Eastman Chemical sees FY23 EPS $6.50-$7.00, consensus $7.70

Commenting on the outlook for full-year 2023, Costa said: “We delivered solid results in the first half of the year despite the challenging global economic environment. With the continued uncertainty, our focus remains on what we can control. This includes demonstrating strong commercial excellence with pricing discipline enabling margin recovery as we realize lower raw material, energy, and distribution costs. We also continue to expect to reduce our manufacturing, supply chain, and non-manufacturing costs by a total of $200 million for the year, net of inflation. Looking to the second half, we continue to expect auto, aviation, and other markets to modestly improve. However, we have reduced our demand growth outlook and therefore now expect primary demand across many of our end markets to be stable compared with the first half. Given the limited improvement in demand, we expect inventory destocking by our customers to persist, although at somewhat lower levels. Consistent with prioritizing cash flow in this environment, we are taking actions to meaningfully reduce our inventories, which when combined with reduced demand expectations, will result in lower capacity utilization and a substantial earnings headwind in the back half of the year. Taking this together, we expect second half adjusted earnings per share (EPS) to be somewhat below first half and for 2023 EPS to be between $6.50 and $7.00. In addition, we continue to expect to generate $1.4 billion of operating cash flow in 2023.”