Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Eastman Chemical First Quarter 2020 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. This call is being broadcast live on the Eastman's website, www.eastman. Com. We will now turn the call over to Mr.
Greg Riddle of Eastman Company, Chemical Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Okay. Thanks Molly, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. On the call with me today are Mark Costa, Board Chair and CEO. William MacLean, Senior Vice President and CFO and Jake Leroux, Manager, Investor Relations. In case you missed it, yesterday after market close, in addition to our first quarter 2020 financial results news release and SEC 8 K filing, we posted slides and related prepared comments in the Investors section of our website, www.eastman.com.
This is new for us, and I hope it's helpful to you. Now, before we begin, I'll cover 2 items. 1st, during this presentation, you will hear certain forward looking statements concerning our plans, and expectations. Actual events or results could differ materially. Certain factors related to future expectations are or will be detailed in the company's first quarter 2020 financial results news release.
During this call, in the preceding slides and prepared remarks, And in our filings with the Securities And Exchange Commission, including the Form 10 K filed for full year 2019 and the Form 10 Q to be filed for first quarter 2020 2nd, earnings referenced in this presentation excludes certain non core and unusual items and use an disclosures, including a description of the excluded and adjusted items, are available in the first quarter financial results news release, which can be found on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark.
I want to take a few minutes to make some comments. Before. For those affected by the pandemic, I want to recognize how difficult this must be for what you're experiencing. So many are helping to in this difficult time in the healthcare community, our first responders in government and local communities. To them, I want to express my gratitude for helping keep us safe.
As importantly, I want to thank the men and women of Eastern. It's been said that characters revealed through adversity and the Eastman team has demonstrated its character and risen to every challenge we face. You've come together in tremendous way to keep everyone safe, while keeping our operations going. I particularly want to thank our operators, our mechanics, our electricians, and their families who have kept our plants running and get our products out to our customers every day. And to the many Eastman employees who are working from home or on site.
Thank you for continuing to support our customers and keeping business going. So, to you, my colleagues at Eastman, Thank you for your courage, your ingenuity, and your dedication. You're truly making an incredible difference in a material way. Turning to Q1, we had a strong 1st quarter in earnings and even more impressive free cash flow generation. This quarter demonstrates what Eastman can do when we have a day of sunlight between the trade we're starting to moderate and COVID starting to escalate.
Given all the uncertainty related to COVID-nineteen is extremely difficult to predict financial results for 2020, though we are withdrawing our guidance. We did see some impact on the first quarter as we attribute a $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 EBIT decline to the impact of the pandemic. Our diverse end markets mitigated some of this. While we saw a substantial impact in transportation and textiles, we also saw stability in a number of our other markets. As we look forward, medical, personal care, and ag.
And there are markets where we expect a mixed impact, such as building construction, consumer durables, and industrial chemicals. None of us can know what will actually happen with how we attempt to restart these economies across the globe. We can take some insight and hope from the recovery we're seeing in China. We are far from having insight in how North America and Europe will restart. We're able to continue to lead from a position of strength because our innovation driven growth model and our operational discipline.
The benefits, especially in this uncertain time, have never been clear. We have a long track record of transforming our portfolio towards specialties, And within this portfolio, we have built an outstanding innovation capability, as well as a decisive operational execution capability. Easman has industry leading cash flow, which we have taken aggressive actions to sustain in this current environment, with a strong balance sheet, and significant sources of liquidity. In addition, we have a proven track record in our specialty businesses of driving growth above end markets. Their innovation driven growth model.
That said, in this incredibly uncertain time, we were focused on the we can control and are exceptionally well positioned to weather this environment. We are realizing stability from our diverse end markets, and leveraging our strong customer engagement. We are taking significant cost actions adjusting operations to the current demand environment. Significantly reducing discretionary spend and deferring some turnaround of assets. We're expecting strong free cash flow this year with working capital expected to be a source of greater than $250,000,000 beyond previous expectations.
We reduced our expectations of capital expenditures approximately $100,000,000 to a range of $325,000,000 to $375,000,000. Finally, will maintain our disciplined approach to capital allocation with a focus on our strong dividend and a significant debt repayment program, progress strengthening the company, and you can see the evidence in the first quarter earnings and cash flow. With that, Willie and I are happy to take your questions. Operator, we're now
Our first question will come from Vincent Andrews of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
I didn't see your prepared remarks, but I'm happy I'm happy you're doing them and I look forward to reading them in the future. I did just give them But with that said, Mark, I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit. I saw on the slides you talked about, April being down 15% versus March. And it sounds like March was worse than the other 2 months of the first quarter, but maybe you could just contextualize April, how much is down versus the overall first quarter?
Sure. So, as we said in the slide, we really try to provide some perspective across the market since we're grouped into 3 categories, Vincent, and it's good to hear you and you sound healthy as well. There are about 40% of our markets are quite stable, and doing quite well, being relatively flat, sequentially. And in those markets, you know, you've got things like personal care, consumables, which is a range of things from packaging adhesives to packaging polyesters, etcetera. The medical pharma parts good ag nutrition.
And all those markets are going to hold up relatively well in this. Then you've got somewhat challenged markets that are like building construction, consumer durables, electronics, industrial chemicals, where they're actually still also, you know, sequentially declining as you can see in April, but you know, we expect those to continue to sort of relatively okay to the more impacted ones in transportation, textiles and energy. So there really are three things. That diversity of end markets, especially that 40% that gives us stability in the world is incredibly helpful in this time. And we would expect that to sort of continue through the quarter.
You know, the, what we call mixed impact are a little bit harder to call. I think there's some of that that's holding up well like consumer durables. A lot of our innovation in Triton and things like that are allowing create our own growth. So we're seeing stability from not just markets, but innovation in some of those applications, architectural coatings holding up really well, as well as our architectural interlayers, but it's reasonable to expect some of that's going to moderate, as you know, existing project might be completed, etcetera. But through Q2, I think it's going to be okay.
The question is, what happens longer term to some new starts in housing? And then the real challenge of course is in the transportation, which I think is extremely well documented, where you've got, auto plants, tire plants shut down all over the world. Fortunately, China coming back. But we track every tire plant, every auto OEM, every, you know, window plant, down to the model and are mapping all that out. As you know, they're all shut down now.
So the question is when are they going to start back up? And we see that recovery and that sequential improvement in China already, but obviously, U. S. And Europe is still a question mark. So We've been conservative.
We've assumed that the auto OEM market is going to be a down from an OEM production point of view. Be down 50% for the quarter, which is on the sort of more pessimistic end of the range of the consultants out there. And that's really to inform our production inventory strategy as opposed to, trying to say, we can predict earnings at this point, given uncertainty. But, so we've been very aggressive in how we've managed our plans for that. And we'll see how it recovers.
So overall, I'd say April is a good indicator of the quarter. I think that we could expect it to be a bit more challenging in May as supply chain light catches up to us with a lot of these plants being shut down. And then we presume that along with the consultants, things will start back up to some degree. And so you'll see some of that benefit in June. Did I answer your question?
Okay. Yes. So just to recap, it sounds like you're saying being down 15% in April, sequentially is probably about right. It'll be a little worse in May. And maybe a little bit better in June, but if we think sequentially between 2Q and 1Q, we could think about your volumes being down.
I'm just going to say 15% to 20% is that there?
I mean, I think that's a range to start with. I just really want to emphasize for everyone. No one knows what's going to happen here. Right? I mean, there's just a phenomenal amount of uncertainty, when we don't even know how the U.
S. And Europe are going to restart yet. And, you know, there's a lot of questions that we have to answer go with that. So, you know, we can give people back to work in a lot of companies, but it's really a question of what consumers are going to do. Are they going to go back to restaurants to their more normal life activities, travel, shop and retail stores, buy cars.
We don't know how the consumer is gonna coming out of this, which will then dictate when auto plant startup, when tire plant startup, you know, how is, you know, housing going to play out when it comes to they've got great DIY and projects that they're finishing in construction, but how many new starts are going to happen? There's a lot of crystal ball gazing. I think April is informative and it's 1 third of the quarter. But, what we're going to do is be conservative, really focus on cash generation, manage what we can control And we will give you updates through the quarter as we get more insight.
Okay, fair enough. I'll pass it along.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeff Zukakis from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thanks very much. How did you make so much money in chemical intermediates on a sequential basis? Think you were up operating $1,000,000,000, maybe it was $20 ish in the fourth quarter. And can you talk about the dynamics? What are you doing right there?
Well, we have a great commercial team there that does things right every day and how it optimizes every market to place products at the best price possible and optimize our big engines that support our specialty businesses. You have to remember, chemical intermediates role is clearing the excess capacity that isn't going into the specialties. And my hats off to that team and doing that. It's a dynamic time. We did have a very strong sequential improvement, from Q4 to Q1.
And, it was really driven by 4 actors. The first was strong volume growth. So we saw strong improvement in ag, alkaminines and that market had been pre depressed. There was a lot of destocking going on in the fourth quarter last year. The Ag market came back to life.
Those are high margin products, for this segment. And so that was quite helpful. But we also saw strong demand in a lot of other markets, acetyls, plasticizers and a few others So volume was the biggest driver, of all the levers that improved it. The second was a lack of shutdown. So we had a huge shutdown going on in the 3rd fourth quarter last year.
A lot of that expense was in the 4th quarter. So we didn't have that. So that was a $20,000,000 benefit in itself from Q4 to Q1. The 3rd was an improvement in spreads. So we got our spreads back to being about where they were in Q1 twenty nineteen.
So that was a bit of an improvement from Q4. Some of it was cracking spreads, got better in January February. Unfortunately, they started to compress a bit in March. But we got the benefit of that. And the last part was, licensing.
So we told you we had a sort of robust multi year licensing program that we were driving in our fourth quarter call in January. And we got the first installment on one of those licenses in the first quarter. I'd say that was a smaller part of the story. But progress, there's more of that to come this year, when we complete that license, and then we, as we said, have a portfolio of licenses we're looking at doing as we go into the next couple of years. So it was just great success, Jeff, on sort of every line of the, income statement and the assets ran well utilization was good.
How representative are those operating earnings for the remainder of the year or what are the headwinds or tailwinds that you foresee. And when you talked about April being down sequentially by 15% for the company as a whole, how much was April down year over year?
April on a year over year basis, just to take that quick question first was similar to sequential. Okay. And, regards to the CI store, unfortunately, it's going to hold up, like it did in Q1. We do see some headwinds as we go into Q2. And the key components there, one is volume, different story.
Agust continues to hold up and be really strong. But with the COVID-nineteen impact, you certainly see market slowing down. Our chemical intermediates do go into end markets, that face these headwinds that we're talking about. So You know, they're going to see that demand pressure on multiple markets. And, in the current environment with the oil situation, a lot of what we would excess capacity we would export to Asia after serving sort of North American European markets is, to sort of run the asset totally full.
Those export markets aren't as available. Asia still isn't coming really back to the life. Margins aren't great. So you got a bit of that. It's low margin volume, but some of that, export volume that sort of restricted in this current environment.
So volume will be the unfortunately, it reverses outside of Agamemes as being a bit of a headwind. And the second part is, you can run the models and I know you have them cracking spreads are a bit more challenged as we go into this quarter. And so we'll feel a bit of headwind from that. And then we'll, as we slow down the big engines due to the decline in specialty business, we're going to have asset utilization headwind, that occurs across the 2 big complex in Longview And King's Port and that higher sort of cost per unit, with these slower rigs will impact CI as well as especially. So it'll feel a bit of that.
So you're going to see a meaningful decline with all those factors as we go into sort of Q2 with this business. I would note that oil is on a corporate basis neutral to positive, but it will have an impact on CI.
Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Frank Mitsch from Fermium Research.
Hey, good morning. And Greg, yes, the prepared remarks were helpful. So, thank you for that. And as I was reading the prepared remarks, on the cost reduction front, you would outline, that you were going to save 20 to $40,000,000 this year and $100,000,000 over a 3 year period. That's been accelerated to $150,000,000 this year.
Can you talk about the buckets that that falls into? How are you going to get at that? How are you going to build up to that $150,000,000 cost savings in 2020?
Yes, thanks. Thanks, Frank. This is Willie and I'll lead on that question. As you think about, Mark's already highlighted how we're changing our operational footprint and becoming focused on cash, here in late Q1 and planning to run that way for the rest of the year. Also, that enables us I'll call it to reduce the level of contractors on-site.
It also results in changing the scope of some of the maintenance, etcetera. Additionally, another key lens to that is discretionary spend. We have stopped travel, reduced consultants and third party services as you think through that. So those are the key factors Also, as you think about that, we did get some of that benefit in Q1. It was a small amount.
We expect that to increase in Q2 to be about a third of the $150,000,000. And that third in Q2 will probably only partially offset the impact of, of our idling of plants and reducing the operation rate And then the remainder would be in the second half of the year.
As I think Willie, as I think about what you just said, it sounds like a lot of that is more transitory. At some point, you are going to have contractors back on-site. You are going to to travel, etcetera. So should we be thinking about this 150 as kind of a a 2020 reduction versus your previous plan and then that'll dissipate in 'twenty one and beyond?
So, Frank, for the second half of the year, we are going to be focused on improving the long term structural cost. Of the company. And we highlighted that on our year end conference call with the 20 to 40. We're looking to accelerate that and transform the operational as well as our, functional footprint, for the long term. But you're correct, in the near term, we have pivoted, the actions on the temporary front and made what has normally been fixed cost variable And some of that will come back, but you have to remember we have strong variable margins in our specialty product lines.
Across Advanced Materials And AFP, and they will more than, obviously, offset that with those spreads.
All right. Understood.
Hey, Frank, just to add, we recognize that good portion will come back important to keep in mind if demand really doesn't come back much, we can extend these savings for longer than what we've currently assumed to ride through even more difficult time on the flip side, I think we're learning a lot about how we can operate and be efficient in this work from home environment and this different operating mode. So we're embedding that into our thinking about how to improve our long term cost structure. And we're certainly escalating and accelerating what we intended to do on that $100,000,000 plus program to get more of that as we go into the back half of this year as well as next year. So there's a lot of actions we're taking to sustain through this 2nd phase of activity, our costs. Key thing I want to emphasize though is none of what we're doing is cutting our innovation programs.
So we are optimizing for this environment. We're very focused on cash, but we are also focused on making sure that we have a long term strategy in place as we come out of this, you know, to have strength to create our own growth when markets actually come back to life through innovation, continue to have that kind of engagement with customers. We're still actually getting a lot of engagement with customers today. On innovation, even in this sort of virtual environment, we've had a number of wins. We've had a recycle Triton content product that we launched.
We've already got 3 wins on that. Now Gene, Camelback and a couple other big brands have adopted. We're getting wins on our recycled say, low 6, as we speak, 2 of the largest, ophthalmic manufacturers have seen the power of a half bio content after cycle content product, for their offerings, continue to get wins in Tetra Shield for canned packaging and food. Where we've got just great chemical resistance and toughness and non intent BPA. So good news is innovation still alive.
We're still focusing on keeping those programs going, but we are very aggressively going after every other bit of cost.
Very interesting. Thanks so much.
Our next question comes from Alex Yefremov of KeyBanc. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And I would join everyone in supporting the prepared remarks. Question on free cash flow. You have about $400,000,000 in dividends.
You said substantially more than $400,000,000 in debt repayments, maybe another $50,000,000 in buybacks. So can we say that kind of the floor for your free cash flow is about $8.50 and it's really substantially more than $8.50 this year?
So, yeah, let me let me answer that question. We, we expected it. And, I want to start a little bit just back on the market comment. So, The, obviously, demand is unpredictable. That's why we pulled earnings guidance.
And we are in the position to Let us know what happened in April, but not know what's coming for the rest of the year. But we have to make some assumptions, and we are modeling scenarios, like everyone else is doing, different kinds of recovery out of the 2nd quarter. We do believe the 2nd quarter will be the toughest quarter, with the complete shutdown of these global economies and the indication as we see it now that people will start trying to come back to life through this quarter. One of the size, this diversity in markets is a huge help for us to maintain stability, the 40% that's very stable and even 35% that's that sort of mixed, you know, is providing a lot of stability, you know, to offset the challenges that we have in that, you know, transportation, textile side. And there's a lot of uncertainty We do see price stability.
So we saw great price stability in the first quarter. We expect price stability to continue into the second quarter in the specialties. So we are getting some benefits there from raw materials, and we expect that to continue through the year. And as I said, low oil is sort of a neutral to positive event for the overall portfolio. So that's all, you know, what we know about the markets.
In that, in that great uncertainty, what we have to do is focus on what we can control. And so what we can't control, more so is a lot of our cash generation outside of cash earnings. And so we're doing everything we can to stay close to our customers, make sure we don't lose share, keep our innovation going. So we, when the markets recover, we will cover with it. We've acted really quickly to idle all of our plants or campaign them or do utilization.
We moved very quickly in March when we saw this was going to get worse outside of China with the COVID spread. So we really sort of went back, raw material purchased and everything else. In the plant so that we could take advantage of what demand does exist to pull inventory down and we're doing a great job of that. So working capital $250,000,000. We think we've been released with all the cost actions really described $150,000,000 on the input, you know, on the on the cost side and about 40% of that will flow into the 2nd quarter number on that 150.
And reducing CapEx to 100. So lots of levers that we're pulling. And so when we look at that and run our scenarios, Obviously, the dividend is our priority. We're going to pay that. It's a great strong dividend.
It's been increasing for over a decade. And on the delevering, which is our focus, we do think we can do substantially more. And what that means to us, even in a very slow economic recovery, we believe we can do greater than a $1,000,000,000 of free cash flow. And obviously, if if the recovery is better than that, there's upside. So when we say substantial, it's substantial.
We're going to make a lot of progress in our de levering, but, you know, people should not be using that to try and reverse engineer earnings. You know, it's what we're trying to do on cash flow. The things and the levers that we can pull, we can pull even harder in inventory if we need to. We can pull harder on costs if we need to. But it's a cash centric strategy that we're operating right now.
Understood. You, Mark. Very helpful. And just to follow-up on your margins. It's understandable that your volumes will affect your margins, but in terms of spread between price and raw materials, by the end of the year, should we expect that spread to be at a healthier level than, let's say, back half of twenty nineteen or even first quarter.
And related to that, if you could update us in your view on the methanol contract headwind this year?
Sure. So I'll take the first part of that question. I'll let Willie answer the the contract question. So on spreads in the specialties, we do expect, to improve our spreads in advanced materials of the raw material tailwinds that we have there. With the 2 thirds of AFP, as we sort of separate that out for you, we expect spreads to improve you know, with good price stability relative to the raw material declines.
And so, in all those areas, I think we see that fiber is very steady spreads. For the year. All that is, I think a place where we can get some additional cash and earnings benefit. The 1 third of AFP, I'd say, the tires adhesives, it's going to be more stable spreads, but at the challenge levels we had in the back half of last year, don't see it getting a lot worse, this year relative to the second half of twenty nineteen, but we don't expect it to get a lot better given or competitive dynamics in that spot. And in chemical intermediates, as I said, we've got some challenges there on spreads.
Something important to note about this oil topic, is our crackers and the spreads there are a little bit different than other companies. So, it's not nearly as challenged at this point as it was in the past. So, 10 to 16 you know, we had a huge tailwind, you know, when oil went up and we had stranded gas, in the, in the U. S, that led ethane appropriate also be stranded and really cheap. You can't remember, our crackers are propylene centric because that's what we make specialties from.
That's why they exist. We're much more propane based, in our crackers. And we on top of that, we made the RGP investment, even further reduce the amount of ethylene reproduce replacing some of the NGL feeds with the RGP. So that changed our dynamic. So we're now 70% to 75% propane, 20% to 25% ethane.
The remainder of 5 to 10 is RGP. And propane isn't stranded anymore, right? So it was stranded up through about 16, but they added so much export to export propane, that's now reconnected to the oil market. So propane propylene spreads are a lot more connected than ethylene to ethane. And RGP is very tightly correlated to PGP.
So, you know, the volatility still is going to be a challenger, but it's not nearly the challenge that we would have faced back in 2015 2016 as an example with this low oil now. So we have some spread. It's more about competitive intensity than it is about cracking spread. That's going to sort of pressure some of these margins in this competitive environment. But spread will be in a challenge in CI, but net, when you put it all together, we're in really good shape on spread to sort of be a bit better this year than last year.
Okay. Mark, on the methanol front, just to follow-up quickly is we made the transition as we highlighted in January. We had marked that contract to market. So, I would actually say it's actually a slight tailwind on earnings. And a modest headwind on cash overall, but we're exposed to, coal based methanol as well as natural gas and market.
So we're well positioned, on the methanol front.
Thank
you. Question from David Begleiter of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Mark, just looking at Q2, thinking about how should you think about decremental margins in the specialty businesses given the asset utilization headwinds you've called out here?
I'm going to let Willie take that one.
Yes, thanks. David, on the decremental margin fronts, we've highlighted the fact that we've idled plants We're lowering capacity utilization and that a lot of that is focused on our our transportation, textiles and energy end markets. And that, that is predominantly in advanced materials and additive and functional products. And as you think about AM, we've previously talked about how, the margins have shown through as the the specialty and premium products have grown, and that's because of the fixed cost leverage as they've been able to grow. So you can expect a little bit of the reverse here in Q2 as we focus on maximizing cash generation, and reducing costs in this environment.
However, you should expect on the recovery that, as as the demand recovers, for these businesses that it, that it would bounce back. A little bit of contrast between AM and AFP is the fact that advanced materials has idled, more plants, whereas as in functional products has slowed those down, Additionally, given the specialty nature and the linkage across the streams, there are more fixed cost and and capital involved in those, specialty product lines that result in, the decremental margins, and fixed costs being worse. When those variable margins come back, they will reverse is true and we would expect to see that in the second half of the year.
Go ahead. Okay. I was just
on the strategic alternatives process, that 1 third of ASP that you highlighted back in October. Any update or progress you made on that initiative? Yes, David. Let me go first and, Mark, and follow on. We had several interested parties, pre the COVID environment, but it's difficult to get a transaction done now.
And, obviously, we need to focus on the earnings impact of this event. We are also focused on restructuring these businesses right now and continuing to evaluate our manufacturing footprint in these businesses, and we'll have decisions soon on those. Additionally, we're taking cost out, such that, on the other side of the COVID environment, we can, focus on, other strategic actions that we can take with these businesses.
So, I think that's not exactly surprised. That we'd be sort of challenged from a process point of view. The thing I want to add beyond just the restructuring activities and we intend to be aggressive there and hopefully make some decisions you're seeing about our asset footprint The innovation is actually very attractive to potential interested parties and, and, and actually going quite well. So our new KRYSTEXX that is far superior to the competitors in the marketplace is getting a lot of adoption more than we thought. That's one plant that's actually running well right now in this entire environment.
In fact, we've had to increase rates there because of the demand for it. So that's helpful and encouraging. Obviously, overall market is extremely difficult in tires. But it's good to see that the innovation still is attracting attention and adoption, and it's at a better price. Same is true in tire resins.
We've been launching and trying to validate a new set of differentiated tire resins. And we've virtually, once again, had progress innovation wise in verifying and validating that with a couple of big MNCs seeing the value in wanting to move forward to those programs. Even over in adhesives, our new Ultra Pure, sort of odor free, VOC free resin is getting a lot of adoption right now, even in this context. So innovation is important. It's all part of restructuring the business and improving it while we have it, as well as making it more valuable to other people.
So we're just going to have to get through this short term environment.
Our next question will come from P. J. Juvekar of Citi.
Hi, good morning, Mark. It's Eric on for P. J.
Hey, Eric.
How much did your premium products and Advanced Materials grow in first quarter or were there destocking actions by auto OEM for interlayers as well as head up displays?
Yes. So it's a bit of a split story between, auto and the rest of the business. So 2 thirds of the revenue from Rubraca was only 1 third of the revenue of Advanced Materials, did really well. So we had strong engagement volume growth, in a lot of different applications, especially in that more stable category we gave you in the slide. So packaging that's inside of consumables did really well.
We had decent, very strong stable medical. It's important to think about in Advanced Materials that while the 1 third, you know, automotive is a big part of our earnings The 2nd largest market is consumer durables. That actually held up well because of Triton continuing to create its own growth. So that's actually been been reasonably good. The 3rd largest market for this business is, medical, very stable, very profitable and doing well.
The 4th market, is these consumables I mentioned stable, 5th is architectural even there holding up relatively well. So, all of that's gone fairly well and why you saw earnings be up and stable. Automotive a very high margin part of our portfolio in the entire company whether it's AFP or AM. Obviously, we saw good demand Actually, we saw good demand in January, February. And then, obviously, demand came off with the escalation of COVID in March.
That is that $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 EBIT headwind we called out was really sort of transportation related and it was really March related. So we, felt that impact on the demand there. So overall, it's holding up pretty well. Except for, for transportation. And prices helped well, raws came in to be quite a benefit for the quarter, and, the asset utilization was, in general, pretty good in the first quarter.
We haven't really seen the impact of asset utilization in this business until we get to the second quarter.
Helpful. And then secondly, some paints and coatings companies are guiding volumes down for 2nd quarter by 3rd. Are you expecting similar declines?
So in automotive coatings, we would expect to see pretty dramatic decline. As you saw, we're assuming OEM production is going to be down 50% sequentially. So automotive coatings is going to track that, be quite a large headwind. On the other side, architectural coatings seem to be holding up a lot better based on what we're seeing and what I heard, the, you know, coding customers that we have, say, earlier this week. So I think that number you're quoting is a bit of a blended number.
Where have 2 markets that have very different sort of tracks, obviously, architectural, OEM, auto OEM. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Duffy Fischer from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Within your ANFP segment and AM segments, Can you walk through the products where your competitors would base their chemicals off of oil? And so even if they have kind of lesser quality products, maybe with this lower oil environment, they will push harder on price? Sure.
Advanced Materials, oil is sort of ultimately drives a lot of the raw material costs for pretty much the entire segment outside of the cellulosic product stuffy. And so in that area, you have that potential. So far, we've seen great price stability through all that year, right. Parazione was a tailwind all last year, prices have been holding up relatively well. Starting to give some back, you know, to be clear, as we've said in many calls in the past, you don't hold on to all of it, right?
You got to treat your customer's respect and share some of the raw material value and we're going to do that. But still net I think it's going to hold up quite well from what we can see. And things like freight and where we're the only competitor in the world, we've got a lot of control over pricing. On the auto related markets, interlayers is annual contracts prices got established last year. So they don't have a lot of movement to them when it comes to raw materials within the year.
And then in Performance Films, it's also very price stable. They, you know, it's a consumer product, and our price are pretty stable there. The value that we present in Performance Films is not remotely connected to raw material. So overall, I'd say that segment is going to have some prices come down a bit this year with raws, but, but hold up really well. In AFP, if you go to the thirds of AFP that we've called out.
So, you know, coatings, especially fluids, care chemicals, crop, etcetera. That's actually going to have pretty good price stability. Has had good price stability through last year, and expected continue to have really good price stability this year. There are some cost pass through contracts in Care Chemicals And Coatings that we'll pass on some of those rods, but the spreads will be stable. Which is in the end all we want from a long term point of view.
But, you'll see some of that impact. That's about 2% 6% for the overall segment. Those cost pass through contracts for the first quarter as an example. We will see some increased price competitive behavior in adhesives and tires in the 1 third, but that's also sort of stabilized. It got very competitive by the back end of last year.
And don't think spreads are going to compress a lot more from that to this year. So overall, I'd say we're in pretty good shape Duffy, to either neutral or, improving even in this environment, and that portfolio of fibers is totally different, as you know, where those prices at 1% down will be that for the year. And in CI, I think I've already addressed.
Sure. Okay, great. Thanks. And then I think it was in your prepared remarks. You made a comment where you thought transportation demand, I don't know if you said it was going to be stronger or less bad than tire and aerospace.
Was that a call on kind of those markets? Or is there some inventory in those different segments that may skew that? How it hits your business? But can you you just talk through why you think transportation will be stronger than tires in aerospace?
So, when we say transportation, Duffy, it's all three. Right. So when we talk about transportation and in any reference, it's always autos, tires, and aviation. So all three are in that comment, you know, about being a very market. What I'd say is, tires and aviation is more challenged than auto OEM.
And so you can go get the external data, but obviously no one's flying now. And I think the rate of people flying is going to come back slower than the rate of people buying cars. And because the initial dynamic about cars, by the way, that could be an upside here is, who wants to get a mass transit right now? We could see more cars sold on the back end of this thing as people shift their behavior, towards being in their own car versus mass transit. We're not baking that into our forecasting, but it might be an upside.
But tires is demands very much off. It's not just the OEM side, but the refinish side, the replacement tire side is obviously off because one's driving. And so, net, that overall segment is what you see 40% down is all of that rolled together.
Our next question comes from Matthew Diall of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Glad to hear you're doing well. It's a little hard to believe there's only a couple, maybe 2 months ago or something we were at Fort Lauderdale, but I wanted to touch a little bit on Frank's prior question. You had mentioned the second half of the year, you're looking for more of the structural savings. And so if we think about the cadence of those stickier savings as we move through 2021, 2022, can you talk a little bit about that? Is it still perhaps $100,000,000 in structural costs?
Is that larger now with an eventual announcement on asset footprint optimization be included in those numbers? Is that upside?
Sure. So, the 150, obviously a lot of it is connected to demand and And by the way, you'll be very happy if that, you know, a temporary cost relief comes back because it's going to come back with revenue that has a very high variable margin to pay for So, we'll be celebrating, those temporary costs coming off. But the structural side, I think, is what we said. So we have a lot of work going on, extensive comp a comprehensive program on an operational transformation project, to look at every element of how we operate, from supply chain manufacturing, inventory management, etcetera, to take significant costs that analysis and what's going on is discovering more opportunity than we expected. And we'll give you more insight on that as we refine it.
So, we're excited about that and that will allow us to escalate and increase that $100,000,000 as a long term goal as well as get some more of it the back half of this year that would annualize into a real helpful benefit for next year. It does include asset rationalizations, and we told you we're gonna address our Singapore plant, where that has material benefit. Obviously, with the tire situation, we're looking at optimizing our our tire footprint, asset footprint, and we'll make some decisions around that. So it is a combination of better maintenance, better network optimization, better supply chain management, more efficient operations, as well as asset rationalizations, pulling every lever we got. We're going to look at SGA 2 and figure out how we take our business operating model.
That's really working phenomenally well and how we built and developed that over the last couple of years in improving how we operate, make, you know, commercial and operating decisions today, and see if we can, you know, that'll enable some efficiencies. Something else I'd note, just on the back half of this year. It's important to keep in mind that as we're running our plants and something that Willie said about idling a bunch of facilities or severely reducing their run rates. That changes cost from going from in the inventory and flowing out to being a period expense. In the second quarter, you're going to see a pretty significant hit on period expense, of conversion costs.
That will be sort of charged in the quarter as opposed to flow normally. So that'll hit Q2 But it becomes a mirror image benefit in the second half of this year because our total conversion cost for the year is going to be down with all the actions we're taking. But the timing of when it shows up by quarter is going to be very different than any other year because so much it's going to get sort of aggregated into the second quarter. So even on the second half basis, we've got that 60 percent of the $150,000,000 coming in. We're also going to have this period charge sort of, if you will, reversing because it's no longer inventory.
So as long as demand comes back at some level, the back half of the year versus Q2, you're going to see that benefit. So there's a number of things that help the back end that's just cost accounting on top of all the actual we're taking to reduce cost that you got to keep in mind.
That's helpful. Thanks. And I guess if I can slide 1 more in, mentioned, you're the only producer of Triton, which is just thankfully the case, but, the product does compete against polycarbonate and SAN. And the other 2, I would imagine we're seeing some pretty significant price deflation. So does the value proposition of Triton change at all here?
Does that possibly limit growth on the back end as well as out of this in Triton and maybe the higher product price versus peers than before?
Yes. So Triton wins in the marketplace for historically for 2 reasons and now it has a third. So historically, we launched it into specific applications where we actually had better product performance, you know, the sort of normal functional way. So better chemical resistance, better, you know, performance in these houseware applications and medical applications than polycarbonate, as a starting point. Then of course, BPA became an issue.
So we picked up a lot of share and a lot of stability in our pricing because we have BPA free and Polycarbon is not. So that helped a lot. And has allowed us not really we don't really compete against Polycarbon anymore the applications we're in. SAN is out there, but it's, brittle, breaks if you drop it, it doesn't have the toughness or at all compared to what we do. So it's a real downgrade, if you want to go with that product.
And now people are starting to, especially in Europe, as a leading indicator, really starting to worry about styrene. So we're getting a lot of conversations, from brands that they want styrene free solutions. So that's also helping us. And then the third thing we've added, that I think is going to be very significant for the entire portfolio, especially 6 is recycled content, whether it's Triton or sort of our other core Cripaul Jesters or even a cellulosics, we now have they'd add recycled content through chemical recycling, which means I can put recycled content on these products and no compromise in performance whatsoever is identical product has recycled content. So we're already getting wins as I mentioned earlier.
So that's adding a whole another level of differentiation and value to sort taking plastic out of the environment and truly offering Circular solutions where we can actually take back products from cosmetics or hydration vessels or any other source and loop it straight back into that same product, even on textiles over in fiber. So a lot going on to help us continue our differentiation.
Is there a market price premium? Are you catching that price premium on the recycled content? Are you finding that people are willing to pay up for it?
We're not actually going to discuss that right now. That's a customer by customer basis, but there is a value to this that in a cost to this. And we're confident that our spreads will be equal to or better than our current spreads.
Our next question comes from Kevin McCarthy of Vertical Research Partners. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. A couple of questions on Pammacore intermediates. Mark, I was wondering if you could expand a bit on your licensing activities last quarter, you had discussed some ethylene glycol market opportunities in licensing. Was that the source of the revenue in the first quarter? How much of a benefit did you have and what does it look like for the balance of the year relative to, the magnitude of the first quarter contribution?
Thanks.
So, I'll let Willie take this one.
Yes, thanks Kevin. So as you think about what we said in January, we said we would get license and revenue of roughly $25,000,000 to $50,000,000 over a 3 year period. I would say this first installment is a modest amount that we see on this. And we would expect, potentially, more in the second half of the year as we hit additional milestones. But you can think about it, as being, I'll call it, a little bit less than the $25,000,000 on the low end.
Okay. And then with regards to volume and chemical intermediates, Mark, I think you called out 4 different factors there. One of them was from volumes in ag. I was curious about your volumes in OXXO alcohols. Have you seen any sort of a boost from isopropanol into sanitizers or sort of COVID related demand there or is that too small to matter in your mix?
I would call too small to matter. I mean, there are certainly some boosts in the propanol area. We see demand holding up relatively well in some of these stable markets. And so CI where their products are going into those stable markets are benefiting from it. But I wouldn't call it significant offset.
The real benefits we're seeing on the positive side of the COVID-nineteen crisis is more in parts of specialty plastics where we're going into face shields and the barriers, the grocery store, if you see those plastic barriers up between the checkout person and the consumer, that's our heavy gate sheet, that goes into those applications. So you're seeing a lot of strong growth in some of that. Medical is obviously doing relatively well. Pharma, etcetera. So there are places where we certainly see some benefits, in that stable section of what we called out, on that market map.
But more in AM, smaller amount in AFP.
I appreciate the color. Be well.
Thank you. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Matthew Blair of Tudor Holt. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Glad to hear everyone is safe. We think of Eastman as having a lot of connections to propylene, both on the commodity side as well as the specialty side of your business. Given that refineries are a key source of propylene, Could you talk about what impact, I guess, if any, you would expect lower global refinery run rates would have on Eastman here?
Yes, so we expect the reduced rates on the refineries to help maintain a better PGP price. But like the price of oil, the demand is off such a degree, it's a little hard to figure that out yet, here in the second quarter. But, we do see PGP holding up relatively well compared to F by a significant amount. And that spread, therefore, the propane is holding up, reasonably well. And so that's helping, but I wouldn't, I don't think it's going to cause us spike up in propylene at this point given the overall macroeconomic demand is.
Sounds good. And then I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the dynamics in tires. Previously you've highlighted your exposure to areas like commercial replacement rather than OEM. And based on the March data, it looks like replacement is holding in better than OEM. So I just wanted to clarify.
Is that Is that reversing as you head into Q2 where these replacement tire markets are softening more than OEM?
Well, I think the expectation of our tire customers is that they're both, you know, everything is soft, right? So what you've seen fire plants do, you know, we serve the vast majority of them across the globe, given our market position in Krystex. And PPDs. So we have a pretty good visibility and if you and we track them by line by plant, you got to have 90% of them shut down in April in the U. S.
And Europe. Obviously, they're starting to come back to life in China, but it's like OEMs. I mean, they're shut down. It's a combination of destocking their channel, like we're all doing to cash generation as well as uncertainty demand. If people are driving, if there's limited commercial activity, there's going to be just less replacement tires needed here in the short term, people are going to run with what they've got, especially in this period of shelter in place.
So I think they're adjusting to that. There's a few plants that are starting to turn back on now. Seeing that in a few places, but we're far from seeing them all come back to life. But I do think the replacement business for sure is going to be more stable than OEM in a normal time or even in a certain normal recession any time. But what we're in right now is just nothing like anything we've seen before.
It's not like a recession, right? Everything light just went off, right, on all service activity, commercial activity, the retail stores, etcetera. So there's just a huge change in mobility, we have to work our way through even applies to auto refinish where normally that's very stable, but obviously that's declined a lot right now too. Appreciate the insights. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Mike Sison of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Hey,
guys. You guys all sound well and healthy. Mark, it's been a while since volume has been a tailwind, but hopefully over time things get better. Where do you think profitability or margins can get to if volumes return, maybe on a more normalized environment whenever we can get back to that?
Well, I certainly think that if we look go all the way back to 2018, when you get to, before the trade war started, and that then got followed on by COVID-nineteen, I mean, we can't really make this up. Those margins that we had back then were, I think, quite attractive, and representative of where we were as a company and where we should be going forward. I don't see any reason that we won't have attractive margins than they am, or the 2 thirds part of AFP And obviously, we're stabilizing fibers. There's obviously uncertainty in CI and and that 2 thirds, the 1 third part of AFD. So I think that as we look at it, there's no reason not to get back to 2018.
And the performance that we had back then.
Got it. And as quick follow-up, I think you mentioned you felt oil prices where they're at would be neutral. But I was kind of thinking about chemical and b, it's a much smaller part of your portfolio, especially business is much larger. So I wouldn't oil more of a beneficiary given the lower prices and raw materials for your other businesses.
Well, I think it is and you're right. I mean, CI was 14% of our earnings in 2019. So it's not a significant part of our story. You know, you got 2 combined effects on CI at the moment because the oil price is so low, right? You've got sort of competitive dynamics, spread compression part of this, as well as, you know, reduced volume, which is not normal for that segment.
Normally they can clear all their but because the prices of oil are where they're at, it's more difficult to access the export markets. The combined effect is a little bit more extreme. Than what is sort of normal, if you will, Mike. But it is, I think, net a positive when you look across the portfolio and the benefits we'll get in the specialties relative to the impact it has. It's also important to remember that CI is not all cracking, right.
So the aqua means business is actually quite stable. Almost all that business has cost pass through contracts. Demand is going really well there in the ag end markets. CIC acid is a really small business for us. It's just a co product of making cellulosics.
So we don't spend that much time on it. You know, but it's, you know, it's relatively stable too because we're predominantly we're pretty much only North America because that's the only asset we have. And so margins are, prices are a little bit more stable, here than they are in Asia. So, it's going to be a headwind, but you're right. Net overall it's a tailwind.
Great. Thank you.
If we could make the next question the last one, please.
Our last question today will come from John Roberts of UBS. Please go ahead.
Thanks and glad to hear you all well. And That was an interesting observation mark on cars given no one's expect any upside there. But my question is you've been transitioning some of the fibers capacity to apparel, which is obviously going to be weak here for quite a while. Do you have the flexibility to shift back towards CIGTO if smoking activity actually stays pretty strong here over the next few quarters?
Well, we don't have to shift back, John. The capacity that we have in place serve the tow market is sufficient to serve the tow market. It's still not growing, right? So it's a it's a very stable business will be stable. We expect tow volume to be stable this year.
It was stable back in 2009. But the market's still declining in that 2% to 3% range. And we don't see the growth rate yet changing in any meaningful way associated with the pandemic. So the capacity is completely sufficient to serve that market. And it's important that we have enough capacity to serve our customers there because security security supply is extremely important to our cigarette customers.
So the capacity repurposed towards, textiles, we're going to be materially reducing the rates of those facilities, to align with the textile demand. So we'll have some asset utilization headwind in the 2nd quarter associated with that. But we still see a lot of ways to grow and create our own growth. Obviously, we need to get past the, past the sort of shelter and place mode But when people come out of that, I expect some will still buy cars again and some are going to buy clothing again. And our value proposition has really been strengthened by adding recycled content to our bio content, right?
So now we're offering a NIAF fiber that's half bio from a certified sustainable forest and the other half is not going to be recycled content taking plastic out of the ocean in the environment. And that's a very compelling value proposition for this market right now. They very much want it. And the third benefit we have is even when it breaks into a microfiber, potentially in the washing machine and gets in the ocean, it's certified biodegradable. So we've got the trifecta of an offer space that allows us to create growth as long as there's some amount of demand.
Okay. Thanks everyone for joining us this morning. An audio replay of this call will be available on our website, a little bit later this morning. I hope everybody has a great day.
This will conclude today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect.