Eastman sales revenue decreases to $2,205 mn in Q4 2019

“We demonstrated resilience in the fourth quarter despite continued difficult global economic conditions impacting consumer discretionary markets such as transportation,” said Mark Costa, board chair and CEO. “Notwithstanding the challenging conditions, for the year, we continued to make strong progress growing new business revenue from innovation and market development initiatives, particularly in the Advanced Materials segment. In addition, with full-year free cash flow approaching $1.1 billion, we once again showed our capability to generate strong cash flow. Although we don’t expect global economic conditions to improve in the coming year, we remain confident in our strategy and the strength of our cash flow going forward.”

In Additives & Functional Products segment, sales revenue decreased primarily due to lower selling prices, lower sales volume, and an unfavourable shift in foreign currency exchange rates for the fourth quarter of 2019 compared to 4Q 2018.

In Advanced Materials segment, sales revenue decreased due to slightly lower sales volume and an unfavourable shift in foreign currency exchange rates in 4Q 2019.

In the Chemical Intermediates segment, sales revenue decreased primarily due to lower selling prices across the segment attributed to lower raw material prices and increased competitive activity.

In Fibers segment, sales revenue decreased primarily due to lower acetate tow sales volume attributed to weakened market demand resulting from general market decline and customer buying patterns.

“We enter 2020 in a period of significant uncertainty related to macro factors that are out of our control. In this environment, we are focused on what we can control, including growing new business revenue by leveraging our innovation-driven growth model, aggressive cost management, and disciplined capital allocation. We are currently assuming that slow growth continues in 2020 at levels similar to 2019, although with less inventory destocking. Taking all of this together, we expect 2020 adjusted earnings per share to be between $7.20 and $7.60 and free cash flow to be between $1.0 billion and $1.1 billion,” said Costa.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (PC)