Westlake Corporation (WLK) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Westlake Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, you will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded today, February 24th, 2026. I would now like to turn the call over to today's host, Jeff Hawley, Westlake's Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Sir, you may begin. Thank you, Amber. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Westlake Corporation conference call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year results for 2025. I'm joined today by Albert Chao, our Executive Chairman, Jean-Marc Gilson, our President and CEO, Steve Bender, our executive vice president and chief financial officer, and other members of our management team. During the call, we will refer to our two reporting segments, housing and infrastructure products, which we refer to as HIP or products, and performance and essential materials, which we refer to as PEM or materials. Today's conference call will begin with John Mark, who will open with a few comments regarding Westlake's performance. Steve will then discuss our financial and operating results, after which John Mark will add a few concluding comments, and we'll open the call up to questions. During the fourth quarter of 2025, we wrote off inventory and accrued expenses totaling $495 million related to the decision to shut one styrene and three core vinyl facilities in North America and our epoxy facility in Pernis, Netherlands, in Pembe. We also recognized 16 million of accrued expenses within our HIP footprint optimization actions and the ...