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.
spk04: Greetings and welcome to Levaro's Fiscal First Quarter 2024 Earnings 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tigran Karapetian, Investor Relations for Levaro. Thank you. You may begin.
spk08: Thank you for joining us today on Lavoro's fiscal 2024 first quarter earnings conference call. Our results ended September 2023. On today's call, our chief executive officer, Hui Cunha, and chief financial officer, Julian Garrido. The company has provided a supplemental earnings presentation on its investor relations website at ir.lavoroagro.com that may be helpful in your analysis of the quarterly performance. Before we begin, Please remember that during the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding our future results in operations and financial position, industry and business trends, business strategy and market growth, among others. These statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and involves risk and uncertainties that could materially differ from actual events or those described in these forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's registration statement on Form F1 filed with the SEC on March 23, 2023, or our report on Form 20F, where the period ended June 30, 2023, filed with the SEC today, and our reports filed with the SEC time to time for a detailed discussion of the risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements made today. Please note, On today's call, management will refer to certain non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, among others. While the company believes that these non-IFRS financial measures will provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with the IFRS. Please refer to today's release for reconciliation of non-IFRS financial measures to the most comparable measure prepared in accordance with the IFRS. I'd like to now turn the call over to Rui Cunha, CEO.
spk01: Thank you, Tigran. I'll begin by touching upon the overall business landscape and the broader economic context after which Julian will delve into our financial highlights. And then I will return for some concluding remarks. So on our last quarter, for our first quarter, 2024 ended in September, Laboro delivered revenues of 483 million U.S. dollars, up 11% year over year, and up 3% in current local terms. Adjusted EBITDA was $11 million, declining 75% over the previous year quarter. Our revenue grew in the quarter in spite of the intense industry-wide deflationary pressures felt across major product categories. A strong volume growth led to market share gains, as well as currency tailwinds and growth in grains revenues more than offset the 40% to 50% average price declines in crop protection and fertilizer in Brazil. These deflationary pressures were a headwind to our profitability, in particular to ag retail in Brazil segments, where gross margins contracted by 10.7%, compared to previous year, to reach 8.7%. It translated to laborious adjusted EBITDA margins compressed to 2.3%. Let me take a moment to update you on the market environment. Since our last update, we saw an emergence of a disruptive El Nino phenomenon in Brazil. Severe drought conditions in many producing states, including Mato Grosso, have caused delays in planting, on this soybean crop and created challenges for the next crop as well. We now expect this to adversely impact the second corn crop with reduced planted acres, as well as seeing a portion of farmers opt for medium-tech corn seeds over high-tech alternatives, as well as curtail investment in specialty inputs such as biological solutions. We anticipate this impact to our second and third quarter results, both in Brazil, ag retail segment, as well as crop care segment. Next, let me provide you with some brief updates on our distribution margins recovery. In our last earnings call, we briefly expanded on the effects that ag input price variations have on our distribution margins. As a reminder, we explained that as a markup business, we are relatively agnostic to absolute price levels of input over time so long as they remain relatively stable. When prices are in uptrend or downward trend, our distribution margins are temporarily impacted given the three to four months inventory days causing the delay between COGS and average sales price adjusting. I refer to this as temporary given the fact that this trend eventually dissipates. Naturally, inventory turnover causes the inventory cogs to catch up to sales price and distribution margins revert to normalize to their normal average. So this, in a sense, what occurs is a normal environment when our margins are relatively stable. What is unusual about the last 12 months in Brazil is that the sheer steepness of the deflationary trend with crop protection and fertilizer prices declining 40% to 60% year-over-year over multiple quarters is a pressure that the agritale industry has not experienced since 2014. While our distribution margins for fertilizer and crop protection have indeed been gradually recovering, the pace of the improvement thus far has been below what we have expected. The destocking of excess agrochemical inventories is taking longer than expected. With all that said, we're updating our financial guidance to reflect the unanticipated impact of El Niño, as well as the slower recovering distribution margins. We're now forecasting adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $80 to $110 million, while our guidance for revenues remains unchanged. With that, let me turn to Julien for some details on our financials.
spk00: Thanks, Rui. I'll begin by covering our consolidated financial results for the fiscal first quarter, 2024. which ended on September 30th, 2023. In providing additional details regarding our revised two-year fiscal 2024 guidance, let me start with the first quarter. Considered revenue rose by 11% to $482 million, as we have mentioned. In constant currency terms, the revenue increase was 3%. The increase revenue increased 5%, with volume growth more than of certain price declines. Grains, ready, increased 109%, driven by a greater desire by our customers for entering larger transactions. Looking at revenue by segment, Brazil retail saw revenue increasing by 15%, reflecting the improved sales volumes of crop protection, fertilizers, and specialty product categories, which increased 54, 53, and 33% respectively. With more than offset the decline in average sales price that we elaborated on before, a lot of gains shared in the quarter, driven by good execution for our local commercial teams. The contribution from recently acquired in the south of Brazil contributed roughly 2% to the overall revenue growth for the segment. Now, talking about the Latin retail revenue, it increased by 1%, 9% in Colombian peso terms relative to the prior quarter, landing at 66.3 million. The decline was probably driven by the pricing headwinds to fertilizers, as well as supply shortages of corn feeds from our key supplier, which resulted in loss, revenue opportunity amounting to just over $2 million for the quarter. Actions have already been put in place to add new suppliers to mitigate impact for the rest of the year. In addition, our Latin business continues to suffer from the impact of the rupture of supply of Paracrac, the top-leading herbicide in Colombia, from our key supplier. The year-over-year headwind from periclads amounted to just over $2 million and a quarter, and is expected to continue impacting the results for the next two quarters. Crop care revenue decreased by 1% to $35.7 million, due to a sharp decline in revenue for per terra due to price declines in agrochemicals. As a reminder, per terra is the crop care subsidiary that imports off-pad and agrochemicals from Asia. with Lavodas Brazil retail as the customer. An additional detractor in the quarter was Agrobiologica, which faced headwinds from delays in harvest purchasing, sorry, decisions making, which pushed revenue out to future quarters. Upsetting the year over impact of this was the new M&A contribution from Chromoquimica, a manufacturer of just acquired in Q4, as well as double-digit growth for Union Agro, our specialty fertilizer manufacturing subsidiary. Consolidated gross profit for the quarter decreased by 34 to 59.5 million, gross margin contracted by 50 base points to 12.3%. The main driver was the steep price decline in crop protection of fertilizers in our Brazil agricultural retail segment, dictated by Rui. Left-hand, agricultural retail size gross margin declined by 50 base points to 13.8%, as we have mentioned, driven by the compression in crop protection distribution margin, as well as a negative product category net shift. This higher margin seed distribution was hampered by previously mentioned product shortage. Crop-care gross margin retreated by 3.3% to 43.3%, driven by a lower margin at per-terra, as we mentioned, due to agrochemical price declines, and negative product mix shift at unit agro, while our higher-margin foliar fertilizer product faced time shift from delayed farmer decision-making. These effects were partially offset by the financial contribution from the newly acquired Chromokinica, which boosts gross margins more than the crop care average as we expected. Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 was $11.1 million down $32.9 million from the prior year quarter, while your adjusted EBITDA margin contracted 7.9% to 2.3%. chiefly driven by the impact of gross margin compression decayed above. Now, SG&A to sales ratio remained constant at 11.9% of sales. Yes, higher consulting and legal expense related to La Verda's public company expenses, as well as increasing allowance for expected credit losses due to the impact of El Nino on our expected foreign car payment schedules were offsets by new initiatives charging low overhead expenses. All three operation segments are negative year-over-year change in adjusted EBITDA as well as adjusted EBITDA margin. No recurring expenses excluded from adjusted EBITDA increased by 5.4 million to 8.5 million in Q1-24. Due to, number one, M&A accounting and tax due diligence expenses, 2.9 million, which includes a one-time deal break fee related to NS Agro resulting from suspending our plans to acquire them. Second, the provision of the second half of the D-SPAC bonus to employees that will be paid in Q3 2024, $1.3 million. And last, related party consultancy services expenses recognized as no recurring 2.3 and the increase of 1.2 million amortization of the fair value of inventories owned from acquired companies, which relates to purchase account. Having said that, I'll pass the ball back to Rui.
spk01: Thank you, Julian. And now I'll move to my concluding remarks. Guys, we're living in a very unusual situation in the global white markets, but particularly in Brazil. Even though grain prices and ag input price adjustments are normal and expected, the intensity of some of those movements was not seen in the last decade, given the high inventory levels carried by retailers. On top of that, we had the severe impact from El Nino that created additional challenges to farmers. In this context, Lavorre is acting to mitigate short-term impacts in our results, And at the same time, we're positioned the company to capitalize on the expected market recovery. Lavoro has gained market share in the first quarter and hired new experienced RTVs that can bring potential new sales of more than $100 million for the next fiscal year. The market scenario is temporary and will improve as the secular trends and strong fundamentals of Latin agriculture have not changed. When this occurs, Lavoro will be in an even better position to deliver strong results and further consolidate our leadership position.
spk03: And with that, I return to questions.
spk04: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. Our first question comes from the line of Bobby Burleson with Canaccord. Please proceed with your question.
spk05: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. So I guess maybe just starting with the share gain efforts that you highlighted. This is a tough market, obviously, in Brazil, but you guys are working to kind of accelerate those share gains. I'm curious your position in the market versus other players and how that might advantage you in some ways and maybe just expand on the efforts underway to drive share gain.
spk01: Hi, Bobby. Thanks for the question. Yeah, absolutely. We're actually accelerating our share gains through some actions that includes, as I mentioned, the hiring of experienced sales consultants that in this more challenging scenario, they see the opportunity of joining a company that is more solid and with higher growth perspective. So we have been very successful in attracting new RTVs as well as we have been achieving a very low level of attrition between our current RTVs. So I think this is a first key component of that. In addition to this, we have been very successful in also Preparing our logistics to deliver products to clients and to take orders in the last minute as farmers were not taking the same approach as previous years of placing orders in advance. So we've managed to present the very strong volume growth that Juliane has mentioned by being better prepared to supply these last-minute orders, and we plan to continue doing so. So I think there's a combination of factors, but in the end, it's related to our strong position to serve this market.
spk05: Okay, great. And then just quickly on the comparison to 2014, I guess this is the worst environment we've seen since. And I'm wondering maybe just contrast the way things unfolded in terms of a recovery from 2014 versus the way things are positioned to recover, in your opinion, from this current situation.
spk01: Yeah, I think the difference between the current scenario and 2014 is that first the magnitude of the changes in prices were not even that close. So we have a higher intensity of price changes in this time, particularly in the fertilizers and herbicides. And I think another point that is important is that the inventory on the retail channel is at much higher levels this time because retailers were preparing for a shortage of products. So what may be different this time is the pace at which the retail comes back to normal inventory levels and the situation of the overall market normalize. So it will be a slower recovery this time and definitely slower than what we have anticipated. We see early signs of improvement. So we see improvements in the level of inventories, we see farmers
spk08: already uh planning for the next uh crops but uh i think the timing will be longer this time okay super helpful and bobby if i may if i may just add a couple of points i think just contrasting 2014 and and and this cycle this cycle you you had a effectively a a number of unrelated whether geopolitical or pandemic-related events occur, and El Nino being the latest one, that were not really related to the market, to the supply and demand for these products, just hit all at the same time. You know, 2014, the decline then was driven by kind of the hangover from the ethanol mandate in the U.S., you know, so it was more of a supply and demand question. Here, as far as inputs are concerned, it's sort of reverting to the mean after the post-pandemic shock to the system. Now, a couple of things that are different is that as far as Brazilian farmers are concerned, they're in excellent shape. In fact, even despite these headwinds, their margins are still double digits. And, you know, they will see a recovery next year once a lot of these trends dissipate and normalize. So that's a couple of things just for you to think about as you compare those two cycles.
spk05: Okay.
spk03: Thanks, Tigran. Thanks, Sui. I'll jump back in the queue. Thank you. As a reminder, it is Star 1.
spk04: If you'd like to ask a question, our next question comes from the line of,
spk03: Ben Thurer with Barclays, please proceed with your question. Ben, your line is live. You have your line on mute. Our next question comes from the line of Vincent Anderson with Stiefel.
spk04: Please proceed with your question.
spk02: Yeah, thanks. Good evening, guys. So I just wanted to dig into the biologicals component of the guidance. I know you're starting up new capacity, so maybe there's some fixed cost absorption there that you're not getting in this revised guidance. But maybe beyond that, can you talk about the revised expectations between repeat customers that are not buying versus just pace of adoption being slower in this market environment?
spk01: Vincent, I think I can start and then the rest can complement you. So first thing, the short-term impact on the biological solution is related to the fact that farmers are more skeptical to invest now in the corn crop. So we have lower expected margins for the second crop. And we have also a shorter time window for this crop as the soy crop got delayed. So we get higher risks for them to invest. So I think the level of adoption of biological solutions in the corn crop this time will be lower than in the previous year. So this is what is reflected in our guidance. I don't think this is, again, it's not a structural change, but it's something that will affect the next corn crop. Regarding our new facility, we have the facility ready. We will not initiate production on the new facility until August. So we will most likely postpone some of the additional costs related to initiating this operation and we expect the market to normalize and then we will eventually accelerate again so I think it's a it's a temporary thing that will face over the next months it's helpful thanks and then just maybe going back to guidance as a whole just to help frame your decision-making process I like the drought obviously has been developing for a couple months now and
spk02: internationally fertilizer prices have been falling for a while now so I'm trying to just understand where the tipping point was in terms of your expectations on the year and you know is it just as simple as you had to make volume commitments before you were certain corn would be delayed or is there something else that I'm missing?
spk01: So I think compared to our last discussion, some of the things that have changed. First is the fact that we expect some of the margins on the inputs to be improving and end prices, not prices from suppliers to retailers, but end prices to farmers to be recovering faster. One thing that we observed is that given the competitive scenario in the market, we continue to see prices at very low and unusual levels from retailers to farmers. Another thing that has caused this concern is what Tigran has just mentioned on the climate events, particularly the El Niño implications. And we saw the situation getting worse as both the soil crop was affected in terms of replanting. So farmers were planting and then they had eventually to replant some of the soil. And also the shrinkage of time, window time for the safrinha. So I think those were the the main changes and so basically the markets we continue to believe that the markets will recover and the challenges are temporary but the pace is just different based on what I just described okay that's helpful and then maybe just one last one on kind of just Brazil in general because the US doesn't have two growing seasons so I don't have a good comparison but
spk02: You know, is the Brazilian farmer, is there an opportunity right now for a Brazilian farmer who's looking at a very difficult safrinha corn environment to then sell them more product to maximize soybean yields or have most of the opportunities to do kind of in-season adjustments to things like nutrient levels or biologicals? Has that window largely passed?
spk08: Vincent, the way to think about it is the reason why the delayed planting and harvesting of soybean is impacting Safrina, which may not be super obvious at first, but it's effectively, there's a window when, you know, you start planting the Safrina typically early to mid-Feb all the way to early March. And the reason why you want to plant then is because of the more drought-like, potential for drought-like conditions in Brazil in general. kick in in April, May, and you don't want your seedlings to be in the growth phases when those things happen. And so what happens when you have a delayed planting for the Safrina is you increase the risk. The farmer has a higher risk of facing yield challenges. And therefore, what they're doing is either they're doing what they did last year, so they they keep planting exactly like they did last year, or they're downgrading technology in terms of medium technology for the seed, or they are shifting their crop type to, you know, other types, whether it's beans or sorghum or other types. And those obviously also have potential for, you know, demand for agrochemicals. But, you know, from our standpoint, what's impacting us more so is the corn seed business for us. which is a higher margin in agrochemicals and fertilizers.
spk02: Right. Yeah, what I was getting at is a farmer facing that likelihood. Does it change their purchasing behaviors on the soy that's already in the ground? But it sounds like the impact of corn just outweighs any opportunity for incremental sales into the current soybean crop that is causing the delay.
spk03: Yeah, that's probably a good assumption. Okay. All right. Well, thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Wright with Roth.
spk04: Please proceed with your question.
spk07: Thanks. Good afternoon. I wanted to give a little bit of how to think about the issue between a medium tech seed environment for Safarina versus your kind of view for planted Hector. how to think about the relevant impact or the magnitude of the impact on each of those on your outlook?
spk03: I would say it's a couple of things.
spk08: A part of it is the downgrading. A part of it is just less acres. We went from, I think, early November, Conabo's And some of the consultancies were forecasting acres to be anywhere between minus two to plus five. I think now the consensus is more like anywhere between minus 10 and minus three. So it's sort of shifted. And it's also impacting our crop care business in the sense that our biologicals, Agrobiologica does sell bio-insecticides for the corn for certain insects. And we expect that to be a headwind as a result of what's going on. The reality is there's still a couple of weeks left. And so we took, I would say, an approach of not guessing and sort of taking what we thought was a scenario that's likely rather than wait. There's chances that the acres actually end up being better than we expect. You know, we didn't want to take a chance.
spk07: Okay, so it sounds like you're kind of thinking more along, like, did this outlook is kind of more predicated on a minus 10 on the acres than the minus three, or is that the range you're kind of thinking as far as, you know, what you're predicating things on?
spk01: Brian, I think more important than the reduction in acreage here is the assumption behind the level of technification that farmers will want to apply in the corn crop. And this is actually more impactful to the overall retail results. We basically believe that they may be trading down some seeds in the sense that, you know, using lower technology seeds and also lower application of biological solutions. It's not as much as the reduction in area that Stigler mentioned. There's still not, you know, a consensus in this market, but I think there's an overall consensus that farmers will be more cautious this year with those types of technology investments.
spk07: Okay, no, no, thank you. If I could ask one more just on, you know, the press releases talked about, you know, ways to go on the de-stocking and just like how the way, and you also mentioned the fertilizer, but just maybe how to think about relative impact. Is it more fertilizer, more crop protection on the de-stocking or like to just help us, you know, figure out you know, the relative importance of those.
spk01: The crop protection is the most important category in the stocking process now. So I think fertilizers, they had an impact, but looking forward, the most important category to be looking at is the level of the stocking of herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. So this is what we expect to see in normalization over the next months.
spk07: Okay. And I just want to make sure I read, so I'm recalling the press release correctly, that the thought process is... the by the end of march kind of time frame is is the kind of view on the the you know substantially complete on the on the destocking or is that a fair characterization or brian i think it's it's it's hard to say i mean uh certainly that some of the data that we've been hearing from consultancies that run surveys
spk08: suggest that as of December, we're probably two-thirds along the way. But to be quite honest, the data is really hard to get and we'll really see it when we see prices at the farm gate, as you mentioned, start to recover. And then that will be really the real leading indicator. And we've yet to see a meaningful, you know, reversal or uptrend. You know, it's sort of been bouncing around in kind of in a range bound way. SKU by SKU is different, but generally speaking, it's sort of stabilizing. It's been bouncing around for the last couple of months.
spk03: Okay. Thank you so much. Our last question comes from the line of Ben Thur with Barclays. Please proceed with your question. Ben, your line is live. Okay. Does this work? Can you hear me? Hello?
spk04: Now we can hear you.
spk06: Oh, finally. We got this done. Technology. First of all, thank you very much for squeezing in at the end. um have a few technical issues so uh two things i wanted to ask so first of all as you look into it i mean obviously the data we just got is uh ending september and and we're late january but as we think about the whole ag chem de-stocking that's that's been an issue in brazil and all this high inventory we've talked about so What's kind of like your best guess with that softened outlook that we're going to get through this? Is that still going to last one, two, or even more quarters than that? So anything that you have from off-the-ground information, that would be my very first question. I'm not sure if you've answered this already, but I got lost, so hopefully you can help me out on that, and thank you very much for that.
spk01: Ben, I think we mentioned that right now it's hard to predict. What I can say is that we have some leading indicators that show that the level of inventory is improving. So when you compare the levels of inventory of retailers in January last year to December last year, we saw a decline back, you know, towards, I would say, more normal levels. The thing is that it's hard to predict if the normalization is going to occur between three months or six months. I think right now we're going to have to see the development of safrinha as well as farmers' intentions on starting the new season, whether it's going to be delayed or if they're going to advance some of their purchases. So I would say we should see at least more three months of this process of stocking it by what the local consultants say, with the possibility of extending a couple of months more.
spk06: Okay, perfect. And then just for understanding reasons, because it's been a while that we had the aluminum, and you've mentioned it as having had an impact. If that were to last for a little longer in a similar situation as we had La Nina for a couple of years prevailing, if we were to assume a similar scenario, can you kind of frame or help us understand what the market dynamics would be and how that would impact your business just from like a historic context, how it used to be in the past and how we should think about the impact go forward under the assumption that El Nino is going to last?
spk08: Yeah, I mean, Ben, always difficult to predict climatic events, but I would say relative to the historical data, this has been a particularly severe El Niño. Just to give you one indicator, the percentage of soybeans that had to be replanted in Brazil, so basically they had to scrap and then replant it altogether, was between 5% and 6%, which is four times to five times higher than normal. I mean, that's a fairly large area. obviously that's you know another very atypical thing to add to the series of atypical things happening this year but you know I can't we can't obviously predict what's going to happen next year with the El Nino but I would say relative to historical El Nino this one has definitely been on the severe side perfect well thank you very much and good luck for the year
spk03: That concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to hand Nicole back to management for closing remarks.
spk01: So I think we covered most of the topics already. Maybe the last comment from my side is, I mean, it became very clear all the challenges, but we're also, I think it's important to say that this crisis is also an opportunity for La Voda to further consolidate its leadership position. The company solid fundamentals will actually act in our favor. So this moment is a good moment for us to continue expanding market share, we'll continue to invest in the acquisition of new clients, and we expect to bring some news for the next quarters based on our continuing investments in the market. Thank you all for participating, and I will be all available for further questions if need. Thank you.
spk04: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.
Disclaimer