LXU Company Profile

The Company was formed in 1968 as an Oklahoma corporation and became a Delaware corporation in 1977. We are a manufacturer and distributor of nitrogen fertilizer and other nitrogen products principally in North America. Our principal customers are cooperatives, independent fertilizer distributors, farmers and industrial users. Our principal nitrogen products are:

ammonia, fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate (“AN” and “HDAN”), urea ammonia nitrate (“UAN”), and AN solution for agricultural applications,

high purity and commercial grade ammonia, high purity AN, sulfuric acids, concentrated, blended and regular nitric acid, mixed nitrating acids, carbon dioxide, and diesel exhaust fluid for industrial applications, and

industrial grade AN (“LDAN”) and 83% AN solution (“AN solution”) for the mining industry.
We manufacture and distribute our products in four facilities: three owned facilities located in El Dorado, Arkansas (the “El Dorado Facility”), Cherokee, Alabama (the “Cherokee Facility”), and Pryor, Oklahoma (the “Pryor Facility”), and one facility we operate on behalf of Covestro AG (“Covestro”) in Baytown, Texas (the “Baytown Facility”).

We pursue a strategy of balancing the sale of product as fertilizer into the agriculture markets at spot prices and developing industrial and mining customers that purchase substantial quantities of products, primarily under contractual obligations and/or pricing arrangements that provide for the pass through of raw material and other manufacturing costs. We believe that this product and market diversification strategy allows us to have consistent levels of production and helps mitigate the volatility risk inherent in the prices of our raw material feedstocks and/or the changes in demand for our products.

The strategy of developing industrial and mining customers is to moderate the risk inherent in the agricultural markets where spot sales prices of our agricultural products may not have a correlation to the natural gas feedstock costs but rather reflect market conditions for like and competing nitrogen sources. This volatility of sales pricing in our agricultural products can compromise our ability to recover our full cost to produce the product in this market. Additionally, the lack of sufficient non-seasonal agricultural sales volume to operate our manufacturing facilities at optimum levels can preclude us from balancing production and storage capabilities. Looking forward, we are pursuing profitable growth. Our strategy calls for continued emphasis on the agricultural sector, while remaining committed to further developing industrial customers who assume the volatility risk associated with the raw material costs and mitigate the effects of seasonality in the agricultural sector.

Our strategy also includes evaluating investment in expansion projects, along with reliability and efficiency improvement projects, that we believe will generate the best returns for our stockholders taking into consideration the risk and return on investment. This strategy motivated our decision to build the ammonia plant at the El Dorado Facility and to construct a new nitric acid plant and concentrator at the El Dorado Facility. All three projects have been completed. We believe that we will benefit from these projects through reduced feedstock costs, expanded capacity, improved efficiency and enhanced product mix flexibility.