CTVA Corteva Inc

By Allison Prang 

DuPont de Nemours Inc. said it expects organic sales to fall slightly this year but raised its expectations for adjusted earnings, as the specialty-material-product company reported a second-quarter net loss.

DuPont also recorded an expected goodwill impairment charge in the second quarter that affected results.

DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., emerged from the split up of DowDuPont Inc. DowDuPont spun off its materials-science business into a company now called Dow Inc. and spun off its agriculture business into a company now called Corteva Inc. DuPont is the specialty-sciences-business portion of the company left.

"We now expect full-year organic sales to be slightly down versus prior year consistent with our expectation that soft demand in our short-cycle businesses extends into the second half," Chief Financial Officer Jeanmarie Desmond said in prepared remarks, noting also that the company is "taking new cost actions in the second half to mitigate our expected top line headwinds."

DuPont said it expects pro forma adjusted earnings for the year to be between $3.75 and $3.85 a share.

For the second quarter, DuPont had a net loss of $571 million, compared with a profit of $1.77 billion in the comparable period a year earlier. Its net loss was 76 cents a share compared with a profit of $2.27 a share earlier.

On an adjusted basis, the company said earnings were 97 cents a share, up from 89 cents a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting adjusted earnings of 89 cents a share.

Net sales at the company, whose product lines include bulletproof fibers and safety gear, were $5.47 billion, down 6.6%. Analysts expected $6.02 billion.

The company recorded a $1.18 billion goodwill impairment charge. DowDuPont, as the company was formerly known, said in May it was going to record such a charge, ranging between $800 million and $1.3 billion, because of revised financial expectations for the industrial biosciences segment.

Write to Allison Prang at allison.prang@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 01, 2019 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)

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