Splash Beverage Group, Inc. (NV)

Greetings. Welcome to the Splash Beverage Group 2022 fourth quarter and full year conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, John McNamara. You may begin.

Thanks, Holly. Good morning, everybody, and thank you again for joining us for the Splash Beverage Group's 2022 fourth quarter and four-year financial results conference call. With us this morning from management are Robert Mistico, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Ron Wall, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, we would remind everybody that certain matters discussed during today's call are or during the answers Q&A session that may be provided to investors may constitute forward-looking statements as defined under the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the company, including those set forth in the risk factors section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. Copies of these documents are available on the SEC's website as well as on the company's website. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this call, except as required by law. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Robert Nistigote, Chief Executive Officer. Go ahead, Robert.

Robert Nistigote Thank you, John, and good morning, everybody, and welcome to our very first conference call. We are extremely excited. It feels like the company is growing up. A lot of work has taken place to get us to this point, and we're very, very excited about the future. We also believe we're at a very interesting inflection point, which I'll get into in a second. And, you know, we've all listened to a million of these things throughout our careers. You know, everybody on this call I'm quite sure is capable of reading financial statements on their own. So we're not going to spend a ton of time digging into line item by line item. Um, you know, there's also some room for that for Q and a, and I'm sure most of you have read these statements already. So I'm really more interested in sharing with you, um, sort of the, uh, resetting the, the vision for the future of splash and really what our objectives are, uh, more so than, than rehashing the history. But the history is important. I've got to tell you, we're very, very proud of the fact that we've done just about everything we've said. This was a great step forward for us, $18 million, $19 million in revenue. We've been now on the National Exchange NYSE American, as you all know, for a year, and we're looking forward to growing our business and shareholder value as time goes on. A little bit more about kind of where we are and where we're headed it's important everybody understands that this is brick and mortar and it takes a long time to get things set up but once you do it's a very very very fun business and as you all know there can be tremendous cash events you know when when a company exits a brevage brand and that's sort of the eye on the prize that we all have here but But as we grow our legacy brands, which is very, very important, because that is really what's driving our distribution efforts. And distribution, most of you heard me say this a bunch of times, but distribution is extremely important. It sounds like that's common sense, but you'd be surprised how many people miss that. So setting up our plug and play scenario for our legacy brands and their potential acquisitions is critical. And We have done a very, very good job of that. I think you all know we have a formal relationship with AB1 and InBev, but we don't stop there. We can distribute outside that network if we choose to. The key thing here is the legacy brand growth, as I mentioned, and also potential acquisitions. I get a lot of questions about that, and Acquisition is a really, really important subject. And, you know, we obviously in a public environment have to be cautious of what we say and what we don't say. But I've said publicly many times we're constantly evaluating acquisition targets. We have numerous ones under evaluation right now as we speak. And we've actually evaluated some and turned them down. So we're very serious about that. And if you look at the organization we put together, Our management team, our board, Bill Meisner, our president and chief marketing officer, has been president and CEO of many companies. You know, Ron Wall, who's also sitting across the desk from me here, coming out of William Grant, running finance and accounting in 50-plus countries. Our board, myself, it's really a pretty good group of people. So our objective here is to grow this thing well beyond $18, $19 million. That said, we are laser focused on both those subjects. And also part of our legacy brand growth, I get a lot of questions about Popoloco and our acquisition regarding that brand. And it's a very, very important acquisition for us, even though it's small. We're still dealing with the Spanish consulate and the Spanish government because it's a Spanish entity. So it takes a little bit more time than we want it to, but the exclusive rights to cardigan is a very important part of our growth in the future. That's a long-term project. More to come on that, but I want everybody to understand that is very much in play. And we really look forward to that for two reasons. It can really help us ratchet down our cost of goods on raw materials for certain brands that that packaging works for. But also what it does, we will have excess capacity for that, and our intention will be to sell that excess capacity when the time comes. So lots of really cool projects on the docket, if you will, for 2023. I think I'll pause there, and I'll let Ron run through the basics on the numbers, and then we'll take some questions, and then I'll close up with a few last comments.