Tim Go
Analyst · Wells Fargo.
Yes, you're right, Roger. It is complicated, and there is a lot of moving parts, but let me just give you a few examples. Like in our finished lubes business, which we do say is our highest margin business that we have. We have some simplification and rationalization efforts. I think, in the last call, we said, we went from, I think, it was something like 3,500 SKUs down to 900 SKUs as we try to simplify and take cost out of our business. And so that is definitely something that you're seeing. That's contributing something in the range of 600 barrels a day of less volumes that you're going to see in that finished loops business as a result of that. But it's taking out some of the low margin; some of the tolling businesses that we had that weren't bringing a lot of the margin. And that's why you're seeing, for example, the EBITDA margin percent that West talked about, a nice rebound in the first quarter to that 14.4%. But we're not just doing that in finished lubes. We're doing that in our white oils business, for example. As we look at some third-party arrangements and again some of the low-margin tiers, we've taken volume out of their, roughly 2,000 barrels a day, that we believe are unattractive volumes that we're not going to pursue. But instead, we've been backfilling them with our strategy of trying to find our niche markets and place those into our niche markets. We're doing the same thing in base oils. As we continue to look for opportunities to improve our net backs in our base oils, and I would just say, as you read and see these -- the length on the base oil market, I'll just point out that, you've got group 1, you've got group 2, you've got group 3, and those 3 different markets are being impacted -- they're all being impacted, but they're being impacted by different levels. And we certainly see group 3 and group 2 under significantly more pressure than group 1 at this point. Now that's not to say group 1 is not under pressure too, so I don't want to give you the wrong impression, but we are seeing that difference in the way those base oil markets are responding.