9/30/2020

speaker
Santiago Donato
Investor Relations Officer, Cresud

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Santiago Donato, Investor Relations Officer of Cresud, and I welcome you to the Fiscal Year 2020 Results Conference Call. First of all, I would like to remind you that both audio and slideshow may be accessed through companies' investor relations website at www.cresud.com.ar by clicking on the banner webcast link. The following presentation and the earnings release are also available for download on the company website. After management remarks, there will be a question and answer session for analysts and investors. If you want to make a question, please click the bottom labeled raise hand. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call is being recorded and that information discussed today may include forward-looking statements regarding the company's financial and operating performance. All projections are subject to risk and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially. Please refer to the detailed note in the company's earnings release regarding forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alejandro Elsztain, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

speaker
Alejandro Elsztain
Chief Executive Officer, Cresud

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our physical year. We are finishing our balance sheet of 2020, June 2020 results. First of all, I hope everyone is safe and well in this We are closing the balance sheet in page number 2 and we can see that the adjusted EBITDA that we are achieving is 33.4 billion pesos. That is a 21% higher than last year's numbers. And something to remark, we can see related to the agriculture, the agribusiness, the adjusted EBITDA for the year is a 31.3% higher to last year numbers adjusted by inflation. We have a very record planted area for the whole story of the group. And this is a 264,000 hectares through the four countries that did risk represent 6.5% higher than last year plantation areas. Related to agribusiness, we can see that the main issues of the balance sheet, we sold 6% of the stake of Brasilagro that represented for us $15.6 million. Apart of that, in the middle of the period, Brasilagro made a merger between Brasilagro and Agrifirma that was a company formed in Brazil to replicate our strategy that finally decided to leave the business and gave us the option of merging through shares. We paid them through shares and we add to our portfolio 29,000 hectares or Farmland in Brazil in the Bahia region. This year we had normal operation in the region because this is an essential activity, so the agribusiness was normal. When we look at the net results of the year, we can compare and we see a gain in this year of 20 billion pesos, comparing to a loss of almost 41 billion pesos last year. And if we go to the net results attributable to controlling company, We see a gain of 3.9 billion pesos, comparing to a loss of last year of almost 27 billion pesos. There were some sales. I will talk later about the sales that were done all in Brasil Agro. The rest of the region didn't sell. 84 million reais in Brasil Agro. In the urban business and investments abroad, we had the shopping malls and hotels. The last quarter suffered a lot. Since 20 of March, we have the COVID-19 that locked down the country and we shut down all the shopping centers and hotels. And so we are going to see the main effect in the last quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year. There was a normal operation in the office segment and in here, not only normal operation, but many sales that we did during this last quarter of last year and the first quarter of this next year. We are analyzing the resolution and evaluating the course of action for the future. We're going to go to more details a little later. So we can move to next page and we can see that in the year we began with a total surface of 731,000 hectares between own and long-term concessions. And we did some small cells. So the four cells done in Brazil are small in hectares. This shows us how small We did in the middle the merge of Agrifirma and the purchase of Serra Grande in May for 4,500 hectares. So we grew in the year. So we had our highest production level selling less than buying. So we grew 4% comparing last year numbers. Talking about the merge with Agrifirma, here we show that there are farms very adjacent to Chaparral and Chateaubriand, two existing farms that we were selling in parts in the past in Chateaubriand. In Chateaubriand, we were selling portion and portion many the last years. In Chaparral, we didn't begin the sales, but this is majority still ours. And we had the chance of merging these assets in that same neighborhood of Bahia that gives us more scale synergies because we don't hire no one to operate this. We have a G&A dilution. We did a merge through net asset value to net asset value considering Brasilagro at 31.5 reais per share. So we issued these shares and with these issuance, Cresud diluted a little because after the merge and after the sale that I explained before, Thank you very much. and the profit is the yellow part of the orange majority of the cell are gains so book value is very low so we see 14 to 34, 7 to 46, 7 to 67, 2 to 19 we can see the total surface of these cells net of the areas is 2.4 thousand hectares of arable land that we sold with huge gains So the total is sales of $19 million with cost of $2 million. This is the kind of internal rate of returns that we're achieving in reales and in dollars, 15% or 20% more in reales and 5% or 15% in dollars. Some of them, because of devaluation in Brazil, affected our internal rate of return in dollar terms. So with that, the company is adding The company in the meantime had the chance of buying another asset called Serra Grande, that is an area for 4.5 thousand hectares, 2.9 to be developed. And from that, we are doing, adding not only new land, but adding rental. This owner gave us 5.7 thousand hectares land of rental for 12 years and an option in the real estate. That's the reason why we did this transaction in Brazil, in the state of Maranhão. So we can move to the next page. And we can see the evolution in the planted area. And we can see that we achieved our record in size, arriving to the 264,000 hectares, main two countries, Argentina and Brazil. after that Bolivia and Paraguay, an increase of 6.5% compared to last year. Soybeans being more than half, 51, corn 24, 11% sugarcane, it's relevant and the investment in sugarcane is very big. So it represents more than the 11 in size of investment. So we see how this year the company had big size in real estate and big size in operation. And the combination of the two we are going to see later made us a very good and a record in operational combining and less important year for the real estate. Small sales, but the two included made us to have a record in the EBITDA too. So we are going to now introduce Mr. Carlos Blusson, who's going to go more to the details.

speaker
Carlos Blusson
Chief Operating Officer, Agribusiness

Thank you, Alejandro. Good evening, everybody. Let's move to the slide number 7, that's farming commodity prices and global stocks. We can see in the graph, in the top right of the graph, the prices keep the low trend. But, after finish the fiscal year, in the last two months, the prices started to increase considerably, about 12-14% in current soybean. The reasons are the following that consider the supply, the production of the crops in South America performed very well in general, generating an increment in the global stocks, and the production in the United States is also coming well. Let's not overlook the fact that the stocks in the United States started to fall down due to an increase on the demand post-pandemic. This is casually related to the fact that agreement with China and United States began to be full fine. Regarding soybean stocks consumption ratio, we can see in the graph a decrease in the world's ratio. This happened due to the demand overcomes the offer, particularly in China before the pandemic. Talking about corn, we see that the corn stock consumption ratio, the world's ratio, increased, especially in the United States, awaiting it to achieve the second record in corn production of about 340 million tons in this campaign. This matched a low in the use of corn for ethanol production affected by the decrease of oil prices in the world because of the pandemic. We appreciate the FOB soybean price. in Brazil continue to be more competitive compared with the United States and Argentina. The reason of the delay, they have two reasons. One is the delay in the agreement to the United States and China was that China's demand was focused in Brazil market. Another reason is the devaluation of the currency in Brazil generated very good prices to the Brazilian farmer sell at good prices. Let's move to the next page, the slide number 8, the good productivity result for campaign 2020. As you can see in the graph, the crop production was a record, obtaining a production... Well, you have a good weather condition and the record planting area. The crop was a record, obtaining a production of 8... 128,000 tons, increasing 2% in relation to the previous year. Related to the good yields, in the line of the budget, we have 6.1 tons for corn and 2.7 tons for soybean. The sugar cane production was also a record, achieving 2.4 million tons, increasing by 12.1% due to the years, very good especially in Brazil. Lastly, the meat production was keep stable, despite the fact that Argentina reduced 20% of the cattle stocks, obtaining profit on the soil as well. Let's move to the next slide, number nine, the COVID-19 agribusiness working as an essential activity. The protocols used by Cresut and these farms, because Cresut is an agribusiness company, is considered essential during the pandemic. We make different protocols. One is security and training protocols, control the farm access, suspension of the visits to the farms, and reduce Transport use and change in the way of teleworking. Move to the next slide. We're talking about meatpacking facility. If you look at the last year, it was a record volume of slaughter canals achieving 116,000 heads. due to the investment to making the plant and the increase the export business. There were 66% more in kilograms and 39% in value, including China's market, as well as the culture business optimization for Israel and the United States market too. The activity generates the first positive EBITDA of $1.5 million after the last five years of losses. Let's move into the agriculture, both companies have agriculture service. The first one is our broker company, Future and Options, continue growing in the local market, ending to the trade terms evolution over to the 5 million terms. A market share of 5.3% in corn, 3% in wheat, and 3.7% in soybean was obtained because it places itself as the leader grain broker in Argentina. Agrofi, our business e-commerce platforms, continues evolving the annual visit to 41 million visits and mostly contacts, 1.2 million contacts, growing year to year more than 100%. The revenue also increased by 43%, being $2.6 million, and we continue to expand it in Latam. Thank you, everybody. I'll hand over to Matias.

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