Vikram Luthar
Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead, Ben. Your line is now open
Well, so on starches and sweeteners, you're right. Let's break it down. The liquid sweetener part of the portfolio, we see resilient demand and strong margins given the good contracting we had last year, and we also see increased volumes from Mexico, which helps the business. The other thing that should help over the course of the year is higher sugar prices. While, you know, we don't have a lot of spot business, but to the extent we do that should be supportive of margins and the liquid sweetener side of the portfolio. The specialty side, we are seeing strong margins, but some softness in the volumes. That's also part of sweeteners and starches. In the biosolutions, when you think about the mix of the portfolio, we are moving more and more towards the BioSolutions business. And that had very strong performance consistently over the last few years and again in Q1 with 20-plus percent growth in revenue and anticipated to continue at that clip for the course of this year. So at a high level Sweeteners and Starches, good volumes and robust margins, so it should give us confidence that we'll have a very good year again in 2023. Now with respect to ethanol, that remains the most volatile part of our portfolio, Q1 was soft. We think Q2 is going to be a little better, although lower than Q2 of last year. We had the biofuel tax credit, which we referenced, which will not repeat. But we also see some green shoots on the ethanol side. We are more constructive about the outlook of ethanol for the rest of the year. Why, for a few reasons. One is, we see ethanol stock levels coming off their peaks from earlier in Q1. Two, we continue to see good export demand. Think about what's happening even in Japan and India. So our export demand should be in the 1.2 billion, 1.4 billion gallons, which is consistent with what we saw last year. We also see higher blending rates. I think blend rates have trended slightly up. Gasoline demand continues to be strong given the strong blend economics. So in short, while we think ethanol will likely be low from an absolute margin perspective versus last year, we're still constructive generally for the rest of the year. So overall, we see a pretty strong year for Carbohydrate Solutions business.