Stronghold Digital Mining, Inc.

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

3/6/2024

spk00: Good morning and welcome to Stronghold Digital Mining's conference call for the fourth quarter and four year ended December the 31st, 2023. My name is Tawanda and I will be your operator this morning. Before this call, Stronghold issued its results for the fourth quarter and four year of 2023 in a press release, which is available in the investor section of the company's website at www.strongholddigitalmining.com. You can find the link in the investor section at the top of the homepage. Joining us on today's call, our strong host chairman and CEO, Greg Beard and CFO Matt Smith. Following their remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, Alice Cupton from Gateway Group will make a brief introductory statement. Mr. Cupton, please proceed.
spk05: Great. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Today's slide presentation, along with our earnings release and financial disclosures, were posted to our website earlier today and can be accessed on our website at www.strongholddigitalmining.com. Some statements we're making today may be considered forward-looking statements under securities law and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. As a result, we caution that there are a number of factors, many of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results and events to different materially from those described in forward-looking statements. For more detailed risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements, please see the disclosures in our earnings release and public filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim any obligation or undertaking to update forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the date the forward-looking statements are made, except as required by law. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables to applicable GAAP measures in our earnings release carefully as you consider these metrics. We expect to file our annual report on Form 10-K on or around March 8, 2024 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which sets forth detailed disclosures and descriptions of our business. as well as uncertainties and other variable circumstances, including but not limited to risks and uncertainties identified under the caption risk factors. You may access Strongholds Securities and Exchange Commission filings for free by visiting the SEC website at www.sec.gov or Strongholds Investor Relations website at ir.strongholddigitalmining.com. I would like to remind everyone this call is being recorded. and will be made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of Stronghold's website. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Stronghold's Chairman and CEO, Greg Beard. Greg?
spk03: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. We will be referencing an associated slide presentation throughout the call that is available through the webcast. and on the investor relations section of our corporate website. Let's start on slide three. I will say this on every earnings call until it is no longer true. Stronghold is the only environmentally beneficial and vertically integrated public Bitcoin miner. We own and operate two mining waste to power facilities in Pennsylvania, Scrubgrass and Panther Creek, with aggregate power capacity of 165 megawatts. Through our process, Scrubgrass and Panther Creek have removed an estimated 30 million tons of toxic mining waste from the environment from nearly 100 different sites. Today, we operate over 40,000 Bitcoin miners with 4.1 exahash of hash rate capacity. While we are thrilled to surpass 4 exahash, we believe that we have significant runway to continue hash rate growth within our existing infrastructure by hydrating our fleet. As a vertically integrated Bitcoin miner, we have a unique, substantial asset base with significant potential for complementary revenue streams. In November, we announced our carbon capture project, which is simply an extension of our reclamation process. We are excited about the progress we have made on this project over the last few months. We believe that we could capture up to 100,000 tons of CO2 annually at base load capacity utilization of our plants, as discussed in our December presentation. Moving to slide four. Over the past year and a half, Stronghold executed on its plan to grow hash rate to 4 exahash with high capital efficiency, and we plan to continue adding hash rate and improving our fleet efficiency opportunistically. We have over 40,000 energized slots And these slots could support more than seven exahash of mining with a high-graded fleet of latest generation miners. We are exploring various avenues and structures to grow into this capacity. Looking at our fleet, the average efficiency for our 2,500 least efficient miners exceeds 40 joules per terahash. And our next 10,000 least efficient miners are approximately 37 joules per terahash. That's low-hanging fruit, and just replacing those miners with the latest generation miners could yield hash rate capacity of over 5.3 exahash. So we think that the high-grading opportunity is very attractive. We also remain focused on improved uptime at our data centers, and have been working closely with the Frontier mining team since October to enhance our data center operations going into the halving in April. This partnership has been a success, as evidenced by our recent achievement of approximately 3.9 exahash of operating hash rate. Moving to slide five. As the halving approaches, we continue to focus on liquidity and debt service obligations. As of February 29th, we had over 10 million of liquidity. So current liquidity more than covers the 6.5 million and 2024 mandatory amortization associated with our WhiteHop notes and the 1 million of remaining committed minor CapEx. And importantly, our operations are generating cash flow, with over 5 million of adjusted EBITDA projected for the first quarter, further enhancing our resiliency. Moving on to slide six to discuss Bitcoin market dynamics. Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in January, we have seen a significant rise in Bitcoin price and hash price. Bitcoin has set a new all-time high, and hash price is around 12 cents per terahash. There have been 8 billion of inflows into the ETFs, which averages nearly 6,000 Bitcoin per day, 6.5 more than what is mined daily. So we view the recent run-up in Bitcoin price as a result of the mismatch in supply and demand. Will the price run-up continue? While we won't take a view on inflows representing potential demand, the halving will impact the supply side of the equation, which all else equal is quite constructive for future Bitcoin price. Moving on to slide seven. Owning our own power assets gives us a lot of optionality. as electricity is the largest variable cost to mine Bitcoin. It enhances our ability to be responsive to changing market conditions. When power prices are high, we turn off our miners and sell to the grid. When prices are lower than Bitcoin mining economics, but higher than variable fuel costs, we use the plants to power our miners. And when power prices are lower than our variable plant costs, we turn off the plants and import electricity to power our miners. Power prices in our region are currently very low, with the forward curve for the remainder of 2024 averaging around $30 per megawatt hour. While low power pricing is a trend broadly, forward curves in PJM are generally the lowest in the country right now. This is great for us because it gives us the flexibility to opportunistically import electricity from the grid to power our miners, and you can expect to see us do just that. Moving to slide eight, On the other side of the equation, the PJM grid is extremely vulnerable over the medium to long term. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are great because they're clean, but the unfortunate reality is that they generate power intermittently. Replacing stable base load generation with intermittent generation severely threatens the stability of the grid. This is becoming very clear in PJM by its own account. 40 gigawatts of base load thermal generation is expected to be retired by 2030. This is over 20% of current PJM generating capacity. On top of this, nearly 95% of the power generation projects in the PJMQ are renewable, and it takes multiple megawatts of renewables to replace each megawatt of base load generation. As a result, at the current rate of development, PJM believes that the new projects will not be sufficient to keep up with demand growth and the expected plant retirements by 2030. The implied outcome here is extreme volatility and market tightness in the medium to long term, making existing base load assets like scrubgrass and Panther Creek highly valuable. Moving to slide nine. Since announcing our carbon capture project in November, Our team has made significant progress in proving out, enhancing, and validating our process. Recall that our initial third-party testing indicated that our scrub grass ash could capture carbon at a capacity of up to 12% by starting weight of the ash, where recent tests from our first carbon list have demonstrated that up to 14% is achievable. We recently partnered with the Pittsburgh Mineral and Environmental Technology Lab was assisting with more enhanced lab analysis, further improving and reinforcing our process. In early February, we announced that we had begun constructing our second carbon lift with our partners, Carbonetic. This carbon lift is now up and running at Scrubgrass, inclusive of design enhancements that we expect will increase airflow and carbonation and reduce costs and construction time. The second carbon lift cost is about $33,000 in materials, representing significant savings from the first couple, and we expect to continue to reduce costs as we scale. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, our team has been working closely with Carbonomics since September to list our project on the Puro Registry, the world's first registry for engineered carbon sequestration projects, to monetize our carbon removals in the private markets. We are excited to announce that Puro Earth Registry registered the scrubgrass facility in late February, and the company will now undertake the audit process, which is the next step towards generating carbon capture-related revenue. We are now embarking on the audit process for Puro, and our goal is to have an accredited carbonated materials project as early as the end of the second quarter. We expect to have further updates on this project including timeline for meaningful monetization and related milestones in the next few months. With that, I would like to pass it over to our CFO, Matt Smith.
spk02: Thank you, Greg. Moving to slide 10, we continue to believe that Stronghold is significantly undervalued on an absolute basis and acutely so relative to public Bitcoin mining peers. When looking at select valuation metrics, adjusted EV to hash rate capacity, and adjusted EV to annualized January Bitcoin production, stronghold trades at an approximately 70% discount to peers. I have nothing else to add. Lastly, on slide 11, revenue for the fourth quarter was $21.7 million with $20.5 million from cryptocurrency operations on 599 Bitcoin mined and $1.2 million from energy operations. GAAP net loss was $21.2 million for the fourth quarter, and adjusted EBITDA was $2.3 million. A reconciliation for those figures is included in the appendix. I will now turn the call back over to Greg for closing remarks.
spk03: Thanks, Matt. To summarize what we've discussed today, we are executing on the objectives we have communicated to the market. We remain confident in the strength of our business going into the halving, And we believe that we have outstanding growth prospects through high grading our fleet and developing carbon capture. With that, we'll open up the call for Q&A. Operator?
spk00: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder to ask the question, please press star 11 on your telephone and then wait to hear your name announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B-Rally. Your line is open.
spk06: Thank you very much, operator. Good morning, everyone. I first wanted to ask a few questions on slide four. Will you show that column with additional opportunities? And a few questions there. First, what type of machines should we be thinking about? What would a reasonable cost or capex range be for that, or is that included in the guidance? I don't think so, but I would appreciate your perspective. And then I have a few more follow-up questions from there. Thank you.
spk03: Yeah, so I think we're thinking about it in terms of, like, the generic latest generation miner that you can still buy. So we're not looking at the next generation, so the current latest generation, so something like a Bitmain S21. In terms of, you know, we... The market for these machines changes really weekly. And in the past, we've been very opportunistic about how we've managed to fill slots, whether it be just buying machines outright, JVing on machines, just to improve the capital efficiency and to get a very high ROE. And so I think if the You know, at current prices, market prices, you'd say, hey, to fill up all these slots would be around $20 million at current rates. We think, obviously, the rates are going to be, you know, potentially materially different post-having. And as always, hey, we're trying to do better than the market in terms of what we spend and how we structure it.
spk06: Thank you, Greg. When would you make a decision on deploying additional capital there?
spk03: You know what? I think we... Why don't you give us a quarter to present what we want to do and the pace of that potential repowering of the data center or replacing all of these miners with more miners. So I think we're not ready to be specific with dates and times yet on those. And that's just really a function of making sure that we're opportunistic to achieve the best pricing and rates of return on that equipment.
spk06: Got it. Do you have a site in mind?
spk03: Yeah, I think we have, you know, we've only got the two sites, Scrub Grouse and Panther Creek, so I think you can expect it at both plants. And just to be clear, at current pricing, it's $20 million per exahash of machines, just in case that was missed.
spk06: Noted. Thank you for that. So, suppose...
spk02: Lucas, I would just add, I think there's, as we've been carefully observing industry peers announcing growth projects that are significant kind of greenfield builds or that require extraordinary timelines and future delivery schedules, what we're trying to focus you on is the fact that You know, we've looked at third sites. We've looked organically at our own existing 41,000 slots. And we have a number of kind of Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 miners in terms of stratifying by efficiency. And if you were to take the least efficient miners and high-grade those into what's called an S21-type miner, which could utilize existing plugs that are energized, you can get to 7x hash. And so, you know, identifying that that's an opportunity is not a commitment to spend the money to do that, but we've demonstrated very, as Greg said, very creative ways of filling slots in the past, and we think there are a lot of opportunities to do that without, you know, stretching for it. So, the fact that we have seven ExaHash capacity in the existing data centers is the message.
spk06: Got it. I appreciate that. Kind of switching topics, obviously power price environment has been very soft, and you noted your flexibility to toggle between your own generation and purchasing power. Could you speak a little bit to what your costs are when you produce in-house today at Panther and Scrubgrass, and kind of what the utilization rate of the plants is expected to be in this price environment. Thank you.
spk03: Yeah, so this is just a nice reminder of the strength of the stronghold business model, which is, hey, if power prices are super high, we can quickly turn the data centers off and divert all that power to the grid. Conversely, when power prices are low... And by low, we mean lower than our available cost to make the power. We can, and we wouldn't do it on a single day, but if it's expected to be low for weeks or a month, we can turn the power plant off. So right now, we're saying that we're expecting costs to average between $40 or $45 per megawatt hour to make the power. And if you looked at the forward curve for expected power pricing, in PJM. It's one of the lowest powered markets in the U.S., and so that decision to buy power instead of make it comes when we see power in the 20s or below, which is where we're seeing it now seasonally. So I think you can expect us to just make the economic decision to buy the power at a cheaper cost than we can make it, which is, you know, there's a spot in the middle where it makes sense to run the plants and supply all that power to the data centers, but now we're looking like if the curve ends up playing out as it's priced, we'll run at least scrub grass seasonally rather than all the time, and then buy power for a lower price so we can make it, which obviously will improve our margins.
spk06: Thank you very much, Greg. Really appreciate the color, and best of luck. I'll turn it over for now. Okay.
spk00: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Joe Flynn with Conference Point Research and Trading. Your line is open.
spk01: Hi, guys. I wanted to dig a little bit more on your strategy going into the halving. I guess, you know, with $30 megawatt hour, it's pretty strong prices from a marginal cost standpoint where you keep machines on. But I guess in the event that, you know, you don't see a correction of hash price and you kind of see it, you How are you going to manage the balance sheet and growth ambitions to ultimately put yourself in a better position from both cost and, I guess, cash position?
spk03: Yeah. So, hey, I think we have the benefit of not having to be making debt amortization payments and we have no or very, very small obligations on CapEx today. So we, and right now, today, we're generating cash. And so I think if you looked at the potential for the improvement in efficiency of our mining fleet, I think you're going to have to, you know, we need to lay to the market what the, you know, what a realistic timeframe is to do that, which we will do. But I think the best response to having in our view, is to drive power costs as low as you can. That's really the most important variable that we can control. And just happily, luckily, we have a power curve that has allowed us to do that. So we're going to end up with lower power costs than what we would have modeled a quarter ago, just given where the curve moved, or just related to natural gas pricing being so cheap. But I think if you were to study our balance sheet and our obligations, they're purposefully low through the halving to let us get to the point where we should be able to begin to spend, upgrade the fleet, which will give us a benefit on top of having an extremely low power price. I think also at some point, hey, we're making a lot of progress on carbon capture, and that project is really designed as well to give us an even lower power price sort of on a net basis for that. So that's one of the reasons that we continue to focus on carbon capture as a benefit to the company.
spk01: Thanks. That's helpful. And I also wanted to dig more into your hosting business, which you know, so far demonstrated strong results, but I guess just, what do you think the outlook is there? I was wondering if you're going to pursue additional opportunities on that front and maybe what's the overall advantages to kind of your, your guys' model versus, you know, traditional hosting miners that, you know, have definitely struggled over the past two years and, There's a lot of industry talk about the hosting model going away, I guess. How are you guys positioned in that respect?
spk03: Yeah, so I think we're – we think we have a good relationship with our partners, and I think you're really unlikely to see us enter into what I would describe as like a regular way of hosting where we run someone else's miners and sell them power. We strongly prefer – the model where we share a significant amount of the Bitcoin mining revenue with our partners. So I think we'll expect them to continue in some way. And if we, you know, I think I would view that as one of the opportunistic ways to drive the efficiency to a better place on the miners is through expanding our JVs with our existing or new partners. So I think it's a, we're not expecting any immediate changes to the JV structures. All right.
spk01: Thanks. That's all for me.
spk00: Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, that's star 11 to ask the question. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Dede with HC Wainwright. Your line is open.
spk04: Thanks. Hi, Greg, Matt. Thanks for having me on. Greg, kind of a, I guess, sort of a broad one. I was hoping you would take some time to walk me through, and anyone else who's curious, on the carbon capture and the balance of now that you're seeing 14% recovery, a lower cost to deploy the carboliths, and the balance of running the plants to generate the ash and the expected revenue offset. It's a big question. I know that you're expecting accreditation on Puro next quarter, which means conceivably you could see revenue in the third quarter. At what point Do you think you can just run both plants all out regardless of the power curve?
spk03: Yeah, certainly. That's what you're describing is absolutely the goal. And I would say, hey, the last three months has been, you know, I would say better than confirmatory because it's when you're driving the rate of carbon absorption up And not only is the upper potential, you know, it moved up, the rate that the ash is carbonating has moved up. So the, you know, not only is it going to require fewer carboliths to get the same job done, The cost of this cartel list is coming down and labor is coming down. So, we're really, I think we were very conservative in the early days, you know, sort of late last year describing the potential of the project. But it's still, you know, while we've made a ton of progress and on every assumption, it's proven to be conservative so far. But it's still too early to spike the football and say, hey, we're going to have X number of Carver lists fully deployed and generating X amount of revenue related to that sequestration. I think that should happen. I would expect that we'll be in a position to do that in the next quarter. But I think we're still testing... you know, just literally dozens of tests a week. Now we're testing this newly redesigned Carvolift number two that has an increased airflow. So I think it's from our vantage point. I think when we see a plateau in the testing results and we've sort of iterated to the best Carvolift design that maximizes airflow and carbonation, that also minimizes the CapEx build-out cost, that's when they'll say, hey, now we're ready to go ahead and do the build-out. And at that point, we'll describe what the CapEx costs are and what we think we can sequester. But you're right. The reason to be excited is that this is a revenue stream that when looked at on an offset for power costs, it's going to meaningfully drive the the revenue up and the sort of the average cost per megawatt down, which is that, that was the, which we've always said that that's even more important than the efficiency of the machines is a low power cost. So that's, that's what we're driving toward. So I think if they stand by, give us a, give us a, you know, a quarter to continue to refine our results and designs. And with those results and designs, we can, have accurate CapEx estimates and accurate timeframes to share. I think on the, you know, we also disclosed we are now listed on the Puro registry, and they've now begun their, quote, auditing process. And I think making a mistake about it, this will be a big year for carbon capture, at least at Scrubgrass. this year, so that's the – and hopefully in the next quarter have specifics to share as well. So I'm sorry we can't tell you exactly per unit and everything, but that's a – I can say we did all that math in December on a hypothetical basis, and it is materially better than what we had initially thought in terms of capex speed to carbonate and the rate of absorption. Let us keep the timing.
spk04: Yeah, no, appreciate the caller. No need to apologize. Understand it's a very dynamic situation. Appreciate all the effort there.
spk03: We just don't want to go backwards and say, hey, we promised X percent or whatever costs and have it be.
spk04: No, I completely understand there's been enough of that. Maybe a little more insight on associated revenue timing. If you are registered by the end of the second quarter, is the press release intimated? Is it fair to assume you could see revenue in the third quarter? Maybe give us a little more insight on that. How are you looking at it?
spk03: You know what I would say? If we get on the registry, what we'd hope to do, is sell carbon credits in the private market and on a forward-looking basis. So it's a, hey, you know, once we have our science center, we're confident we can share that with potential buyers of carbon credits, and we're on the exchange and audited and, you know, I guess then transactable in this way, that then opens up the ability for us to sell you know, we could sell out then the, you know, a certain number of credits and deliver those as we build the project out. So I think it's absolutely right. So I think it's, if there's a benefit to being on a registry, it's that, and have the process fully vetted out and we can then sell credits before we generate them. with an expected timeline to deliver them.
spk04: Love the forward market.
spk03: In the forward market.
spk04: Okay. Okay. That sounds good. Another topic I think has to do with the mention of Champion. Could you just help me understand how Champion interfaces between you and PGM and how you see them helping to deliver those lower power prices to you before carbon capture is, you know, fully up and running at both plants?
spk02: Hey, Kevin. It's Matt. So, I would refer you back to our December press release and, you know, when we mentioned that we had been through deep discussions constructive discussions with PJM around our data center load banks co-located the plants. And, you know, we have been, over the course of the last few months, you know, purchasing retail electricity. And when you're in that market, this is when the plant is not on, which we were, you know, in December Panther Creek had an outage that we've since come out of, and it's been running well. But During that period of time, we were purchasing retail electricity, and at times the premium to wholesale can be onerous, which I think you can see in the fourth quarter, fuel and import power costs. Fast forward, we wanted more visibility and more flexibility. When you go into the shoulder here, it was a very warm February. Natural gas prices are at $1.50, $1.75 versus a year ago when they were twice that. and it's the marginal fuel in our market. And so we expect single-digit to $20 real-time prices in the shoulder potentially, notwithstanding any, you know, Ukraine, Russia type of real structural items. And you want to be able to purchase power at as low of a cost in the real-time markets as you can during that period. And so we have been working on competitive supply agreements for a while to make sure we have ultimate flexibility. And we were very grateful to have Calpine, our champion energy part of Calpine, step into that role. And we're very excited about the reduced cost of power that will absolutely result from that during periods when we're importing. So it's a pretty big – it will result in a pretty big savings for us.
spk04: Okay. So looking out, we should – assume generally right generally that you're running both plants sort of uh sort of peak times x this past winter uh but uh maybe through the summer and then off on the shoulder months is that a fair assumption at least for the next year or so
spk02: Yeah, so we are going to run scrub-ras. We'll just say more or less the base case is as a peaker or more than that, depending on carbon. I mean, as we start to monetize carbon potentially and perfect our design, carbon could be a step change in the scrub-ras cost of power. But right now, as we're looking at it, the peak price for power the rest of the year is in July at 50 bucks-ish. And so in that case, If you can buy power well below your marginal fuel cost, you'll do it. So scrubgrass probably runs as a peaker, and Panther Greek is likely to run as a baseload, continue to run as a baseload plant throughout the year, aside from some potential plant outage time that is not yet on the calendar.
spk04: Okay. Any immediate plans to try the carboliths at Panther, given that you'll have a continuous supply of ash?
spk02: So we're still – scrubgrass is nearest term due to the, you know, really high limestone calcium element of the CFB process there. Once we perfect scrub brass where we started, where we're studying it, we'll move over to Panther. We don't really see any reasons why Panther can't scale as well, but we need to go over and further test the ash, the byproduct beneficial use ash, and then ultimately can potentially scale at both plants. I would just say scrub brass is near-term focus because it's It's already started, and we have 600-plus acres, and there are a lot of benefits, including the very calcium-rich nature of the ash. And so we're going to scale Escobar S first, probably, and then move over to Panther.
spk04: Understand the grand demand on capital. That's the hinge. But have you considered other sites? Any change in your thinking on that? And if so, what type of timeline might you consider?
spk03: Yeah, I think we're always looking at other sites and comparing what we have. Does it make sense to migrate our fleet at our current sites or should we look at new sites? We're constantly sent opportunities to review new sites, but I think the cost of our power is lower than what most of the things that we see could achieve. So I think, yeah, we have no pending or announceable new sites at this point, but we are constantly reviewing.
spk04: Okay, fair enough. I'll hop back in the queue, Greg.
spk03: Thanks, Evan.
spk00: Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, let's start 1-1 to ask the questions. Please stand by for our next question. We have a follow-up question from the line of Lucas Pipes with D. Rowley. Your line is open.
spk06: Thank you very much, operator. Thanks for taking my follow-up question. Greg, there's a lot of talk about shortages of power given demands not only from Bitcoin mining but also AI applications. To what extent are you receiving inbound given your direct access to power and land package? Thank you very much.
spk03: Yeah, I would say we do have interest from inbound, but I would say the recent run-up in Bitcoin price and hash price. It's an attractive business to run right now. We'll see what happens to hash price and Bitcoin price. But I think, yeah, if Bitcoin were to be outlawed from the earth, there are multiple purposes for 40,000 fully built out plugs that have computing capacity available, given what's happening in the world of AI as well. So that the, you know, we're confident that all of the infrastructure that we're running, that we built, with the access to the power, and that redundancy is a valuable infrastructure asset.
spk06: Thank you. Matt, quick, quick question on the whiskey tango slide. You've you've been in public markets for a long time. How do you explain these discrepancies? We'd be keen to get your take on this. Thank you.
spk02: Yeah, so I want to avoid speculating, but I think what's interesting is that it's a business where it's an industry and a stock market where people can buy or sell us every day. And that can happen in any sort of way. And when you think about The reasons and past, you know, potential execution issues or, you know, our leverage, which we're, you know, we've chipped away at some and are optimistic about, really about escape velocity with cash flow-related deleveraging against that debt. You know, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic, and there's hard asset value here that is – is absolutely, in our view, not recognized by the market in terms of our plants and the carbon opportunity. And so, you know, I can start to step through the different attributes of Stronghold, you know, compared to other peers. And, you know, there's some scale-related things. There are some, you know, kind of daily trading volume and size-related matters. But in the end, it's a commodity industry where... There should not be large disparities other than adjusting for operating and financial leverage and some other nuances between businesses. And so to trade at a 70% or 80% discount to peers who are in the same business doesn't make any sense. And so the question is, what's going to close that? And I'll just leave that to you all to ponder, but we're working on it. So I'll just leave it at that.
spk06: I appreciate it, Matt. Again, best of luck. Thank you. Thank you.
spk00: Thank you. I'm sure no further questions in the queue. That concludes the question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Beard for closing remarks.
spk03: Okay. Hey, stockholders, investors, stronghold employees, thank you for all the effort. Thank you for the faith. Hey, we're doing our best and we are optimistic about our prospects given the business model, and we will see you next quarter. Thank you. Bye-bye.
spk00: Thank you for joining us today for Stronghold's earnings call. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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