Rayonier Advanced Materials at 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference: Strategic Growth Plans

On Wednesday, November 19, 2025, Rayonier Advanced Materials (NYSE:RYAM) presented at the 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference, outlining ambitious plans to double its EBITDA by the end of 2027. Despite revising its current year guidance downward due to tariffs, currency fluctuations, and operational challenges, the company remains optimistic about future growth driven by strategic initiatives in its core and biomaterials businesses.

Key Takeaways

• Rayonier aims to double its EBITDA to $315 million by 2027 through price and volume increases, cost reductions, and biomaterials investments.
• Current year EBITDA guidance was revised down to $135-$140 million due to external and operational challenges.
• The company plans to refinance a $700 million term loan to save interest costs and increase free cash flow.
• Rayonier is focusing on deleveraging, targeting a net leverage ratio of two to two and a half times.
• Biomaterials projects, such as the Altamaha Green Energy facility, are expected to significantly contribute to future EBITDA growth.

Financial Results

• EBITDA guidance for 2025 was revised from $215-$235 million to $135-$140 million due to tariffs, currency issues, and operational setbacks.
• The company is targeting $50 million in cost reductions and aims to generate over $140 million in annual free cash flow after executing growth plans.
• Rayonier's current leverage ratio is just over four times, with a goal to reduce it to two to two and a half times.
• The $700 million term loan is set to become callable next year, with refinancing efforts expected to save up to 400 basis points in interest.

Operational Updates

• Operational challenges in France, including work stoppages, affected performance.
• The paperboard and high-yield pulp business faced downtime to adjust inventory, impacting earnings.
• The bioethanol plant in Tardis, France, is projected to generate $8-$10 million annually.
• The Altamaha Green Energy biomass facility is expected to contribute $100 million of EBITDA.

Future Outlook

• Rayonier is focusing on increasing prices and volumes in its core cellulose specialties business, with expected annual price growth of 4%-6%.
• The company plans to convert commodity production to specialty production, aiming for $30 million in margin enhancement.
• Investments in biomaterials, including the AGE biomass facility, are key to future growth.
• Non-core paperboard and high-yield pulp businesses may be sold to expedite deleveraging.
• Discussions and MOUs are underway to explore opportunities in Sustainable Aviation Fuel.

Q&A Highlights

• Free cash flow of $140 million is anticipated from core EBITDA, biomaterials, cost savings, and price increases, excluding potential sales of non-core businesses.

For a detailed understanding, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 17th Annual Southwest IDEAS Conference:

Operator: Good afternoon, everyone. I want to thank you all for joining us for our next Southwest Ideas Conference presentation. Presenting next is Rayonier Advanced Materials, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RYAM. Representing the company today is their Treasurer and VP of Investor Relations, Mickey Walsh. Mickey.

Mickey Walsh, Treasurer and VP of Investor Relations, Rayonier Advanced Materials: Thank you, and I appreciate you guys having us here at this great conference. As William said, I am Mickey Walsh, Treasurer and VP of Investor Relations at the company. You were scheduled to have our CEO and President, D. Lyle Bloomquist. Unfortunately, he was a little under the weather and could not make the trip. I am really excited to be here today to tell you a little bit more about RYAM. We are a company that has been around for nearly a century. We have really pioneered and developed a platform of natural cellulose fibers that you will have used, and everybody will have used every day, everywhere across the world. I will tell you a little bit more about that here in the coming slides. We operate in four facilities today. We have one in Florida, one in Georgia, one in Tardis, France, and one in Temiscaming, Québec, Canada.

We operate in five segments. You can see there on the left hand or the right hand side of the screen, we have the cellulose specialties, which is the core of our business. We have a cellulose commodities business that we sell into. I'll go into details what that is. The biomaterials business is the next exciting chapter of our journey and our future growth. I'll tell you more about that here in the coming slides. We have our non-core paperboard and high yield pulp assets. Those are the ones that are located in Canada. As I mentioned, we'd like to think that everybody has used our products at least five times today. We're used by everybody everywhere. We're in the food that you use, in the fat free salad dressing that we had at lunch today. It was delicious.

We're in a time release gel capsule on your medication, where you provide the inactive ingredient that spaces out the active ingredient. While we don't necessarily look like we have a lot of smokers today, we do make cigarette filters. We also go into the heat not burn systems, which are coming into the U.S. markets. They've been in the Asian markets for a little while. We also make natural plastics. You can think about this LCD screen that you're looking at has a thin layer of cellulose acetate in there, provides a polarizing film. You might have acetate glasses. Those are another plastic grade that we make today. Again, you've used this many times today. If you've had hot dogs anytime in the recent past, almost every Oscar Mayer hot dog has been made out of our product.

Filtration in your auto, in your car, heavy run, high speed tires, high end tires, a rayon cord. That's us. We're wrapped in there. We really build the natural building blocks for our customers, which are typically chemical companies, to then make these products that you have used every single day. That left hand side of your screen, that is the specialty market. On the right hand side, we start with the commodities. Our primary product there is what we call fluff. It is mostly going into baby diapers and personal hygiene products. It's a good business for us that we do out of our Georgia facility. The assets that make the specialties also make the commodities. When we don't have significant or sufficient demand for the specialties, we will go ahead and make the commodity products.

We'll make things like a textile grade like viscose, maybe the inside of your jacket lining would be a good example of that, or even as low as just generic paper pulp grades. Again, the biomaterials, which is the next segment there in kind of light green, is the exciting part of our future growth. I'm going to go into that in a lot more detail. It ranges everywhere from energy to ethanol and lignin that we do today. There's a few other products that we're going to be developing here in the next several years that will fuel our growth. The last two businesses, again, those are our paperboard, high yield pulp businesses located in Canada. Paperboard is a nice market. Think about lottery tickets or an Orbitz gum wrapper. That's a good example of a packaging grade that we're able to develop.

We just launched a freezer board version, so a paperboard that you can wrap around a frozen fish or something like that, that can handle changes in temperature and changes in moisture. High-yield pulp has probably been the most challenging business for us here this year. This is going into printing and writing. It goes into packaging. It's been under extreme pressure this year. We have some plans here to fix these businesses and try to package them up for sale as we look later into next year or even 2027. As I mentioned, it's been a challenging year, not just for paperboard and high-yield pulp, but we've also had some unique challenges specific to us as well. We started out the year giving out guidance of $215-$235.

You can see today on the left hand side of the screen, we're $135-$140 is what we're guiding to. We've been impacted by tariffs, I think like a lot of people. Some of those we think we'll get back, some of those less so. Currency. We've had some extraordinary operational challenges in France and a little bit here in the U.S., but primarily in France related to some work stoppages due to national strikes. We've also had some non-cash environmental charges hit us. Most recently, we decided to take some downtime in our paperboard and high-yield pulp business to help right size the balance sheet and the inventory there, but it came at an even cost to us. As we think about this business going forward, we like to think of $195 as kind of our baseline that we can look to grow from.

We are going to talk a little bit more about that in a couple of slides. As I mentioned, we think the headwinds are mostly behind us now, tariffs being a big one. The nice thing now is we have zero tariffs on our sales to China, zero tariffs on our sales to Europe, zero on our imports from Canada into the U.S. The only thing that we have outstanding is 10% on our fluff sales into China. We are actually starting to see tariffs become a bit of a tailwind. Now that we are a manufacturer in the U.S., we have 15% tariffs on European imports. That is going to help support both our paperboard and our cellulose specialties business. There is 10% on imports coming from Brazil. That is going to help support us in cellulose specialties as well as our future biomaterials business.

Most recently, in September, we just received word from the U.S. International Trade Commission that we as an industry have been harmed from imports from Brazil and Norway. That is now sitting with the U.S. Department of Commerce to determine how much of a tariff they should be putting on these imports that would be in addition to the existing tariffs that are on there. In addition to tariffs, we're starting to see FX start to abate, and we're starting to see the U.S. dollar strengthen, which will provide us, again, a bit of an advantage in the currency. Again, looking forward, starting with that 195 baseline, we are looking to really double our EBITDA here over the next two years. We're looking to get a run rate of $315 million of EBITDA by the end of 2027. We're really doing that in three main areas.

It's going to be coming from price increases and volume increases within our core cellulose specialties. It's going to come from cost reductions that we've got listed there at $50 million, and then our investments in our biomaterials business. I'm going to dive into each of these a little bit more in the coming pages. Starting with our cellulose specialty franchise, we are the leader in this industry. It's an industry that is made up where the three largest players have about 80% of the market share for the dissolving wood pulp cellulose specialties. They're running at about 90% utilization. We're generally seeing that our competitors are largely full on capacity. We're expecting, or analysts are expecting, prices to grow at 4%-6% a year. That $89 million that you saw on the previous slide is really related to about a 5% increase.

That outpaces the inflation just on its own. If you had a chance to listen to our earnings call a couple of weeks ago, our CEO was even more bullish than just the 5%. He talked about even 10% and beyond for potential price increases for 2026. We are currently in negotiations for 2026 pricing. We do not really have an update necessarily on where we are there, but we do think the industry is set up for higher price increases. We also are expecting to grow with the market. We are expecting about a 1%-3% increase in demand for cellulose specialties. Again, given that our competitors are largely full, we think we will receive the vast majority or outpace our portion of the market share at least with the market growth.

Turning to slide 10 there, if you're following along at home, the industry utilization at 90%, as we mentioned, we are not expecting any new capacity coming into this market until at least 2029. This supports our belief that we're able to push pricing with a significant reset. This will help us recapture years of lost value from inflation. The $89 million that we showed in the chart is reflective of that 5% increase. There is potential for further upside to that depending on how discussions go here over the next two years. In addition to the price increases, we talked about $30 million coming from our ability to convert the commodities production that we're making into specialty production. There's a margin enhancement, obviously, going from the lower grade to the upper grades. We're targeting that to be about $30 million over the next two years.

We think, again, that's in line with kind of a 2% growth in the market. There is potential for that to be even greater. We saw in 2022, the markets shifted downwards as the European construction market fell off. If we can see a faster recovery to that European. I've teased a little bit enough the biomaterials. We'll dive into this in a little bit more detail. What we do today is we take a tree and we're really isolating out the cellulose fibers within that tree. That's about 40% of the dry mass of the tree. Going today, the other 60% we're essentially using for energy value. Going forward, we think there are huge opportunities to up tier the product categories for that other 60%.

We're able to leverage our existing assets, our existing raw materials, and with a little bit of investment, we're able to create really compelling investment returns and growth in this business. A great example is our bioethanol plant in Tardis, France. This is one that we just got up and running earlier this year. It's expected to do about $8-$10 million annually on a $40 million project. We only had to kick in about $5 million of that $40 million to generate this $8-$10 million of EBITDA. What are these new projects that we are looking at? It's really these five we have up on the screen. The largest of which we call AGE or Altamaha Green Energy. This is a biomass facility that we would put in our Jesup, Georgia plant.

Materials has partnered with another company, and we would own 49% of this plant. It already has a purchase power agreement to sell power to the state of Georgia. We have developed an EPC agreement. The last thing we need to do here is get financing. We think as we get financing, it will take about three years to build. This plant will do about $100 million of EBITDA. We will have to kick in about $46 million to get our share, about $50 million of the economics of that plant. We are excited about that one. We are working through financing and hope to have an FID that we could talk about here in the near future. The second one we have there is a sister plant to that bioethanol facility in France. Again, very compelling economics.

We would only have to kick in about $6 million to capture 80% of the $19 million of total EBITDA at the plant. It is well-known technology. We have already proven that we can do it. What we are working on right now is the permitting process. That is in play. The target here is to get this up and running in 2027. The next two are both CTO plants, so crude tall oil. It can be used as a precursor to biodiesels as well as a host of kind of higher tier products. Combined, they are looking to generate about $8 million of EBITDA with only a minimum CapEx requirement from equity capital from Rayonier Advanced Materials of about $1.5 million. The first one there is the one located in Georgia. The second one there is the one in France, which is really just the tolling of our tall oils.

The last one's a real interesting one. This is probably we're providing updates here today on it. It's called our Prebiotics Project. The issue we ran into this one is a good one. The product worked too well. We were expecting to sell a certain amount of volume. Then through testing, we realized the product's going to work, has higher efficacy than we expected. Customer didn't need nearly as much. They only needed a fraction of what we thought they were going to need. We are now redesigning the plant to be more modular and scalable over time. We are thinking now that we can generate, what is it, $6 million of EBITDA from that project, on a smaller scale, but lower CapEx requirements overall, only needing about $5 million of our own money going into this. We are excited about these projects.

We think combined, you add all these up, we got about $80 million of opportunities here with less than $60 million of our own capital going into them. They are all happening here in the next two to three years, depending on each of the projects. One of the things that makes us very unique is our ability to recycle capital into these attractive ROI projects. We are able to leverage our existing raw materials, our existing footprint and assets to make minimal capital investments and generate significant returns. Beyond what we have already showed you there through 2028, we are already starting to think about, what are the next projects? Some of the exciting stuff we are looking at is SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel.

We're in discussions and MOUs with a couple of different companies, both in the U.S. and France, to figure out how we can play in the SAF future. You can see there we've got some of the details on who those people are and what we're doing. The newest stuff that we have out there is we're working on a study to complete a pilot-scale bioethanol plant in Jesup. We would be providing the feedstocks for that, and the plant would be funded by a DOE grant. We would have, again, no capital on that one. Exciting stuff. We continue to think about this as the future of Rayonier and the growth here. William, I think, mentioned that I am also the Treasurer as well as Investor Relations, so I'd be remiss not to talk about the balance sheet when I have an opportunity.

Despite a challenging year, we're still maintaining really adequate liquidity as well as cushions against our covenants. We've got about $140 million of global liquidity, which is probably below where we would normally like to target, but still where we feel comfortable. On the leverage ratio, we have a net secured leverage covenant under our term loan. We're five times. We're currently operating just over four times. We, again, despite a challenging year, feel like we still have cushion against that. As we fast forward into 2026, we'll continue to see that leverage continue to tick down. We have a publicly stated target of two to two and a half times net leverage that we would like to work towards. To help us accelerate and get towards that goal of two and a half times, we talked about the non-core paperboard and high-yield pulp.

We've got a plan to fix those businesses. They're currently losing $14 million of EBITDA today. We've got new products and cost savings that we are executing on as we speak to help restore those businesses back towards their normalized profitability of about $30 million. As we execute that, we'll also get some clarity on where USMCA might be coming out next year. That could help. The idea would be, let's position these businesses for sale and then help accelerate our deleveraging plan. The last piece I wanted to cover here was on the debt. We have $700 million of term loan that becomes callable next year. It's currently at SOFR plus 750 basis points.

We believe there is a significant opportunity to execute on our growth plans, demonstrate to the market that we're trending towards this 2-2.5 times leverage, and we should be able to refinance this high-cost debt at significantly lower than we are currently paying today. We have an opportunity in May. We'll have a 102 call then and then a 101 call in November. We would like to think that there's somewhere up to 400 basis points of interest savings that we could do. That would be $28 million of free cash flow that can come our way. You think about the 315 of EBITDA, start to save on interest. We do have about $85 million normally of maintenance CapEx.

Next year, we are seeing that we're going to have a blip up closer to $100 million as we have an extended outage at our Jesup, Georgia facility. As we can drive down interest costs down into that $60 million range, $50 million range, we think we can generate over $140 million of free cash flow annually off of this business. Priorities for that cash flow continue to pay down debt. We want to not only bring leverage down, we want to bring absolute debt down by at least 5% a year. We want to continue to invest in our business. We think, again, we have unique ability to recycle capital back into our business and look for other capital return opportunities. In summary, I just want to leave you with this.

We think the short-term issues that we had impact us earlier in the year are behind us. We think that the tailwinds or the headwinds we were facing from tariffs have now become tailwinds. The operational disruptions that we had are behind us. The non-environmental charge and FX remeasurements are behind us. The future looks bright. The core cellulose specialties, which really drives a lot of the value of this business, is trending upward. We have opportunities to continue to reduce costs, expand margins, and grow our biomaterials business. We believe, as we look out at our peers that are trading at 10 times EBITDA, we're currently trading at kind of five to six times, depending on which EBITDA you're looking at, as well as some recent private market transactions.

At 10 times our 315, we should be trading at something closer to five to maybe even six times stock price where we currently are trading today. We think it's a very compelling opportunity and a great opportunity for you guys to enter into this stock. I am sub 10 minutes, so maybe I'll pause and take some questions from the audience. Yes. We're kind of evaluating and describing. You mentioned the $140 million of free cash flow derived from the core EBITDA, but of course, there's all these high-return projects underway as well. Do you have kind of a forefarmer view of those? If those are successful and all implemented, what does that 140 actually become, including? The question was about free cash flow. Yes.

The core business, as we think about it, includes the biomaterial business as well as all the cost savings you described, the price increases. All that is baked into the 315. What is not baked into the 315 is the paperboard and high-yield pulp businesses that we would expect that we would be able to sell at some point in the future. Any other questions? All right. I appreciate everyone's time today. It's been a great conference for me. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.

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