← Business Metric: Financial (all topics)
EBITDA per tonne
What it is
Operating profit divided by tonnes sold - the standard disclosure for commodity processors, since revenue per tonne moves with pass-through inputs and reveals nothing about performance
It strips out feedstock price movement to show the actual conversion margin
Impact on industries
- The honest measure in any pass-through business - it separates operating performance from commodity price direction
- Comparable across periods and competitors in a way revenue and margin percentages are not, since both are distorted by input prices
- Still affected by product mix, so a shift toward specialty grades raises it without any efficiency gain
- Applies equally to carbon black, cement, steel and chemicals - wherever a tonne is the unit of production and price is passed through