The Closure That Never Gets Announced
Huntsman spent $30 million on its plants last quarter and depreciated $77 million of them. MDI prices rose across all three regions in the same quarter, which is the part that should worry anyone buying it.
Huntsman put $30 million into its plants in the second quarter.
It depreciated $77 million of them in the same three months.
That is not a quarter-end timing artifact. The company told the market after Thursday's close that it expects to spend approximately $170 million on capital in all of 2026, against a depreciation and amortization line that ran $150 million in the first half alone.
We count closures here. Announced ones, with a press release and a WARN notice and a date.
This is the other kind.
"How much capacity leaves the Western system without anyone ever filing a notice?"
Five Years, One Direction
Pull Huntsman's own tagged filing data and the shape is unambiguous (chart below).
Capital spending went $326m in 2021, $272m in 2022, $230m in 2023, $184m in 2024, $173m in 2025. Depreciation over the same five years sat between $278m and $289m and never moved much.
So the capital line fell 47% while the wear-and-tear line stayed flat.
The 2026 guide of roughly $170m is the sixth year of the same decision. Against the 2025 depreciation print, that is 59 cents of replacement for every dollar of asset consumed.
Worth saying plainly: a company can run below depreciation for a year or two and lose nothing real. Depreciation schedules are tax and accounting artifacts, useful lives get set conservatively, and a well-run site can defer a lot without anyone noticing.
That is the honest version of Huntsman's side of this.
Five years is not one or two.
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