Chemours Is Hot From a Cooling Trend
You don’t often find a company sitting in the right spot to capitalize on a huge change in how thousands of companies must do business. It’s even less often that you find only one company with a nearly exclusive technology to fill the demand spurred by that change.
Chemours Co. (NYSE: CC) is such a company. The global chemical company, spun out of DuPont in June 2015, is one of two companies making low-global-warming-potential (GWP) coolants that will replace most hydrofluorocarbons over the next five years.
Hydrofluorocarbons are used in everything from refrigerators to autos to air-conditioning units worldwide. Replacing those coolants is a massive opportunity.
Chemours’ earnings per share were $1.02 in 2016, despite a slight decline in revenue. A shift away from less profitable chemicals to Opteon, the company’s low GWP coolant, boosted earnings 29%. My $48 target is based on multiplying 2018 earnings by a price-to-earnings ratio of 20.
Target: $48
Buy Chemours up to $30.
Regulatory changes that set up this sea change began back in 1987, when the Montreal Protocol ignited the idea of lowering the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. Over the intervening 30 years, several iterations of that agreement have been proposed, but none has mandated a schedule of reductions as specific as the one recently ratified.
The Kigali Agreement, which most developed countries approved in October 2016, lays out a fixed plan for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons. Chemours, along with Honeywell, are the two companies that produce the low-GWP coolants needed to replace hydrofluorocarbons.
Starting this year, the U.S. will begin freezing the amount of hydrofluorocarbons that can be used in cars. This will be followed by a steady reduction in hydrofluorocarbon use worldwide until 2022. Chemours does not specify the amount of Opteon sold, but recent commentary from the company is bullish. Although Chemours also makes less profitable hydrofluorocarbons, revenue from Opteon delivers much higher profits so that a shift between these two products will continue to drive profits higher.
On the company’s fourth-quarter conference call last week, CEO Mark Vergnano predicted demand for Opteon would increase 40% this year, and he expects Opteon to drive growth for many years.
When discussing the company’s new Opteon plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, he noted that the plant is on track to begin production in the third quarter of 2018 and will triple the company’s capacity to make Opteon. The plant will be the world’s largest chemical coolant facility.
A huge risk to the stock was reduced last week when DuPont agreed to share in the cost of a legal settlement for a large environmental lawsuit. This was unexpected. Many bears believe the reason why DuPont spun off Chemours was to shift the legal onus of these lawsuits over to the newly created company.
Abundant cash flow allowed Chemours to pay off some of the debt that it assumed during the DuPont spin-off. In 2016, Chemours paid off $381 million in debt with a portion of the $594 million in cash that it generated during the year. Cash flow more than tripled in 2016 and should remain robust as the company delivers cool profits from Opteon.
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