With us today is Mark Costa, Board Chair and CEO of Eastman Chemical. I'm going to lead off with some questions for Mark, and we'll go from there. Mark, welcome to our conference. Great to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Excellent. Maybe you can walk us around the world from a demand perspective by region, by business, by end market. How are things progressing through the second quarter? I'll start with end markets first, and then I'll come back to regions. Sure. On an end market basis, if you look at sort of roughly half our revenue is exposed to what we call consumer discretionary. That's autos, which is the largest end market, and then building construction and consumer durables. Consumer durable parts, which includes a lot of appliances, TVs, things like that, are obviously connected to the state of the housing market because that's a big trigger for purchases of those kind of products. In that world, what I'd say is, there isn't anything dramatic in its change relative to last year. The building construction market we expect to be similar to last year. There was obviously the hope for interest rates dropping and stimulating demand. That's obviously not happening. The auto market, I think, is a bit softer this year. That's been the one change, I think, for the whole industry from what people thought in January to where we sit today, where that global market will be off low single digits. It's not a significant change, it is going to be a bit weaker this year from what we can see so far. I'd say on consumer durables, it's a little bit better than last year, but similar. Right? You could see demand getting a bit better sequentially out of Q4 into Q1. We're seeing seasonal demand that you would expect on those kind of products being purchased to be made into things that show up for Christmas, et cetera. Things like that. Put it all together, it's sort of stable when you look at it. On the, what we call the more stable markets, so that's personal care, consumer packaged goods, medical, Ag, all those kind of more stable markets, I'd say we're seeing modest, sort of low single-digit kind of growth in the market for this year versus last year. We're not seeing any headwinds. We're certainly not seeing any snapback, that's the whole point of those markets is they're relatively stable. That is sort of the way it's playing out. Ag, I'd say is so far looking like a normal year. Lots of conversation about what Ag will look like next year given the Strait disruption. This year, I think it's in the normal category. Geographically, I think it's what you all know. Europe and China are certainly worse off economically than here. The economy here is obviously not strong. Even though affordability is a big issue, I think what's defied everyone's logic, including mine, is that demand has held up relatively well compared to consumer confidence. The biggest way to explain that, I think, is just employment is still really good, right? While people are worried about what they can afford, they still have a job. They're still buying things. They're certainly stretched and we're worried about that as a back half kind of question around where consumer demand goes. Right now, we're seeing demand hold up well in this quarter across the portfolio. We're not seeing any signs yet of demand destruction associated with what's going on with the Gulf and the impact it's having on prices. It takes a while for those impacts to actually show up in the final price of a consumer product. We're just going to have to see how this plays out. Relative to your guidance of $1.70-$1.90 for the second quarter, are we tracking a lot of those expectations? Yeah, we feel good about where we are on our guidance. On the specialty side and Advanced Materials, we're seeing the sort of sequential improvement in demand that we expected. If anything, it's a little bit stronger than we expected on the consumer durables side, a little softer on the auto side for the comments I just made. Overall, I would say demand's on track and the quality of the demand's good. The mix value of what we're selling are some of the higher margin products, so that's good stability there. On the price cost side of it, and the innovation's coming through as we expected. The ramp-up of the recycled PET, ramp-up of some of these consumer durables using our Renew content is on track. We still feel good about that 4%-5% revenue growth this year versus last year for the Advanced Materials segment driven by the circular economy. It's not just that, right? You've got the heads-up display interlayers that are very high value, that are growing faster than the underlying auto market. You've got some good solid growth in the Performance Films business. I'd say that's more in line with the market than growing faster than it. Because aftermarket products are not exactly a priority when people can't afford a car, they're not going to put film on it, right? That's a bit more challenged. Overall, I think it's in good shape. On the price cost side, you've got the benefits of price increases we've put in place. We've got them all in place as we said we would do, and feeling confident about that. Because of the speculation that maybe the Strait will open and oil prices come off, raw material headwind is probably not quite as strong as we expected in things like PX, which have moderated a bit, so helpful. When you look at that volume increase and you put it together with operations running hard to keep up with demand relative to relatively low utilization we had in the first quarter in Advanced Materials, as we were still managing inventory and uncertain about demand. We got a pretty helpful utilization tailwind going from Q1 to Q2 in Advanced Materials. Additives & Functional Products is just rolling along. Demand's holding up solid. They have a lot of cost pass-through contracts. 2/3 Of their demand's in stable markets, so it's stable. The cost pass-through contracts are working as they should to keep up with raw materials and energy distribution costs. That business is on track for a good quarter. Chemical Intermediates is obviously doing fine. I'm sure we'll come back to that in a more detailed question, so I'll just keep it short here. It's doing fine. Its earnings are probably going to be a bit better than $50 million, which is what we originally sort of estimated, with the tightness in the market. I would say fibers is going to be potentially a little bit light. As we told you, Mid-East demand, how to get cheerlead, and more importantly, cigarettes out is the bigger issue. They're solving, but it just takes time to sort of work our way through it. That's about 10% of the fibers demand revenue is the Mid-East and tow. That was a bit of the challenge. Overall, the customers are committed to their contracts on a full year basis. We're not seeing any divergence there. We'll come back to that, I'm sure, in another question, what that means for the back half. Would you say the bias is to the upper half of the guidance range too? At least say that? Well, I would say where I sit today, you could see potentially we're in that zone, but June is an extremely important month. Yeah. You just don't know on how demand will play out in June. The order books in investment trends are solid through July right now, which is good and not typical, right? At some point, if the strait opens, people are going to say, "Oh, maybe if I just hold off buying, the price will get cheaper," right? There's going to be a month like that at some point. I don't know which month that's going to be. Clearly, none of us do, but I don't think it's going to be June at this point. Right. I feel good about how volume should be trending, but you got war on multiple continents. There's a lot going on. Just on that pre-buy question, there has been some pre-buying across the portfolio. Is that fair? I don't think there's been much pre-buying in Chemical Intermediates, just to start off with the easy thing. Right. We can sell whatever we can make because other people can't make it. Right. Everyone focuses on oil, but naphtha and methanol and things like that is what you should really be focusing on for this industry at the moment, and it's short. 15%-20% of the naphtha for the world comes out of the Gulf. It's not coming out. There isn't a bunch of refineries sitting around empty outside of the Gulf to be ready for this scenario. When you're dumping all the strategic reserves into the world, you're depressing oil prices because there's no refineries to use it, right? Yeah. That's the part I think people are missing is you got to do the supply/demand balance at every step in the chain. You've got an artificially depressed price in oil, I think, and it's partly because demand's coming off on fuel. It's also partly because there's no refineries to turn it into. That naphtha situation is going to drag on for a long time. We were just talking about it in the last meeting. I met with the CEO of one of the biggest chemical tanker companies, and they're like, "Look, there's a clear priority of what's coming out of the Gulf, and it starts with avgas and urea and sulfur because we need transportation and people to not starve next year," right? That gets prioritized, then oil, then chemicals. We are not in the priority rank of getting things out of the Gulf. When you open this thing, I don't understand how they do this, but apparently, they can prioritize what goes through it. I'm told. If that's true, it's going to take a while to reestablish naphtha and other refined chemical products for very good reasons for the state of civilization, right? I think things are going to stay tight. Certainly, people who are far more qualified, like the Dow's and LyondellBasell's, can give you a better detailed explanation of it. I've had the conversations with those guys, and they're of this view. Without a doubt, China's adding some capacity, but we'll see how it plays out. There may be some pre-buying in AM. Is that fair? On the AM side, there could be a little bit of pre-buying. There could be a little bit of pre-buying in AFP. Certainly not. We have the opposite going on in fibers. You have to keep in mind that the back half of last year, which was brutal, as you all know, involved a huge amount of de-stocking. The good news is we saw that de-stocking come to an end because we saw a very substantial recovery, right? Sequentially, our volumes in AM and AFP came back 10%, right? From Q4 to Q1, which was encouraging. The underlying demand hasn't improved a lot. January, February were relatively weak. No one was ramming up plants, including us, for some expectation of growth this year. People were being cautious. Suddenly you get to the war where now people can't make things as easily as they used to. People may want to buy forward, they can't because it's not there to buy. I think that there's just constraints on what's out there to be pre-bought. We certainly had stock outs in places as we got to the end of March, constraining what we could actually allow people to build, and we're still running hard just to keep up with demand right now. Right. I think that inventory situation is quite a bit different than obviously when we were in 2022 or even in 2025. Because in 2025, everyone thought the economy was going to get better. Trump's president. This is all good. People like us were building inventory for growth for the year in the first quarter. That did not happen this year. Back to the conflict, how long do you think it will take for supply chains to normalize once the conflict ends and the strait reopens? There's two different camps on that out there, and I'm guessing the answer is in the middle. One camp is China is going to make everything and ramp up their coal assets and this, that, and the other. 70% is naphtha, 15%-20% is coal. They can't ramp up the coal that much. They certainly have plenty of reserves, but again, they didn't have a bunch of idle refineries sitting around. They're all running relatively hard, so they don't have a lot of swing up in what they can do to solve the gap in the world. I think I'm in the camp that things are going to be constrained. It's going to take a while to reestablish the supply chain, just like shipping explanation. You got to fix the things that are damaged in the Mid East. You got to reestablish. Starting these plants are not like light switches. It takes a while to start them up. There's some we know got shut down hard, which never come back well. There's all of that that's going to sort of drag this out at least six to nine months and really getting back to some stability. I don't think we're ever going back to where we were in the back end of last year or the beginning of this year. Whether it's oil or naphtha or everything else, I just think it's going to be structurally short for quite a long time. It's not going to stay as extreme as it is here, right? Our expectation is there's some moderation of spreads in the back half of the year. We'll see how it plays out. You were just at ACC, the American Chemistry Council's annual meeting. What was the mood in Colorado? Maybe what's the divergence of opinions, if you mentioned them a little bit on the straight reopening? What I just said is, things will remain tight, versus it's going to loosen up faster than people think. Normally at ACC, by the way, you have all these meetings like this, right? Back-to-back meetings, and by the time you get to the end of yesterday, everyone has the exact same point of view about the world. That is not the case right now. People have very divergent views about how this is all going to play out. As I said a moment ago, I think the answer will typically end up being somewhere in the middle of the extreme case. I would say uniformly, the opinion is what I said, demand's holding up. We're not seeing any signs of demand destruction. I think that's sort of a consistent point of view out there. Everyone's worried about inflation impact on consumer demand in the back half of the year, and it's only rational. The consumer continues to defy that concern every year and holding. To be clear, it's not like markets are good. Let's not overstate it, right. End market demand is bad, but it hasn't gotten worse. Housing is 20% lower than 2019, right. Same in Europe, 20% lower. China, total disaster, right. There's nothing good about that. It's just not getting worse. There's a huge amount of pent-up demand when you think about just how many housing transactions have not happened now for four years, right. The age of a car is getting 14 to 15 years old on average, right. I mean, that's a lot of really old cars that are just going to start hitting the end of life. Appliances, right. They were massively bought in 2020 and 2021. They last five, seven years, and then you got to replace them, right? You're getting to replacement cycles at a minimum, let alone maybe some demand recovery. The area under that curve is significant. It needs to be unlocked, which it is, in my opinion, not probably going to get unlocked this year, right? Unless interest rates come down, you're not going to sort of unlock the housing, consumer durable side of things. I'd say demand-wise, everyone's nervous about the future, but not seeing it yet in their orders. People aren't seeing a lot of pull forward, consistent with the comments I made earlier. There's maybe a little bit of that going on, but not significant for the reasons I've already mentioned. The big question about China and what they're going to do, I think, is they're just going to keep doing what they've been doing, right? Which is add capacity and take global market share on the commodity side of the world, where it's just about price and subsidies they have to go do it. On the specialty side, we still don't have a lot of direct Chinese competition yet. I mean, we always assume we're going to have it. That's why we have an innovation-driven company to innovate and stay ahead of that challenge. Circular economy should be a regional business. That's another way to sort of disconnect from Asia if we're going to have actual circular economy. We're always looking for all the boats that we can build around that threat. So far, everything is holding up reasonably well. Longer term, you're thinking, the group's thinking about benefits to U.S. suppliers. You're a heavy U.S. asset base. Is there a premium on U.S. supply, security of supply? Is there less dependence on Persian Gulf supply? Are the long-term benefits beyond six to 12 months of this conflict to you and your U.S.-based peers? Yeah, without a doubt, that's true. On the commodity side, we can sell whatever we make, right? That's clear as markets are shorted from what I said earlier about naphtha and everything else around the planet. On the specialty side, I think for sure part of the reason orders are holding up as they have is we're viewed as a much more secure supply. Most of our competition is not in China, but it is in Asia. It's typically Japanese or Korean competitors who are not in the best spot right now on the specialty side of things. That's holding up reasonably well. They're under more cost pressure than we are when it comes to pricing. I think that being a North American asset-based company, 80% of our volume is made in the U.S. 60% of our revenue is outside the U.S. We're highly leveraged. North America always happened. Now it's a really good thing, right? Our energy costs, our advantage, our Off ERC or Olefin cost structure with ethane and propane are advantaged. We're viewed as having much better position to be secure in our supply and reliable to supply to customers. That's always a good thing. Right. The North American chemical assets will be winners in this long term. The Middle East is, it's going to be hard to recover the Strait being safe completely, I think, forever, right? Yeah. At this stage, because the Iranians now know they have a huge leverage point. While the Chinese are certainly adding massive amounts of capacity and massively subsidizing it and getting discounted oil to run it, one, they're not getting the discounts anymore. Two, all their assets from a cost position point of view are in the third quartile. They can add it, but they're not cost-advantaged in doing it, right? If they want to subsidize forever, then that's a long-term problem for the industry. There's also just a limit on how long you can do that. Right. Segue into Chemical Intermediates, which has been the biggest beneficiary for you guys, this conflict. Where are spreads today versus where they were pre-conflict, expectations of the back half of the year, and longer term, the role of this asset in your portfolio? Sure The company? There's two elements of what's going on in Chemical Intermediates before you get to the war, right? There's a structural element and there's a cyclical element, to what's going on. The cyclical side is North American markets are far more attractive than the export markets for anyone who makes these kind of products, whether it's acetyl or olefin. Demand came off because that also goes into housing, goes into consumer durables and cars and everything else, for the intermediates that we make. That has that same sort of market exposure. We had a mix hit, when that demand is lower than normal. Those margins are much better than export. Right? Then on the export side is where the structural part showed up because the Chinese aren't really penetrating our market because we have tariffs and things like that, and logistically, it's easier to go to Latin America and Europe for them, or Southeast Asia, than it is to come here. That export market got crushed in 2024 and 2025 by all the exporting done by China, right. Those values basically got down to very low values. Those values are now very high, right? That benefit on the export side of things is obviously helping us. While that comes off, if there's stability that comes back in the North American market, we can offset some of the decline in export values with higher value mix in North America and some demand recovery. Those can stabilize out a little bit. That would be helpful, but the margins right now are certainly higher than what I would call normalized in the world that we now live in. given the structural dynamics out of China. I also think because of everything I've already said, it's not going back to where we were last year. Right. Somewhere in the middle. Right. I mean, anyone guess somewhere where that is? Long term, its importance and role in the Eastman portfolio? Look, the olefin business, first of all, acetyls is part of the integrated complex in Tennessee. That's not going anywhere. It's all a big pile of spaghetti there, right? You can't disassemble anything with cellulose esters and polyester from that site. When it comes to the Texas side, we've been clear that's not a strategic asset to us. It carries a lot of costs, a lot of costs are spread by revenue, and it has a lot of revenue, so carries a lot of cost structure. You got to keep that in mind when you're trying to think about its role in the portfolio or its absence. Half of the output does go into our specialties. That gives us a nice secure raw material position that's made in America, so that's a good thing to have. At some point, does it fit in the portfolio as we're growing the specialties and building up the circular economy? Probably not. Right now, it's doing its job. Okay. It's providing some earning stability, right? The nice thing is it's a small percentage of the portfolio. When raws go really up, like 2021 or now, where you have pricing trying to chase it on the specialty side. The margin expansion here actually offsets that. It gives you a bit of a stability edge. Yeah. You don't want to be too big. Right. Otherwise, you're going up and down with it. It's small enough where it just helps offset some of that and gives you more stable margins. There's this thing going on with our stock where people don't know how to trade us, right? Do I want to trade on the commodity side? Do I want to trade on the specialty side? You can see that word debate in the investment community going on daily. The reality is it provides stability, which is a good thing in this world right now. Stable cash, stable growth. That's what you get out of this portfolio. Right. Talking about stability, fibers, acetate tow, we have seen some destocking. Yeah. The last few quarters. Where are we sitting on that journey? Where are we sitting on that destocking journey in tow? The destocking is not a few quarters. Unfortunately, I have to think about this in years. Tow is a critical part of a cigarette. It's about 5%-10% of the price of a cigarette. If you run out of tow, that is uber bad when you have 65% gross margins, right? Security supply is always the priority in history for this industry. When we had all the shortages and we had some operational problems at the beginning of 2022 with our site, the customers became, especially the big multinationals who are very well run, built inventory because they wanted security supply. They built it in 2021, they built it in 2022, they built it in 2023, a little bit every year because we have these volume band contracts that they stay in. They don't buy a lot extra each year, but they bought a bit extra each year. They accumulated a lot by the time they got to the end of 2024. Of course, no one ever tells you when they're building inventory, ever. Either they're worried you'll put them on allocation and not give it to them if the market's relatively tight. You just don't know what's happening. That's what happened across so many marketplaces in 2021, not just tow, but everything, right? Everyone else started to destock right away in the end of 2022. These guys, because they're so worried about security of supply, didn't start destocking anything until last year. They're all under contracts, especially the big ones, that have a min and max. They went to their minimum commitment, which allows them to chip away at the destocking, but they can't solve it in a year because we hold them to these minimum contract, so to keep stability in the business on the volume side. It started last year, it's going through this year, it's going to keep on going to some degree into next year. By then it'll be done. There's an age limit on this tow. Right. It will sort of resolve itself. It's a journey. That's the primary drop in demand. Why it got enabled was a Chinese player came out with some capacity that made it available to the Western world. Historically, they'd just been selling into- Russia and Venezuela and Iran, places that we can't sell. They added some capacity, so they could actually take some of the risk out of the marketplace about supply, which is what enabled the de-stocking. The asset that's being shut down by Celanese is pretty much equivalent to what they added. That helps sort of on the balance side. Right. There's still a lot to go, and the margins are very high, so people get tempted into chasing volume, because the value is so high. That's why you get these dynamics where prices come off, and we had really high prices in some places. Right. I mean, really high. It was not a surprise that they were going to come off. Right. Underlying decline rates still the same, 1%-2% or? It was 0%-1%, it turned out between 2014 and 2024. It's moved more into that 1%-2% range. There's some more excise taxes in places like India. Right. This, that, and the other. That's going to impact demand to some degree. Historically, demand, despite all the drama around cigarettes, has just not changed a lot over time. Yeah. It will definitely decline a little bit more than the last decade. The non-tow portion of fibers, that's still progressing? The textile business was a great opportunity to keep the assets running full. The margins were actually pretty good. I mean, not exactly tow margins, but not that far off. As that business was growing, it offset some of that tow market decline, as we told you. About 40% of the earnings decline has nothing to do with tow from 2024 to 2025. Right. This was about a $30 million decline in 2025 relative to 2024 with all the drama of the trade war, the retaliation tariffs on our products going into China. That slowed sort of demand for us. I'd say that we thought demand would be coming back meaningfully this year. At the beginning of the year. It's a lot slower than we thought because of all the- Right Economic drama going on right now. There's still that $30 million recovery out there, but it's more in the future than it is this year at this stage. I mean, it's coming back a little bit, but not a lot. Right. That'll help in the coming years. I want to touch on M&A. Yep. It's been picking up in the space here and there. You've been one of the least acquisitive companies in chemicals. I think you've earned a right to do something, but you've chosen to focus organically, internally. What role does M&A play in the growth of Eastman Chemical? Yeah. Historically, by the way, we're one of the more acquisitive companies in a different timeframe. We went through this huge portfolio optimization, if you know our history, from 2006 to 2011, where we got rid of a lot of commodities and really upgraded the quality of the portfolio through a series of divestitures. Then we flipped around in 2012 through 2014, we did $9 billion of acquisitions. Right? We were very acquisitive, right? We bought Solutia, we bought Taminco, we bought a bunch of bolt-on businesses, all of which have delivered great returns, and very successfully integrated into our company. Yeah, when we hit 2014, after we'd bought all this stuff, we went into an organic phase. Say, well, we have all these products, all these specialty businesses. The ones that we bought had a lot of potential but had not been properly invested in from an R&D point of view, so we were working on that, ramped that up successfully, and built a pretty good business. Through all that, and we had a lot of leverage that came with it, and the economy wasn't exactly great. The rate of de-levering wasn't quite as fast as we'd liked. It took us a while to get to the balance sheet back to where we wanted it to be. You had COVID hit, and then you had supply chain grids, and then you had complete and utter drop of manufacturing consumer-related demand. Right? It's been a little chaotic in the last five years. Operation day, wars. Yeah. It just never stops. Yeah. By the way, I joked a year ago that we're running out of terrestrial problems, so we'll have an alien invasion. Apparently, that's true, too. Who knew? The good news is, they've been walking among us for decades, and so they must be peaceful. Maybe we don't have to worry about the disruption, but maybe he'll tax other galaxies as well for imports. We have to think about all that chaos and being responsible with your balance sheet and your cash flow, and being stable and reliable. Running around doing M&A didn't seem like a great idea. The real choice that we made, I'm getting to your question, but I think history's important. Yeah. The real choice we made in 2021, which is we could go really aggressive with the strength of our balance sheet at that point, and the strength of earnings right back then, on the M&A side, or we could go on the circular economy side. We couldn't do both. We decided that the circular economy had far more upside, and organic growth gets a far better valuation if done well, that that was the right choice because we're unique in what we could do at that scale of platform level relative to anyone else in the industry. We still believe there's a lot of value there, right? Go look at PureCycle, right? Negative $140 million EBITDA, $2 billion valuation, right? We've got very significant revenue. We actually have significant profit, and it's not in our stock at all because people are worried about the core. You stabilize the core, you start getting that valuation on top of the portfolio, creates a lot of value. We still believe our organic strategy has a lot of value despite all the chaos. Having said that, the world is going to speed up on M&A, as you said. The world is definitely going to, I think, in our industry, consolidate to some degree. Certainly, that seems to be the going theory. We're looking at all options at this point. There's nothing, just to be clear, going on at the moment. Right. You have to realize the world's changing and change with it, right? Right. M&A probably play a role in our portfolio too, both ways. Both the things you could divest or things that you could buy or et cetera. We're starting to consider those things, but there's nothing- imminent. The pipeline filling small bolt-ons at least, or how's the pipeline today? The pipeline, there's always the bolt-ons out there, but the thing about bolt-ons is they take a lot of effort relative to the value they bring. If you've got a machine going like Rohm and Haas did a long time ago, where they're rolling up like competitors and coatings, it's really compelling. We've done that well in Performance Films, where we rolled up competitors and built that business to be more robust than what it was. We're always open to doing it, but it's not as robust as. Right Any of us would like it to be. Right. Okay. You mentioned methanolysis, organic growth. Yeah. Where are we standing on that journey today? Well, certainly it's a little slower than what we've done in 2021. Yeah. The current status is the plant's running great. The yields are fantastic. We've got clear insight on how we can dial back to at least 130% of design rate. To stretch the asset and give us time before we have to have the next big capital spend. On the specialty side, the volumes are growing with some of the recovery of the market, but they're going into blenders. They're going into reusable water bottles. You're going into those products that are discretionary. Where the market conditions aren't great. It's going to grow with the rate of the market, because people don't want to just add recycled content to an existing product. They want to put it in a new product launch. Where they get people paying attention, you get the value for it, et cetera. If you're not launching products, then you're not growing a lot of revenue. We are seeing half our revenue growth, which would be that 4%-5% I mentioned on AM, is in the specialty, where they are starting to launch some products. They are picking up some volume there. The other half, which is the rPET, demand has improved considerably for that side of the business in the last nine months, as we've talked about on the calls. Principally because their mechanical is degrading faster than they thought. We blend it with the mechanical and make it look good again. There's more recognition of our value proposition about how our product is identical to virgin, where mechanical really is not. Right. Going to be less so every year. That's creating a lot of opportunity for us. At the moment, we're capacity limited, not demand limited. Our assets are flexible, but they're not that flexible, right? You have to take some effort to sort of swing them back to making PET, which is what they originally did. Before we turned them into specialty assets. Right. We're in the middle of sort of making some of those adjustments. We told you about one line we're switching over, and we're looking at another one right now. Things are good on the demand side. premiums are holding. PepsiCo's a big customer for you guys. What has been their feedback on the material, and what do they want from you going forward? They've been extremely happy with the product. They actually have a whole thing on their website around Eastman and how we're enabling them to sort of address the environmental challenges of packaging. They've been great. A few other big package companies are engaged as well. They're pulling forward their volume, even in this economic environment. You think about the stress test and the value proposition. Things are not good if you're in the consumer package world, right? They have extremely demand challenges because pricing got so high. They're lowering pricing right now to rebuild volume, and they're still buying our material. It's a good value proposition test in this context, right? They could easily just say, "You know, I really care about the environment. I'm going to care a lot more about it in 2027 than 2026." A number of the brands are doing that, right? That is certainly happening. The ones who really take the environment seriously, like Pepsi, like P&G, as two examples, are very much sticking with their plans. You have your home state, California, putting in place recycling laws. Yes. That can only help matters, I presume? Depends on how the rules get written. There's always two camps out there in the environmental community. One is they really want to solve the problem, which is recycling and supporting all those types of initiatives, whether it's recycling or the biodegradable. cellulose polymers we have that we're taking to food service now. There's also a contingency that just wants the world to have no oil on it ever, right? The only way to get rid of oil is you have to get rid of combustion engines, you have to get rid of plastic. For that group, the more extreme NGOs just want to ban everything, right? There's that war going on. Okay. Which is totally unrealistic. It sounds good, raises money, but they can't actually ever accomplish their goal. That creates a lot of policy volatility. Yes, in general, the recycling rates being required, EPRs, which are Extended Producer Responsibility, also known as a tax on packaging waste, those drive behavior. Colorado, I would say, is the best example of a pretty thoughtful design. That I wish more countries or, not countries, but states would adopt. Of course, California's going to be more extreme about everything, so we'll see how it plays out. What's next here for methanolysis? Texas obviously didn't work out initially. What's next from a capacity standpoint? The Texas project was a very capital-intensive design because we were building everything new, right? Polymer line, new. methanolysis, new. All the infrastructure around it, new. That's led to why the capital cost was so high and also helped us when we got that DOE grant of $375 million to bring the number back down to sort of more targeted, rational range. When we lost that grant, it actually forced us to step back and say, "Well, is there a different way we can approach this to be a lot more capital efficient?" At the same time, you have so much stress in the commodity markets, including PET, a lot of assets being effectively abandoned. That creates the opportunity to leverage existing facilities and infrastructure and focus, really, the capital down to the methanolysis unit. We've been looking at multiple options of how to do that. I believe we have a couple different pathways. Yeah. We haven't finalized exactly what we're going to do, and so we're not going to talk about the details until we've got it all sorted out. There is a capital-efficient way to go forward. Could we hear about that in 2026, or? Yeah. Okay. We could not start any CapEx in 2026. No. A pathway- Right with more clarity and precision in 2026. Will that be only U.S., or could that be Europe as well? Do both. Okay. The issue, we're in a tough environment. We're going to be very disciplined about our capital allocation, and we're not going to be ramping CapEx up a lot till we feel like the economy is stable. Yeah. Which is certainly not the moment. Because we can develop the first plant, it buys us, let's say, two years of grace in how we want to sort of build out this facility and stretch its capacity, and then add on the next plant. That allows us to be capital efficient, allows us to be disciplined about the market demand, making sure it's building as strong as we believe it will. Therefore, higher confidence around a good return on investment for the second plant. My last question is, you've always been referred to value, PEG, what is Eastman Chemical? I think people either fall to lower valuations. They can't really figure out what you are and where you're going. How do you address those concerns and issues? You have Greg here as well. The age-old question, what is Eastman, and how do you value Eastman Chemical? Well, look, at the core of Eastman is, it is a specialty chemical company. It is not a commodity company. Yes, it has a little commodity tail on it, which actually stabilizes earnings and cash, and we can debate how it impacts the valuation. The reality is, Advanced Materials as a functional products business are the sort of the core of where all the capital goes and where the growth happens or where the acquisitions will occur, or whatever else. Circular economy is completely not valued in the current stock price. Right. Zero. Zero. Yes, I agree. We have a company that can't make any profit that has a $2 billion value. As a reference point, I'm feeling pretty good that we're worth a lot more than that on the circular economy, since we've got the largest asset in the world that's doing chemical recycling. It's up and running, it's up and running at high yields. The technology's totally proven. We have an established customer base with a serious amount of revenue now, who are paying premiums in the worst economic environment we could imagine. I think that platform has value. I think that what's being missed is the margin challenges, the earnings challenges are all volume driven. It's not about some sort of collapse in margins in the specialties. It's just asset utilization, because demand's low. You've got all this pent-up demand on the upside of the core business. You've got circular, not just on the polyester side, but on the cellulosic side. We got the Aventa products and things like that coming on food service. Obviously, we got to stabilize fibers and take that uncertainty off, because I think that's a bit of a hang-up. We're in an earnings known range now where it's going to start stabilizing. It's not stabilized yet. We're working on it. I think CI gets back to a more stable level. Call it $150 million-$200 million of EBIT on a normalized basis. You've got the E2P investment that adds $50 million-$150 million of earnings, depending on the market conditions on the ethylene propylene investment that'll be online in the summer of 2028. That further strengthens that, which is just great cash flow. Whether it stays in portfolio or not is debatable based on how we're growing the specialties. I think that people are missing about the quality of the portfolio and how well it's holding up in this context because so much of our demand is exposed to discretionary consumers. Right. That is the issue. We are going to have exposure Right to discretionary demand. Demand volatility on that side is real, but we're at the bottom of the market when it comes to consumer discretionary demand. There's never a better time to not get into the stock, because the incremental margins are at least 30%-40% Advanced Materials when that volume comes back, if not higher. Right. It really hurts on the way down. It's really good on the way back, not just on the earnings, but on the cash flow. Yeah. The margins on those products are high. AFP is really holding up well through this thing. You got a nice stable base there, you've got all the upside in AM. On that circular- I think they obsess too much on the tail risk. Right which is a very small part of the company. Do we get a circular segment at some point to highlight its value relative to the company you mentioned, your own circular segment? We've had that debate. With the first plant, that's not going to happen because it's so integrated into making all the specialties. As you scale up to a second and third plant that's more standalone, if we perceive value to making sure that's called out as a separate segment, we'll do that. That's a problem for a different year. Right. Well, our time's up. Mark, Greg, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all.