Koppers Holdings Inc (KOP) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Koppers' fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call and webcast. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this event is being recorded.

Now I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Quynh McGuire. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thanks, and good morning. I'm Quynh McGuire, Vice President of Investor Relations. Welcome to our fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 earnings conference call. We issued our press release earlier today. You may access it via our website at www.koppers.com. As indicated in our announcement, we've also posted materials to the Investor Relations page of our website that we referenced in today's call.

Consistent with our practice in prior quarterly conference calls, this is being broadcast live on our website, and a recording of this call will be available on our website for replay through May 27, 2025. At this time, I would like to direct your attention to our forward-looking disclosure statement seen on slide 2. Certain comments made on this conference call may be characterized as forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward-looking statements involve a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including risks described in the cautionary statement included in our press release and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking statements included in the company's comments, you should not regard the inclusion of such information as a representation that its objectives, plans, and projected results will be achieved.

The company's actual results, performance, or achievements may differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call. Also, references may be made today to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The press release, which is available on our website, also contains reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures.

Joining me for our call today are Leroy Ball, Chief Executive Officer of Koppers; and Jimmi Sue Smith, Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I'll turn the discussion over to Leroy.

Thank you, Quynh. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin this morning by stating my disappointment of falling short of our financial expectations for the fourth-quarter and full-year 2024. We seem to be on our way to meeting our fourth-quarter goal after posting a record October that followed a record second and third quarter for adjusted EBITDA. As the last two months of the year progressed, however, we experienced volume slowdowns in each of our businesses that could not be overcome by short-term cost measures.

There are a number of factors for the drop, including the market share loss we called out in our PC business in November that began sooner than expected, some hurricane hangover as customers needed to absorb the influx of material from late September and October storm response, issues with consistent car flow with rail customers that delayed shipments and backed up plants, and frankly, some of it was just companies pushing pause and proceeding with caution as they began assessing the outlook with the Republican White House and Congress.

In anticipation of some of the challenges we knew we would face in 2025, we began in Q4 reducing our workforce through a series of actions that has, to date, resulted in a 5% reduction of our global employee base that had very little impact on the fourth quarter but will result in over $10 million in savings this year. I'll get into more detail later in the call on my thoughts for this year. But to set the stage, I still believe we're poised to post a strong year overall in every important metric in 2025.

But it may not be a smooth and easy ride to get there. We anticipate earnings to benefit from a combination of top-line improvements that will ramp up as the year progresses, greater operating efficiencies, and continued aggressive cost containment measures across our business. We remain encouraged by the accomplishments of our global Koppers team to create a foundation for a connected world through our leading portfolio of critical products and services.

I want to begin with a summary of key metrics for the fourth quarter as seen on slide 4. We achieved consolidated sales of $477 million compared with $513 million in the prior year, reflecting the demand pullback I mentioned earlier. Despite the revenue shortfall, we still generated record fourth-quarter adjusted EBITDA of $55.2 million compared with $53.9 million in the prior-year quarter.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 11.6% versus 10.5% in the prior-year quarter. Fourth-quarter diluted loss per share was $0.50 compared with diluted earnings per share $0.59 in the prior-year quarter. And while adjusted earnings per share for the quarter was $0.77 compared with $0.67 in the prior-year quarter. GAAP EPS was negatively impacted by restructuring-related charges in addition to the standard LIFO and non-cash hedging impacts. We generated a record fourth-quarter operating cash flow of $74.7 million versus $66.6 million in the prior-year quarter.

Slide 5 outlines our full-year key metrics for 2024, starting with consolidated sales of $2.09 billion compared with $2.15 billion in 2023, a slight decline driven primarily by continued soft pricing in our CMC end markets. This was partially offset by a record sales year in our railroad and utility products and services business, driven by added sales from our Brown Wood acquisition and some pricing benefits.

Adjusted EBITDA was $261.6 million, representing our ninth consecutive record year in profitability. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the year was 12.5% compared with 11.9% in the prior year. The 12.5% margin represents our best annual margin since 2021, and continuing to move this number higher will be a primary focus in 2025. Diluted earnings per share were $2.46 versus $4.14 in the prior year.

Adjusted earnings per share were $4.11 compared with $4.36 in the prior year, representing our fifth straight year of crossing the $4 mark after never having reached it prior to 2020. We generated operating cash flow of $119.4 million in 2024 compared with a record $146.1 million in the prior year. More importantly, with our second straight year in the black from a free cash flow standpoint following the investment-heavy early years of our 2025 strategy, which had put us in a free cash flow deficit, I expect the improved free cash flow trend to continue in 2025 as operating cash flow improves and capital expenditures continue to moderate.

As seen on slide 6, Koppers will be hosting a virtual Investor Day on Thursday, September 18. Our executive team will be unveiling the details of our 2030 strategic plan. Look for more details in the months to come. But in the meantime, please mark your calendars and plan to join us that day.

I want to highlight a few more things before turning the call over to Jimmi Sue, as I don't believe that financial performance alone tells the full story of Koppers. If you move to slide 8, you'll see that about half our facilities worldwide, 23 out of 47, operated accident-free for the year. And notably, our Europe CMC and Europe PC businesses completed the year with zero recordable incidents.

The relentless focus of our leaders on driving leading activities once again led to a new all-time low recordable injury rate across Koppers and enabled us to take our next step towards zero. I've said many times over, the safety and health of our people will always be a top priority, and the progress made in 2024 brings us closer to our goal.

Slide 10 shows an important achievement worth mentioning. We're honored to be again recognized by Newsweek as one of America's most responsible companies for the fifth consecutive year. Our move up the rankings to 113 overall is a recognition of our holistic approach to business, knowing that if we don't run responsible operations and value people as we seek to improve profitability, We jeopardize our future.

Moving on to slide 11, I want to point out the results of our 2024 Employee Engagement Survey, which were slightly better than 2023, resulting in our highest engagement scores to date. We know that our chances of success improved dramatically with an engaged workforce that feels valued, is rewarded for superior performance, and is informed and aligned to our long-term goals. My thanks to everyone that took part because it is your feedback that enables us to continue working on making Koppers a better place for everyone.

I'll now turn the discussion over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jimmi Sue Smith.

Thanks, Leroy. Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing our fourth-quarter and year-end 2024 results. My comments this morning are based on that information. As seen on slide 13, we had consolidated fourth quarter sales of $477 million, a decrease of $36 million or 7% compared with the prior-year quarter as Leroy said, all in the last two months of the year following a record October.

By segment, RUPS sales were flat with the prior year, while PC sales were lower by $16.5 million, or 10%, and CMC sales decreased by $19 million, or 14%. As seen on slide 14, full-year 2024 consolidated sales totaled $2.09 billion, a decrease of $62 million, or 3%, versus the prior year. By segment, RUPS achieved record sales for the year, with sales increasing by $45 million, or 5%, while PC sales were lower by $20 million, or 3%, and CMC sales decreased by $87 million, or 15%, compared to the prior year.

On slide 15, adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $55 million, with an 11.6% margin. By segment, RUPS generated adjusted EBITDA of $18 million with an 8% margin, PC delivered adjusted EBITDA of $29 million with a 19% margin, and CMC reported adjusted EBITDA of $9 million with an 8% margin.

On slide 16, full-year 2024 adjusted EBITDA was a record at $262 million with a 12.5% margin. By segment, RUPS generated adjusted EBITDA of $82 million with a margin of approximately 9%, PC had adjusted EBITDA of $143 million with a 22% margin, while CMC provided EBITDA of $37 million with a margin of over 7%.

On slide 17, fourth-quarter sales for our RUPS business were $216 million, consistent with last year. Sales were impacted by decreased volumes of Class 1 crossties, partly offset by higher utility pull volumes driven by our acquisition of Brown Wood, and continued price increases across multiple markets, mostly commercial crossties and Australian utility bulls. The market prices for untreated crossties remain stable.

Year over year, fourth quarter crosstie procurement was down 8% and crosstie treatment was down 11%. Adjusted EBITDA for RUPS was $18 million compared with $21 million in the prior-year quarter. Profitability declined primarily due to higher raw material, operating, and allocated SG&A costs, offset in part by net sales price increases, insurance proceeds, and record fourth-quarter operating profit and adjusted EBITDA in our domestic utility pole business.

On slide 18, our performance chemicals business delivered fourth-quarter sales of $148 million compared to $164 million in the prior-year quarter. This can be attributed to lower volumes of residential wood treatment preservatives related to market share shifts and reduced demand for industrial preservatives, which together drove an 8.5% volume decrease in the Americas. In general, prices remained relatively flat compared to prior year.

Adjusted EBITDA for PC came in flat year over year at $29 million. Profitability was impacted by volume decreases and higher raw material costs. However, margin improvement was achieved through cost-saving initiatives, including lower logistics and overhead expenses. Slide 19 shows fourth-quarter sales in our CMC business of $114 million compared to $132 million in the prior-year quarter. This decrease was driven by reduced market pricing totaling $11.3 million across most products, including an 8% decline in carbon pitch prices and an 18% decrease in carbon pitch volumes. These factors were partially offset by higher volumes of other products.

Adjusted EBITDA for CMC in the fourth quarter was $9 million compared with $4 million in the prior-year quarter. This boost in profitability stemmed from lower raw material costs, lower allocated SG&A costs, and $2.8 million of bad debt reserve in the prior-year quarter, partly offset by lower sales prices and volumes. Compared to the prior quarter, the average pricing of major products was down 8%, and average coal tar costs were lowered by 7%. Compared to the prior-year quarter, the average pricing of major products was down 13%, while average coal tar costs were down 18%.

As shown on slide 21, we continue to pursue a balanced approach to capital allocation. We invested $74 million of capital back into our business in 2024, and we're targeting $65 million for 2025. We returned $43 million to shareholders through our stock buyback in 2024 and our Board just authorized a new $100 million repurchase program. In addition, our Board recently increased our quarterly dividend to $0.08 per share.

In terms of leverage, we ended the year with $887 million of net debt and had $381 million in available liquidity at December 31. We finished the year with a net leverage of 3.4 times and remain committed to our long-term target of 2 to 3 times net leverage ratio. While we certainly see our normal increases in leverage in the first and second quarters, we expect to end 2025 at or below 3 times leverage for the first time since mid-2014.

As shown on slide 22, in December 2024, we successfully completed the repricing of our senior secured term loan B due April 2030. The credit spread over SOFR on the TLB was reduced by 50 basis points, from 3% to 2.5%. This transaction contributes to our ongoing efforts to optimize our capital structure and reduce interest expense, and it did not alter our leverage, covenants, or maturity date.

On slide 23, total capital expenditures in 2024 were $77.4 million growth or $74 million net of cash proceeds. We spent $54 million on maintenance, $5.5 million on zero harm, and $18 million on growth and productivity projects. By business segment, we spent $32 million on RUPS, $15 million on PC, $27.5 million on CMC, and nearly $3 million on corporate projects.

And finally, on slide 25, as announced on February 12, our Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.08 per share of Koppers common stock. The dividend will be paid on March 24 to shareholders of record as of the close of trading on March 7. At this planned quarterly dividend rate, which is subject to review by the Board of Directors, the annual dividend is expected to be $0.32 per share for 2025, a 14% increase over the 2024 dividend.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Leroy.

Thanks, Jimmi Sue. Now on to a review of each of the businesses. And I'll start with performance chemicals on page 27. While we expect a solid year overall for performance chemicals in 2025, that business is coming off an all-time best performance it will not be able to repeat. As mentioned on our November call, as well as earlier on this call, we will experience some market share loss in our residential chemical business this year as we face a more aggressive industry competitor that has invested in bringing capacity online.

Some of that conversion began earlier than expected in the fourth quarter and contributed to the volume reduction that Jimmi Sue mentioned. On the positive side, it's given us an opportunity to further diversify our customer base by adding several smaller accounts to backfill part of the lost demand. And importantly, we still maintain just over 50% overall market share in the residential market.

Focusing on the North American market, which drives the bulk of results in this segment, I would describe customer sentiment for this year as cautiously optimistic; persistently elevated mortgage rates, existing home turnover, seemingly stuck in neutral; and declining consumer confidence due to policy concerns has treated us uneasy about whether we will see any growth in treated products this year.

But on the flip side, remodeling spending seems to have flattened out after eight straight quarters of year-over-year declines. And the Home Depot, on their call earlier this week, specifically called out decking and fencing as two of the categories that they saw strength in the fourth quarter. Our market forecast for 2025 is one of slight organic growth, while some hope also remains that spending to rebuild from the historic storms last year will begin in earnest.

Anecdotally, excluding the market share loss I spoke to earlier, we have seen healthy comparative volumes in the early part of this year, and traders have been reporting that despite the frigid winter throughout the US, they've not seen an impact on demand. PC's industrial book of business remains robust, and we have more than enough capacity to satisfy increased demand when the utility pull market springs back.

The share loss and relative economic uncertainty has us emphasizing the importance of cost control and efficiency gains which we are pursuing across the organization, not just at PC. Tariffs remain somewhat the wild card in this business as we do source some components of our production from China and other countries that could be targeted for tariffs. And the recent inclusion of copper in the discussion has created a new challenge with which to contend.

All this seems to change by the day. We currently estimate that tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico could have an approximate $5 million impact on PC, which doesn't include the potential impact of retaliatory tariffs. We do have mitigation options to address most of the US tariffs and believe that any impact for PC would be negligible.

The copper issue could be a little more problematic, and so we're keeping a close watch on where this goes. The copper we use is predominantly domestically sourced scrap, which we hedge to smooth the volatility. Without getting too far into the weeds, the copper we purchase and the hedges we put in place are based off of pricing in two different markets that have traditionally been highly correlated.

Now the noise around tariffs has caused a widening gap in the spread between those two markets, which is causing our hedges and underlying purchases to not match as well as they traditionally have, which is creating additional expense that we may not be able to recoup. Now this is a new phenomenon that we're working to mitigate in case it does persist.

The total unmitigated impact of this issue in 2025 could be as high as $10 million. Factoring in the full impact of the copper issue just mentioned, we are projecting our PC business to finish with adjusted EBITDA of about $113 million, down $30 million from 2024. Moving on to our utility and industrial products business shown on page 28, fourth-quarter 2024 sales and adjusted EBITDA were records as results were fueled by early strength from hurricane response and the contribution from Brown Wood.

Demand tailed off in the back half of November through the rest of the year, and we took a late quarter inventory charge in Australia. Although not yet robust, demand in the early part of 2025 has recovered from the late fourth quarter hangover and is at least back to levels seen for most of 2024 prior to the hurricane activity. Customer sentiment is that demand levels will likely not change until at least mid-year.

Now while customer demand is an important consideration, the linchpin of our growth in the utility market is through share growth in underserved geographic regions, which was the purpose of most of our investments in this business over the past couple of years. Now we are implementing the technology solutions and realigning the organization to more effectively expand the breadth of our sales reach.

I'll repeat what I've said a number of times as it relates to greater market share penetration. We are not interested in participating in a race towards the bottom. We believe that a large swath of the US and Canada would like greater options for supply, and that's what Koppers is interested in bringing to them. We have no big investments, organic or otherwise, teed up at the moment for UIP in 2025, although we will continue to remain open to opportunities as they arise.

Our utility pole plants are all running well. and our new Kennedy, Alabama plant has begun treating Douglas fir, a western species critical for the transmission market all across the US and key for Kopper's portfolio offering as we compete for certain customer accounts. At this time, we have no heightened concerns on the fiber supply as worries about the impact from last year's hurricane damage seem to have abated with overall pricing remaining largely intact. Other than potential follow-on impacts from tariffs in our PC business on the chemical side, we have no current tariff exposure in our pole business as it relates to fiber or other major raw material expenditure.

Our railroad products and services business is summarized on page 29. We unfortunately finished 2024 in RPS with a disappointing fourth quarter. Similar to UIP, demand did drop more than expected as the fourth quarter went on, and despite personnel and cost reductions, we couldn't quite overcome an 18% decrease in quarterly sales volumes. All but one Class 1 account fell lower sales in the fourth quarter, which was also the trend for the year, but the rate of decline was steeper than the first three quarters and larger than expected.

Even commercial volumes were down in the fourth quarter, despite being a bright spot for the full year. On the good news front, we are projecting up to an 8% volume increase in 2025, which is based upon discussions with customers and some market share shifting our way. Our projections are based upon customer interactions, which of course can change as evidenced by customer feedback that had us expecting a 5% volume increase in 2024 at the beginning of last year that ultimately turned into a 4% year-over-year deficit by the end of the year.

Now while the performance of this business continues to be frustrating in many ways, I do see a path to measurable improvement in 2025 and beyond as our commitment to quality and reliability has led to market share gains and better pricing in certain Class 1 accounts.

While we haven't given up hope on the two accounts where we haven't realized meaningful price improvement, we've pivoted our attention for now to improving our unit costs through targeted actions that include reducing operating costs, overhead, and material waste. We won't see any direct impacts from US tariff actions on our rail business but would have some exposure if Canada enacts retaliatory tariffs.

Finally, in 2025, we'll begin to shift our crosstie recovery and disposal business model to one of recovery only. We've reluctantly accepted that the rail industry isn't quite ready to pay the full cost for Koppers to responsibly dispose of its end-of-life ties. We've ceased grinding at Somerville, Texas.

And effective tomorrow, we'll be closing our Launce, Michigan collection and grinding yard. This is unfortunate for the small but dedicated group that has faithfully served our customer base over many years and was recently recognized with our Zero Harm CEO Award for Safety. I want to personally thank the Launce team for their dedication and efforts.

Next on to the CMC business, which is summarized on page 30, while the fourth quarter was much improved from prior year, it too fell short of expectations based upon softer volumes due to pullbacks in the latter half of the quarter. As announced in December, we are in the process of winding down phthalic anhydride production in our Stickney, Illinois plant due to declining market conditions over the past 10 years, coupled with major investments needed over the next five years that we're not able to justify.

The original plan was to cease production by the end of May, but we are working to beat that timeline by one to two months. This closure is not expected to result in any EBITDA improvement due to stranded costs and will result in an additional $43 million to $47 million in charges above the $8 million recorded in the fourth quarter. $22 million to $26 million of those charges will be cash expended for cleaning, waste disposal, and plant demolition and is expected to be spent by the end of 2026.

At worst, we expect the plant closure to have up to $3 million of negative annual impact EBITDA, but it will save us $40 million to $60 million of capital investment over the next 5 to 10 years. Like the launch closure, it's never easy to shut down operations because of the impact on employees' lives and the communities we operate in. Once again, I extend my thanks and appreciation to the 25 affected employees for their service to Koppers and our customers, and I wish we could provide a better outcome.

These actions are not the fault of anyone but the result of an ever-shifting economic environment that will, at times, put us in the position of being the best owners of certain assets and other times not. This level of portfolio repositioning that we've experienced in the past 10 years is somewhat indicative of the mature markets that we serve. When we've made these decisions, we'll continue to make them as necessary to make our remaining businesses more competitive and put the business on stronger ground for our remaining team members.

Stepping back to look at the global view of CMC in 2025, we've not modeled much improvement in our end markets except for creosote due to an increase in treating demand, as I mentioned earlier. Now our view on the market could change if the variety of measures taken by the new administration spur any restart of vital aluminum capacity, but we've not factored that into our current expectations. Direct tariff impacts as of now are expected to be small with mitigation plans in place.

As of now, we're expecting that the creosote volume improvement along with further cost reductions and improved variable margin spread will drive a $14 million increase in adjusted EBITDA compared with 2024. On slide 32, we expect consolidated sales to reach $2.17 billion in 2025 compared with $2.09 billion in 2024, which would represent a 4% increase. More than all, it attributed to stronger volumes and some pricing improvement in our RUPS segment, partially offset by net market share loss in performance chemicals.

On slide 33, we're forecasting adjusted EBITDA of $280 million, which represents a 7% improvement over 2024 adjusted EBITDA of $262 million. And while there's a massive amount of noise in the system right now, we believe we can still show measurable improvement in 2025 as three of our four businesses are already at trough levels with nothing but upside in front of them, and cost and other benefit measures in progress that will more than offset the challenges in front of us.

Also, we're a few weeks from completing a comprehensive assessment of each of our businesses and functions, which will provide more insight into how much opportunity we believe exists beyond our current performance and what portfolio realignment is needed, if any, in order to reach our full potential. It's part of the final touches to our 2030 strategy that we plan to showcase in detail at our September 2025 Investor Day.

As we think ahead to Investor Day and the metrics we plan to use to measure success, expect us to place a greater emphasis on earnings per share moving forward, which justifiably includes the depreciation and interest burden of investments made to drive the EBITDA improvement we've been building towards through the current strategy. And now that the major investments have been made, I believe we can improve EPS by greater than 10% per year through 2030 due to multiple levers, which would be remarkable.

And I'll use that as a segue to direct you to slide 34, which shows our 2025 adjusted earnings per share bridge and the strong improvement we expect in 2025, driven by higher operating earnings and lower interest expense. Accordingly, we're forecasting $4.75 per share in 2025, representing a new high for Koppers and a 16% improvement over 2024.

On slide 35, we're projecting capital spending of $65 million in 2025, compared with $74 million in 2024. Our 2025 CapEx spending reflects an ongoing normal run rate and will enable us to generate significant free cash flow over the next several years. Much of that cash flow is planned for debt reduction, as well as share repurchases if our shares remain undervalued. We've completed the heavy investment period of our growth strategy and are now poised to maximize the value of those investments as market conditions eventually improve.

As I wrap up my prepared comments, I'll leave you with a few points I want you to take away from the call today. First, despite the uncertain economic environment we find ourselves in, we expect earnings to improve meaningfully in 2025 as we place even greater emphasis on driving improvement through actions that we control. Our business remains resilient, and our products remain critical elements of markets they serve and will continue to be needed long into the future.

Second, we're moving into a more normalized capital investment period beginning this year that will unlock significant free cash flow that will prioritize to reduce debt and leverage and buy back undervalued shares. Third, we believe that we have multiple ways to improve shareholder value through consistent double-digit EPS growth over our 2030 strategy timeframe that we look forward to discussing in greater detail over the coming months, culminating in our Virtual Investor Day in September.

And with that, I would like to now open it up for any questions.

(Operator Instructions) Liam Burke, B. Riley FDR.

Yes, thank you. Good morning, Leroy. Good morning, Jimmi Sue. Leroy, you mentioned in your prepared comments about PC. There was market share loss, and you mentioned it last quarter, but it's moved into this quarter as well. What is your competitor strategy? Is it a pricing strategy, or is there an alternative formula that's competitive?

No, Liam, it's -- and just to be clear, this isn't new market share loss, right? What we announced in November was planned for in 2025. Some of that started happening in terms of plant conversions in the fourth quarter, which was before we had expected, but it's the same share loss that we had mentioned back in November.

We have grown market share significantly in the time that we've owned that business to the point where most of the top treaters were sole sourced with us. And I think, over time, as they look to diversify their supply chain and mitigate some risk, they were looking to flip a little bit of that business. And you had a competitor that had changed hands in terms of ownership. Some investments were made to be more aggressive in going after business, and that's purely what it is.

I think it's a diversification of risk on some of our customers' ends and an aggressive competitor who put some money into capacity to try and improve their overall business. It's one of those things that as you continue to grow and get bigger and increased market share, you get to a point where, obviously, there's a greater risk and likelihood that you're going to go backwards than go forwards. And so that's kind of where we found ourselves. And we're a little bit of a victim of our own success over the past 10 years.

Great. Thank you, Leroy. And you discussed on the UIP that there are no immediate plans of investment on expansion either. Is it because the acquisitions aren't out there, or you just have other projects that have better opportunities to invest in?

Yes, I'd say it's a couple things. I'd say that we made some investments that are already going to provide us opportunities to grow share in markets that we don't have a lot of presence in right now. So we're working to start to deliver on those investments. And there's discussions going on and things that we're looking at relative to other geographic markets here in North America that we'll see how it develops over time. Some of it could happen this year. If so, we're not talking about big numbers at all.

And so at this point in time, I'd say from a capital standpoint, we just don't see a lot of immediate near-term needs. Now as we move into '26, again, we'll be reassessing as we go throughout the year. But overall, I think for us to be able to continue to grow, a lot of the investments have been made. There's still some more to make. They're not huge in the overall scheme of things relative to the money that we spent in the last three-plus years.

Great. Thank you, Leroy.

Gary Prestipino, Barrington Research.

Good morning, Leroy, Jimmi Sue, and Quynh. Leroy, I just wanted to ask a couple of questions here. I'm going to jump around. You talked about your goal of share growth in under-penetrated regions, utility. I assume you're hiring more salespeople. Have you actually started to pursue these under-penetrated markets, or is that something that's going to start coming through in 2025 with a bigger impact in 2026?

Yes, so we've already been down that path, right? Some of it is through the investments we've made to go into Texas. And so we've already been actively adding some business in that particular market. The Brown acquisition really opened up more opportunity for us to go up into the Midwest in terms of where those assets are situated. We will be in 2025, I believe, starting to see some of the benefits of that in terms of being able to go up into and having more of a presence up in that area.

And then as it relates to really going further west, that's still a little bit out in the future. We're just not really set up at the moment from an overall operations and distribution standpoint to go after those markets. It's kind of what Liam was alluding to, I guess, with his question around the investments in UIP and sort of where we sit at the moment as it relates to expansion plans.

We're set up right now where I think we have more than enough capacity to continue to make penetration into Texas and the Midwest. We're not yet really set up to go out west just yet, but that's sort of the next phase of things, and that will be out sometime probably '26, '27 timeframe.

Okay. That's great. And then just a question on the closure of the Stickney plant. Again, I'm not really a chemical analyst, but first of all, what level of sales? Can you quantify that coming out of that Stickney plant?

Yes. So what that particular unit of operation is, is one that actually consumes a byproduct of our distillation process, right? So there's -- basically, what we'll be losing is a little bit of, if you will, incremental added value pricing and the coverage of costs associated with taking that byproduct that we make and making phthalic anhydride into it.

The naphthalene that we used to basically consume in that process will be selling out into the merchant market. So I forget what the overall impact on sales we had estimated that to be. But it's maybe, I don't know, $30 million, $35 million, or something like that.

Okay. And this plant was not producing any creosote that you use in your other stations?

Well, Stickney does. It's just a different unit operation. So like I say, we have tar distillation, which basically takes our raw material and produces carbon pitch and creosote and carbon black feedstock, and then this naphthalene that essentially goes into the phthalic anhydride production. And then that gets sold out into the market. We're closing down the phthalic operation.

Okay. Thank you.

Michael Matheson, Sidoti and Company.

Good morning, guys, and thanks for taking my question. My question relates to forecasting what you'll be doing with your free cash flow next year. Just some back-of-the-envelope figures with your reduction in CapEx and factoring out the ground acquisition that's incremental gain in free cash flow of around [$110 million], even before any improvements in operating income. I know you'll be buying back shares opportunistically, but can you give us any kind of a guesstimate about how you'll be allocating free cash flow to share repurchases versus debt paid out?

Yes, sure. So I think we tried to provide some clarity in the release that went out this morning. Look, our shares have been trading at a significant discount to our long-term average of enterprise value multiple. We see continued growth in our business, which will only continue to push that side of the equation up.

So to the extent that the share price doesn't move, it's going to get even more undervalued, and we're going to buy back shares within our window and within our credit constraints under our current facility as that situation is in place. And then beyond that, we're allocating the additional free cash flow to pay down debt. And we believe that the combination of the two will get us, by the end of this year, to right around that 3 times leverage mark and put us in a position to get meaningfully below it as we go into '26.

Terrific. If you'll permit one more question, it looked like the key difficulty in Q4 for the RUPS segment was crosstie volumes for rails. I'm wondering if you've seen any improvements there in either volume or pricing.

Yes -- so yes, and look, I think that was certainly short term. Again, the discussions we've had with customers as it relates to volumes in '25 would have us have us expecting an 8% increase in crosstie volume this year. And so we're planning for '25 to be a pretty good year overall from a volume standpoint.

As it relates to pricing, there's some contractual pricing that will definitely come through. And we continue to have discussions, again, with a couple of the customers that that we've not been able to push the more meaningful price increases through. And there's some potential for some movement there, we believe. So right now, I'd say pricing, we do expect to be higher in '25 overall in volumes. Right now, our projections are for an 8% increase on crosstie.

Thank you, and good luck in the coming quarter and coming year.

Thank you, Michael.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to our CEO, Mr. Leroy Ball, for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

Okay. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate everyone's taking the time to participate on the call today and your continued interest in Koppers. We'll talk to you again next quarter. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.