Alleghany DEL Earnings Call NUGGETS: PRB Trends, Cost Improvements

On Friday, Alleghany Corp DEL reported its second quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

PRB Trends

Andre Benjamin – Goldman Sachs: Couple of questions. First, in terms of costs how much would you say was a result of say lower commodity prices I’m sorry cost improvement was a result of lower commodity prices and service concessions and if they were at rebalancing in the second half of the year going to 2013 in commodity prices how much of the lower cost level would you expect to be able to retain?

Paul A. Lang – EVP and COO: The cost reductions we made were mix of both variable and fixed and we continue monitor situation and we’ll continue to look at ways to reduce things. If you look particularly at Black Thunder about 60% of our costs are related to labor, diesel and explosives and as I mentioned in my comments we did a good job of controlling each of those areas. That being said I think a lot of what we’ve done is relatively sustainable which would brought about our decision to lowering the cost guidance about $0.50 in the Powder River basin.

Andre Benjamin – Goldman Sachs: Then given you guys are a diversified producer it would be great if you can maybe give a little more detail on what you’re seeing in terms of coal burned in inventory utilities burned in the various types of coals you sell, are the trends you’re seeing for the PRB specifically very different than what you’re seeing for Appalachia and whether your customer is actually seeing in terms of when they are looking to make decisions around 2013 contracting?

John W. Eaves – President and CEO: Yeah, a good question Andre, this is John. Certainly we’ve seen a pickup in shipments over the last couple of weeks out of the PRB. We think at the current burn rates you could by the end of the year have PRB inventories back to somewhat normal levels. As I indicated in my opening remarks typically from May to August you see about 20 million ton drawdown in inventories, we’re anticipating at least 30 million tons during that timeframe. So, we’re seeing strong burn, inventories peaked at about $205 million in May, we think they’re probably in the $195 million range by the end of June and continuing to come down. Gas prices directionally are going in the way. We’re seeing a good demand for the PRB coal in 2013, 2014. We’re getting bid requesting and we’d be responding to those over the next couple of weeks. Inventories remain a little bit high for our eastern thermal products, but actually we’ve seen a couple of opportunities in the East over the last couple of weeks that have been pleasant surprises. Western Bit continues to have higher inventories in that region, but we’ve been pleased by the international demand that we’ve seen out of Western Bit. The API prices have come off a little bit recently and made it a little bit more challenging, but we have been encouraged by what we’re seeing about demand and the international markets there. Met coal obviously, the uncertainties in Europe, the perceived slowdown in Asia has kind of pull that back a little bit. That’s why we pull back kind of our mid range for met coal to 7.5 million tons. We get 7 million tons committed currently, so we don’t have a whole lot of coal to put in the market the balance of the year. We’re making very good progress in the third quarter in placing those tons. So, as stand here today, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll get that place at reasonable realization. So, overall I think things are going in the right direction like we’ll get natural gas prices are, PRB clearly is back in the money, the fact that we’re starting to see some demand for our eastern customers that’s encouraging. What we’ve done is company to right size our thermal production Paul and his team has done extraordinary job in managing the cost in a low volume environment. So I guess, as we stand here today, I feel pretty good about where we’re heading, and our ability to manage through this thing to get to the other side, but we are very positive still in the long-term fundamentals of our business and think we’ve got the Company well positioned to be able to take advantage of that.

Cost Improvements

Mitesh Thakkar – FBR: I’m sorry for the problem, my line had some problem, but first of all congratulations. My first question is for Paul, on the cost improvements. Can you just put the $0.50 improvement on the PRB side, and few buckets like, what is the saving on the supply and labor and what is the saving just from other cost optimizations which you might have done?

Paul A. Lang – EVP and COO: Mitesh as I mentioned earlier, labor by itself at Black Thunder accounts for about 30% of our cost and in that category alone we were able to decrease our man hours about 10%, so that translates almost directly into proportional savings. We’ve also had good efforts along with vendors. We have a great relationship with several of our strategic and alliance vendors and we’ve had great success in terms of working with them in the area of supply chain management and that has also really translated into reduced costs. As far as the commodities, we got a little bit of help in the second quarter, but that really was not a big portion of our savings.

Mitesh Thakkar – FBR: My follow-up is just on, how do you think your long-term steam coal’s production should be modeled as far as Appalachian is concerned? I know you have idled a lot of mines. So if I look at steady state, how should we think about long term steam coal production in Appalachian?

John T. Drexler – SVP and CFO: Yes. What we’ve tried do is right size our thermal production and I think we’ve done that with the recent announcements. We’re at about a 9 million to 10 million ton run rate, very low cost; that we think will be competitive in the U.S. and international market. So as you think about going forward, I would kind of model that kind of range. We think if you look at the cost structure, that $68 to $72 cash cost range is something we think we can stay within. We’ve got some pretty attractive thermal operations now that actually can be competitive in tough markets and make a whole lot of money as markets start to prove and that’s really the way we’ve positioned ourselves with these thermal operations.