By Rob Curran

Westlake posted a drop in third-quarter earnings as plant outages and a weakening U.S. home-building market weighed on chemicals and building-materials sales.

The Houston maker of chemicals and specialty materials such as polyethylene and residential siding, logged a third-quarter net profit of $108 million, or 83 cents a share, down from $285 million, or $2.20 a share, a year earlier.

Sales inched up 0.1% to $3.12 billion, shy of the average Wall Street target of $3.3 billion, as per FactSet.

Revenue at the performance and essential materials unit was $2 billion, more or less in line with a year earlier.

Revenue at the housing and infrastructure unit fell to $1.1 billion, reflecting a slowdown in U.S. residential construction markets and weather disruptions, the company said.

"During the third quarter, global macroeconomic trends modestly improved with relatively solid and improving conditions in North America, a continuing recovery in Asia, and slow improvement in Europe," said President and Chief Executive Jean-Marc Gilson, in a statement. Third-quarter results did not fully reflect these strengthening markets because of extended maintenance outages at two plants in the performance and essential materials unit, the executive said. Those plants are now up and running again.

"The pace of the recovery from the recent trough in global industrial and manufacturing activity remains uneven," the executive said.

Separately, Westlake accrued $75 million of expenses at the performance and essential materials unit related to mothballing certain European epoxy operations.

Write to Rob Curran at rob.curran@dowjones.com

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November 05, 2024 07:33 ET (12:33 GMT)

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