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

John Fortson: You’re thinking about it the right way, John. I mean, look, if you — I mean you can kind of reverse do the math, right? I mean, you make some growth assumptions on Ed’s business Performance Materials. We talked about margins in the mid-40s, which is kind of where they finished last year, right? So, you got a back end of what that looks like for the PC side of things, right? We talked about Engineered Polymers improving their margins on continued growth, right? I think that growth will come down a little bit from last year because it was pretty explosive, but well above sort of GDP or market growth we talked about the tailwinds that we expect to have and payment, what you’re left with is Industrial Specialties margins, which we think will come under some pressure potentially because of the CTO.

So, you know us, we’re pretty conservative. We’re trying to factor in what we think could be that inflation. But I will say, John, I mean, look, if you look at it over the long haul, we’ve always maintained that we want to be a specialty chemical business in that. And % we may suffer a little bit next year; our plan is to get those margins back into the top quartile area as we sort of move through these different markets and make some of these adjustments.

Operator: The next question comes from Vincent Anderson from Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is now open. John Fortson – CEO If we missed it, John, we’ll come back. Go ahead, Vincent. Sorry.

Vincent Anderson: No worries. So, you hinted at this already. So, as I think about the scenarios for CTO availability over the next few years, we’ve talked a lot about alternative fatty acid feedstock, but we really haven’t talked about rosin and what it might take for you to maintain your market position there if you were to switch more capacity away from CTO. So just is it feasible for you to process crude gum rosin, for instance, out of Brazil to backfill some of your quarter derivatives. And I want to focus on crude because one of the distinguishing characteristics of your more adhesive focused competitor traditionally has been their turpin chemistry. So, is there some additional opportunity by finding a way process crude gum?

John Fortson: Well, it’s interesting, John, you’re being pretty thoughtful. To answer your question — Vincent, sorry. To answer your question, Vincent, I mean, yes, we have the ability to use other types of rosins, and we are locating those other types of rosins. I’m not nearly going to go to which ones we are focusing on at this point, but our intention is to continue to be competitive. As you know, and what’s kind of interesting we talked about this. I mean — some of our fatty acids are not — that we’re looking at are not going to generate the same levels of rosin, right, that you typically get from crude tall oil, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing because it allows us to look at other rosin that could be used in the marketplace as substitutes, right? And we feel better about it just because the price of TOFA is so high, right? It gives us the we’re not a bad spot economically to try and look at some of these different markets, if that makes sense.

Vincent Anderson: Sure. No, that checks up. And then it sounds like a good portion of your high-value product destocking that you noted it sounds like it was mostly in the rising value chain, maybe a little bit in pavement there. where you did see destocking in TOFA derivatives and maybe your outlook for oilfield in general as natural gas prices have rolled over. Can you walk us through at a high level what the mix impact will look like today given current commodity TOFA prices are so high? And I assume, given the timing of the destocking late in the quarter, were you even able to move any of that lost demand into the spot markets?