American Vanguard Corporation

Good day. Welcome to the American Vanguard first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are placed in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Robert Winters with Alpha IR. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to American Vanguard's first quarter of 2026 earnings conference call review. Our prepared remarks will be led by Dak Kay, American Vanguard's Chief Executive Officer, and David Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. After their prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions. A copy of today's press release, along with supplemental slides, are available on our website. A replay of the webcast and a transcript from this event will be made available on our website shortly after the call. Before we begin our presentation, we would like to remind everyone that today's press release and certain comments on the call include non-GAAP figures and forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from these forecasts. please refer to the cautionary language included in our press release and slides and to the risk factors described in our SEC filings, all of which are available on our website. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to CEO Dak Kay.

Thank you, Bobby, and welcome everyone to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. The year so far for American Vanguard has gotten off to a good start, despite continued challenging market conditions, which I will speak to more in a few minutes. As I indicated during our last earnings call in mid-March, 2025 was a challenging year for the agricultural sector overall, but it was also quite a consequential year internally for American Vanguard. Important actions were taken on the commercial and operational fronts, and we also made important investments in technology, and systems while making key personnel changes across the organization. And we're not done. There's still plenty of work to put the company in a better position for growth opportunities that we see in front of us. However, a lot has been accomplished in the last 12 months that lays the foundation for delivering value for our shareholders. Going forward, our progress will be measured in many areas. but three key metrics to focus on that can be tracked are sales growth, operating efficiency, and improvement in net trade working capital. Progress on these fronts will all be tied to accountability around key financial goals or metrics to deliver on our success. Importantly, I will also provide some near to medium term goals that we will be focused on over the next 18 to 24 months. A little later in my prepared remarks, I'm going to provide a more expansive view of what has been accomplished so far beyond my comments from our fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. I will also talk more about the key strategic areas of focus for us going forward and finally review the new capital structure put in place that positions us well to execute our strategy. Turning to the first quarter results, we are pleased to see net sales of 124 million for the quarter, an increase of approximately 7% versus the year-ago period. The improvement in sales year-over-year was mostly driven by our domestic crop business, which saw sales increase by 17%, driven by strong demand from both our herbicide and our insecticide products, as well as a 6% growth in our specialty business, driven by our OHP horticultural products. This growth was partially offset by weaker results from our international businesses, which saw revenue decline 7% year over year. Higher sales in Central America, Mexico, and Australia were more than offset by lower sales in Brazil, mostly due to timing of deliveries in the previous year that created a tough comparable. We also saw weaker sales year-over-year in India that was mostly timing related. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 245% year-over-year to 10.3 million compared to 3 million in the first quarter of 2025. The strong improvement in adjusted EBITDA was driven by increased sales of higher margin U.S. crop and specialty domestic products and improved gross margins which increased by 500 basis points year over year. I am pleased with the progress we are making on the manufacturing front. We have been streamlining our manufacturing footprint over the past year, transferring production from our now more focused LA facility to our operation in Axis, Alabama, driving further efficiency and cost savings. As a reminder, we expect the rationalization of the LA production facility to save us at least $4 million on an annualized basis going forward. Adjusted operating expenses, which exclude items such as transformation costs and asset impairment costs, were 26.7% of sales this quarter compared to 27.9% in the year-ago period. Improvements in operating efficiency and tight cost controls drove the year-over-year improvements. Turning to what we are seeing in the agricultural economy, a lot of what I said in March when we reported our year-end results for 2025 still remains true. The industry has yet to recover from a downturn that started in 2023, though we are seeing some improvement in 2026, at least in the U.S., relative to the environment across most of last year. As I said in March, While agricultural commodities are recovering from the low levels that we experienced during the summer of 2025, they remain well below what industry observers consider to be historically normal levels. The worst of the industry destocking appears to be in the past, but distributors have shown no inclination to restock their inventories. Farmer liquidity remains a top concern after several years of depressed commodity prices and thus growers are making more last-minute crop decisions than ever before. Furthermore, global geopolitical developments this year have only added to the existing levels of uncertainty that was in place last year. Turning briefly to the disruptions caused by recent events, mostly in the Middle East, like everyone, we are seeing higher oil prices, higher natural gas prices, and higher fertilizer prices. Higher fertilizer prices should not materially impact this season, as most farmers have already made those purchases for this season. But the current situation, even if resolved relatively soon, will likely have some impact on next year's crop decision. As I've indicated in recent calls, while we wait for an improvement in the agricultural economy, we are focused on the things we can control and executing our strategic business improvement plan. which should allow us to improve adjusted EBITDA as compared to 2025. We continue to expect to generate adjusted EBITDA of $44 million to $48 million in 2026 on sales of $530 million to $550 million. I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, David Johnson, who will briefly review our financial results for the quarter in greater detail.