Westlake Corporation (WLK) Presents at JPMorgan Industrials Conference 2026 Transcript

Jeffrey Zekauskas
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division

Hi. Good afternoon. I’m Jeff Zekauskas. It’s my pleasure to introduce the management of Westlake. And representing Westlake is Steve Bender, who’s the Chief Financial Officer. And I must say it’s my honor to introduce Steve. He’s been the CFO of Westlake since 2008. So he’s done it for 17 years. And he and Albert Chao really built a remarkable business. Steve is retiring. And what they did is they built a polyethylene business from the ground up by building assets and they built an integrated, PVC business that’s low cost.

And periodically, what they would do is make large accretive acquisitions. They bought Axiall, which was a PVC company in the old days, and they bought Boral in order to build a building products company. And it really was a remarkable value-creating run that these 2 men have had. Albert is now the Chairman and no longer the CEO. So it’s my pleasure to welcome Steve, and we’ll have a fireside chat format. Steve, would you like to make opening remarks?

M. Bender
Executive VP & CFO

No. Jeff, thank you very much for those kind words. But I would say that we’ve grown the business in a variety of different ways, as Jeff outlined, and really have extended what we call an integrated production chain, obviously, starting on the chemical side of the business, but moving downstream over the course of time. And our starting point when downstream was making pipe and fittings and have grown that, as you noted, in 2011 — excuse me, 2021 to include non-chemical-related building products, all kinds of roofing materials, all kind of windows, all