Eastman Chemical posts 24% growth in sales in 2021

Eastman Chemical Company posts 24% growth in sales to $10.5 billion in 2021. The strong topline growth was due to 15 percent higher selling prices and 8 percent higher sales volume/mix.

Higher selling prices were due to significantly higher raw material, energy, and distribution prices, and strong end-market demand as the global economy recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher sales volume/mix was due to innovation and market development and strong end-market demand. The company’s profit also surged 77 percent to $867 million.

“Eastman made tremendous progress in 2021, delivering record sales revenue and adjusted EPS for the year. We are continuing to leverage our innovation-driven growth model to grow faster than our end markets. We also made outstanding progress advancing our leadership in the circular economy, including plans to build multiple world-scale material-to-material molecular recycling facilities,” said Mark Costa, Board Chair and CEO.

“We also remain focused on driving strong cash flow going forward and on continued disciplined allocation of cash. We are very excited about delivering continued success in 2022 and in the coming years.”

Commenting on the outlook for full-year 2022, Costa said: “We enter 2022 having delivered record full-year 2021 sales revenue and adjusted EPS reflecting the strength of our innovation-driven growth model. Our specialty product lines are growing faster than our end markets, as we generated approximately $600 million of new business revenue last year, which will drive significant growth in 2022. In addition, we continued to make progress improving our portfolio. We achieved these results despite a number of headwinds, including the continued impact of COVID-19, unprecedented logistics and supply chain challenges, and inflation, including higher raw material and energy costs.

“As we look forward, we expect market demand to remain strong and continue growing faster than our end markets due to our innovation and market development initiatives. The pricing actions that we took in the second half of last year are expected to deliver a strong spread tailwind in the specialty businesses. We also expect to benefit from a substantially lower cost structure as we continue to implement our operations transformation program and have substantially lower manufacturing maintenance costs. Our strong cash generation and the proceeds from the divestitures are expected to enable increased organic growth investment and higher share repurchases. These strong tailwinds are expected to more than offset the approximately $100 million EBIT impact from the divested businesses and normalization of margins in Chemical Intermediates. Building on our strong results in 2021, we expect 2022 revenue to be higher than 2021 and for adjusted EPS to be between $9.50 and $10. We also expect operating cash flow to be greater than $1.6 billion.”

The full-year 2022 projected earnings exclude any non-core, unusual, or nonrecurring items. Our financial results forecasts do not include non-core items (such as mark-to-market pension and other postretirement benefit gain or loss and asset impairments and restructuring charges) or any unusual or non-recurring items, and we accordingly are unable to reconcile projected earnings excluding non-core and any unusual or non-recurring items to reported GAAP earnings without unreasonable efforts.

The company confirms expected 8-12 percent adjusted EPS growth for 2022, building on strong growth in 2021.