Earnings Labs

Icahn Enterprises L.P. (IEP)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 25, 2022

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Icahn Enterprises L.P. Q4 2021 Earnings Call, with Jesse Lynn, General Counsel; David Willetts, President and CEO; and Ted Papapostolou; Chief Financial Officer. I would now like to hand the call over to Jesse Lynn, who will read the opening statement.

Jesse Lynn

Management

Thank you, operator. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for forward-looking statements we make in this presentation, including statements regarding our future performance and plans for our businesses and potential acquisitions. Forward-looking statements may be detailed by words such as expects, anticipates, intends, plans, believes, seeks, estimates, will or words of similar meaning and include, but are not limited to, statements about the expected future business and financial performance of Icahn Enterprises L.P. and its subsidiaries. Actual events, results and outcomes may differ materially from our expectations due to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that are discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including economic, competitive, legal and other factors, including the severity of magnitude and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, there is no assurance that our expectations will be realized. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements should circumstances change, except as otherwise required by law. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of such non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the back of this presentation. I'll now turn it over to David Willetts, our Chief Executive Officer.

David Willetts

Management

Thank you, Jesse. Good morning, and welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2021 Icahn Enterprises Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on today's call is Ted Papapostolou, our Chief Financial Officer. Together, we'll provide an overview of quarter 4 and the full year results and then be available for questions at the end. Before discussing the earnings, I'd like to provide a brief update on recent activism at Southwest. Our tender offer of $75 per share remains outstanding and was recently extended. We are awaiting a shareholder meeting and a vote on our full slate of independent, highly qualified Board candidates. We will not comment on the specifics of this campaign, but refer you to our public filings and statements that are easily available. Second campaign, McDonald's. This is an activist campaign of a very different nature, but one that's being pursued outside of the Icahn Enterprises in a personal capacity by Mr. Icahn. We believe activism is the best paradigm for investing through our Investment segment as well as managing our controlled subsidiaries. We focus on improving the capital structure and operations of companies within all of our segments. As part of our strategy, we routinely hedge against market risks, and in the past, this has worked well. The last several years have been a bit of an outlier to our modus operandi. We believe we are much better positioned than we have been in the past with our hedges, and we are encouraged based on 2022 results to date. 2021 earnings ended with a net loss for IEP of $518 million for the year and with a $396 million loss for the quarter, which is significantly improved versus 2020. IEP's full year adjusted EBITDA was a positive $273 million. The full year '21 results were negatively impacted by losses of…

Ted Papapostolou

Management

Thanks, David. I will begin by reviewing our consolidated results and then highlight the performance of our operating segments and comment on the strength of our balance sheet. For Q4 2021, we had net loss attributable to IEP of $396 million compared to net income of $146 million in the prior year period. For full year 2021, net loss attributable to IEP was $518 million, which includes several significant items that negatively impacted the results. These include RINs expense of $435 million within our Energy segment and $149 million of transformation losses and $56 million of inventory write-downs within our Automotive segment. For Q4 2021, adjusted EBITDA attributable to IEP was a loss of $443 million compared to a gain of $423 million in the prior year period. I will now provide more detail regarding the performance of our individual segments. The Investment Funds had a negative return of 8.3% for Q4 2021 compared to a positive return of 5.6% in the prior year. Contributing factors of Q4 2021 returns were the negative performance of broad market hedges of $493 million and a single name position of $290 million. Long positions had a positive performance attribution of 1.4% in Q4 2021, while short positions and other had a negative performance attribution of 9.7%. The investments had a net short notional exposure of 31% at the end of Q4 2021 compared to a net short notional exposure of 11% at the end of Q3 2021. Our investment in the funds was approximately $4.2 billion as of year-end. And now, on to our Energy segment. In Q4 2021, our Energy segment reported net sales of $2.1 billion compared to $1.1 billion in the prior year period. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $116 million for Q4 2021 compared to $1 million in Q4 of…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Chapin Mechem with Northeast Investors.

Chapin Mechem

Analyst

I want to ask a couple of questions about this case. I think, previously, you talked about contracts coming up in the beginning of the new year. So I'm just wondering if you can provide any additional just sort of insight into how that's going passing through the cost.

David Willetts

Management

Yes. I think the short version is, the contracts are up. We actually met with Viskase yesterday to specifically talk about pricing for Q1 of 2022. And they are actively repricing and renegotiating those contracts and there's a significant increase -- I won't share the specific number until the end of this quarter, but there's a significant increase that looks to offset the inflation that we've realized to date. Frankly, we're in discussions with management about how much further can you go, with the idea that offsetting inflation is step 1, but we also need to make sure we're at parity to market based on just general product, and we need to get a premium for the products that are truly a premium and adding unique value to the customers. So pricing is a very large target in our crosshairs. The contract renewals are going forward, and we are targeting that for a major lever of improvement this year, and we're seeing some positive results.

Chapin Mechem

Analyst

Great. Wonderful, good news. Look forward to hearing more about that. And then, just I'm curious if you know anything more. I think Viskase fans talked about how they've increased their capacity a little bit and increased their market share. And I just wondered if there's any -- if you guys are seeing anything from that, if there's any impact on volumes or if that has any negative impacts on your ability to increase your prices, which it sounds like maybe it doesn't. But any thoughts on that?

David Willetts

Management

I'll talk rear-word looking. Rear-world looking, we don't see any issues from Viskase impacting us in a material way. We're refocusing on what we're producing and what we're providing to the customers. Candidly, one of the larger challenges, just getting the raw materials in. So there's a bit of a shortage in terms of raw materials that is constraining capacity, even if there's enough line time. So I think that, that probably is ameliorating any issues on the Viskase fan. But we haven't seen anything from Viskase fan itself. So it's -- right now, that is not a major risk factor that we're focused on or we're seeing for our pricing.

Chapin Mechem

Analyst

Great. And then just one last quick thing. On the supply chain disruption, is that just normal what everyone in the world is seeing or was there a specific incident or a challenge going forward or it's on the past, or anything you can...

David Willetts

Management

It's more of a wood pulp shortage, which is impacting our cellulosic product. We're seeing shortages in Europe. We're seeing shortages in the U.S. It's not a normal -- we're out of shipping containers issue across the ocean. It's more of a local market issue. Certainly, there are many demands on wood pulp. We don't fully understand all the dynamics. But we're focused on offsetting those with either new sources of supply, transferring raw materials from geography to geography. And frankly, we're also pushing a very aggressive scrap campaign so that, even though there is a shortage, we're able to do more with the pounds we do have than we have in the past.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions. I'd like to turn the call back over to David Willetts for any closing remarks.

David Willetts

Management

Well, as always, it’s very good to talk to you all. We will talk again in 90 days. Thank you for attending the Q4 earnings presentation. If there are any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Investor Relations, which can be found on the website. Thank you, and have a good day.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.