Federico Trucco
Analyst · Oppenheimer
Thanks, Paula, and good morning to everyone. And welcome, Milen Marinov, our Chief Commercial Officer, on his first earnings call with us. Please turn to Slide #3 for an overview of this quarter's main highlights. Our third fiscal quarter is typically uneventful as it falls in the off-season for most of our geographies. In the past 2 years, it stood out of the ordinary due to the accrual of portions of the $50 million upfront payment from Syngenta, which significantly improved the P&Ls of the quarter. This year, however, it stands out for a non-P&L achievement, which is our exceptional cash flow performance. We're very pleased to report a $40 million improvement for this metric on a year-over-year basis, which helped us reduce our debt and improve our cash position, as Enrique will describe in a minute. An important contributor to our cash flow performance this quarter is the shift in our seed business strategy, which is also enabling a more focused approach. Some early benefits of these changes are already visible this quarter with more expected in the quarters to come, as I will describe later in the presentation. We're also very excited about the long-awaited EPA approval of RinoTec. As Milen will describe in a few minutes, we can now offer growers and partners a full suite of on-seed and on-field biological solutions for pest control and plant health and nourishment alike for both cash and row crops across the world's largest agricultural markets. We are indeed in a unique position to facilitate the transition to a more sustainable, yet more productive agricultural reality. Let me now pass the presentation over to Enrique for a deeper look at this quarter's financial performance.
Enrique López Lecube: Thank you, Federico, and good morning to everyone. Good to have you on the call and good to have Milen for the first time with us as well. Let's please turn to Slide 4 and to take a look at the revenues in the quarter. Like Federico mentioned, there is nothing particularly eventful in the third quarter as it is off-season in almost every geography and not much activity for most of our product portfolio. So not a great quarter in terms of thinking of revenue-generating opportunities in the context of a tough year for the industry as a whole. We are seeing signs of normalization in some of the markets we target, which is good in terms of confirming that the overall industry is stabilizing after a couple of rough years, but surely a bit early to tell that we are seeing a bounce back yet. For the quarter, total revenues came in at $60.6 million compared to last year's $84 million. As expected, the accrual in the third quarter of last year of almost $16 million from Syngenta's initial down payment related to our inoculants collaboration was too big of a gap to be closed with business as usual in a particularly slow quarter, even more so considering that profits from the global distribution agreement will now be evenly distributed throughout the year as opposed to the accruals of the initial compensatory payments that were done in the third quarter of fiscal '23 and then again in the third quarter of '24. This effect alone, the accrual of this down payment, explains 2/3 of the top line negative change and was something to be expected. Aside from this accounting impact, Argentina had a particularly slow third quarter with overall reduced commercial activity for our inputs compared to prior years. In general, what we are seeing in the Argentine market lately is that more stable macroeconomic conditions have driven farmer and distributor purchasing behavior to become more closely linked to the agronomic calendar as opposed to a financially speculative pattern in the past where maybe hedging or taking currency risk was part of the decision-making process for these players. With that in mind, it's natural to see that during the third quarter, commercial pace was increasingly dictated by on-field use of inputs and particularly for crop protection. In contrast, and like I mentioned, other geographies outside of Argentina are showing early signs of recovery and delivered good growth during the quarter. We had a particularly good quarter in the U.S. and Mexico, as well as other smaller Latin American geographies. But I think that the important takeaway here is that this seems to be steadier growth in priority countries and with selected bioprotection technologies that we are targeting to become increasingly important in terms of contributing to incremental sales. From a geographic standpoint, in summary, I'd say that the performance in Argentina this quarter is not particularly indicative of market status other than what I mentioned about seasonality becoming more evident. More than halfway into Q4, I'd say that the winter crop season is showing good progress. But still, the biggest part of the Argentine market is dependent on summer crop season that starts in August-September, so a bit early to know what the market will look like after a rough year. On other geographies, great to see good results in U.S. and Mexico despite noise from tariffs and maybe early signs that market headwinds have bottomed and that we are slowly moving into a new cycle there. And finally, also a low season quarter in Brazil with no particular news other than the impact from tariffs has been somewhat positive to Brazilian soybean prices, which has improved farmer sentiment, and there is somewhat of a reasonable expectation that next year will look stronger than what this one was. From a segment standpoint, the decrease in Crop Protection revenues was fully driven by lower sales of noncore products in Argentina and was partially offset by higher sales of bioprotection solutions. In Seed & Integrated Products, revenues increased by 26%, primarily fueled by accelerated sales of HB4 grain from existing inventory, which is in line with the reorganization efforts of our seed business that includes transitioning to this working capital lighter model. And finally, Crop Nutrition was primarily shaped by what I already mentioned about the impact from the Syngenta down payment. Excluding that effect, inoculant sales -- underlying operational inoculant sales were up and slightly offset by the Argentine seasonality effect on fertilizers. Let's please now turn to Slide 5, where we will take a look at the gross profit, which for the quarter totaled almost $24 million compared to $42.6 million in the same period last year, and that included the full $15.7 million accrual from Syngenta. As expected, the trend in gross profit largely follows what we saw on the revenue slide. What I would say is that at the consolidated level, gross margin decline from 51% to 39% is explained in full by that comparison effect to the Syngenta down payment last year, which carried 100% margin. So without this effect, consolidated gross margin remained roughly flat at 39%. When we look at historicals for this quarter, this is a 40% quarter usually, if you look at the last 4 years. So we're slightly below that, but not far from where it was historically. From a segment standpoint, in Crop Protection, despite the gross profit decrease, which is in line with revenues, we saw a favorable shift in product mix with growing sales of proprietary adjuvants and bioprotection solutions, and this led to a margin expansion from 38% to 41%, which is what we want to see going forward in this segment, a margin recovery, and that also carries a benefit in terms of working capital that I will address further in the presentation. In Seed & Integrated Products, the gross profit was slightly below last year, mainly because the growth in revenues was primarily explained by the divestment of HB4 grain inventories, which carry a low margin. And that, to some degree, diluted the margin of the rest of the products that we report in this segment that are particularly seed treatment packs. And finally, in Crop Nutrition, again, the impact is mainly explained by the Syngenta accrual last year -- down payment accrual last year. When we exclude that, margins remained fairly stable for the products that we report here that are particularly in this quarter, inoculants and fertilizers. Let's now please move to the next slide, Slide 6, to look at our adjusted EBITDA results. The quarter came in at $9 million compared to $21.1 million last year, a decline that was expected following what I already described about Syngenta's down payment accrual in Crop Nutrition results last year. The impact from that drop in EBITDA was partially offset by other income stemming from portfolio actions that we took as part of the seed business reorganization process. This other income contribution reflects a favorable exchange of noncore soybean trades and intellectual property assets for the prepayment of outbound royalties to third parties, as well as the expansion of rights on selected technologies and is part of us cleaning up our portfolio in seeds, as well as making that particular business more working capital efficient as we pivot to the new model. And then, regarding OpEx, we saw a modest decline that reflects the early impact of our ongoing efforts to realign the company's cost structure to the new market reality that has been going on, on multiple fronts. Not only on seeds, we are also adjusting part of our SG&A for us to have a lighter company, a lighter business and prepare to capitalize on what will come hopefully in the next couple of years with a more normalized industry. These measures were put in place late in the quarter. So we are seeing only a partial result of that. And going forward, we do expect to see further benefits of this becoming a contribution to the operational leverage and helping us increase our EBITDA margins back to normal levels and not where we see them today. Let's please move to Slide 7, which I think is, like Federico mentioned, important and high point for the quarter, and that refers to cash from operating activities. As we communicated in prior quarters, this was a key focus for the year, us driving and improving cash generation. And to that regard, working capital management was for sure a key component. And this is probably the first quarter in which we clearly see tangible results from the efforts that were put in place before. So despite this one being a weak year in terms of the P&L performance, the quarter delivered $23.3 million in net cash from operating activities, which is, in my view, an impressive $40.7 million improvement compared to the $17 million in cash that were required by operations in the same quarter of the prior year. So just to break it down, and again, I think that working capital is the main sort of like component on us having a more efficient cash performance. At the inventory level, we kept operating more just in time than what we used to do. And this led us to a reduction of $13.5 million during the quarter as opposed to a $6.1 million use of cash last year. I do think that it is important to note that the acceleration of HB4 grain divestment was in part something that helped us improve this number. Of course, this is something that is onetime, but it was important for us to show progress to ourselves in terms of making that particular business be more capital light and inventories was -- were a big part of that. Then we also placed a strong emphasis on accounts receivables management, and that brought in roughly $31 million in cash during the quarter compared to a negative $16 million number in the prior year. I think that apart from the progress that this shows in terms of trending back our accounts receivables to what they were historically, the important point here is that it also speaks to the quality and health of our accounts receivables that we can eventually hit the gas on improving that number and have it done. And finally, I also think it's worth noting that these improvements on the asset side of the working capital were achieved while reducing our accounts payables during the quarter by $20 million or so. So we are not relying on delayed payment to suppliers or vendors to improve our net working capital, and this is a healthy improvement and something that we aim to maintain going forward. I think that enhancing cash generation and ensuring efficient capital allocation, as generic as that might sound, is an important part of our strategy, will continue to be an important part of our strategy. And we think this is homework we better do ahead of us capitalizing on the expansion of our portfolio and the introduction of new technologies that Milen will refer to further in the presentation. Finally, let's please turn to Slide 8. Of course, that this performance in cash flows had a positive effect on our cash position and our total debt at the end of the quarter. Sequentially, cash increased by a bit less than $10 million and total debt decreased by $13 million by the end of the period. This is also in part reflective of what we've been communicating in these calls that our debt position is highly reflective of what we do with working capital and that eventually streamlining our working capital will have an effect on our total debt position. And that led us to a leverage ratio of 4.1 -- slightly about 4.1 at the end of the quarter. That concludes my part of the presentation. With that, I will turn it back to Federico. Fede?