E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company Earnings Call NUGGETS: Performance Coatings, Volatile Asian Volumes

On Tuesday, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company (NYSE:DD) reported its second quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call. Take a look.

Performance Coatings

Jeffrey Zekauskas – JPMorgan: Have you come to a decision as to whether you’ll sell Performance Coatings or not?

A Closer Look: E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company Earnings Cheat Sheet>>

Ellen J. Kullman – Chair of the Board and CEO: Jeff, I’m not sure where that question is coming from. Certainly Performance Coatings as you saw had good performance this year, but as you know we evaluate our portfolio each and every quarter and if we have anything to announce about any of our businesses or product lines we will make sure we include you on the call.

Jeffrey Zekauskas – JPMorgan: Then as my follow-up. Were titanium-dioxide prices up sequentially in the second quarter and do you expect them to be up sequentially in the third quarter?

Ellen J. Kullman – Chair of the Board and CEO: Nick why don’t you take that?

Nicholas C. Fanandakis – EVP and CFO: Jeff, I want to take that. When you look at TiO2pricing in the second quarter it was flattish versus being up and expectation is that it’s going to be flattish as you continue through the rest of the year.

Volatile Asian Volumes

Kevin McCarthy – BofA Merrill Lynch: Your Asian volumes were off a 1% in the quarter. Do you see volumes there stabilizing? When I look at it in the context of minus 2 last quarter and minus 10 in the fourth quarter. You called out improvement in China and India. I’m wondering, if you think Asia may have bottomed here?

Ellen J. Kullman – Chair of the Board and CEO: Asia is still a tale of two cities when you think about the developing areas versus the developed areas. Although our volume was down 1% in the quarter in the developing Asia, it was up about 3% versus the – developing Asia was up 3% with developed Asia down 4%. You saw China, Hong Kong, I mentioned in my remarks were up 5% and then India was up 3%. If you look at it sequentially I mean it’s been a hard one to call this year, because it just was moving all over the place coming off of the Chinese New Year, but we have seen and continue to see sequential improvement and as we take a look at the underlying markets, we expect that to continue.

Kevin McCarthy – BofA Merrill Lynch: Just as a follow-up, Ellen. You mentioned that June was the strongest month for TiO2 in China. I think in the past, you’ve talked about pigment as being a leading indicator. So, my question is to what extent does that activity in June in China reflect restocking given some price declines in the region or rather would you attribute it to an increase in underlying demand there?

Ellen J. Kullman – Chair of the Board and CEO: Yes. I think it’s a hard one to call, because you got to kind of look at it over time, but we see both happening. I mean we see that there is movement in some restocking and I think that the Chinese government has really tried to really create and has done some stimulus are just – in the last month or so they have had two cuts in their benchmark blending rate. They put in consumption incentives for some consumer goods and they’ve been working to accelerate project approvals on infrastructure. We see all that is starting to move that market and I think TiO2 is the best that we will ever have.