Mark Douglas: Yes. Thanks, Vincent. Well, listen, for pricing in the first half of the year, I mean, pretty much most of it, as I said, is already underway. The U.S. and Canada markets are active now, Europe is getting active right now. So those price increases are through. I think what you’re referring to is probably in the fourth quarter as we roll into the Latin American market, where we will be. It’s a valid question to ask. We don’t know. We are planning price increases. At the end of the day, as Andrew just alluded to, input costs are still higher than they were last year. They are still increasing. They’re just increasing at a much lower amount. Plus the fact that we’re seeing significant labor cost inflation around the world, not only for SG&A, but within our manufacturing plants, et cetera.
So for me, there is a cost environment that is still conducive to price increases. In Europe, you have high energy costs. Yes, they’ve come down off their peaks, but they’re still meaningfully different to the average over the last few years. So we will continue to move price where we see fit. And of course, it’s not a standard number around the world. We’ve talked about this before. It’s different in different markets with different products. We continue to use that differentiation to move price. I think most of the value chains that we operate in really do see that inflationary environment. It’s like any negotiation, they’re always difficult. They’re never easy. But overall, we are getting the price that we need to get to move us back to the EBITDA margins we want.
You’re right on the nonselective herbicides. You can look at all the metrics, you see them coming down. They went up very quickly. They come down very quickly. They truly are commoditized. We’re not seeing that sort of curve for the more specialty products where you’re really selling value not just on a cost basis through a contract. And that’s a key differentiator for us. We don’t have those nonselective herbicides. We don’t operate in that type of environment.
Vincent Andrews: Okay. And just as a follow-up, Mark, did I hear you say — I believe last quarter, you thought the market overall would grow low to mid-single digits. I believe now you’re thinking low single digits for this year. Is that just a function of last year for the market coming in better than you thought. So just a harder compare? Or is there anything at all different about sort of what you expect for this year globally?
Mark Douglas: Yes. I think overall, when I look at the market, we are — we do have a lower view of the overall market. But frankly, it’s driven by Latin America. I mean we still expect North America to have a reasonable growth despite how strong it was in the past year. There is very good sentiment in the North American market right now for the coming year. Europe, we expect to be up. We do see increase in cereal acres, which will be positive. So we see Europe up. Asia will be slightly flat. There has been some weather issues in India, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, offset by a good market in Australia. I would say the reason we’re going lower in the world today is because of Latin America. There are independent numbers that suggest the Latin American market may have grown $6 billion in 2022.
Now the vast majority of that is with nonselective herbicides, mainly price and then pricing for other active ingredients. So I do think that people need to watch that nonselective herbicide market in Brazil and Argentina. That’s the reason we’re calling for a lower overall market, but it really is focused in that particular segment, which is so large, it does impact the rest. The rest of it is probably close to where we said it would be in November.
