American Vanguard Corporation (NYSE:AVD) Q1 2023 Results Conference Call May 9, 2023 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Bill Kuser - Director of IR & Corporate Communications

Eric Wintemute - Chairman & CEO

Scott Hendrix - SVP of Crop Sales for U.S. & Canada

David Johnson - VP, CFO & Treasurer

James Thompson - Director of Business Development

Ulrich Trogele - COO & Executive VP

Conference Call Participants

Chris Kapsch - Loop Capital

Gerry Sweeney - ROTH Capital

Wayne Pinsent - Gabelli

Operator

Welcome to the American Vanguard Corporation First Quarter 2023 Financial Results.

I will now turn the call over to Bill Kuser, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Bill Kuser

Thank you, Misty, and welcome, everyone, to American Vanguard's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Review. Our speakers today will be Mr. Eric Wintemute, the Chairman and CEO of American Vanguard; Mr. David Johnson, the company's Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Scott Hendrix, Senior Vice President in charge of the U.S. and Canadian crop sales and our application technology initiatives; Mr. Jim Thompson, Director of Portfolio Strategy and Business Development, the one who is guiding our Green Solutions Initiative. Also available to assist in answering your questions, Mr. Robert Trogele, the company's Chief Operating Officer.

Before beginning, let's take a moment for our usual cautionary reminder. In today's call, the company may discuss forward-looking information. Such information and statements are based on estimates and assumptions by the company's management and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from management's current expectations. Such factors can include weather conditions, changes in regulatory policy, competitive pressures, supply chain disruptions and other types of risks as detailed in the company's SEC reports and filings. All forward-looking statements represent the company's best judgment as of the date of this call, and such information will not necessarily be updated by the company.

With that said, we turn the call over to Eric.

Eric Wintemute

Thank you, Bill. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, just a quick slide, we're traded on the New York Stock Exchange as American Vanguard founded in '69. We've got about 800 employees. We're fully integrated ag company. We do basic R&D as well. And our business model has largely been to acquire branded products from the majors. We have 2 growth initiatives on top of that, that we'll be talking about in a moment.