Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. And welcome to Murong BioInnovations conference call, fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After this week's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press the star, then the one key on your touch-tone telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require operator assistance, please press star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker host, Linda Moore, General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Welcome to the 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call for Morone BioInnovations. Our presenters today are CEO Kevin Helash and Interim CFO LaDawn Johnson. They will be joined by Mattie Tannen, Senior Vice President for International Sales, and Kamal El-Mernissi, Senior Director of Product Marketing for the Q&A session at the end of the call. If you would please refer to slide two, I would like to remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding management's future expectations, plans, projections, forecasts, and prospects. Certain material assumptions were applied in reaching these conclusions and making these statements. Therefore, actual results could differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause differences are contained in the reports filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. including under the heading Risk Factors, MD&A, and elsewhere in the company's annual report, quarterly report, and other filings. The company expressly disclaims any obligation to revise or update any guidance or other forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call. After our remarks, we will hold a question and answer session. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Kevin Helash. Kevin?

Thank you, Linda, and thanks to everyone joining us on the call. We'd like to cover several items with you today. I'll start with a high-level review of 2021 at an outlook for 2022, while Adan will go into more specifics on Q4 and the 2021 financial results. I'll wrap the call up with a few comments on our definitive agreement to combine with BioSeries, which we announced on March 16th. If you would turn to slide three. Our strong end to the 2021 fiscal year contributed to our 15.5% Avenue revenue growth in line with our prior forecast. Our fourth quarter results were driven by solid demand from our customers who are looking to secure supplies and lock in prices in the face of tight inventories and rising costs throughout the agricultural supply chain. Gross margins exceeded our expectations and we're extremely pleased to report our first full year with margins above 60%. This result speaks to the improvements in our product mix and to manufacturing efficiencies at our Michigan plant as well as to the capability of the entire team to manage our business in a dynamic environment. We made excellent progress towards our goal of attaining adjusted EBITDA breakeven this year with a loss of $8.7 million in 2021 as compared to a loss of $11 million in 2020. LaDawn will speak in more detail about our operating expenses, but I would note that in 2020, this line item benefited by $1.4 million from the forgiveness of the PPP loan. If we take this into account, adjusted EBITDA improved by more than 30% year over year. As evidenced by our results, the combination of top-line growth and disciplined spending continued to move the needle in the right direction. With the first quarter nearly in hand, we have a good line of sight on how we expect the first half of 2022 to unfold. We anticipate revenue growth for the first half will significantly outpace our performance in the first half of 2021. Furthermore, as is customary for MBI, we expect sales in the second quarter will exceed those in the first quarter. Higher demand for our insecticides and nematicides in row crops in the first quarter is expected to offset headwinds from continuing drought conditions in the western United States, and we were particularly encouraged by the second quarter forecast for our products in Latin America through our partnership with Rhizobacter. Turning to our supply, we have put contingency plans in place given the uncertainty surrounding the heartbreaking situation in Ukraine. We manufacture a number of our pro-farm products through a minority ownership in a third-party facility in Russia. We have activated plans to move approximately two-year supply of seed treatments and one year supply of foliar product out of this facility by the end of the second quarter. Obviously, the agricultural outlook in Ukraine is highly fluid and difficult to predict, and we will continue to monitor the situation closely. In summary, we ended 2021 and are starting 2022 with a number of positive developments that set the stage for future growth. We've recently announced two significant distribution agreements with Corteva, one for foliar products to support plant health and one related to the further global expansion of our seed treatment collaboration. Both are major commitments by a leading player in agriculture to the value of our biological solutions. Of course, our most notable announcement in the last two weeks has been our entry into a definitive merger agreement with BioSeries. We believe our proposed combination will provide the commercial diversity and financial wherewithal to allow MBI to deliver on its full growth potential, and I'll cover the merger in more detail in my closing remarks. Let me turn the call to LaDawn now to discuss a few more financial items of note. As we announced previously, LaDawn joined us in February as interim CFO, and he has immediately made positive, meaningful contributions to the company. LaDawn?