American Vanguard Corporation (NYSE:AVD) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call May 9, 2024 4:15 PM ET

Company Participants

Anthony Young - Director of IR
Eric Wintemute - Chairman and CEO
David Johnson - CFO
Bob Trogele - COO
Tim Donnelly - Chief Information Officer
Don Gualdoni - Chief Transformation Officer

Conference Call Participants

Scott Fortune - ROTH MKM
Chris Kapsch - Loop Capital Markets

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the American Vanguard First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Anthony Young, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Anthony Young

Thank you, Jessie, and welcome, everyone, to American Vanguard's first quarter 2024 earnings review. Our speakers today will be our Chairman and CEO, Eric Wintemute; and our CFO, David Johnson. Also joining us to answer your questions will be our Chief Operating Officer, Bob Trogele; our Chief Information Officer, Tim Donnelly; and our Chief Transformation Officer, Don Gualdoni. Before beginning the presentation, let's take a moment for our cautionary reminder. The company from time to time may discuss forward-looking information. Except for the historical information contained in this release, all forward-looking statements are estimates by the company's management and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ from management's current expectations. Such factors include weather conditions, changes in regulatory policy and other risks as detailed from time to time in the company's SEC reports and filings. All forward-looking statements, if any, in this release present the company's judgment as of the date of this release. With that, I will turn the call over to Eric.

Eric Wintemute

Thank you, Anthony. Hello, everyone, and welcome to American Vanguard's first quarter 2024 earnings call. We appreciate your continued support and interest. As you will note from Slide 4, I will be covering four topics today. Our Q1 '24 financial performance, current market conditions, our '24 outlook and our transformation efforts. Moving to Slide 5 on Q1 performance. We recorded a 35% jump in adjusted EBITDA during the period. In addition, our operating income rose by 87%. This improvement in operating leverage is evidence that the cost control initiatives that we have started in the second half of '23 are having their desired effect. As I've mentioned in prior calls, our cross-functional teams remain focused on controlling expenses while maximizing operational efficiency. In that vein, we recorded lower operating expenses as a percent of net sales while increasing sales by 8%. Further, all three of our businesses grew during the quarter. Within our consolidated sales results, US crop was up 9%, US non-crop, 28% and International 2%.