Mercer International Inc. Q2 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

  • download
  • Print
  • Recommend
  • 0

2008-08-29 10:38:14.0

Tags: Mercer International Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator instructions) Your first question is from the line of Bruce Klein with Credit Suisse.

Bruce Klein Credit Suisse

Hi. Good morning. I was trying to figure out just the – I guess on the Restricted Group what the impact was from the FX hit versus the first quarter of '08.

David Gandossi

No, I don't have that number for you, Bruce. I'll work it out offline.

Bruce Klein Credit Suisse

Okay. And then the Celgar, what – I guess the production or the maintenance downtime, any sense of what kind of a hit that was in the second quarter? And was Celgar EBITDA positive in the second quarter? Could you share that?

David Gandossi

Well, it was 11,000 tons. A maintenance shut at Celgar typically runs about $8 million Canadian, and so the net result was Celgar was not EBITDA positive in the quarter.

Bruce Klein Credit Suisse

And the German fiber, could you just help us – I know the Russian export tax you mentioned is up to 50 bucks. What's the mitigant to that? I didn't quite follow whether you thought there was – or what the rationale was why you didn't think there was going to be much impact on your wood basket.

Jimmy Lee

No, I mean right now, it's still not up at $50 yet, but of course, it's coming. It seems that there's really no present outlook for a change in that position and, therefore, of course, the Finnish industry has been looking at many alternatives to supply their wood-related industries. They have, of course, made some attempts to take some wood from Northern Germany, but this has been very much on a very limited basis and has really not impacted the pricing overall for wood in Germany. And, therefore, so far, all of the things that have been occurring to try to increase wood availability in Finland have still have really no noticeable impact in terms of our wood pricing and wood volume availability at our German mills. Basically, that's what I wanted to say.

Bruce Klein Credit Suisse

But the tax hasn't come into effect yet, correct?

Jimmy Lee

Not the 50.

David Gandossi

It's EUR15 a cubic meter today, and it goes up to 50 on January 1 of 2009 if nothing changes. And just to sort of add to Jimmy's comments, we've seen the scans [ph] in the German market in the past but in a small way, and the limitation has always been the availability of equipment to move the volumes of wood that they need. In fact, they bought wood in the past and ended up calling our guys and saying, "We can't move it. Will you buy it back?" So the buying that they'll be doing, if they do much, will be limited to the Baltic region, Northern Germany, and there's just no way they could be buying the volumes that they'll be missing from the new developments in Russia. So it remains to be seen how hard they try, but our view of it is that physically it's just impossible for them to replace their lost fiber sources, so they're going to have to think about capacity reductions.

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement
Click Here