S&W Seed Company

Good morning, and welcome to the S&W Seed Company fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 financial results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need any assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw a question, please press star, then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Robert Bloom with Lithum Partners. Please go ahead.

All right. Thanks so much, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss the financial results for S&W Seed Company for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022, ended June 30, 2022. With us on the call representing the company today are Mark Wong, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Betsy Horton, Chief Financial Officer. At the conclusion of today's prepared remarks, we'll open the call for a question and answer session. Before we begin with prepared remarks, please note that statements made by the management team of S&W Seed Company during the course of this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended, and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as may, future, plan or planned, will or should, expected, anticipates, draft eventually, or projected. Listeners are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risk that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors and other risks identified in the company's 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2021, and other filings made by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that said, let me turn the call over to Mark Wong, Chief Executive Officer for SMWC's company. Mark, please proceed.

Thank you, Robert, and welcome everyone to the call. As you probably can tell, I've got a bit of a cold, so I apologize for any raspiness there or a cough or two during the presentation today. But I wanted to basically make the presentation myself and be available for all of your questions. So, as I mentioned in the press release, we remain focused on developing key centers of value we outlined in the last quarter, while moving to align our cost structure to support these key centers. As a reminder of what we talked about last quarter, the key centers of value are, first, our U.S. sorghum operations, which includes our lead value driver double team, and our which is our next generation GMO herbicide tolerant resistant trait solution. Next is our international forage business, which encompasses our historically profitable but lower margin alfalfa business, where S&W has a strong customer base and market share. Third, our specialty crops. We are looking to leverage our unique research and development and production capabilities in stevia and camelina. And finally, our U.S. sorghum and alfalfa operations, where we have unique germplasm and valuable research and production facilities. In our opinion, each of these areas has value and must be extracted by the management of S&W to move to profitability. In addition to developing these four key centers of value, we need to align our cost structure and execute on various restructuring steps to drive the business towards profitability. On the cost alignment efforts, we have detailed a plan to remove $5 million from our operating expenses in fiscal 2023. We're implementing several of these steps to achieve our goals. We are closing a joint venture that would combine wheat efforts in Australia with Trigol Genetics, which is a JV between BioSeries Corp Solutions and Floramond Dupree, which is a European wheat breeding company. We anticipate finalizing this deal during the second quarter of 2023. Similarly, as we focus our activities on our key centers of value, we have rationalized our European sunflower operations with approximately a 700,000 cost savings from that operation. We fully recognize that losing tens of millions of dollars per year is not a sustainable business model. We will discuss the actions that should drive the company significantly closer to break even in fiscal 2023. And we are going to give for the first time our shareholders more detail on our EBITDA projections for 2020-23, our current fiscal year. So let me provide a quick update on our key centers of value. Excuse me while I take a drink of water here.