Clean Harbors’ Safety-Kleen segment and Heritage-Crystal Clean’s oil business segment both reported higher revenues for the first quarter, compared to 2019’s first quarter. Both companies noted that although the Covid-19 pandemic’s economic impacts were limited in the first quarter, impacts started to worsen at the quarter’s end.
Clean Harbors
Norwell, Massachusetts-based Clean Harbors’ Safety-Kleen segment – which includes oil rerefining – reported $330.4 million in third party revenues for the quarter ending March 31, up almost 8 percent from $306.5 million in the year-earlier period. Third-party revenues include the sales of base oil, blended products, reclaimed fuel oil and a small amount of other products.
“Waste oil collection was stable at 55 million gallons, and we gradually increased our charge-for-oil rates during the quarter,” Clean Harbors Chairman, President and CEO Alan McKim said in the company’s earnings news release. “Within Safety-Kleen Oil, we generated greater production volumes, and our transportation costs improved from a year ago, when flooding and frozen rivers disrupted barge traffic.”
McKim said that although the impact of Covid-19 on its first quarter results was limited, it progressively worsened toward the quarter’s end as shelter-in-place orders took hold in the United States and Canada.
Heritage-Crystal Clean
Heritage-Crystal Clean’s oil business segment reported $29.8 million in revenues for the quarter ending March 21, up nearly 2 percent from $29.3 million in the year-earlier period. The segment includes used oil collection activities, sales of recycled fuel oil and rerefining activities. The Elgin, Illinois-based company attributed the slight increase in revenue mainly to an increase in its selling price for base oil, partially offset by a decrease in the volume of base oil sold.
HCC cautioned that its fiscal first quarter financial results don’t fully reflect the adverse impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on its business, because it first experienced the impact of the Covid-19 economic slowdown at the end of its first fiscal quarter in late March. The company noted that as a result of the outbreak, some of its customers have temporarily closed their businesses, limited HCC’s access to their businesses or have a decreased demand for the company’s products and services due to a slowdown in the demand for their own products or services.
“We believe that we will experience a material decrease in activity on both our environmental services and our oil business segments during the second quarter of our fiscal 2020, but cannot determine the full extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic will impact our business and operating results at this time,” the company noted.