This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk02: Good morning and welcome to NVIDIA's Incorporated first quarter of 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need 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. Please note that this event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Kay Walsh, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk09: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Enviva Inc.' 's first quarter of 2022 earnings conference call. We appreciate your interest in and support of Enviva, and thank you for your participation today. On this morning's call, we have John Kepler, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Shai Eben, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our agenda will be for John and Shai to discuss our financial results and provide an update on our current business outlook and operations. Then we will open up the call for questions. During the course of our remarks and the subsequent Q&A session, we will be making forward-looking statements which are subject to a variety of risks. Information concerning the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in our forward-looking statements can be found in our earnings release as well as in our other SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect new or changed events or circumstances. In addition to presenting our financial results in accordance with GAAP, we will also be discussing adjusted EBITDA and certain other non-GAAP financial measures pertaining to completed reporting periods, as well as our forecasts. Information concerning the reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures and other relevant disclosures is included in our earnings release. It is important to note that as a result of the simplification transaction we announced on October 15th, 2021, we were required to recast our historical financial results in accordance with GAAP to reflect that transaction. Today, we will discuss 2021 historical financial results on a recast basis or a non-recast basis, depending on the reference point. Please refer to our earnings release and Form 10-Q document for more details on our recast and non-recast presentations. I would now like to turn the call over to John.
spk01: Thank you, Kate. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As you have heard me describe consistently during the past 24 months, we have been fortunate to have been largely insulated from the widespread and unexpected geopolitical, economic, and pandemic-related pressures confronting the global economy, but we have not been immune. And we saw a subset of impacts affect us in the first quarter, several of which we previewed on our last call together. As you'll recall, the first quarter is our seasonally softest quarter. This year, it was also impacted by lower plant availability due to Omicron related absenteeism affecting our plant level workforce, as well as failures by some of our trucking and rail partners to consistently service our plants, which required us to curtail production in several instances. We also incurred incremental costs in certain areas of our cost tower, such as cost of fiber and logistics expenses, as we work to mitigate our workforce and supply chain disruptions. We're pleased to report that the pandemic-related issues are largely behind us now. We are also optimistic that the efforts our logistic partners are making will soon put their challenges firmly in the rearview mirror as well. This means that the operational issues we faced should be largely temporary. What we see as permanent, however, is the market and sales growth momentum as we execute agreements with major power generators and industrials in hard-to-abate sectors for the long-term supply of lower carbon renewable fuels and sustainably produced raw material inputs. The same dislocations caused by inflation, energy price volatility due to the war in Ukraine, and supply chain challenges causing scarcity and urgent requests for delivery for many commodities are translating into durable pricing increases for our current agreements and ones that we are signing for future deliveries. I will spend some time on those exciting new contracts in a moment, especially our developments in Germany. Before we get there, given where first quarter results landed and taking stock of how we see the next seven months of the year unfold, we are revising certain 2022 guidance metrics to better reflect our assessment of the implications for the short term. As noted in our release, we are reducing our adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $230 million to $270 million, from the original range of $275 million to $300 million. The 10% shift in the top end of the range for adjusted EBITDA is primarily driven by three key factors. First, lower production. We estimate that lower production and sold volumes for full year 2022 will have a negative impact of approximately $10 million on adjusted EBITDA. This is an isolated, identifiable, and short-term issue. Second, a loose sale plant start-up date was delayed to the end of March, which is expected to have an impact of approximately $10 million for 2022, as the 12-month ramp-up period is effectively shifted to the right by a bit more than a quarter. And third, We expect to purchase fewer third-party volumes this year, simply due to the limited physical liquidity of industrial-grade wood pellets, which was exacerbated by Russian and Belarusian supply being closed off to the market. Additionally, while we expect SG&A to be about $5 million higher for the year, given our further acceleration of fully contracted new plant and capacity development, that is expected to be offset by about a $5 million pricing uplift for the year, which we believe is durable and should continue to grow well into 2023 and beyond. We also still expect the shape of our adjusted EBITDA profile during 2022 to look a lot like prior years, with the back half of the year being a big step up over the first half. We are projecting that roughly two-thirds of our earnings will be back half-weighted, with the first half generating roughly one-third of our expectations. So net-net, we're still forecasting solid growth for this year. with adjusted EBITDA, using the midpoint of the range, still expected to increase by over 10% as compared to 2021. We've also given a preliminary look to adjusted EBITDA in 2023. Given all we know today about our contracted volumes, pricing, and cost, 2023 is penciling that to be in the range of $305 million to $335 million, in line with fact-set consensus estimates for most of our analysts covering the business. But importantly, We are also seeing full year adjusted gross margin per metric ton of roughly $50, which is higher than we have given guidance to in the past. Given how we see the balance of 2022 shaping up and the continued growth in 2023 and beyond, what's not changing is our 2022 dividend guidance of $3.62 per share, which also represents a 10% increase over 2021. For the first quarter of 2022, we declared a dividend of 90.5 cents per share. which represents a 15% increase over last year's comparable period. For the remainder of 2022, we intend to flatten out the quarterly dividend to 90 and one half cents per share. We continue to be very proud of our rare combination of being a high growth company and a strong dividend pair. We're the largest global player in an industry where the total addressable market is rapidly expanding and new use cases for our product continue to emerge. We are virtually unmatched in terms of the fully contracted nature of our business and the highly visible and durable cash flow growth that our business generates, as well as the truly remarkable growth prospects ahead of us. We are very pleased to have announced yesterday that we have signed our first series of German agreements, including a memorandum of understanding with a German utility. This new customer is focused on providing baseload, dispatchable, renewable energy, and our pellets will be used to displace coal in one of its large power plants. We expect this MOU to become a firm contract within the next 12 months. This contract, as I mentioned, is large, with delivered volumes over the 10- to 15-year term expected to be at least 1 million metric tons per year, which means this one contract alone could underwrite the construction of a new plant. We also announced yesterday that we signed a letter of intent with another new German customer to serve a completely new industrial vertical for us. This new customer intends to use Enviva's wood pellets to phase out fossil fuels and generate green process heat in their manufacturing facilities in Germany. Delivered volumes under this 10-year agreement are expected to be around 100,000 metric tons per year, with deliveries to start as early as 2023. We expect to convert this LOI to a firm contract within the next few months. To facilitate the delivery of wood pellets to our growing customer base in Germany, and to enhance the returns we generate from this burgeoning market, we are partnering with Rhenus Group, one of Germany's leading logistics service providers, to develop an inbound logistics supply chain from strategic port terminals to industrial quarters throughout Germany. As part of the agreement, we will consider highly accretive incremental capital investment opportunities related to import reception, storage, transloading, and other terminal infrastructure. with a plan to replicate what we are successfully operating at our export terminals along the coast of the Southeast U.S. So again, pretty solid growth and new exciting opportunities and momentum, augmented by increasing volumes we are supplying to our existing customer base. In today's geopolitical environment, the security of energy supply is an equally important driver for customers purchasing our wood pellets, as is the energy transition itself. Countries and companies are not only facing extremely high and volatile fossil fuel prices while they navigate towards net zero goals, but they now also need to revisit the long-term security of supply for the carbon feedstocks they are sourcing. This congruence is further complicated by the fact that there are limited large-scale alternatives available for renewable baseload and dispatchable power and heat generation, and even fewer low-carbon feedstocks to substitute in hard-to-abate sectors. With this as a backdrop, Demand for both urgent deliveries and long-term contracts for VIVA's sustainable woody biomass products and fuels has never been stronger. I'll come back in a moment to discuss some key sustainability attributes of our business and our asset and capacity growth plans. But now, I'd like to turn it over to Shai to share more detail on our financial highlights.
spk00: Shai Shai- Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. We generated net revenue of $233 million for the first quarter of 2022 as compared to $241 million for the first quarter of 2021. Net revenue decreased by 3% year-over-year, primarily due to metric tons sold being down by 4.6%. Metric tons sold decreased due to low plant availability related to the Omicron-related absenteeism John mentioned which not only impacted us, but also a number of our logistic providers as well. These are mainly temporal issues, and we are seeing many of them resolved. Many of our rail and truck providers have been quite public about the progress they are making, hiring, and their expectation of being able to provide service consistent with pre-pandemic levels. Adjusted gross margin for the first quarter of 2022 was $50.7 million, up 3% from the first quarter of 2021 on a non-RECAS basis. Adjusted gross margin per metric ton was $46.25 as compared to $42.73 for the first quarter of 2021 on a non-RECAS basis. The uptick in adjusted gross margin per metric ton of 8.2% year-over-year was driven primarily by contract price escalators that are tied to inflation indices. This pricing uplift is a durable benefit and should continue to improve cash flow on a go-forward basis. Net loss for the first quarter of 2022 was $45.3 million as compared to a net loss of $1.5 million for the first quarter of 2021 on a non-RECUS basis. Net loss for the first quarter of 2022 includes costs that resulted from the significant impact Omnicron had on our operations during the quarter, as well as incremental costs incurred as a result of the war in Ukraine. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2022 was $36.5 million, compared to $46.3 million generated for the first quarter of 2021 on a non-RECUS basis. When we announced our simplification transaction last year, we said that roughly $40 million of SG&A expenses would be brought into EVA and the $10 million decrease in adjusted EBITDA year over year is impacted by us absorbing those costs as planned. Distribution of cash flow was $25.3 million for the first quarter of 2022 as compared to $30.4 million for the corresponding quarter in 2021. Similar to adjusted EBITDA, the year over year decrease is due to absorbing SG&A costs from our simplification transaction as planned. Our liquidity as of March 31st, 2022, which included cash on end and availability under our revolving credit facility, was $280 million. As we have consistently demonstrated in prior years, we expect that the back half of the year will be a significant step up from the first, providing two-thirds of our annual adjusted EBITDA for the business. As John pointed out, we revised certain full-year 2022 guidance metrics, which means we should expect the second quarter to look a lot like the first before significantly accelerating to Q3 with another step up in Q4. And although we are accelerating our highly accretive capacity expansion plans, Our total CapEx guidance for 2022 is not changing, and thus we are reaffirming our total CapEx range for 2022 of $255 million to $275 million. Our CapEx spend is expected to be back-end weighted with around 60% of the spend happening in the second half of 2022. In terms of leverage, we expect to stay well within the terms of our credit agreement. Our commitment to conservatively managing and vivis balance sheet is unchanged. We continue to expect to transition to a fully self-funding growth model over time, and we will increasingly use cash flow generated from our business to do so. The timing of this transition is dependent on the cadence of new plant construction, and John will give an update on our asset growth outlook shortly. Over the long term, we are targeting a dividend coverage ratio of 1.5 times, and we expect to have the financial flexibility to increase dividends over time. Stepping back to look at the big picture, I am very proud of the resilience and strength of our business model. Notwithstanding the short-term, temporal challenges we encountered during the first quarter of this year, our business model is set up to protect us for most of the macro pressures that are dominating news headlines, including the impact of a potential recession. There just isn't another fully-contracted company with a similar profile of visible, durable cash flows growing at this rate. And we believe we have much more shareholders' value yet to unlock. Now I would like to turn it back to John.
spk01: Thanks, Shai. To pick up on Shai's last point of NViva being a fully contracted business, our contracted revenue backlog remains over $21 billion, with a weighted average contract maturity of more than 14 years. Our contracted revenue backlog is complemented by a growing customer sales pipeline in excess of $40 billion. Given our robust contracted position, our growing demand profile, and the persistent structural short that remains in the market, We are also aggressively expanding our production capacity. With Losedale now ramping production, we will begin construction in the coming weeks on our next large-scale, fully contracted plant in Epps, Alabama. Epps is designed and permitted to produce 1.1 million metric tons per year and will be the largest industrial wood pellet production plant in the world. This fully contracted plant is expected to generate approximately $65 million in annualized adjusted EBITDA once the plant is fully ramped. We're better than a five times multiple of invested capital. At this time last year, we were still buying smaller drop-down assets from our former sponsor on a seven and a half times investment multiple. That's an incredible improvement on accretion. And when you think about multiplying that by the next five plants we're building, you can understand why we have such conviction around our long-term growth profile. We also recently announced that our next greenfield development will be in Bond, Mississippi. Bond will be similar in size to our EPS facility, and we expect to begin construction in early 2023. Losedale, EPS, and Bond are the first three plants in our growing Pascagoula cluster, and plans are underway for the cluster's fourth plant. One of the very attractive aspects to building out the Pascagoula cluster is the operational leverage we have at our Pascagoula terminal and the enhanced returns we expect to generate as we add new plants and increased terminal throughput. We expect to make a decision on the site for our fourth Pascagoula cluster plant around the end of this year. Next on our path to doubling production capacity from 6.2 million metric tons per year to over 13 million metric tons per year is the addition of a new plant in each of our Savannah, Wilmington, and Chesapeake clusters. We continue to expect to add six new plants over the next five years, with the likelihood that we'll add more after that. A lot of work ahead of us, but a lot to look forward to. And as I'm fond of saying, we're just getting started. Before we open up the call to questions, I want to take a moment to give an update on the sustainability attributes of our business, especially in light of Earth Day being just two weeks ago. As a pioneer in the biomass industry, we've built a business focused on our core values, caring about people in our communities, fighting climate change by displacing coal, and ensuring that we are growing more trees. managing our business under industry-leading sustainability practices that ensure that we are delivering favorable impact to energy and the environment right in line with the IPCC guidance. We source our renewable wood fiber from the U.S. Southeast, a region where forests are primarily owned by private landowners, and these sustainably managed forests have grown by over 40 percent over the last 25 years. while at the same time supplying more than 20 percent of global demand for forest products, including bioenergy, making it one of the most vibrant, robust, and growing forest resources in the world. Further, far from depleting timber resources, USDA data shows that in the areas where we buy wood fiber, forests have increased by 21 percent over the last 10 years since we began our operations. because of the positive impact and long-term markets that NViva helps create for landowners to keep their land holdings in forest, and in fact, plant more trees. NViva leads the industry in sustainability and responsible sourcing, strictly adhering to our responsible sourcing policy and our industry-leading track and trace technology to ensure that we are keeping our forests healthy, thriving, and growing. All of the wood we procure, regardless of its form, is low value. In the competitive market for saw timber and other high-value wood, landowners can receive six to nine times more than the price for fiber that Enviva pays, eliminating any incentive for the landowner to sell a high-value tree to us for a much lower price. There are, however, few buyers in our regions today for the residual tops, limbs, commercial thinnings, what used to be sold as pulpwood, Neither are there natural markets for the understory, diseased or deceased, or crooked trunks and trees that are both byproducts of a traditional saw timber harvest and impediments to replanting and regrowth after the higher value timber sales have occurred. As a result, by turning low value or unmarketable wood from a harvest into productive, low carbon, renewable fuels and feedstocks, we are symbiotic with the broader forest product sector, delivering tangible benefits for the climate as well as economic value to landowners. On Earth Day, President Biden signed an executive order recognizing the role American forests play in wildfire resilience and climate change mitigation, with the White House specifically highlighting in its fact sheet its wide-ranging support for healthy forest economies, including grants to expand markets for innovative wood products and wood energy that supports sustainable forest management. We are incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to continue to build a company and a unique platform that delivers real climate change benefits today at scale. We are also fortunate to be able to define our company in relatively simple terms. The world wants less carbon more quickly and more cost effectively from secure sources. And that's exactly what we offer. Now let's open up the call for questions.
spk02: Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. Using the speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To draw your question, please press star then two. This time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble the . First question comes from Jordan Levy of Truist. Please go ahead.
spk03: Good morning, all. Exciting to see the three announcements related to the Germany market. That's been a market that you've been working on developing for a while now, and maybe a combination of policy being rolled out and recent geopolitical events have kind of spurred that into action. I'm wondering if you could give us an updated sense on the potential market opportunity there, both on the utility and industrial side, and what that can mean for your growth trajectory in the coming years.
spk01: Jordan, thank you very much. We're incredibly excited about the progress that we're making in Germany. You're right, it has been a key target market for us, really initiated by the German government's conviction around ending coal and the coal exit law. Certainly that has spurred a lot of utility consideration, as we've talked about in the past, of conversion of existing coal-fired infrastructure into repowered biomass-fired both power and combined heat and power assets. And this first large utility customer of ours is one that we're obviously very, very excited about as an entry point for us. Large-scale, million-ton-per-year-plus type contract really gives us a strong foothold in continuing to expand the opportunity to facilitate the energy transition in Germany. And so we do expect follow-on opportunities there. over the course of the next several months and certainly as the question about energy security becomes just as prominent in the decision making of many of our utility partners as is the focus on decarbonization. And so, you know, as we've guided you in the past within the core power and heat generating sector, we would look at a 5 to 10 million ton per year market as that continues to mature. So, again, lots of opportunity there, great long-term structured agreements that are, frankly, complemented by what we see in the industrial sector. And we're very, very pleased to announce today another major contract into that sector. Frankly, in a segment that we haven't talked about before, it's beyond the cement, steel, lime, SAF sectors that we've talked about historically. So as new use cases continue to evolve, estimates on the total addressable market continue to increase. And as we've shared in the past, if you sort of benchmark yourself on, if you think about the utilization of coal today in one perhaps large steel manufacturer in Europe, that's about 20 million tons. There are multiple folks like that. I wouldn't suggest that we're going to displace 100% of that, but 10% of a number like that, even with one customer, is a very large number. And so, as you've seen in some of our prepared remarks and some of our published materials and our investor decks and the like, we tend to think that there is an opportunity for 20 to 30 million tons per year. at a pricing that, you know, continues to match or better than what we have historically seen in the utility segment, driven by both scarcity and, frankly, the difficulty in mitigating the carbon intensity of these industries. There really aren't any other alternatives. So, very excited about it, really encouraged. I would point out and reinforce that the opportunity for us to leverage a capability that, frankly, we don't talk a lot about generally is the terminal and distribution infrastructure. that we're frankly really quite good at from the export side of our business. Our ability to replicate that with people like Rhenus in Germany and across continental Europe provides some substantial operating leverage and margin expansion potential for us as we continue to grow this business. Really excited about it. Great, great toehold in a number of these sectors and lots of runway ahead of us for margin expansion and durable volumes.
spk03: Thanks, Sean. And maybe as my follow-up, more on the macro side of things, you guys pointed to a $10 million negative impact from lack of the third-party volumes in the market, and it seems clear that the spot market right now is pretty constrained for a number of reasons. But you also pointed to a $5 million positive impact.
spk01: Jordan, it sounds like we lost you there for a second. Can you hear me? Yeah, you're back now. The last I heard was – Jordan, you back?
spk03: Yep, yep, I'm here.
spk01: Okay. So comments on the, certainly the near-term supply dislocations that we're seeing, that clearly the Baltics have been fairly substantially impacted by the war in Ukraine. You've got certainly the limitations around Russian volumes and Belarusian wood fiber challenging production in that region, too. So a market that was already structurally short, you're now seeing, you know, roughly 2 million metric tons per year be pulled out of that market. And I think, again, some broader supply challenges around the world is making that even more difficult. The spot market opportunity for us, to the extent that we can, you know, drive incremental production, you know, gives us the opportunity, if you look at some of the recently reported transactions, in the $300-plus per ton range. Obviously, we'll be looking to try and tackle some of those. But the general durable pricing uplift that we've seen and guided to for the back half of this year and certainly in the uplift that we see going forward into 2023 and beyond, those same challenges for Q1 are translating into durable pricing uplift for us going forward. And we look to monetize that on a go-forward basis quite substantially.
spk03: Thanks, and even though I cut off, I think you got to the second half of my question that I didn't get to ask anyway, so appreciate that and appreciate the responses.
spk01: Well, Jordan, thank you so much. Always good to talk to you.
spk02: Thank you. The next question is from Jarma Key, Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hey, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for the time. Why don't we start? We've had a couple MOUs announced over the last couple quarters now. You've given us some details on timing on when you expect to convert them, but maybe if you could just give us an update on where some of them stand, including maybe the big one like J-Power and some of the others on SAF. Thanks.
spk01: Yeah, John, thank you so much. I will tell you, The relaxation of the travel restrictions for COVID, particularly into Japan, has helped us remarkably accelerate a number of the things that we've had both under development and, frankly, under contract there, too. I mean, the ability for us to get our development teams directly face-to-face with a number of our key contracting partners really has put that back on an acceleration path. You know, clearly we saw some challenges in being able to be face-to-face, even though we do have strong team in Tokyo The efforts right now are really focused on plant-level specifics across a whole host of our contracting counterparties, and so the ability to get our people there has really, really helped us out there. Certainly, when we look at the broader MOU profile, as we enter into a number of these new segments, one of the most important things that, frankly, Customers who have, for the very first time, begun entering into these long-term take-or-pay contracts, obviously 10-, 15-, 20-year duration, that has a take-or-pay component to it and a notional value, in some cases $1 billion, $2 billion, their ability to secure and know and underwrite the fuel supply at known economics is the first step of that, before they can consider really the rationalization of exactly how and when in each one of their, frankly, multi-location facilities, they can then implement the appropriate conversions to. So the MOU or the LOI is a really important first step to get all those key critical terms, the benefit of the bargain for both parties, in ink, on a sheet of paper, so that we're all understanding the terms of the trade. From there, and that's why it's about a six- to 12-month conversion, there's a lot of education about, for many of these industries, the take-or-pay obligations, the contract nature of these pieces, and then the engineering and focus, of course, on... actually converting each one of these industries and their particular manufacturing processes to consume biomass. That generally occurs right in parallel with a permit timeline that many of our customers will undertake. And so, as a result, you know, this has entered sort of our contracting profile of really important first steps that give everyone a really good set of certainty around the pricing, the volume, the terms. And then we convert that over time into the actual agreements and then begin deliveries. Some of the earlier ones certainly are well on track to deliveries commencing around the end of next year with substantial deliveries across the overall portfolio of the incremental contracts beginning in about 2024. As we had articulated in some of our prepared remarks, some pretty attractive pricing opportunities that provide for durable margin expansion over time, too.
spk04: All right, that was thorough. I appreciate that. Thank you. Maybe picking up on that last piece, the gross margin guidance for next year was helpful, and you've talked about a couple moving pieces here. Maybe if we're just walking from kind of where we sit now to there, if you could break up how much is, you know, maybe getting better pricing across the board versus getting a little more comfortable with some of these cost pressures right now abating. Thanks.
spk01: Yeah, great question. So when we talked about our contracted portfolio, the contracts into which we've entered each have various pricing escalators. Some are PPI and CPI driven. Some are fixed escalators. And so, you know, on an average basis, what we see is probably a little less than total reported headline inflation because some of them are fixed and some of them are, of course, get the full pass through that. But net-net, when you look at sort of the guide that we would have given historically to the mid-40s to roughly 50 or better now, that's a 10% increase in a fully contracted business. That's a very attractive margin for metric ton increase. Headline price, big portion of it. Obviously, you're inflating your margin inherently by inflating the headline price, so we certainly don't see the similar inflation in the underlying cost tower, which is providing about that 10% increase year over year. And what we would say is that's the first step of many that we see going forward in 2023 and beyond.
spk04: All right. Thanks for that. Maybe if I can squeeze in just one more. So the MOU and LOI in Germany make sense. Maybe if you could talk a little bit more about the partnership you've launched as well, and just seeing if I heard you right, that you're thinking about specific investments, I guess, in continental Europe itself. Maybe if you could just kind of talk about
spk01: that could look like um and maybe what you know costs could be and returns could look like thanks yeah the um well look we we we've got a a very attractive uh capital investment profile in the business as as we described in in in announcing the the progress that we're making on the epps plan you know this is a sub five times in investment multiple to generate about 65 million in annualized adjusted ebitda for for an asset that we would be building in in northern alabama on a fully contracted basis to serve our contract counterparties around the world. Yet a component of our overall infrastructure that we don't talk about as explicitly as perhaps the new plant development is really our investment in the terminal capacity where we're aggregating from a distributed set of plant assets into a single point of reception, storage, loading for transportation and delivery around the world. The operating leverage that we're able to realize on investment like that is absolutely remarkable. Certainly, the marginal cost for every incremental ton of that fixed asset provides for durable margin expansion that you see within our own cost tower. We're seeking to replicate that principally in Germany. Because of the fragmented nature of our customer set there, the industrial activity of reception, storage, transloading, and distribution downstream to our customers we believe is a margin capture opportunity for us as we go forward that would be consistent with or, frankly, better than what we would expect to be a more traditional plant-level investment because of the such substantial operating leverage that we see in these fixed-cost assets like our terminals.
spk04: Interesting. All right. I appreciate that detail. Thanks for your time today. Absolutely, John. Thank you so much.
spk02: Thank you. Our next question comes from Alvaro Escoto, RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk08: Hey, good morning, everyone. I have a few questions here, some are on the guidance. So what gives you the confidence that the challenges that we saw in the first quarter are largely behind us? And can you talk about what gets you to the low end versus the high end of your 2022 guidance? And then maybe also just talk about, you know, the COVID impact that you outlined How does that compare to, you know, the COVID impact last year or at the heart or at the height of the pandemic?
spk01: Avara, thank you. It's a really good question. You know, we've been very, very privileged in this company. If you look at the, from the onset of the pandemic, the 20-plus months of uninterrupted, undislocated operations as the pandemic continued to ravage in various forms. The Delta variants certainly continued It certainly had people in our company affected, as we've shared in the past. We're very fortunate that people weren't getting COVID at our plants. The transmissibility of the Delta variant was certainly much lower than Omicron, which we'll get to in a second. But we were able to keep our people safe, and when someone did fall ill, we were able to quarantine and isolate them and limit the impact of COVID quite remarkably. As certainly as vaccination rates in our own workforce quite closely mirror the vaccination rates in general across the Southeast U.S., which are generally lower than elsewhere, the Omicron variant quite substantially hit us in late December with a significant portion of our workforce affected. We gave some color to this on our last call together, but the infectivity of the variant as well as the quarantine provisions of of not only the individuals affected, but anyone that would have come in contact with, of initially 10 days, fortunately that later in the period subsided to five days under the CDC guidance. That kept a substantial fraction of several of our appliance workforces on the sidelines. We were able to mitigate some of that with contract labor or overtime, but ultimately our production profile was materially degraded in a number of these facilities, compounded by what I would say is similar impacts in our supply chain from our logging and trucking workforce, as well as what I would characterize as more broadly reported dislocations and disruptions in rail service. Many of the major rail service providers have continued to face staffing and hiring challenges, which means that when trucks or rail cars or power doesn't show up to our facilities, we oftentimes will have to curtail them. dampening production, so stopping production because we have no place to store the pellets having exhausted all of our on-site physical resources of trucks, rail cars, or storage silos on the site. The net impact of that, if you try to quantify it, is about 200,000 tons. So when you think about what the quarter should have been, we're about 200,000 tons light in terms of our own production. Those are naturally the most profitable tons we didn't make. And so from a contribution margin basis, that's in the neighborhood of 12 to $15 million. which meant that the quarter should have penciled out much more closely in line with the 50 that we would have expected. So why are we, what do we think about the world going forward? Certainly the staffing position that we have and the health of our workforce and the mitigation of I think the Omicron variant in the rear view mirror gives us a fair bit of good confidence about our ability to mitigate this. Also what we've seen of course is our own investments in contracting with incremental trucking and other logistics providers they give us a much greater comfort around our ability to manage and mitigate going forward. That capacity didn't exist in the deepest trough of that challenge in Q1, which, as we've shared in the past, it's our seasonally most challenging quarter. You've got a wider procurement radius for fiber. So you saw some implications on sort of road miles and diesel from the spike in the war in Ukraine as well. But now that that procurement radius has, of course, shrunk, the warmer weather that we describe as the seasonal benefit of our operations, we do see that resolving fairly straightforward. and are very excited about what we have the opportunity to do for the balance of the year. That is why we certainly feel very comfortable in the back half guide. And if you tie together the 2023 preview that we gave, our expectations are exiting full year 2022 consistent with run rates we would have had before.
spk00: And also, Elvira, as John mentioned in his comments, one of the reasons for the change to the to the guidance for 2022 is the shift to the right of the of the loose dealer plant. The startup of Luther. So if we think about 2022 and if we think about that, we may see a like a better better production from Luther. As well as the law impact of of of a COVID-19 and now lesser extent impact Well, in Ukraine, that's how we can see us meeting the higher side of the range of $270 million for 2022.
spk08: Great. Thank you. That is really, really helpful. Just to follow up on the production curtailments, did that How does that affect, you know, your contracted volumes? Were you still able to meet your contracted volumes? I know you have a plus or minus band around your contracted volumes, but is there any penalty for these production curtailments?
spk01: Yeah, when you look at the aggregate production profile of our capacity, 200,000 tons on north of 6 million is, what, kind of 4-ish percent, 3%. what that does for us is, frankly, just shifts deliveries a bit to the right. And so, we've been able to, you know, within our ranges of our contractual obligations, we're certainly at the lower end of those ranges, which means that we limit our opportunity to overdrive into certainly some of those contracts. That's also compounded, of course, by the challenges and the physical liquidity of lower third-party volumes that are available, given some of the challenges in the geopolitical environment. But what it basically does is it shifted us a bit to the right. And so the delivery schedule moves to the right, which is why you see a little bit of that fallout of Q2 into Q3, and then obviously full year into 2023 as well.
spk08: Great. Thank you. And then just to follow up on the question regarding the partnership with Reyna's group. So how do you see that developing? I mean, is that a 50-50 partnership? What's the timeline here? What sort of CapEx spend? And when you add this sort of incremental spend, you know, would you still be able to fund this and your plants, you know, with internally generated cash?
spk01: No, it's a great question. I think that we would be, you know, from an actual deployment of capital, we're not within a 12-month window of thinking about, you know, putting dollars into steel or concrete in the next 12 months. What we are doing is identifying really critical points in the overall both import infrastructure as well as distribution infrastructure to our growing customer base in Germany as well as continental Europe. Because Rhenus has such a great footprint, we have the opportunity to evaluate multiple opportunities alongside their existing asset base, bringing the know-how that we have for high-quality, durable management of wood pellets that ensures the delivery to our customers on time, in the right spec, in the right quantities and form factor. And that's what we're exploring with them right now. And so you look at it, as I mentioned in response to one of the previous questions, was really around, okay, We have a great investment. We know exactly what every dollar into a pellet plant or a U.S. port looks like. We think we can do better than that in the opportunities in Europe. And frankly, it's filling a critical infrastructure and logistics need as the world continues to want to do something different than their traditional energy delivery mechanisms. Some of that's clearly driven by the challenges in the war in Ukraine, the limitations on some of the things that used to come from east to west, and now the opportunity for us to fill a bunch of those gaps with renewable wood resources from the southeast U.S. Very attractive, both from a long-term contracted basis and on a fundamental return on invested capital into these potential new infrastructure assets.
spk08: Great. Thank you very much.
spk01: Avair, always good to talk to you. Thank you. Operator, do we have another individual with you?
spk02: Oh, yes, yes. One moment, please. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Ryan Levine of Citi. Please go ahead.
spk06: What is the diesel price exposure of the company in relation to suppliers that cannot be passed on to customers given the fiber basket-based pricing, and how did that impact Q1 results in the outlook for the remaining portion of the year?
spk01: Hey, Ryan. Always good to talk to you. As we've talked about in the past, we actually have very limited diesel exposure within our direct operations. What we do see and what we saw in Q1 was a selection of our fiber and trucking partners who faced a really abrupt and severe spike in diesel. As you might know, that particular part of the country had some of the lowest diesel inventories coming into that challenge, and so you saw a pretty significant spike And what that did was it actually kept some of our loggers and some of our truckers who provide the hauling services to them out of the woods altogether. And so we needed to provide on, frankly, a quite temporary basis to a subset of our loggers an increase in delivered fiber pricing, not directly tied to diesel, but really to account for the fact that in Q1 we have much larger procurement radii for fiber as our loggers need to get to drier and more accessible tracks in the colder, wetter winter months. And so that's largely behind us now. The short haul distances of our trucking generally downstream from our plants to our ports mitigates the implications of diesel variability around that. But that is exposure to our supply chain partners who generally tend to deliver to us under a fixed tariff or a fixed rate for a period of time. And so, we have some cover against that, not unlimited, but we were certainly affected by that in Q1. More exacerbated, Ryan, frankly, by the fact that the trucking capacity was limited by labor. And so, recontracting or spot trucking opportunities to source that was much more expensive in that quarter than what you would expect, either on a previous basis or on a go-forward basis.
spk06: Thanks. And then, is there higher costs associated with the Losedale project from a CapEx perspective? And are there any practical implications of the contract delay with customer contracts?
spk01: No, I mean, the Losedale plan, I mean, the construction for that is largely in the rearview mirror. I mean, we're completing sort of the tick and tie and close out of the contracts there. And you'll see the final capital retainage kind of go out as part of the reaffirmed CapEx guide that we gave, which didn't change. So the amount we expected to spend on Losedale is what we spent on Losedale. We're now in the process, depending upon the contractor, of releasing retainage, going through the equipment and performance testing, all the things that close out a contract. That spend is expected to flow out in our CapEx guide for the balance of the year. So it continues to be kind of right in line on that. The shift to the right is certainly, you know, we basically, the first quarter is not all that material production expectation in terms of tons. What I will tell you is, This plant is ramping quite effectively. What we're optimistic about in terms of the Losedale facility is that, again, early going, but the ramp of this facility is at a much steeper and, frankly, more advanced curve than anything we've done in the past. And so that's pretty exciting for us. That does give us some opportunity potentially to certainly overdrive as we get through the back half of the year. But, no, there's no implications directly to customers for that. Again, we don't tie the production of any one of our plants to a specific customer set. So the portfolio approach, as we described, about 200,000 tons short from our own production in Q1, that does shift the delivery schedule a bit to the right. But we're quite optimistic and encouraged about our ability to grow through that.
spk06: And then last question for me around labor. In your prepared comments, you spoke about using more third-party labor products. given some of the limitations that you've experienced in overtime. Is that a more permanent trend that you expect to continue and using a third-party entity? Not at all. Does that produce additional costs?
spk01: No, not at all, not at all. In fact, some of these admittedly emit a pretty challenging Q1, one of the real bright spots. was some of the changes that we've made in our overall hiring strategy. Really quite effective here is, you know, as large plants that are more mature for us, if we had an opening, we would tend to think about filling an opening with an individual, go recruit for that one spot. We've completely changed the paradigm on hiring, and it's proven incredibly effective. We're actually hiring cohorts now, bringing hiring into a balance of whether it's 30 or 60 people, putting them in a training program for four to six weeks, across the portfolio of our plants, cross-trained multiple opportunities for these folks, and what we're seeing is really great retention and better performance over the first 90 days of employees than, frankly, we've seen in a very long time. It's a really remarkable change in our hiring strategy, which is part of why we can talk about what we believe a number of these challenges being pretty firmly in our rearview mirror. Okay, great. Thank you. Absolutely, Ryan. Always good to talk to you. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you. Next question comes from Pavel Markovna. Raymond James, please go ahead.
spk07: Thanks for taking the question. Let me ask a high-level one about the European power sector. Since the war began, we have seen something that's very uncommon in recent years, which is mothball coal-fired power plants being restarted as a way of reducing imports of Russian nap gas. Does this trend represent a headwind for you, or is it a tailwind or neutral?
spk01: You know, Pavel, I think it's pretty early going. We've got a lot of dislocation in energy supply and demand across Europe right now. Commodity flows are uncertain. What I believe is probably durable for some period of time, regardless of how the Ukrainian war ultimately resolves, is the commodities from Russia will probably continue to be challenged in terms of delivery into Europe. That's both gas, coal, a whole host of input commodities to not only the energy sector but the industrial sector. And so I think it's a mixed bag right now. I think that we do have some potential opportunities because what hasn't changed is the level of conviction around mitigating climate change. And so if there are incremental coal-fired assets that have a prospectively longer life, to mitigate some of the energy security supply issues, we do think that that is not a tailwind for the utilization of biomass and other renewable resources to displace the carbon intensity of energy generation. How that ultimately shakes out and over what period of time, my crystal ball is not great on that. But I would suggest that the opportunity set is increased and the pricing opportunity is further augmented by the general conditions we see continuing to evolve.
spk07: Okay, that's helpful. In that same context, there have always been utilities and regulators in Europe that perhaps did not appreciate the sustainability attributes of biopower the way others have. And given... this uncertain fossil fuel supply environment that you just described. Is there a sense that more prospective customers are looking at biomass, would tell us included, as an attractive option than what they would have said three months ago?
spk01: Yeah. Pavel, I think you also cut out there, but the answer is an emphatic yes, absolutely. What we continue to see in terms of the customer perspective on a shift from whatever fossil fuel profile they had been considering before to a renewable resource biomass is absolutely part of that mix. We had folks and are engaged with folks in the German context especially who had had gas on a critical roadmap to decarbonization given its treatment under the green taxonomy now focus on almost exclusively on biomass. I mean, that is clearly both an energy security as well as a favorable tailwind in the policymaking environment. And you can also see that discreetly on a policymaking and sort of national level in places like Poland, where the alternatives are really just not great, but the focus and the effort on decarbonization continues to be a paramount focus, and biomass will play a critical role in that as well.
spk07: Then lastly, domestically, we have not seen $7, $8 in MCF natural gas for more than a decade. Is there any prospect that some domestic utilities might look for the first time at pellets as an electricity source?
spk01: You know, I think the U.S. market prevails, as you and I have the opportunity to chat in the past. I think the U.S. market will ultimately be large for us, but not necessarily in the power generating sector. What we have is our first U.S. customer is a sustainable aviation fuels provider. We have a tremendous amount of reverse inquiry right now around biomethanol. Really, the very difficult pathways to decarbonize because of the fossil fuel intensity and, frankly, the limited substitution alternatives available abroad from renewable spaces. There are substitutions that can be achieved in the power-generating sector here. Ultimately, I remain convicted that, unfortunately, the U.S. does not have the same level of conviction around decarbonization of the energy sector that you see elsewhere in Europe. Clearly, that is somewhat driven by the supply and demand dynamics of actually available and secure sources of fossil fuels. We benefit quite significantly from that here without perhaps the same urgency or alternatives and pricing construct that you see around the world, even in the face of, and Pavel, I'm agreeing with you, we haven't seen $7 gas in a while. Actually, when we started operating this business in its infancy, some of the things we were doing was displacing $12, $15 gas in industrial applications. Can that materialize here? Sure, but I tend to think that it will be more along the lines of the industrial sector as opposed to the utility sector. And, of course, many of the multinationals that we are beginning to serve in Europe in the industrial sector also have manufacturing assets here in the U.S., and the consumer drive for decarbonization and the customers that they're serving I think is still pretty high, and so we're optimistic about that too.
spk07: Thank you very much, guys.
spk01: Well, thank you.
spk02: Thank you. Next question will be from Kevin Pollard, Pickerton and Partners. Please go ahead.
spk05: Just a couple of quick questions on some of the expansion. First of all, I noticed in the press release that the EPS facility, you're talking about approximately $65 million in the adjusted EBITDA once it's up and running, which seems a little bit higher than the kind of 50 million rate we've talked about in the past, and which seems to imply an investment multiple a little bit closer to four times than the five times target. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on what's driving those improved economics, and is that something that we could apply to some of the future expansions on the docket?
spk01: Yeah, Kevin, thank you so much for picking up on that. It's a bigger plant in a higher-pricing contracting environment. This is, as we think about penciling out the facilities going forward, certainly we benefit from higher-priced contracts, larger-scale assets that drive, again, the operating leverage a couple times. These are large fixed-cost assets. When you run them at scale, the return profile is absolutely remarkable.
spk05: Okay. And in terms of the talk about accelerating the expansion plan, I guess with PASCA rule number four, that would seem to put you in a position where you're managing three large expansions simultaneously. I think you in the past kind of talked about keeping it around two. And I was wondering if you could talk about the steps you've taken to kind of give you that project management capability and how it might affect your ability to pull forward additional expansions in the future?
spk01: Yeah, super, super question. You know, one of the critical things that we're doing is evaluating our contractor counterparties right now. We certainly have benefited from a sort of scale level and frame contracts for equipment purchases of our major process islands. That's the core of our build and copy approach. What we're working through right now is a level of standardization across our contracting partners, meaning that we're bringing the same civil, mechanical, engineering controls, trades to bear with multinational or certainly national-level contracting counterparties that can give us that leverage to do two plus three, perhaps even more, assets at the same time because of the scale of their own workforce.
spk05: Great, thanks. That's all for me.
spk01: Thanks so much.
spk02: Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. John Tepler for closing remarks. Please go ahead.
spk01: Well, it goes without saying that amidst a very difficult Q1, we appreciate today and hopefully got through in some of our prepared remarks. These are temporal issues. They're transitory. We've gotten through so many of them, and we're very excited about what comes next. We've got a track record of a really good, stable, safe, healthy operating workforce that's back at it again day in, day out, continuing to work very, very hard every day to reliably displace fossil fuels. They're doing a great job, and we're excited to continue the progress that we're making growing more trees and fighting climate change. We're very excited about what comes next, and we really appreciate everyone taking the time with us today, and we'll look forward to talking again over the coming weeks and the next quarter. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy, and thank you very much.
spk02: This concludes our conference. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer