I would do it if we felt there was something create significant value. We're obviously not staying here either. You know, we're doing the share repurchase now. We've got another $2 billion on the heels of that. We said we would start up as soon as we finish this ASR. We'll have taken $5.2 billion of shares out of the market, which is perfect timing, I think, because I think we're still undervalued.
We've closed the gap to a multi-industrial group, but there's still a gap. I just think it's a great time for us to be buying back shares. That's why we're leaning more heavily there. Having said that, by the end of 2023, if we wanted to lever to that target again, and the cash we'll have and we generate, we'd have, you know, give or take $6 billion of available cash by the end of the year. It's not committed to share repurchase or football or something like that.
Yeah, that's with Delrin proceeds too.
Yeah, with Delrin proceeds, yeah.
To your earlier point where you kind of sized your expectations of our core EPS growth and whether it'd be above the market, I was happy to see it was above the market. You know, a key enabler of that too, beyond just our earnings generation from the business, is the capital allocation decisions that we make. You know, obviously taking significant shares out of the market. We also paid a November 2023 debt down early, which generated $100 million of interest expense savings for us this year. You know, between those two items, you had at least 10% EPS growth out of the gate without business earnings growth generation. That's a good position.
Great. Ed, you just touched on it, but I mean, you've been fairly, I would say, consistent in your views of DuPont premier multi-industrial company just given the sizable buyback, and I think you just stated now you continue to think the company is undervalued in the market today. What do you think investors are missing? Or I mean, again, make that pitch. What do you think kind of marks are the areas that you think people underappreciate about DuPont business?
Yeah. I started on the multi-industrial thing, like four years ago. I could tell you would all look at me a little like, "Are you sure, Ed?" I think a high percentage of people now tell us they really knew the choice is. By the way, there's a lot of portfolio moves we made. I understand. I think there's a few things. One is, because we made so many moves, I just think there is a learning process with this portfolio. You know, there's this history of DuPont. It was a cyclical chemical company. There's none of that in it anymore. You know, there's muscle memory that's very significant. Because of all these moves, it's been complicated to follow the story. I think that's why we did the teach-in.
Yep.
We'll probably continue things like that. I think since the M&M transaction, very interesting. I think our capital allocation moves we're making, we've had way more incoming interest in the company, in the last, you know, four or five months. It's been like noticeable for me. So I think it's a learning process. I think PFAS is at the top of the list of getting that settled. I think that clearly has created a gap. Some people just don't own the stock because they wanna see that resolved. In fact, I've told our board of directors at every board meeting, it's now the number. By the way, it's been high on my list personally.
Sure.
It's at the top of my list because I don't have any other big, like M&M moves to make or anything. I mean, it's literally number one on the list to close the gap. By the way, make 1 other point. We showed our board, Lori and I, this last week at our meeting. It was crazy how we were viewed in a bucket with Dow and Lyondell. I just as a fun thing, every day, I would look at Dow stock first, then Lyondell, and then I would look at ours, and I could tell within $0.10 where we literally to the every day would trade.
If you put the line together, you can't see the 3 lines. That was for the last three years. About six months ago, they have drifted down a little, and we have significantly shot up. Having said that, there's still a gap of some significance that we should be able to close. I think people finally are seeing the portfolio, and you can see we moved off of that. That's just an interesting point.
Okay. I remind you, we're at the Barclays Industrial Select Conference, which is a good start.
I thought about that.
I did just quickly, I think it's, wanna give a shout-out to Chris Mecray and Ed Breen from the IR team who did a great job, I think, organizing and setting up a lot of those teach-ins that you mentioned, Ed. On PFAS, on that, I mean, to the degree you're able, can you just update us where the AFFF settlement negotiations are going? You mentioned last quarter, I believe, about a judge appointing a mediator. I mean, just to kind of frame out what you're working on. Then maybe after that, just for folks that aren't as familiar, kind of the cost sharing or agreements you had with Corteva.
Yeah. I don't wanna say too much. The judge did appoint a mediator. By the way, we were already in negotiations, In the class, which is good. There's a class because you can get the thing all settled. We were in negotiations, but I felt the mediator was a really smart move because, you know, the trials start coming up in the spring, and I think the judge is trying to make sure he pushes everybody along to a settlement. I think that's been a very productive, and, you know, we're very focused on it. Let, let me leave that there.
The sharing agreement was important because, you know, for a long time it was hard to negotiate because Chemours, Corteva and DuPont are all in it kind of as one, because we were together as a company and then, you know, when I separated it, they're all. We came up with a share agreement that caps out at $4 billion. Now, if you ever get there. But just the net of that is the maximum exposure for DuPont is about $1.3 billion over a 20-year period. That's what the agreement is for. Look, once we get the class settlement out of the way, that's the bulk of it. You know, there's a few other, you know, onesie, twosie cases out there, so very focused on that.
Okay, great. I do want to pause for a second if there's any questions from the audience. I could sit up here and ask Ed and Lori questions for two hours. I did want to see if anybody in the room has any questions. Once in place. All right, I'll continue firing away. Raise your hand if you want to stop or ask a question at any point. Lori, you touched on it a little bit. A lot of people are focused on core growth. What should be kind of the normalized earnings power of this business? Again, there's been a lot of moving pieces. When you think about your core 5 pillars and what have you, I mean, GDP plus top line growth, double-digit EPS. I mean, just steady state, how should we kind of conceptualize what DuPont is?
Yeah, I think that's fair. Ed had mentioned roughly 50% or 55% of the portfolio should grow above GDP and around the remainder at GDP. That kind of puts you in that mid-single digit top line growth range. We'll target 1.5 x earnings leverage on that mid-single digit top line growth. Obviously you would have in the low double-digit range on EPS outside whatever choices you're making from a share repurchase perspective or a leverage perspective. A nice place to be on, in a normal macro, obviously. Got to get to the other side of what's going on right now, and then see that.
Yeah. By the way, it's funny we feel this way, I keep saying if there's a global recession, certainly we're seeing it in Electronics. I said I actually think it's kind of good for our investors to see us perform in the down part of the cycle, because that was always for the last two years, Lori, that was a top three or four question for investors. It goes back to they remember the DuPont portfolio the way it was, they're like, "Ooh, DuPont doesn't do good in a downturn." Well, yeah, commodity chemicals, they take a dive the price goes away we don't have that in our portfolio.
You know, the speed and resiliency of the portfolio. Obviously, we were doing well in the upcycle the last few years, or a normal cycle, I would say generally. You know, it'll be interesting to watch this. We've, you know, we've laid out a plan for this year, and I think, you know, it's a totally different picture than the way it would have been.
To drill into Electronics, obviously there's a lot of moving pieces. I mean, you touched on it a little bit, just how do you see the year unfolding? When do you think kind of all the inventory is flushed through and we can start to have a quite reasonable baseline to grow off of in the channel?
Yeah. The ICS business saw the downturn first. That's the PCB business, the metalization films and laminates. By the way, everyone saw it almost at the same time. It's interesting, it started in the middle of last year, probably troughed out this past quarter. Talking to our end customers, because that's really where we're getting our data. We're not trying to guess here. They all are pretty much about the middle of the second quarter, they're gonna start ramping up. Those fabs in that business went down to like 40% utilization. They normally run like 70%, 75%. The gut we're getting from talking, and we talk to our 10 largest, is they're gonna kind of get up to around 60% and then ramp from there.
You know, we could be off a month or something like that. Then the semi business, we really just saw that, it was no surprise because you see all our customers, what they've announced. We're thinking that's a couple quarter downturn. To Lori's point, it's such a secular growth area for us in the next decade or two. It's what's going on. By most of the fabs being built are the higher-end chips, the more dense layered. That plays to why we outgrow the market.
We've outgrown the market the last three years because that trend is continuing, and it's going to accelerate with all these new fabs. Yeah, we'll see this little. By the way, a bi g part of this is destocking. It's not the end market demand is so low. Everyone in the world's had elevated inventory because of COVID and supply chain. You get a little bit more of a whammy down till you get through the destock.
Yeah.
That's about the timing we're thinking. We also plan that our construction business will stay down for a year. I think that was good planning. Everything else kinda in there, you know, kind of where it's been running.
Yep. The one area I did want to touch on that you didn't, Water, again, has been doing quite well. There's been a lot more, I think, interest in the space, and you guys have obviously done quite well. Can you just remind folks again, kind of what you guys do in that area, why it's held in so well, and kind of why you feel so good about the growth trajectory there?
Yeah. It's about $1.6 billion in revenue. It's primarily a filtration business today. The largest portion is reverse osmosis and ion exchangers are the two technologies. At the end of 2019, we added some ultrafiltration technologies via acquisition. The opportunity is massive, just given the access to clean water. It's primarily an industrial play for us today. It's about 70% industrial, and the rest is split around municipal and residential needs. Just with the access to clean water, the treatment of brackish water, sea water, that's where the opportunity really sits for us. For us, it's the largest piece of our portfolio that has a recurrent revenue stream.
You know, the industrial players will go in, they'll put in their infrastructure, then they have to replace the filtration on a periodic basis. That gives us confidence around a recurring revenue basis. It's a certainty on the top line, and also gives us a backlog from that perspective to be able to feel comfortable with what the revenue looks like at over several months. That is the longest piece of our portfolio that we have visibility to. We'll continue to invest and see where we can be opportunistic to add on to our overall water play. You're probably a little bit tapped out from the filtration side. We're leaders already in RO and ion exchange, but we'll continue to try to add that out. It's very secular, obviously with all of the global demands and the UN sustainability goals and everything, so.
Great. I'll ask one more before I turn it back over and see if there's any questions. Ed, with fourth quarter results, there was, I'll call it an update on your employment contract extending beyond the end of 2023. I think you made it pretty clear the end of 2023 was not your retirement date. Can you maybe just frame out for folks that kind of read that or saw that without as much context, just what, if anything at all, the contract change means, and just kind of your ongoing commitment to the company?
I had a contract because of the DowDuPont merger and the, I'll call it the payoffs around all that. I was owed some payouts, and I delayed getting them because I didn't want to make it look like I was gonna retire because I get asked it in every meeting. I kept the contract in place because the payments were owed to me. They're being paid out at this point. The company didn't want to change again. That was the reason for the contract. Normally you wouldn't have a contract.
You know, because I had the contract, everyone just looks natural. That's Ed's retirement date, you know, at the end of 2023. I actually went to the board and I said, "Look, I don't need a contract. You know, I'll work at will, just like most other CEOs. I don't..." You know, they'd asked me if I would stay longer. I'm like, "I would love to stay longer. I'm really having fun. I'm enjoying it. I love the team." There's no retirement date. I'm working well past the end of this year.
Great. Any other questions before I could... Again, one right there. Sorry, I'm not... Just because it's webcast. Is there anything taking place on the regulatory frontier that you would be more informed of than we would be at this time?
No.
I guess maybe to ask that or come at that from a different angle, beyond AFFF, is there anything else that investors should be really focused on PFAS or, again, to your point, I think earlier, there's just a lot of call it onesies and twosies in your view?
Yeah, there's natural. There's like the Delaware settlement. We settled a natural resource claim in Delaware. I think we had five of them. We settled Delaware for $50 million. That's what I meant by a few other things. Look, the bulk of it, you know, I won't put a percent on it because it's a lot, but it's getting that settled.
Yep.
Is huge. You know, and we know. Look, I've been around forever doing this. There's some investors that literally just point blank say to me, "Ed, I've invested with you your whole career. Just get that settled. It's always been on my top three to get out of the way to close the gap, you know, with the multi-industrials, but now it's the only one, so. By the way, therein lies an opportunity for people. We're buying back shares like tomorrow, and we will get to the finish line.
Yeah. Any other questions in the room? Again, maybe there's one minute left, so Ed, I'll ask you a little bit broader question. I mean, you've seen a number of these different industrial cycles and what have you in a number of different roles. I mean, just when you put your macro hat on, kind of how do you see the world today? I mean, again, there's a lot of different cross currents.
Well, you know, I don't know if I'm answering your question directly, but what's so different this time is the macro obviously is a little wobbly out there, right? Everything's slowed down a little bit. What's so different this time is the inflation we had going into a potential soft period. You know, I've never in my career, I've been a CEO for 26 years, I've never raised prices like we've all done here. You know, as you all know, we raised prices $800 million last year.
How that dynamic plays out, especially if the economy softens and there's significant deflations in raw, there certainly is already coming on energy. Natural gas is way down, you know. It's like crazy what happens. So we covered all the inflation last year with that $800 million of price increases. And by the way, a lot of other companies did a phenomenal job on that.
I think the interesting thing is watching the quality companies, how do they lay that out over the next year and a half? Because that's a big driver of your bottom line going to, you know, bad or you're doing really well. I think it showed the quality of some companies that could you get price or couldn't you get price. I think it's just gonna show just as much the quality on the way down when there's deflation. I think that's a big fun difference this time.
Hopefully we'll be sitting here in February 2024, and we'll have the answer. Appreciate it. Appreciate the DuPont team being here. Thank you.