All right. Thank you all for being in attendance here. Gabe Hajde, Wells Fargo, key paper and packaging analyst. I'm joined by my colleague, Alex Yee, in the back there. We're welcoming for the first meeting, for us at least, Sylvamo. Thank you for being here. Representing the company is gonna be John Sims, as Senior Vice President, CFO. And then other, I'll call them Sylvamo ambassadors. We got Matt Barron, I think the Chief Legal Officer in the back, Hans Bjorkman, Vice President of Investor Relations. So thank you all again for attending. Many of y'all are familiar. This should be conducted as interactive, so to the extent you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
And with that, John, I'd like to hear about Sylvamo, and I think you have a few opening remarks, some slides?
I do, Gabe, and thanks. Thanks for everybody for being here. I've got a couple of slides I wanna go through, and let me flip to them. I'd also want to thank those that may be joining us via the web. So good morning. I'm gonna start by discussing the basis of our strategy, Sylvamo's strategy. Our strategy is to be singly focused on uncoated freesheet. That's a product that we produce and sell, because we believe that uncoated freesheet is gonna be around for a long, long time. It's the largest and most resilient graphic paper grade, as this chart shows. It has the highest number of end-use applications. So you think across banking, finance, government, education, real estate, manufacturing, distribution, all those vertical channels use uncoated freesheet.
It's used across all sectors of the economy and in regions where we operate. This is why the total demand of uncoated freesheet, as you can see from this chart, exceeds the sum, the total, of all the other printing and writing grades combined. It's sustainable, it's affordable, and functional, and we believe paper will remain an effective vehicle for education, communication, and entertainment well into the future. You know, for example, paper plays a critical role in education. Studies continue to show students at all ages absorb more when reading on paper versus reading on digital screens. Just last year in Sweden, they reversed their decision, made in 2019, to move all their education to digital, and now they're moving students back to books. So as I said earlier, our strategy is to be singly focused on uncoated freesheet.
Since we operate in attractive markets for uncoated freesheet, and because we have an inherent competitive advantage, this provides us the opportunity to create long-term value for our shareowners. Our capital allocation strategy is to maintain a strong financial position, reinvest in our business to improve our competitive advantages, and that's reinvesting back into uncoated freesheet, and continue to return substantial cash to shareholders. So I'm going to provide some additional color on each of these three uses of cash on the next couple of slides. Slide six, this one, shows our commitment to maintaining a strong financial position that allows us to operate and invest through the cycle. So since we've spun from International Paper, we've reduced our gross debt by $580 million, almost 40% since the spin-off, and remained below our $1 billion target.
This is a healthy position that allows us to retain flexibility to address macro conditions, downside risk, and to invest in high-return opportunities across the cycle. Let's look at cash returns to shareholders on the next slide, slide seven. We will continue to return substantial cash to shareowners via dividends and share repurchases. As this graph shows, we initiated a regular dividend with the first year of our spin-off, and after paying down significant debt and strengthening our financial position. We've more than doubled our regular dividend to kick off 2023, and then raised it again $0.30 per share in the fourth quarter of 2023. We also issued a special dividend of $0.30 per share in the fourth quarter last year.
Just a few weeks ago, we announced that we are raising our regular dividend by 50%, up to $0.45 per share in the third quarter. I'm going to move to the next slide. On Friday, since 2022, we've returned $170 million in cash via opportunistic share repurchases. We have repurchased almost 3.5 million shares, or 8% of our initial shares outstanding, at average price of $49. These repurchases have shown a return of 45% based on a share price of $70. We'll continue to look for opportunities to repurchase shares at attractive prices and to also return cash via regular and special dividends. We remain committed to return at least 40% of our free cash flow to shareowners this year in 2024. Turning to slide nine.
We will continue to invest in high-return projects to strengthen our business while increasing earnings and cash flow. On this slide, you can see how we ramped up our spending in these high-return capital projects since our spin-off. At the time of our spin-off, we projected at least $100 million of high-return projects, about $70 million of which we will have funded by the end of this year. We've now identified over $200 million of additional high-return capital projects to invest in the coming years. This is gonna provide us opportunities to grow our earnings and our cash flow in the future. We expect such investments to generate well above cost of capital returns. And again, all these investments are in the business that we know. That's uncoated freesheet. I'm gonna wrap up by the last slide, slide 10.
We're strengthening our ability to create shareowner value throughout the cycle. Sylvamo was a cash flow story and continues to deliver against this, our investment thesis. Our earnings are improving from the bottom of the cycle. Last year, we achieved 16% EBITDA margins and earned over $600 million Adjusted EBITDA and generated significant free cash flow. We achieved this while continuing to reinvest in our business and strengthen our competitive advantages. We're reducing our cost structure, as I discussed earlier. We see several opportunities to invest and grow our earnings and cash flow. Financial discipline is a key component of our strategy, and we'll continue to leverage our strength to drive high return, invested capital, generate free cash flow, and use that cash flow to increase shareholder value. We're confident in our future and motivated by the opportunities that lie ahead. So that concludes my remarks.
Gabe, thanks for letting me share that.
Thank you, John. So the first question, you talked about being pretty much a honed hedgehog focused on one product line specifically. Can you give us maybe just a lay of the land, geographically speaking, and a little bit off script, maybe talk about some of your competitors and what they do? Because one of the things that stands out to me is your ability to identify some of these projects as an independent company and deploy that capital internally versus maybe what you were able to do in the past, and maybe how some of your competitors are hindered in that regard.
Yeah, I think... And that's the key thing with us in terms of our strategy of being focused on uncoated freesheet. So we get up every day thinking about how we can create value, increase our competitive positions. But one of the things I think that's, that we need to understand with the uncoated freesheet market is, we believe that we operate in very hospitable markets, very conducive to earning high return on capital that we reinvest back in the industry. And because the industry, over time, is declining in some of our markets, particularly in Western Europe and North America, that market naturally has players exit, and we're seeing players exit today. So we've had players exit from Europe, players that are exiting from North America, and also even in Latin America.
We, on the other hand, are reinvesting back in the business, strengthening our competitive positions and strengthening our ability to to grow, actually grow our earnings in, in these markets. It is different than our competitors. Our competitors, we've seen other competitors that have diversified into product lines that, into different product lines, different investments. What we tell investors is that we're gonna we believe that there's a lot of opportunity to increase our earnings, increase our cash flow by staying true and focused on uncoated freesheet. We're gonna generate a lot of cash, and if you wanna invest in a different business, we're gonna give you the dividends to be able to do that. But we're gonna stay in our home markets.
We're gonna stay with what we know and where we feel that we have a competitive advantage and that we can generate a lot of earnings from.
Well, it's served investors well, I think, over the past 12 months. The stock up 80% or so, so it seems like a fine strategy. 3 years post-spin, maybe some of the key highlights, key learnings, and any challenges that you all have faced.
Yeah, I think when you think about, you said 3 years, it was about 2.5 years. But we faced some significant challenges, if you think about it. You know, not only did we spin from International Paper, and you have to deal with standing up and, and, you know, your own company, getting off the IT systems, but we, within, you know, 2 quarters of the spin, we were faced with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One of our largest, most profitable businesses was in Russia. We decided that we had to exit that business. But we also then took an opportunity that same year to acquire a mill in Sweden. That fit strategically very well.
Then the next year, you know, even in face of high, high inflationary markets back in 2022 and in 2023, we had to deal with probably the biggest downturn that we've seen in uncoated freesheet because of inventory corrections. I mean, the demand, the apparent demand, not the underlying demand, but the apparent demand, was a lot lower, more dramatic decrease in Western Europe and North America than even in COVID.
But in all of that, the company performed extremely well because we were focused, because we were, we had a team that can react quickly, make decisions quickly, and even in light of the challenges that we had, we were able to exit Russia, we were able to acquire Nymölla, and we were able to generate 16% EBITDA margins last year, probably in the worst down cycle we've seen in uncoated freesheet, generate $600 million of adjusted EBITDA, and returned $125 million back to cash, back to the shareholders, and increased our investments internally, even in the worst downturn that we've had. So I think it just speaks to the advantage of it being a focused company on a market that we understand.
Okay. Makes sense. I mean, again, I go back to the share price. You've articulated being a cash flow story, and then giving shareholders the option, either through share repurchase or dividends. What's the feedback then from investors in terms of your strategy or the investment thesis that you are putting out there?
Yeah, thanks for asking that question, because we've heard from our shareholders, they're very pleased with the balanced approach that we've taken. And as I said, I mean, our first priority was to make sure that our balance sheet is strong. We set a $1 billion target, and we were able to achieve that really relatively quickly. So we want to keep a strong balance sheet so that we have the strategic flexibility to take advantage of any opportunities that may arise, you know, for example, with Nymölla. But after that, then the cash that we will retain, we want to reinvest back in our business that are high return projects, that can then have to grow our earnings going forward. And, you know, this is important because most people believe and have a bias toward companies that are in declining industries.
The belief is you can't grow your earnings. That's not true. You know, that there are so many opportunities. We said, you know, over $300 million of investments, that we have the ability to do that. But at the same time, we also said that, "Hey, we're gonna balance those investments opportunities with also balancing, buying back our shares." If, if the, the value of the company is significantly below its intrinsic values that we're seeing, that's gonna be a hurdle that we're gonna look at before we even reinvest back in the business. And that's what we've been doing. We've been buying back our shares because we believe we've been undervalued, and so we've been able to do that.
I think the other thing that's important is kind of the foundation for our capital allocation is a dividend that we believe that we can sustain for a long time. So it's core to our strategy, return cash to shareholders, but we wanna make it so that the dividend doesn't constrain us strategically, but also is optimum in terms of returning cash steadily back to the shareholders. That's why we raised the dividend, and we're really comfortable with at the level that we're at, that meets that hurdle.
And there's a shareholder base out there that embraces that?
They do, and I think what they've to answer your question that you asked is what they like is our balanced approach.
Yep. Okay.
You know, but the priority, I think, is that, you know, make sure your balance sheet is strong, and then deploy capital where you're gonna get the highest returns.
Okay, sometimes we use these events to communicate to the market anything on the demand side or pricing or what have you. There's a current price initiative out there we could talk about in a minute. But on the demand side, it's been tricky, so there's been a lot of volatility around destocking, restocking, and things like that. Any updates that you'd give us? I mean, do we think that 2024 can track sort of what a normalized year should look like? Appreciating, I know down in Brazil, it's a little bit, you know, they're going in their winter months right now, so it's southern hemisphere business. But just anything that you'd point out to us that you're seeing in the business today from a demand standpoint?
Well, you raised a good point. So that was really where the key driver last year was, inventory restocking. But when you look at the past several years, even through COVID and stuff, the underlying demand decline, particularly in Western Europe and North America, it's been pretty consistent with what we've seen. So we still believe that, you know, because of electronic substitution, we're seeing about 3% to 4%, you know, maybe 3% to 5% decline in those markets, whereas Latin America remains steady. And nothing's really changed our view on that going forward.
All right. Shifting gears to pulp. You, we're reading a lot about pulp price increases. Pulp market is a little bit of a different animal, but you guys operate vertically integrated mills, so you don't necessarily have to substitute. But just maybe talk about that dynamic again, relative to your competitors and, and how it serves as a, a strategic advantage for you.
Well, the pulp market, so we've about 10% of our volume that we sell, we do sell as market pulp.
Mm-hmm.
It does impact us, not as, you know, to the extent from as pulp goes up, then we're gonna earn more on the market that we sell. And most of the market pulp we sell is in Europe and North America. It also is a big driver of a competitive advantage, particularly in Europe. About 25% of the uncoated freesheet capacity in Europe is non-integrated, so they're buying market pulp, purchased pulp. And so when the pulp prices go up, the cost curve steepens pretty significantly, and so that helps with raising prices in Europe. So we're seeing that in Europe with the pulp prices going up, it's we're essentially moving to the lower end of the cost curve, and our competitors, the non-integrated players, are moving up to the right.
Less of an impact in North America because predominantly all the players are integrated.
Mm-hmm.
Same thing down in Brazil, it's integrated. Most of the impact you'll see is in Europe.
Okay. But domestically, there is a price increase initiative at the moment that the industry is pushing through?
Yeah.
And minus what?
Yeah, in our outlook, we showed that we got price increases going across all regions, both in paper and in pulp. And I believe our outlook, we showed that we expected $20 million to $25 million that, you know, higher price mix than Q1 .
Okay.
And that's across all the regions.
S ticking with pulp prices and specifically in Europe, the changing regulatory backdrop. I'm not an expert on this, but the European Union, regarding some deforestation, I think generally speaking, North American producers kind of adhere to a pretty strict, if you will, sustainable forest process and things like that. As it relates to, I guess, Sylvamo, is that a strategic advantage? Is that a risk to the business model over time? What does it mean as it sits today, I guess, as the regulation is in its current form?
Well, you're talking about the European regulation that they're proposing in terms of tracking?
Yep.
Yes. So, well, first of all, recognize that, you know, Sylvamo, our name comes from two Latin roots, love of trees, you know. So we know that forestry and sustainable forestry is very important to our business, and we actually support the E.U. We know what they're trying to do is ensure that all products that are sold, not just paper, but anything that's made, is sustainably produced and being able to track that. So we believe and support that initiative. We don't see that as an issue because we ensure that the fiber that we source is sustainably produced. The difficulty in the legislation is the practicality of the implementation.
Because you gotta think about it, what they're asking us to do is be able to tell them what tree was produced and used to produce this ream of paper. And if you've ever been to a paper mill and look at, you know, the wood yard and look at the pulp, the chip pile
Mm-hmm
and try to say, "Well, we can tell that chip went into this piece of paper," how difficult that is. But it's not just a Sylvamo issue, it's every paper producer have that difficulty. So we're trying to work with the EU, work with them to find a reasonable solution to meet what they're trying to do, but make it practical so that we can actually abide by it.
Sounds like things are getting more complex, not easier.
Well, that's true of the world, true of many things.
Yep. But, so switching gears a little bit, we had a dinner last night with a fiber-based packaging company, a couple here today. There's interest from, you know, European buyers buying domestic assets. There's news articles talking about potential Brazilian buyer of pulp assets here in North America. Just when we zoom out a little bit, how do, how should investors, do you think, view kind of the risks or opportunities, and maybe scarcity value of assets in the context of maybe what some other foreign buyers might see in North American assets or global assets for that matter?
Okay, Gabe, you have to help me with.
Just from, you know, what we've heard in North America is that there probably will never be a virgin pulping mill permitted.
Mm.
Then construction costs have really escalated. Maybe just this isn't the right way to think about we value things we tend to on cash flow, but just replacement cost and, and
Yeah
construction costs and a different perspective, and maybe what those other foreign buyers might see in having that footprint in North America.
Well, let me answer it this way. When we think about the uncoated freesheet market, because it's declining, what we see is everybody generally is moving to exit uncoated freesheet. And this is actually a good thing for us, you know, because we're actually running in. I tell investors, I say, "We're like the Marines. When everybody else is running out, we're running in
Mm-hmm
because we really believe, with our competitive advantages, the long-term sustainability of uncoated freesheet is that, this gives us an advantages." So players are. When you look at assets, you're right. I mean, nobody's really building an uncoated freesheet when you think about our markets. However, a lot of our uncoated freesheet assets can be, are low-cost and can be, can be converted into other assets, producing containerboard, for example, or other grades. And what's attractive to us, and this is gonna be true, it's been true in the past and been true in the future, is it's low-cost assets that are converted. Nobody's gonna take an uncoated freesheet, high-cost asset, convert it, and, and try to compete against a very competitive packaging market, right?
Mm-hmm.
So they're gonna take the low-cost assets, and those low-cost assets then steepen the cost curve of the field that we continue to play in. And because we have the low-cost assets positioned well on the cost curve, that's why we believe that over time, even with that declining market, margins can improve and our earnings and cash flow can improve. But it also speaks to the enduring value of our assets and uncoated freesheet. And this, I think, investors miss, is the underlying value of our assets have a lot of value. You know, for example, our flagship mill in North America, the Eastover Mill, it would make a great containerboard mill, right? A very low cost, integrated containerboard. So there's a lot of value in that.
That's why we continue to believe that we're undervalued, because people don't understand that the, the market's gonna be increasingly more attractive going forward, and that we have enduring underlying value in our assets
Mm-hmm.
both the mills that we operate, because they're low cost, and we talked about, you know, we announced this Brazilian forestry asset that we have, and was valued over $1 billion under a recent appraisal, that also is an important part of our enduring value.
You bring it up, I think that came up from $400 million previously, and it's sort of phantom value, if you will, that, that unless you sell it, you may not necessarily be able to monetize or, or recognize the value today. But, was that something you kind of prepared independently or, or just given, again, knowing what we know about eucalyptus and, and the trees down there and, you know, silviculture, how do we, how do we think about that in the context of, I guess, the Sylvamo story?
Well, we
Give you balance sheet strength or what?
There's a couple things that will answer that. First of all, we believe that we're capturing the value today. I mean, we're capturing that in the integrated value that we have in our assets down there. So every day, you know, that's one of the advantages that we have by being down in Latin America, and in Brazil, is a very low-cost fiber
Mm-hmm
being integrated and having that. Also, how you're gonna think about that in the future is that, that enduring value, exists there. So it gives us always there's always potential options down the road. You know, we don't know how things will be playing out, but that, that value, we believe, will continue to increase. And the reason why you asked the question, why do we do that appraisal? It was really because some public announcements, some of our competitors or players down in Brazil had publicly announced the purchases of land very close to our where our plantations are, and we recognized just simple math when we did it.
We said, "Wow, you know, the value of our land is much higher than even what we had appraised it when we spun from International Paper." So we hired the same appraiser that International Paper had hired. We did the appraisal, and it came about what we expected it to be in terms of that. But that just shows the value of that land and also the forestry asset. The pulpwood has increased pretty dramatically over the last three years.
Out of curiosity, there's a North American company that comes to mind that has some timberlands. Are you able to leverage that into maybe better terms or lending, you know, lending terms with the banks?
It's possible. We haven't, we haven't done that because we don't need to do that. So,
Okay. Switching gears. Project Horizon, that was an initiative you guys kind of put out there pretty recently. I think you talked about $110 million of potential for this year. Specifically, if you dive into that, you know, what is Sylvamo doing? And what do you expect to get out of it?
So we did that, the backup, and just to put it into context, is that we knew that when we spun, that we were gonna have additional cost being an independent company. And we knew that once we got up and running fully, we needed to start working on becoming more streamlined, more efficient. So that was always the plan. And we decided to do this in a very short time frame, but, so we did target $110 million of run rate. So by the end of this year, we would get $110 million run rate savings, 30 of that in SG&A overhead-
Mm-hmm
70 of it in manufacturing and, supply chain. So we've already announced the SG&A part, 150 people globally. That's, that's being executed. The supply chain and the manufacturing is a lot of the different initiatives that we're doing. But now we expect, you know, to realize probably about $10 million to $15 million of it to bottom line this year, because there's $50 million of inflation. So about $60 million or $70 million, we'll actually get this year, minus the inflation, so we'll see about $10 million, but we'll be at a run rate, at the end of the year, of about $110 million.
Okay. As we think about productivity, and this is true again, across at least my sector, I don't know about other sectors, but I call it the inflation treadmill. You mentioned $50 million. Sometimes you're able to get a little bit of commercial initiatives to offset that. Customers aren't racing to the, you know, door, knocking down doors to pay higher prices. But do you feel like it's incumbent upon you all to have a program like that in place all the time and drive productivity?
I think so, and then, and that's, you know, because inflation has gotten significantly higher, so it's a bigger challenges for business. So this really is motivating us in terms of the high return investments that we're putting back into the, into the company. There was a period of time before we spun that, we were underinvested in, so both in terms of maintenance, which then affects reliability, productivity. Our forestry down in Brazil,
Mm-hmm.
which affects the cycle time of the trees. So the longer we can wait to harvest the eucalyptus, the higher the yield, the less energy, the less chemicals. And so we've been reinvesting back into our plantations to increase the yield. Unfortunately, you won't see that until about six years, but we started it, you know, last year, but that's gonna drive cost reduction, you know, in our facilities down there. Improving the maintenance and reliability also improves. But all these things need to overcome inflation. And that's what our drive is, is to increase our ability to reduce cost at greater rates to inflation so that our margins can increase. It's another way to grow our earnings and cash going forward.
Probably should have done this before. I don't know if anyone in the audience has anything. I was gonna make an analogy about making the investment. You're like: Well, unfortunately, it won't be for six years. But loblolly pine trees or hardwood trees in North America grow a lot slower.
Right.
So maybe the stock price will grow with your eucalyptus trees instead of the-
North American?
North American hardwood. There was a chart, I can't recall which one. I think it was seven. $200 million of high return projects that you've identified.
Yes.
You talked a little bit about being underinvested, or maybe certain projects overlooked because they were compared against a bigger enterprise before. Just maybe talk about what you're doing today, in terms of these projects or returns associated with them, to the extent you can, and then maybe the runway, 'cause I think that's what can get folks excited, is, you know, you guys have taken a 5 to 7 year strategic look at the business and saying, "You know, we've identified a series of these projects.
Yeah, I think... I'm glad you asked that, 'cause I wanted to clarify. You know, when we initially, when we spun, we said we had $100 million of high-return capital projects. And, you know, we said that if you look at it today, we'll, and I'll get to the graph, but we're gonna spend about 70 of it by the end of this year. And then if you look at the carryover, even into next year, that $100 million will have been spent. So it, you know, it took us a little over three years to spend $100 million of high-return capital projects. Now, we've identified and been working, you know, even since the spend, to identify more opportunities to invest. But if you look at those projects, I'll give you an example.
So it's like, if you average, the projects of the 100 that we have really committed to spend, it's an average of $2 million a project. Now, there's some that are $6 million, there's some that are $12 million, and there's some that are less than $1 million. But the return on those projects are very similar to the returns we've had on the share buybacks. So they're, they're significant in terms of, what they yield. We believe, and this is what's consistent with our strategy being focused on uncoated freesheet, is that we're investing in our assets, our brands, our people, our teams. We think these are low-risk investments. Why? Because we know these. It's not,
You know, we know these markets, we know these mills, and we believe have high confidence in the ability to generate the returns that we're, we're talking about. So we target north of 20%. I mean, there's some projects that'll be 20, there'll be some projects that have 60% returns. So when you think about the $200 million that we've identified going forward, I think you can think about essentially the same sort of rate, in terms of how we will spend that, and the returns are very similar to that.
Maybe one last one on, on cash flow, and might be close out of time, is, to your point, maybe as some, competitors de-emphasize uncoated freesheet, do you see, opportunity for M&A for you all to further consolidate any markets? Not saying today, tomorrow, just conceptually, how investors could think about that.
We've always said that M&A is not core to our strategy. However, just like we did with Nymölla, if there are uncoated freesheets assets that are low cost in the markets that we are focused on, as being North America, Europe, and Latam, we're gonna be interested in looking in that. And I think there potentially could be. I think that players we're seeing it, like I said, you know, we have some players in exit are exiting uncoated freesheet in Europe as we speak. Now, they're doing some of it through capacity closures
Mm-hmm.
and some of it they're doing through, so like, like we did when we bought the Nymölla mill.
Mm-hmm.
But I think that there could be potential opportunities going forward, and we will certainly, you know, evaluate those. Again, it has to fit our strategy, and we have to ensure that we're gonna believe that those assets are gonna be around for the long term, and that, you know, it's gonna be accretive