American Vanguard Corporation (NYSE:AVD) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 6, 2023 9:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Eric Wintemute - Chairman and CEO
Conference Call Participants
Gerry Sweeney - ROTH Capital
Chris Kapsch - Loop Capital Markets
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the American Vanguard Business Update Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Chairman and CEO, Eric Wintemute. Please go ahead, sir.
Eric Wintemute
Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining this call.
Let me start by putting a point on what we had outlined in the press release that we issued on Friday. We expect our full year 2022 financial performance will exceed that of 2021 in all material respects. Furthermore, we expect to achieve significant growth and profitability in 2023 over 2022, and we will be giving you specific performance targets for the '23 year in about six weeks on our March earnings call.
In the fourth quarter, we were forced to delay roughly $15 million of high margin sales due to a supply chain disruption. Now that we have fixed this supply disruption, we expect to largely recoup the sales that we lost in Q4, such that they will shift forward and benefit 2023 performance. With a strong balance sheet and favorable market conditions, we believe we are poised to enjoy strong growth in all metrics for this coming year.
I'll show you -- here is the safe harbor. Okay. So on Slide 3, the global supply chain has been an unsettled state for the past three years due to the pandemic and shifting buying practices. At one time or another, we have witnessed shortages in containers, ships, warehouses and trucks used to transport many goods across multiple sectors. Within our industry, these factors have interrupted production of raw materials and intermediates particularly those sourced in Asia. In spite of these conditions, our supply chain team had succeeded in sourcing virtually all raws, intermediates and packaging without interruption over the past three years of the pandemic.
I am proud of the work that we have done as this has required near constant attention and preplanning. However, in the fall of '22, our domestic supplier of a key intermediate that is used to produce Aztec our leading corn soil insecticide was unable to start production due to capacity constraints. This persisted for several months.