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'You can run but you can't hide,' Cleveland-Cliffs CEO tells analyst

19th October 2018

By: Bloomberg

  

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Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves isn’t a fan of the Goldman Sachs Group analyst who covers his company.

As shares of the largest US iron-ore producer fell as much as 10% Friday, Goncalves closed his analyst call by specifically calling out Goldman’s Matthew Korn. The CEO questioned Korn for saying in a report Friday that the company "modestly missed estimates.”

“Matthew Korn from Goldman Sachs, you can run, but you can’t hide,” he said. “I will see you at the Goldman Sachs conference, very soon. And bring your commodity desk guy, because you owe me that for last year.”

It was the end of a call in which Goncalves raged against analysts that he said don’t understand his company and short-sellers who are betting against it. The CEO’s statements come after Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk pledged to ”burn” short-sellers in an analyst call in May.

His statement prompted comparisons to Musk, and an analyst on the call asked if he would consider opening a Twitter account like the Tesla CEO did. In an interview later, Goncalves demurred.

“Of course not,” Goncalves said in a telephone interview. “Look, this is a real company here. We make money. We don’t need publicity. We will continue to generate profits over and over and over again. Our profits are real, and all the publicity I get is well deserved and supported by real results. That’s us."

MAXIMUM PAIN
Cliffs shares plunged to $10.32, the lowest in more than a month, before the start of the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts. Prices pared losses to $10.77 after Goncalves used the company’s call to announce he will “buy the stock back with two hands,” if prices continue to fall.

Buying back shares “will all be done to inflict maximum pain to this guy,” Goncalves said of his company’s naysayers. “I wake up in the morning every day, looking at this guy and then go to bed at night every day thinking about this guy. And that’s a bad place to be. That’s the message that I would like to deliver in this call.”

Even with Friday’s decline, the Cleveland-based iron-ore producer has climbed 48% this year. Goncalves, 60, has been CEO since August 2014.

Goncalves said in the interview he was “very mad” because Korn had used Cliffs’ 64c in diluted income per share from continuing operations, instead of the 67c  in basic income per share, when he said in his report Friday that the iron-ore producer ‘‘modestly missed estimates".

“The Goldman Sachs guy should know better,” Goncalves said. “The reason why the number of our shares diluted increased is because our stock price appreciated so much that the right way to account for the convertible is the way we did. So its just a calculation. We did not issue stock, we did not dilute the shareholders, we did not do anything. It’s just an accounting thing -- an accounting thing that a research analyst must know.”

Leslie Shribman, a spokeswoman for New York-based Goldman Sachs, declined to comment. Korn didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Edited by Bloomberg

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