Ingevity Corporation (NYSE:NGVT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Fortson: Well, I mean, it’s really, in my mind, predominantly a cost issue, right? I mean there are obviously revenue changes that will occur. First off, I would say, Look, we’ve known this was coming for a long time, right? What makes us in a good, unique position is that we do have long-term contracts that allow us to ensure a certain amount of supply of CTO to run our facilities, right? So — but we do buy some on the third-party market, and it is inflating and those prices are going up, and that will continue next year, there’s no doubt, right? But what we want to be able to do is we’re trying to articulate in our prepared comments is we want to be able to offer our customers either a CTO-based product or an alternative from another fatty acid, right?

We might even look at historically, some of the volatility, as you guys know, follow us have really been on the rosin side of things. And frankly, if we found ourselves in a position where we need to provide RASM alternatives we would. But where oil prices are and where we think it will go, it will provide some relief for us from the rosin side. And on the fatty acid side, what’s going to be different, we’re pretty excited about the opportunities, right? We talked about the biofuels market. That is a very, very, very large market for fatty acid and not just not just all oil fatty acid, but we think we’re going to be able to offer our end market customers kind of a suite of different alternatives. And in theory, we should be able to hold the revenue, if not grow it, as we enter this new market of biofuels, right?

So that’s our strategy.

Operator: And the next question comes from Jon Tanwanteng from CJS Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Tanwanteng: Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Just a quick question on the destocking trends. Have you seen that reverse already? Or is that something that’s expected to be on the come or maybe reverse in Q2? Just an indication of where trends are heading there? And specifically, on what end markets, I think you mentioned adhesive. I don’t know if there’s any going on in catheter anywhere else, but just across the entire portfolio, if you could do that.

Richard White: John, this is Rich. And as John Fortson mentioned, we saw January a bit soft, but February is starting to pick up a bit. And we expect as we go through Q1 that we’ll see that trend continue. And normally, the season is higher for us overall in Q2 and Q3 as compared to Q1 and Q4. So that’s what we’re expecting going forward. And that was mainly in the Industrial Specialty segment, not so much in our engineered polymers or any of our other segments.

Jonathan Tanwanteng: Okay. Great. Thank you. And then you mentioned repricing your annual repricing in the carbon business. But obviously, you ran into difficulties last year when the prices ran up on you. Has there been any change in the pricing formulas or contracts that you have that enables you to adjust a little bit more in real time as you go through the year, if that does happen again? Or are you just resetting to the point where you think you’ve adjusted for those if they happen again?

Ed Woodcock: Yes, John, this is Ed. Yes, we pushed through pricing effective January 1. And we’re trying to recoup energy costs as well as raw material increases. And if we’re unable to do that, then we will consider additional price increases as we move through the year.

Jonathan Tanwanteng: Okay. Great. And then last one for me. Just the implication for the margins in the Chemicals business, if you’re expecting materials to be a little bit better year-over-year revenue to be growing, but EBITDA to be roughly flattish. I would assume that the margin is going down in that segment. Is that simply a function of the top line increasing and the margin comes down mathematically? Or are you actually expecting a margin decline on a per…