Westlake CEO provides outlook

Westlake (WLK) CEO Jean-Marc Gilson provided the following outlook: “Our focus for the remainder of 2025 will be on running our plants well and reducing our controllable costs. Higher planned turnarounds and some unplanned outages within our PEM segment impacted our EBITDA and cash flow below their potential in the first half of 2025. After taking steps to address the operational disruptions, our chlorovinyls production is returning to normal rates during the third quarter. Turning to our cost-reduction efforts, in the first half of 2025 we eliminated over $75M of company-wide costs towards our 2025 cost savings target of $150M-$175M. While we are pleased with progress to date, in light of continued soft global demand and profitability in some of our businesses, we are expanding the scope and nature of these cost-reduction efforts to target an additional $200 million of cost reductions by 2026. Additionally, during the Q2 we announced the planned closure of Pernis to put our global Epoxy business on a path to profitability. We expect this action, along with our broader cost-reduction efforts, to significantly improve our profitability in 2026,”