Vintage Wine Estates, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Vintage Wine Estate's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 financial results call. My name is Carla and I will be your operator for today's call. If you would like to register a question for the Q&A portion of the call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. When asking your question, please ensure your telephone is unmuted locally. And to evoke a question, you can press star followed by two. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Deborah Pawlowski. investor relations of vintage wine estates to begin. Deborah, please go ahead when you're ready.

Thank you, Carla, and good morning, everyone. We certainly appreciate your time today and your interest in vintage wine estates. On the call with me are John Morimarco, our interim CEO, and Chris Johnston, our CFO. You should have a copy of our earnings release that went out after market close on Friday. And there is a slide deck that will accompany our conversation today that was distributed via email and posted this morning on our website. If you do not have these materials, you can find them at ir.vintagewineestates.com. Following the market close on Friday, in addition to the release on financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023, We also issued a press release announcing that we had closed on an amendment to our lending agreement. The amendment can be found in the 8K that was filed on Friday as well. In addition, we filed our restated interim period 10Qs for fiscal 2023, as well as the fiscal 2023 10K. We recognize that it's unusual to file this kind of information on a Friday after market, so let me give you some background. Our extended SEC filing deadline was last Friday, and there were several dependencies that needed to be achieved in order to meet that deadline. The 10-K, which also includes immaterial revisions to numbers for fiscal 2022, was dependent upon the restatement of the three quarters and the related changes for 2022's quarters. And the amended credit agreement was dependent upon the final financials. Given that, we did not want to miss the filing deadline. Fritz's team and all of our partners, including our auditors, tax accountants, BMO, who is the administrator of our lending agreement, and the nine other lenders in our loan syndicate, as well as our legal advisors, worked tirelessly to make the Friday deadline. While we understand that being in a situation itself created a bind, I think recognizing how far the organization has come in 2023 should not be overlooked. We scheduled a call this morning, both to give folks time to digest all the information, but also because I really didn't think anyone would appreciate a Friday evening teleconference. So John is going to begin with an overview of his objectives as interim CEO and the progress the company has made in the last eight months since he was appointed in that position. Chris will review financial results and then John will wrap it up. We will then open the call for questions. On slide two and three of the quarter deck, you will find discussion on forward-looking statements, non-GAAP measures, and key performance indicators. As you know, we will make forward-looking statements during this presentation and during the Q&A session. These statements apply to future events that are subject to risks and uncertainties, as well as other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from what is stated here today. These risks and uncertainties and other factors were provided in our SEC filings that you can find on our website or at sec.gov. I will also point out that during today's call, we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures, as well as key performance indicators, which we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. You should not consider the presentation of this non-GAAP information in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. We have provided reconciliations of comparable GAAP with non-GAAP measures in the tables that accompany today's slides and release. In addition, we use case volume as a key performance indicator to gauge performance and inform our strategy and tactics. With that, if you turn to slide four, I will turn it over to John to begin the discussion. John?

Thank you, Deb, and good morning, everyone. These last eight months since I was appointed as interim CEO, have been extremely busy. My objective during this time has been to strengthen the foundation of the business and provide a more focused enterprise for Seth Kaufman, our new CEO, who will be joining us in just a couple of weeks. This has been a turnaround for the organization and led us to creating the five-point plan to communicate both internally as well as externally our operating plans and priorities. You have seen this before, so I won't go through it in detail. but we'll confirm that the plan does keep top of mind for everyone at VWE what is important for our success. Turning to slide five, we highlight the miserable progress the team has accomplished since they came on board that we expect to contribute to our margin improvement as we advance through fiscal 24 and beyond. To drive margin improvement, we have streamlined the organization on many fronts from personnel to SKUs. There is still work to be done on SKUs, but the heavy lifting has already created efficiencies and taken out costs. Understanding margins has been critical to our thinking in this process. SKU reduction was very selective and prioritized on lower margin product. In addition to reducing SKUs, we are being more strategic regarding product to improve margins such as optimizing blend. I should point out that we'll get some tailwinds as well as we deplete the higher cost 2020 vintage. From a productivity perspective, our warehousing operations are running much more efficiently and throughput through our Hopland bottling facility has measurably increased. In addition to improved productivity, we have taken out costs by lightweighting glass and rationalizing our bottle molds. The plan has driven a different mindset as well, and as a result, we are much better at recovering shipping costs. Analytics with market data has informed our pricing strategies, and as a result, we have been able to capture on average about 2.8% with price. As part of the five-point plan to monetize assets, we are initiating processes to sell certain properties. Our amended credit agreement includes the strategy for us to achieve our goal to reduce debt using properties that are underlying collateral to the lending agreement. In July, we restructured the leadership team to improve internal communications and drive collaboration. This new structure empowers the team to rethink how things have been done historically and be creative in our efforts to collectively achieve our plan objectives. Seth will likely bring a fresh perspective to further evolve how we operate. In addition to our human resources, we've refocused our marketing and sales spend to key core brands. This applies at wholesale as well as direct-to-consumer channel. The diversification strategy with Ace Cider and leveraging international accounts and distributor relationships are proving effective as we gain points of distribution and expand market reach. With that, let me pass it over to Chris to review the financials.