The Creosote Comes From Denmark Now
Koppers took $164.6 million of impairment against its Stickney coal tar still on Thursday, and the word conditional came off the closure. Two plants are left in the group and neither of them is in this hemisphere, so the pitch, creosote and naphthalene arrive by ship from the fourth quarter.
There has been a coal tar still at Stickney, Illinois since 1922, on a site a local paper reckons has run in Cicero for more than a hundred years.
On Thursday its owner wrote $164.6 million off it.
Koppers' second quarter carried $215.8 million of impairment, restructuring and plant closure costs, and turned $16.4 million of prior-year net income into a $(147.5) million loss.
Adjusted EPS still came in at $1.37. Strip the write-off out and this was an ordinary quarter at a company with three segments and a soft one.
"When does a conditional closure stop being conditional?"
When somebody books the impairment.
The word that quietly came off
Koppers announced Stickney on May 8 as a conditional decision, subject to satisfying any bargaining obligations with the union that represents employees at the site. Roughly 85 people, wind-down of the remaining distillation and chemical production by December 31 2026, production tentatively shifting to the company's coal tar distillation plant at Nyborg, Denmark in the fourth quarter.
Thursday's 10-Q opens the same paragraph differently: "We have made the decision to discontinue distillation and chemical manufacturing operations."
Underneath it, the whole cost of that sentence, booked in one quarter: $164.6m of impairment, $36.4m of plant cleaning, waste disposal and demolition, $8.5m of depreciation and asset disposal, $2.0m of severance. The cumulative column in that table equals the quarter column, so nothing was smoothed in ahead of it.
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