FMC Corporation (NYSE:FMC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

If I run around the rest of the world, Europe, South of Europe is high again because of hangover from the last season. Northern Europe is pretty much okay, I think. In Asia, we’ve talked about India in the past. The weather didn’t help again in 2022. So we see high channel inventories in India, which we’ll be working through. Parts of Indonesia are similar, somewhat high. Rest of Asia is good. So overall, it’s pretty much what you would expect. And don’t forget, people are focused on what happened in Brazil in terms of growth. The vast majority of the growth in Brazil was price, it wasn’t volume and that’s important to recognize. So I think out of the weather patterns that we saw in the South and in Argentina, I think other parts of the country are fine.

Kevin McCarthy: That’s helpful. And as a second question, if I may, you’ve owned BioPhero for roughly 6 months now and so I was wondering if you could provide an update on what you’ve seen so far. I think when you bought it, you talked about potentially launching 5 new pheromone over the next 3 to 5 years with an eye toward $1 billion of sales by 2030. Maybe you could just provide an update as to how that aspect of the biologicals pipeline is going here?

Mark Douglas: Yes. Thank you. Great question. We’re very happy with the acquisition we made. In fact, I would say, when I think of the key metrics that we’re looking at when we acquired the product, we had 5 new pheromones in the R&D pipeline. Today, that number is 9. So the accelerated rate of discovery and application of new pheromones is growing. We have made our first batches of products and move them into the marketplace. So that was a major milestone. The company that we acquired, BioPhero had not — I was just at the very beginning of making commercial scale quantities. We’ve now got past that. We are looking to invest in our own manufacturing. We do use some toll manufacturers today, but we’re looking at balancing that out across the world.

And I would say the trial work, we have substantial trial work around the world on the pheromones that we already have in place. And those trial works are going very well. So from my perspective, the integration has gone very well. But more importantly, I see an accelerated rate of discovery and development coming out of that pipeline, which is very encouraging.

Operator: The next question comes from Richard Garchitorena with Wells Fargo.

Richard Garchitorena: First question on CapEx. It looks like for ’23, a bit of a step up $140 million to $180 million versus 2022. Can you talk about where you’re going to be adding capacity. What new products plan to increase? And where your operating rates are currently?

Mark Douglas: Andrew, why don’t you talk about the overall CapEx.

Andrew Sandifer : Yes. So we spent about just under $120 million in CapEx in 2022. We’re stepping up at the midpoint to about $160 million. So about a good-sized increment in CapEx. A lot of that additional CapEx is to support manufacturing capacity for our new active ingredients. So we’re expanding production of Isoflex which is our serial we introduced in Australia several a couple of years ago and are rolling out now more broadly around the world. We’re expanding capacity for Fluindapyr, the fungicide that we’ve introduced in a couple of key countries and starts becoming much more material as we get into the next several years. That CapEx, I think, building on comments earlier, that CapEx is largely directed in places outside of China.