22nd Century Group, Inc

Welcome to the 22nd Century Group's third quarter 2022 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following management's prepared remarks. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star 2. We ask that you please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, May Kuo, Director of Communications and Investor Relations. Please begin.

Thank you, Rob. Good morning, and welcome to 22nd Century's Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Jim Misch, our Chief Executive Officer, to Hugh Kingsman, our chief financial officer, and John Miller, president of our tobacco business. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our results for the third quarter of 2022. The release, earnings presentation, and 10Q are available in the investors section of our website at xxiicentury.com under the events subheading. We'll start today's call with prepared remarks from Jim, John, and Hugh before moving into a Q&A session. As a reminder, those joining by webcast can submit questions through the online interface, which we may include during the Q&A section of today's call, time permitting. Some of the statements made today are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Additional information regarding these factors can be found in our annual, quarterly, and other reports filed with the SEC. During today's call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, which we define as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization as adjusted for certain non-cash and non-operating expenses. For more details on these measures, please refer to our press release issued earlier today. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jim, beginning from slide three.

Thanks, Mae. Good morning, everyone, and happy Election Day. I've spoken at a number of recent conferences, so I'm going to keep my opening comments brief, and we can get to the details quickly. I will say it's been an incredible few months since our last quarterly update, and there are more exciting topics to discuss than we can fit into our call today. We're going to focus our time on commercial activities of our rapidly expanding U.S. tobacco business and our global scale hemp cannabis ingredients and CDMO business. I'm joined today by John Miller, President of the Tobacco Business Unit, and Hugh Kinsman, our CFO. First, since our last call, we have aggressively expanded our exceptional VLN pilot results by moving into a multi-state commercial launch designed specifically to leverage our awareness, education, and trial approach. We've advanced from our Chicago pilot to expanding across Illinois to our first statewide multi-partner launch in Colorado, and now announced three additional statewide launches to complete the Four Corners region. This is just the beginning, as we intend to grow our presence in now up to 18 states over the next 12 months and take a notable share in these markets. John will detail this more in a moment, but I can't be more excited about our prospects. We have an unstoppable expansion blueprint driven by consumer interest. We can reach a 1% share milestone quickly where we decide to go. We have a plan to cover over 50% of the addressable market within 12 months. Second, we have now integrated GVB Biopharma, a top shelf ingredient and CDMO provider in the hemp cannabis derived ingredient space. This catapulted us into a fully commercialized and growing hemp cannabis business with increasing margins, and we're moving quickly to complete certifications that will further differentiate our products and make us the dominant global supplier of hemp-derived ingredients. I'll come back to this detail after John. Finally, our financial results are driving long-term growth, margin expansion, operating leverage, and cash generation. Our balance sheet is fully funded to support our existing business plans, and we're closely monitoring our investments to rapidly drive share, scale, and financial returns in our commercial pursuits. The chart on this slide illustrates the quickly developing revenue scale in our business that will ultimately drive us to cash-positive flows as we complete this carefully planned commercial launch and investments. With that, I'll let John dive into the incredible work he and his team are doing in the tobacco business. John?