American Vanguard Announces Preliminary Unaudited Full Year 2022 Financial Highlights

American Vanguard Corporation (NYSE: AVD), today announced certain key preliminary and unaudited financial results for the full year ended December 31, 2022.

Eric Wintemute, Chairman and CEO of American Vanguard commented, “The growth trajectory that we had enjoyed for the first three quarters of 2022 was moderated by a shortfall in Q4 performance. The primary reason was a temporary supply chain shortage of one key raw material for our largest corn soil insecticide, Aztec, resulting in consolidated net sales that were equal to those of Q4 2021. Having secured a supply of that raw material and in light of strong seasonal demand, the Company expects that the sales and gross profit from Aztec that we had anticipated in Q4 will shift forward into the first half of 2023. That said, we expect our full-year 2022 adjusted EBITDA¹ to be between $73 - $75 million as compared to $80 million as previously announced, which will nevertheless amount to a 15-18% increase over the adjusted EBITDA recorded in 2021. Furthermore, based upon preliminary unaudited financial data, our full year performance for 2022 will exceed that of 2021 in all material respects.”

Mr. Wintemute continued, “As you may recall in our last earnings call, I mentioned that raw materials originating in countries impacted by pandemic restrictions were affecting the availability and price of key intermediate products. After having successfully managed through global supply chain disruption since the start of the pandemic, in Q4 we were unable to source a critical intermediate ingredient for Aztec from either our domestic or foreign source. Due to capacity constraints, our domestic supplier was not able to commence production mid-year (as planned) and was subsequently delayed for several months. Accordingly, we had positioned one of our China-based suppliers to meet our requirements; however, that supplier was serially affected by a COVID lockdown followed by a widespread wave of infection. Thus, we lost the anticipated sales and gross profit from Aztec during the fourth quarter. By contrast, we had sold a significant volume of that high-margin product in the same period of 2021.”