What Ingevity Corporation told the SEC could break it.

Ingevity's automotive activated-carbon business (Performance Materials) is highly customer-concentrated: it sells to roughly 65 customers globally, but its ten largest accounted for approximately 90% of sales in 2025. Those large customers are major automotive parts manufacturers (e.g., PHINIA, A. Kayser Automotive, Korea Fuel-Tech — captured as edges) that build fuel-vapor canisters. Loss, in-sourcing, design-out (e.g., accelerated EV adoption removing the evaporative-emissions canister), or repricing by even a few of these top customers would materially affect segment revenue. A steep top-10 concentration in the company's highest-margin product line.

“In 2025, our ten largest customers accounted for approximately 90 percent of sales.”

Ingevity exports U.S.-made Performance Materials and Performance Chemicals into China (a major automotive market for its activated carbon), so China's retaliatory tariffs directly threaten its margins on those U.S.-origin products if it cannot pass the cost to customers. New U.S. global tariffs also raise the cost of importing raw materials and exporting finished goods, and indirect tariff effects already weakened demand — its Advanced Polymer Technologies segment sales fell 15% in 2025, partly attributed to indirect tariff impacts and China competition. A concrete, two-sided trade-policy exposure (export margins + import costs + downstream demand).

“The retaliatory tariff measures imposed by China, if not unwound, may significantly lower our margin on Performance Materials and Performance Chemicals products sold from the United States into China if we are unable to pass these costs onto our customers.”

Several of Ingevity's products are made at only one plant, with limited ability to shift production elsewhere: extruded honeycomb and other Performance Materials products at Waynesboro, Georgia; pavement/road products at its North Charleston, South Carolina Performance Chemicals plant; and caprolactone at its Warrington, U.K. Advanced Polymer Technologies plant. It notes that while there are some in-plant redundancies, it has limited ability to make these products at other sites. A fire, equipment failure, labor action, or other disruption at any of these sole-manufacturing facilities would cut off the entire supply of the associated product line — a concentrated single-point-of-failure supply risk.

“we have products, such as our extruded honeycomb, caprolactone, pavement preservation products, road construction products, pavement reconstruction and recycling products, that are only made at a single site, such as our Waynesboro, Georgia Performance Materials plant, North Charleston Performance Chemicals plant and Warrington, U.K. APT plant.”