Village Farms International, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Village Farms International's fourth quarter and year-end 2024 financial results conference call. This morning, Village Farms issued a news release reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter and year-ended December 31st, 2024. That news release, along with the company's financial statements, are available on the company's website at villagefarms.com under the Investors heading. Please note that today's call is being broadcast live over the internet and will be archived for replay both by telephone and via the internet beginning approximately one hour following the completion of the call. Details of how to access the replays are available in the company's news release. Before we begin, let me remind you that forward-looking statements may be made today during or after the formal part of this conference call. Certain material assumptions were applied in providing these statements, many of which are beyond our control. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements. A summary of these underlying assumptions, risks, and uncertainties are contained in the company's various securities filings with the SEC and Canadian regulators, including its form 10-K MD&A for the year ended December 31st, 2024, which will be available on EDGAR and CDAR+. These forward-looking statements are made as of today's date and accept as required by applicable securities law. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any such statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Michael DiGiglio, Chief Executive Officer of Village Farms International. Please go ahead, Mr. DiGiglio.

Thank you, Tanya. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. With me are Steve Graffini, our Chief Financial Officer, and Gillian Lefevre, Chief Operating Officer. Today we have Orville Bovenchin, President of Canadian Cannabis, and Patty Smith, our Corporate Controller, as well as Sam Gibbons, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs. Let me begin with a summary of highlights from today's results before I pass the call on to Steve for a more detailed review of the financials. Excluding the inventory impairment disclosed in this morning's press release, we had one of our strongest quarters of performance over the past four years. which gives us great confidence that we have good momentum behind us as we are continuing to execute our profitable growth strategy in 2025. As a reminder, all currency figures referenced in today's call are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Total fourth quarter revenues of $83 million increased 11% year-over-year, and full-year revenues increased 18% year-over-year to $336 million. Total net sales in Canadian cannabis for 2024 grew 31%, with all of our growth generated organically without acquisitions, and retail branded sales were up 23%. Over the past three years, we have organically grown our Canadian cannabis business into a perennial market share leader in a highly competitive market and one of the only operators with a track record of positive cash flow from operations. We have been successful in our efforts to achieve a defensible leadership position in Canadian cannabis before expanding to other markets. And over the past couple of quarters, we have begun to focus more energy toward our international strategy, prioritizing profitable sales growth over competing for low margin business to drive volume and market share here in Canada. Current dynamics in the value end of the supply chain in Canada and impacts of key account spend to maintain shelf space with retailers are not sustainable for the industry. We have made some conscious decisions recently to move away from lower tier categories that no longer align with our longer term global strategic objectives. And these decisions were reflected in the market share trends in the fourth quarter. However, I would also like to make it clear that the out of stock strain impacts that we discussed on last year's conference call have been resolved as we anticipated they would be, and we did begin to recover some share at the end of the year and in the first few months of 2025, as these strains begin making their way back onto shelves. We have made incremental share gains in dried flour for the past four months in Ontario, and since December, our national share of the dried flour category has gained 120 basis points. Even though we are prioritizing profitable sales growth over low margin volume in Canada, we remain one of the top three producers, holding the number three market share position overall in Canada. We were the second fastest growing LP organically during 2024 and held the number two position in both Ontario and Quebec. We also further expanded our number one national market share position in dried flour, and moved into the number two national share position in the pre-roll category for 2024. All of this success has been achieved organically without M&A activity, which is a rarity in Canada and an incredible testament to the hard work and dedication of our team who continues to drive our Canadian cannabis business forward with product offerings consumers love. I would like to congratulate our entire Canadian cannabis team on these great achievements. Improvements in market share in the early months of 2025 have coincided with our recent launch of our Super Toast all-in-one vapes, which we launched in December and have quickly become the number six ranked vape offerings nationally and number two in Ontario over the past three months. This strong market share capture highlights the quality and consumer trust we have built with our Super Toast brand. As we mentioned last quarter, we are in the process of of moving our extraction and vape manufacturing capabilities in-house in 2025, as we believe there are opportunities for us to capture profitable market share in these categories with new product offerings. I will note that the fourth quarter performance was impacted by our decision to take a $10.5 million non-cash write-down of non-flour manufactured inventory in Canadian cannabis. This product was purchased primarily from third parties for vape and manufactured products, and they simply did not meet our quality standards. We felt that selling suboptimal vape products and related inventory into the market around the same time we are bringing extraction and vape manufacturing back in-house would have been detrimental to our brands and future product launches. This write-down only enables our sales team to focus strictly on quality and profitability with a healthy inventory position in 2025. If we exclude the inventory write-down, it was one of our best quarters for both Canadian cannabis and our entire business on a consolidated basis in several years, as we generated positive adjusted EBITDA in each of our Canadian cannabis and U.S. cannabis and fresh produce businesses. Including this impact, gross margin for our Canadian cannabis business would have moved back into our 30% to 40% target range and adjusted EBITDA net income with the highest in the last four years. We're also making steady progress on our international cannabis strategy, which generates higher margins with no excise tax. Q4 exports to international medical markets were up 113% year over year, driven largely by increased sales in Germany as that market continues to experience exponential growth as well as continued volume increases in both Australia and the UK. Subsequent to the quarter end, we added our fifth international medical market with our first shipments from our BC operations to New Zealand. Our Pink Kush strain, the top-selling dried flower strain over the past four years in Canada, is now available to patients in New Zealand via established distributor Medley Therapeutics under its Bloom brand. The New Zealand... Medical cannabis market is forecasted to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 58% over the next five years. International cannabis sales for the year increased to Canadian 8.4 million and momentum has continued into 2025 with strong year-over-year international sales growth in both January and February. Combined with a very strong pipeline of potential new customers and markets, we are confident that we will be able to at least triple our international medicinal export sales in 2025. Outside of our medicinal export sales international markets, our other international opportunity, of course, is in the recreational market in the Netherlands, where our Lely Holland subsidiary has one of 10 licenses to supply recreational cannabis to coffee shops. With a long-established culture of cannabis consumption, zero restrictions on vertical integration, and a considerably more favorable pricing environment than Canada. We believe the Dutch market represents one of the most attractive cannabis investments globally and for us. In December, we completed our first harvest at our first facility in Drockton on schedule and commenced sales as expected in February. We couldn't be happier with the yields and quality of the product coming out of the new facility. And initial feedback from the coffee shops we are selling is that our product is head and shoulders above expectations. And importantly, pricing and margins are right in line with our forecast. With such a great start of Lely, we are pleased to announce today that we have broken ground on phase two, our phase two cultivation facility in the town of Groningen that will quadruple our annual production capabilities. Our phase two facility is expected to be planted out sometime in the fourth quarter of this year and will be a brand new state of the art indoor facility. We are very excited about this new location which already has a six megawatts of power supply that will more than support our needs and give us a competitive advantage in market as it is our belief that other operators may face power constraints in the future. Moving on to results from our fresh produce business, we continue to benefit from our steady progress implementing new cultivation technologies, including AI and machine automation, to drive operation improvements and efficiencies. Performance in the fresh produce included $3.5 million of other income in Q4 related to vendor settlements associated with the partial recovery of previous operational losses from the tomato brown ragose virus that we experienced. This impact contributed to adjusted EBITDA of $4.1 million and net income of approximately $2 million in the fourth quarter. Our U.S. cannabis business also delivered a quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, along with our clean energy business, which ended the year on pace to deliver approximately $2 million in net income to our consolidated results in 2025. In summary, despite the Q4 inventory impairment, we are pleased with our fourth quarter and full year results, and we believe we are well positioned to execute on the many growth opportunities we see in front of us to deliver a successful year of profitable growth in 2025 and beyond. In addition to our phase two expansion at Lely Holland, we are also in the process of optimizing our Canadian cannabis resources to improve operational efficiencies between our pure sun farms and rose subsidiaries and align our business with more profitable growth opportunities. These efforts are nearing completion at the end of Q1, and we expect them to result in lower costs and improved productivity, efficiency, and profitability moving forward. Before I turn the call over to Steve, I would like to spend a few moments discussing the proposed Canadian and Mexican tariffs, which for now have been delayed until April 2nd. Let me provide some perspective on how we plan to manage any tariff impacts and what we think this could mean for the business. As always, we will focus on controlling what is in our control. Approximately 60% of our 2024 fresh proto-sales in the US were imported either from our own facilities in Canada or our third-party growing partners in Mexico and Canada. If tariffs do go into effect, we intend to relocate resources to fulfill as much of our demand as possible from our Texas greenhouse operations. And we do expect significantly increased demand for U.S. grown produce and higher market pricing in an environment of prolonged tariffs. For any of our demand that needs to be addressed with imports, ironically, the tight margins in our produce business resulting from Mexican competition under the previous free trade agreements means we have no choice but to pass on the 25% tariffs to our customers. I will also note that 2025 sales from our Canadian operations began in early April as those facilities come into their season. We are also working with our third-party supplier relationships in Mexico regarding the tariffs. Notwithstanding the short-term impact, we remain confident that as one of the largest and longest operating greenhouse produce companies in North America, coupled with our strong retail relationships, we have a significant advantage and an integral role to play in the evolution of the produce industry. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve to review the finances before I make some last closing remarks.

Thanks, Mike. Starting with our consolidated results, as Mike noted, excluding inventory impairment in Canadian cannabis at year-end, Q4 was one of our strongest quarters in recent years. Total sales grew 11% year-over-year to $82.6 million with strong top-line growth in both Canadian cannabis and fresh produce. Net loss improved to $8.6 million or $0.08 per share from $22.5 million last year. The $8.6 million for Q4 this year includes the $10.5 million Canadian cannabis write-down. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was negative $3.5 million. If one were to exclude our fourth quarter inventory write down, we would have reported adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of $7 million. Our best results in four years and our full year adjusted EBITDA would have been $12.2 million. I will now turn to the business segments individually starting with fresh produce. Q4 Sales increased 17% year-over-year to $43.3 million. Growth was driven by higher volumes from both our own production and that of our partners. We can see the positive impact of our success around yield expansion and cost efficiencies in our gross margin for the quarter, which improved nearly 60% from Q4 last year. Adjusted EBITDA was positive $4.1 million compared with negative $600,000 last year, and net income was positive $1.9 million. Both include the $3.5 million of other income, which is the result of the recovery of prior period brown regrowth losses. Moving to Canadian cannabis, which I will discuss in Canadian dollars, net sales were up 10% year over year, driven mainly by non-branded sales and international sales. As Mike mentioned, we benefited from the continued momentum in our international medicinal exports, which were up 127% from Q4 last year on the Canadian dollar basis or 113% on the U.S. dollar basis. Non-branded sales were up 20% year-over-year to $9.5 million as we continued to be opportunistic where possible to align supply with demand. Retail branded sales were essentially in line with Q4 of last year at Canadian $35.1 million. Excluding our inventory impairment, Canadian cannabis gross margin was 33%, up from 23% in Q4 last year, well within our target range of 30% to 40%, and demonstrating positive impacts of our recent decisions to move away from lower margin business. SG&A expense as percentage of sales for Q4 was 22%, compared with 21% in Q4 last year. Q4 adjusted EBITDA for Canadian Canvas was negative 9.1 million as a result of the inventory impairment. Excluding the impairment, adjusted EBITDA was positive 5.9 million, which compared to last year was more than double. Finally, as we continue to report quarter after quarter, I will highlight that in Q4 we paid excise taxes on retail branded sales of 44.1 million. I mean, $44.8 million, which includes excise taxes paid for both the third and fourth quarters. This brought the total excise tax we paid in 2024 to just shy of $100 million. For perspective, that is more than double our SG&A. Any forward Canadian excise tax reform would be a welcome change given that Canadian cannabis excise taxes are one of our largest single expenses. Turning to our U.S. cannabis business, On our Q4 call, I noted that we have stabilized the business within the regulatory headwinds, and we're working on a number of initiatives in 2025 to reinvigorate sales of our responsible GMP-produced natural hemp products, and we continue to manage our costs. Although Q4 sales continue to be impacted by the state's attempts to deal with unregulated products by restricting all intoxicating hemp-based products, we saw a 17% increase sequentially to US $4.6 million in revenues, with a healthy gross margin of 70%, and adjusted EBITDA moved back into positive territory at $300,000. Finally, clean energy generated $400,000 in net income with royalty payments we are now receiving from our energy partner, providing a healthy stream of incremental profits for the company. As Mike mentioned, we believe VF Clean Energy is on track to deliver approximately $2 million in net income to the consolidated company in 2025. Turning to consolidated cash flows in the balance sheet, total cash flow from operations for the full year was $10.5 million, with $400,000 in Q4, reflecting our third consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow. I should also reiterate that the fourth quarter cash flow from operations in Canadian cannabis was negatively impacted by the timing of the Q3 excise taxes, payments of Canadian $24.1 million, which occurred during the fourth quarter, in addition to the Q4 excise taxes of $20.7 million, which were paid at year end. The timing of the Q3 tax payments falling in Q4 was due to a national holiday, which negatively impacted the cash flow from operations during the fourth quarter. We ended Q4 with cash of $24.6 million and a working capital of $53.8 million. Total term debt at the end of Q4 was $41 million, split equally between fresh produce debt due May 2027 and Canvas debt, which matures starting in February 2026. We remained very comfortable with our net debt level of $15.9 million. All of our lenders remain very supportive of the company, especially considering our improving performance in growing international business. We are in the final stages of amending our produce debt, which will provide more favorable, flexible financial covenants, as well as other commercial changes to recognize the company's change in focus from produce to cannabis, as this loan originated way back in 2013, long before our move to cannabis. We are awaiting property appraisal, to complete the refinancing of our Pearson Farms debt maturing in February 2026. We expect to have the refinancing completed on or before March 31st with a new maturity date of February 2028. And finally, we have begun discussions with two Dutch lenders with respect to placing commercial bank debt on our Lely Holland operations. We expect to have something in place by the end of Q2 of this year. I'll now turn the call back to Mike.