Huntsman's Last Solo Act: A CEO Who Won't Answer for the Company He's About to Stop Running
Peter Huntsman spent his final standalone call routing every strategic question to a board that doesn't exist yet — while Advanced Materials quietly became the only thing still growing.
HUN · Earnings Call · 2026-11-03
A farewell, not a forecast
There is a particular texture to an earnings call where the CEO has already mentally left the building. Huntsman's third-quarter call has it in abundance. Frank Mitsch of Fermium Research opened the Q&A not with a question but with a eulogy, thanking Peter Huntsman for the historical factoids and noting “if this happens to be the last Huntsman conference call, which very well may be depending on when you close the transaction” — Frank Mitsch, Analyst · 2026-11-03 — a fair read, given the merger of equals with Olin is expected to close early next year. (The IR script even welcomes listeners to the "Third Quarter 2020" call while the release is dated 11/02/2026. Nobody corrected it. That is how much attention this quarter is getting.)
The tell comes later, when Josh Spector asks where divestitures sit on the priority stack for the combined Olin Huntsman entity. Peter's answer is that a new board will handle it — and then:
But for me to comment further on that, as a shareholder of Huntsman, not Olin Huntsman, I think would be misplaced.
That is a lame-duck CEO speaking, and it is the single most informative sentence on the call. This was not a quarter of guidance; it was a handover. The strategic answers — portfolio pruning, deleveraging, which assets fit — were explicitly deferred, and had already been deferred once before, in July, when Peter said portfolio management “is going to be a decision that would be made by the new CEO of Olin Huntsman, Ken Lane.” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO, and President · 2026-07-31
The one number that actually matters
Buried under the geopolitical monologue is a genuinely good operational fact: Huntsman will deliver better than $100 million of EBITDA improvement in 2026 versus 2025, in a year when North American housing starts fell by roughly 100,000 annualized. Peter hammered this repeatedly — that the company made more money on fewer homes. The filed numbers corroborate the direction: revenue of $1.7B in the June quarter, up 14% year over year and gross margin back to 14.7%, up 2.2 points. That is the price discipline Peter keeps invoking: seven price increases led this year, some successful, some not.
The problem is what comes next. When Hassan Ahmed asked what standalone 2027 EBITDA improvement looks like from the cost programs, the answer was essentially: we'll budget it in the coming months. The forward-looking specificity on this call is close to zero. What exists instead is bravado — “I would just be absolutely shocked if we are at the end of 2027 and we are not looking back at materially better year than we did in 2026.” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 Shocked. Not guided.
Advanced Materials is carrying the entire story
If there is one theme that is genuinely new in emphasis rather than in kind, it is Advanced Materials. It topped the company's keyword table this quarter, and for good reason: 12% volume growth, spread across all three regions, driven by aerospace and the power grid build-out. Peter's framing of the moat is the most persuasive thing he said all morning — qualification cycles of “5 to 6, 7 years in some applications” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 for anyone trying to displace Huntsman on a widebody. He expects GDP-plus growth through 2027.
And then, within thirty seconds, he undercut his own pricing case: “We have got plenty of capacity. And if anybody out there wants any more product, we are willing to sell it to them.” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 Growth without scarcity is volume, not margin.
The contrast with spray foam is stark. Spray foam was the company's third-ranked theme last quarter, with management touting low-double-digit growth and share gains in a lethargic construction market. This quarter, asked directly, the answer collapsed to “we are still up low single digit numbers from the prior year” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 — and the note that pushing 10% growth is off the table until housing turns. The keyword did not disappear; it deflated in place.
Europe: from fix-it problem to exit venue
Peter has been savaging European energy policy for years — it appears in his keyword history from 2025Q1 through this quarter, and he has previously told Ursula von der Leyen to restart nuclear and start fracking. So the rhetoric is not news. What is news is the verb tense. In July he was still describing Europe as a place to "calibrate the business around the market needs." Now the language is “where we are struggling in Europe, we will have greater leverage to source raw materials and access to markets” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 — sourcing leverage, not operational recovery. The energy prices math he cites ($34–35 per MMBtu against sub-$2 on the Houston Ship Channel, a 20x gap) is not presented as a cyclical problem.
What went unsaid — and what the tape is saying
The dividend did not come up. A year ago Huntsman cut it 65%, with Phil Lister framing the $60 million annual cash requirement as comfortably coverable. Now, asked about cash, Lister simply offers “Free cash flow was an inflow in the third quarter of $82 million” — Philip Lister ACMA, Executive Vice President and CFO · 2026-11-03 and confidence that the dividend is covered for the full year. Note the tension with the last filed data, which covers the June quarter: free cash flow of -$97M. The burden of proof now sits on a Q4 that has not yet happened.
What also went unsaid is any defense of the balance sheet beyond the merger. Effective net cash sits at -$2.1B, and the payoff is deferred to $300 million of synergies plus $100 million as chlorine contracts expire — the largest of which runs to end-2030, as Lister confirmed in July.
The market has rendered its verdict. Huntsman's stock is down 12.8% over the last 90 trading days and 27.8% off its July peak, having never recovered from a 76.8% drawdown from its February 2022 high. At 0.3x revenue, investors are paying nothing for the "1 and 1 makes 3" arithmetic Peter has been pitching for two quarters. On this call, when asked whether he was surprised peer boards keep adding MDI capacity, his answer was disarmingly honest: “I have not the foggiest idea of what goes on in boardrooms” — Peter R. Huntsman, Chairman, CEO and President · 2026-11-03 — words that could equally describe how the market currently feels about the Olin Huntsman boardroom. The deal may well work. But the last standalone Huntsman call was a company explaining why it needs to stop being Huntsman, and not quite convincing anyone yet.