Urethane Blog

Urethane Highlights from Dow Investor Call

April 27, 2015

Dow

 

Turning to Slide 11, performance materials and chemicals reported sales of $3.2 billion and delivered EBITDA of $535 million excluding divestitures, which is up 4% versus last year and represent the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year EBITDA growth and margin expansion.

Polyurethanes delivered a record first quarter EBITDA driven by a combination of volume gains and margin expansion as the business continues to make progress focusing on their defined markets as well as developing customer tailored solutions through our system house capabilities in the consumer comfort and energy efficiency sectors.

Ongoing selfhelp productivity actions will also continue contributing to margin expansions in the coming quarters. Epoxy also continues to improve with double-digit volume growth particularly in differentiated product lines as well as the continued productivity focus.

Andrew Liveris – President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Look, timing, no change. We are on schedule with all of our projects. Of course, I think the earlier question on the big Texas cracker, 2017, early 2017 startup. No change to the budget. Everything going according to our financial plans that we’ve announced to all of you. And we showed you on our Investor Day some very specific details on that. No change to that, if you go back to that slide.

PDH, we are quite excited. It was on track for a mid-2015 startup, and that will have a material effect on our run rate to EBITDA on our propylene derivatives. Construction there is over 85% complete, also within budget. And all of their other projects that we’ve announced, the incremental ones, also doing just fine budget and timing-wise. I would tell you that the low oil price and the effect on LNG plants and what might happen out there, you are starting to see that on the Gulf Coast. So that’s a good thing. So you know, you’re not seeing the huge upswell that many of you were asking about last year.

 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3096116-dow-chemicals-dow-ceo-andrew-liveris-on-q1-2015-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

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