Bioceres Crop Solutions Corp.

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. I would like to welcome you to the by Chris Harris Crop Solutions fiscal second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on lead to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press start and then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to update your question, press the pound key. Thank you. Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Max Goya. You may begin.

Thank you. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Presenting during today's earnings call will be Federico Trucco, the ESERES Chief Executive Officer, and Enrique Lopez-Negue, our Chief Financial Officer. Both will be available for the Q&A session. Before we proceed, I would like to make the following self-help statement. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, and I refer you to the forward-looking statement section of today's earnings release and presentation, as well in our recent filings with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new or change events or circumstances. Also, please note that for comparison purposes and a better understanding of our company's underlying performance, in addition to discussing as reported results during our presentation today, we will discuss comparable results, which exclude the impact of hyperinflation accounting in Argentina. Additional information in connection with the application of the rule IAS 29 can be found in our earnings report. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Federico Trucco.

Thanks Max and thanks everyone for joining us today and happy new year. Today we are reporting on our second fiscal quarter that ended on December 31st. As a technology company, our value proposition is centered on developing highly differentiated solutions that create economic incentives in the form of improved yields, management practices, and other efficiencies. to further decarbonize production processes while regenerating agricultural ecosystems. With this central purpose in mind, we have been investing over the last 18 years in a solution called HB4, designed to improve the resiliency of crops in the face of adverse climatic conditions. More specifically, limited water availability. The single most important factor affecting agricultural sustainability. During the quarter, we achieved the first approval ever of this technology in wheat, an approval we have been working on since 2015. We discussed the implications of this approval in our September earnings call. Today we are presenting the data obtained from our first pre-commercial production process with independent growers totaling close to 7,000 hectares and 17 times more than in our prior production cycle. And the results are as follows. HV4 wheat outyielded commercial varieties commonly used by participating growers by 13.5% on average across all environments and locations. In our yielding environment, representing one-third of all hectares harvested, the average improvement from the HV4 technology was 42%. This is more than twice the performance we estimated using our historical data. In higher yielding environments, we also perform our historical data and we will discuss this in more detail later in today's presentation. As a result, all participating growers have anticipated their willingness to repeat and or increase their exposure to HB4 wheat in the coming season, further validating our value proposition. The performance of the current H3-4 wheat varieties and the validation of our value proposition with farmers, as well as the high quality of the seed obtained, allow us to ratify our prior guidance, projecting almost 20 times more hectares for the upcoming season. As we indicated, this projection is subject to Brazil's import approval. Regarding this approval process, the public hearing that precedes the introduction of any new GM crop has already taken place. This occurred on October 22nd, and no further information has been requested by regulators as of today. Continuing with H3-4 Soy, we have engaged with 148 growers across 220 locations, for a total of close to 23,000 hectares, where we are currently multiplying seven materials ranging from maturity groups three to five. Despite some initial dry conditions in certain regions, this scaling up process is advancing favorably. We continue to make progress with our collaborators to develop materials for a broader range of maturities, and we have recently announced an important collaboration with ENSIP, a computational breeding company, to fast-track product development and targeting efforts in the United States. This collaboration is possible given the increased flexibility we have achieved after the full acquisition of Verdeca. We will also comment on this later in the presentation. From a financial performance perspective, we experienced a drop in revenues of 17% for the quarter, which Enrique will explain in detail during his part of the presentation. This slowdown in revenues partially upset the good momentum of the last three quarters, giving us a revenue growth of 8% for the trailing 12 months. This number does not include HB4 deferred revenues accumulated to date, which we refer to as contributed goods, totaling 3.6 million over the approximately 30,000 hectares of HB4 crop farmed thus far. Please now turn to slide four for a more in-depth overview of HB4 wheat performance. The heat map of South America on the right side of the slide indicates soil water availability in late October of last year as compared to an average year. Blue areas have more abundant water than usual, and orange and red areas have less. This image illustrates the severity and extent of the drought conditions during the last week's growing season. As we zoom in on the left side of the slide to the HB4 wheat production locations, we see that in the northern locations where drought was more severe, the average improvement in yield was 60%, with some extreme situations where yields were more than doubled. The average drop in production for this region was reported at 47% by the Rosario Board of Trade, and institutions that have historically reported statistics for different crops. Accordingly, our HB4 technology could have reduced this loss by two-thirds. Improved performance was still observed in southern regions, indicated as D and C, with average increases of 7 and 8% as shown. where water constraints were less significant and yields in general were above average. On the following three slides, we present case studies in environments with different productivity levels. First, we see a location in Henderson, Buenos Aires Province, where yields were above 5 tons per hectare and the improvement in the HB4 crop was 20%. In these high yielding environments, we have outperformed commercial varieties every 6 out of 10 times, with an average improvement of 3%, probably more a factor of the elite genetics of our varieties and less so of the drought tolerant technology. Moving to the next slide, we see another location in Buenos Aires province, now within an intermediate yield range, that is between 3 to 5 tons per hectare. In this location, we observed an improvement of 30%. When we averaged all locations within the 3 to 5 tons range, we observed a benefit of 11%, outperforming commercial materials every 7.5 out of 10 times. Lastly, in the next slide, we go to a western location in the same province, where yields are generally below 3 tons per hectare and observe a benefit in the HB4 crop of 68%. In these lower yielding environments, we have obtained an average yield improvement of 42% across all sites, as indicated before, outperforming commercial materials every 9 out of 10 times. Slide 8 provides an overview of our HB4 scaling up process. We take this opportunity to ratify our prior guidance in terms of hectares and associated discovered revenues, knowing today that we have the variety performance, the seed quality, and the volume of inventories needed to meet these goals. Moving now to HB4 Soy on slide 9. We have been able to plant close to 23,000 hectares with 148 participating growers despite the slow start to the planting season, mostly affected by the lack of rainfall until late December. This production cycle represents an 8 to 10 times increase in the number of hectares of farmers, respectively, compared to the prior cycle. We have been able to replace some of the lower performing varieties with new materials coming from our US off-season multiplication process, with a total of seven materials now being validated and scaled up. As indicated before, the process is progressing favorably, and we are closely monitoring the adaptation of the different genetic backgrounds to the current universe of growing conditions. A key determinant of our ability to speed up the deployment of HB4 soil. Chinese import approval for HB4 soil is still pending. We are actively engaged with regulators to facilitate the generation of independent in-territory data and supplement our dossier whenever new information is requested. In our assessment, the process is advancing according to precedence. An important aspect of the HP4 seed multiplication process is the data gathering aspect where all sites are actively monitored over 130 different variables with a resolution of some of these variables at the meter square level. Slide 10 provides an overview of our data acquisition process and farm inventory surveillance interface. Taking advantage of the data science possibilities generated by this growing database, we have engaged with Nature Source Improved Plants , a U.S.-Mexican company dedicated to computational breeding, to gain powerful insights regarding the interaction of different environments with the genetics of our materials and eco-seed combinations. Improving the design of our breeding strategies and short-cutting the product development process by more accurately predicting the performance of our products for a given location. Using the operational research approach championed by ENSIP founder Steve Tankley, a pioneer in genome mapping and black molecular breeding, we also aim to significantly improve the return on our R&D dollars dedicated to this process. As recently announced, we will first use these capabilities to fast track our green efforts for HB4E in the United States, where we expect our proprietary drought-tolerant technology to quickly gain a foothold. Incorporating NCIPS computational technologies into the development of HB4Soy and HB4E, will also help us better target a wider range of drought-prone growing regions around the world, as well as bring them to market faster. With that, I will now turn the financial portion of the presentation over to our CFO, Enrique Lopez-Mecure. Enrique?