World Fuel Services Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the World Fuel Services Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Victor, and I'll be coordinating the call this evening. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Instructions on how to ask a question will be given at the beginning of the Q&A session. If at any time during the conference, please, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I want to turn the conference over to Mr. Glenn Clevitz, World Fuel Service Vice President, Treasure and Investor Relations. Mr. Clevitz, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Victor. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the World Fuel Service's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. which will also be presented alongside our live slide presentation. This call is also available via webcast. To access this webcast or future webcasts, please visit the World Fuel Services Corporation website and click on the webcast icon. With us on the call today are Michael Kasbar, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Ira Burns, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. By now, you should have all received a copy of our earnings release, If not, you can access the release on our website. Before we get started, I would like to review WorldFuel's safe harbor statement. Certain statements made today, including comments about WorldFuel's expectations regarding future plans and performance, are forward-looking statements that are subject to a range of uncertainties and risks that could cause WorldFuel's actual results to materially differ from the forward-looking information. A description of the risk factors that could cause results to materially differ from these projections can be found in WorldFuel's most recent Form 10-K and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. WorldFuel assumes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in World Fuels Press release and can be found on our website. We'll begin with several minutes of prepared remarks, which will then be followed by a question and answer period. As with prior conference calls, we ask that members of the media and individual private investors on the line listen in listen-only mode. At this time, I would like to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Kasbar.

Thank you, Glenn. Before I comment about the quarter, I want to thank our global team in every part of our business and in every part of the world for the results they drive every day for our customers, suppliers, partners, and shareholders. We've managed through COVID followed by supply chain disruptions and then severe inventory backwardation and still produced exceptional results. And now over the past several weeks, our land team responded to the energy and logistic needs of those impacted by Hurricane Ian, one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit Florida since 1935. Our thoughts go out to our neighbors who have been impacted by this horrible storm. Our team responded once again under difficult circumstances, which speaks volumes about the character of our logistics and supply and operations team, as well as our back office team that supported the effort. Thank you for all your service. You executed thousands of deliveries in difficult conditions when it was needed most. Responding to our customers' immediate and evolving needs remains the hallmark of who we are and what has guided what we do. This drove us to establish our sustainability business well before it became a global imperative. Our lower and zero carbon solutions continue to grow in North and South America, Europe and Asia, and will become a bigger part of our business over the next several years. Our approach has always been to drive economics in all forms of energy and digital solutions because that's what our customers want, ask us for, and value. With this as our guide, we will continue to refine our offers organically and through select acquisitions in our core conventional, sustainable, and digital business activities as global energy demand continues to grow and evolve. In the third quarter, our aviation business performed extremely well, aided by a very strong transatlantic summer season in Europe, which continues to rebound from the pandemic, as well as continued growth in business aviation demand. Our recently launched My World Tankering fuel and flight optimization product is the latest evidence of our focus on driving digital engagement with our customers by adding more digital and service solutions to our legacy energy and logistics offerings while simultaneously increasing automation and revenue generation within our ecosystem. My World Tankering utilizes our unique position in the supply chain with experience over millions of flights and many years of data to deliver a breakthrough product that, in seconds, helps operators minimize overall fuel costs on multiple leg flights. This is just one example of the innovation occurring between our business and technology teams. Our marine business once again performed extraordinarily well, managing a volatile, high-priced environment and the associated underwriting risks. It has been quite a run for the container, dry-balk, and tanker markets with strong demand across all segments. While the container sector is softening from historic highs, both tanker and dry bulk are still buoyant, and crews, while dealing with debt and inflation, continue to experience strong demand. And finally, in more ways than one, our land business achieved solid performance across the board, which Ira will now discuss in greater detail, along with his usual fulsome update. Ira?

Thank you, Mike. Good evening, everyone, and please be prepared for my fulsome update. As Mike discussed, we really produced exceptional results in the third quarter across all of our business segments. Aviation continued its rebound from the pandemic with strong year-over-year growth in international markets and generally strong seasonality throughout the business. Marine again posted extremely strong results. And lastly, our land segment also delivered solid results on the back of strong results at flyers combined with year-over-year growth. across the broader land platform. Before I review our third quarter results, please note that the following figures exclude the impact of non-operational items highlighted in our earnings release. We actually did not have any such costs this quarter, but we did book an adjustment of approximately $700,000 after tax in this year's third quarter for restructuring costs, which we had previously accrued, which had not been utilized. You can find the breakdown of the non-operational items, which were last year's third quarter, as well as this quarter's adjustment on our website and at the end of today's webcast presentation. I will get into the details in a moment, but first, I would again like to summarize a few more key financial highlights. A 30% year-over-year increase in average fuel prices and a 10% increase in overall volume drove consolidated revenue to $15.7 billion in the third quarter, of 88% year-over-year, bringing our year-to-date revenue through the third quarter to $45 billion. Volume again grew year-over-year across all three of our business segments, with international commercial aviation passenger volumes in particular continuing to rebound, and land segment volumes again benefiting from the additional rateable volume associated with suppliers' energy. Adjusted third quarter net income and earnings per share were $42 million and 67 cents per share, respectively. This represents our highest level of quarterly earnings per share in more than two years. And lastly, adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $123 million. That's an increase of $59 million, or 92%, compared to the third quarter of 2021. And now the broader details. Third quarter volume in our aviation segment was 1.8 billion gallons. That's an increase of 11% year-over-year. Year-over-year volume increase resulted principally from the ongoing recovery in commercial passenger activity, again, particularly in international markets, which have been lagging the recovery in North America. Overall, we are back to approximately 82% of pre-pandemic volumes globally, up from approximately 69% at the end of last year. Volume in our marine segment for the third quarter was 4.8 million metric tons. That's up slightly year over year. Dry bulk and tanker markets remained strong during the third quarter, partially offset by pressure in the container markets as inflationary headwinds have posed challenges for this particular sector. Our land segment volume was 1.5 billion gallons or gallon equivalents during the third quarter. That's an increase of 17% compared to the third quarter of last year. The year-over-year volume increase was principally driven by volume associated with the Flyers transaction, which continues to deliver solid performance, as well as increased activity in WorldConnect's natural gas and power activities. Consolidated gross profit for the third quarter was $322 million. That's an increase of 63% year-over-year. Our aviation segment performed extremely well during its seasonally strongest quarter, generating gross profit of $130 million. That's an increase of 15% year-over-year and a very significant rebound from the second quarter. As mentioned on last quarter's call, our team did an outstanding job renegotiating fuel contracts during the second quarter. This minimized the impact of backwardation in the third quarter and significantly reduced such risk going forward, driving greater rateability in our aviation results. As we begin the final stretch of 2022, the fourth quarter will experience its traditional seasonal decline from the strong summer season in the third quarter. Notwithstanding this normal seasonal decline, full-year volumes should still be up approximately 20% year-over-year, and considering the significant impact of backwardation in the second quarter, reasonably strong operating results for the full year as well. The marine segment continued to perform tremendously well in the third quarter, benefiting from high bunker fuel prices, continued fuel price volatility, as well as the impact of inflation and interest rates, which tend to constrain broader credit availability in the market. This resulted in quarterly gross profit of $75 million. That's nearly three and a half times the amount of gross profit generated in the prior year. The marine team continues to do an outstanding job optimizing the volatile and credit-constrained marketplace while continuing to manage working capital and related risk with excellence. As we look ahead to the fourth quarter, with bunker fuel prices down approximately 30% for average prices during the second and third quarters, the fourth quarter is currently not expected to be quite as strong as the third quarter. However, we expect marine's fourth quarter results to, again, significantly exceed the prior year. And lastly, our land segment delivered gross profit of $118 million in the third quarter. That's up 88% year over year, principally as a result of the Flyers' acquisition, as well as improved year over year results across the land platform, including World Connect. As we look ahead to the fourth quarter, with Flyers' seasonal strength in the third quarter now being part of the equation, while we expect fourth quarter operating results to experience a seasonal uptick in the UK, Overall land operating results are only expected to increase modestly from the third quarter. However, year-over-year results will obviously remain significantly higher principally related to fliers. Core operating expenses were $221 million in the third quarter. This represents a significant year-over-year increase principally related to increased cash and equity-based incentive compensation related in part to the record level of quarterly gross profit delivered in the third quarter compared to the third quarter of 2021, when variable compensation was down significantly, driven by the ongoing impacts of the pandemic last year. And the year-over-year variance was also impacted by the operating expenses associated with Flyers Energy that obviously were not in our numbers in 2021. Despite the operating expense increase, considering the very strong gross profit contribution this year, our operating margin as a percentage of gross profit actually increased significantly both sequentially and year-over-year in the third quarter to the highest level we have seen since the pandemic began. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, with the expected decline in gross profit related to seasonality and lower fuel prices, we expect core operating expenses to fall back to the range more consistent with the second quarter of this year somewhere between $198 and $204 million. However, our quarterly operating margin should remain well ahead of the prior year, once again. Our debt expense in the third quarter was $1.4 million. Our credit and collections teams continue to manage our accounts receivable portfolio remarkably well during a period of continued economic uncertainty. Adjusted EBITDA, as I mentioned earlier, was a record $123 million in the third quarter, representing an increase of 92% year over year. Trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA is now $329 million. That's up nearly 50% year over year, benefiting principally from the addition of flyers and a significant increase in profitability in our marine segment in 2022. Our interest expense increased to $34 million in the third quarter, principally related to the sharp rise in interest rates, where short-term borrowing rates increased by approximately 1.5% during the third quarter. With a further rate hike expected next week, we expect our fourth quarter interest expense to be somewhat higher than the third quarter, despite continued efforts to optimize working capital and borrowing levels and look for as many ways as possible to reduce our interest expense going forward. Our effective tax rate for the third quarter was 30.2%, flat with the prior year's third quarter and flat with our expectations for the fourth quarter. Our effective tax rate for the full year is now expected to be somewhere between 21% and 23%, which is down from 26% in 2021. We generated $259 million of operating cash flow in the third quarter. driven principally by lower fuel prices, which declined approximately 15% from the second quarter, and record adjusted EBITDA generated during the quarter. This contributed to a reduction in our net debt position to just under $430 million, further strengthening our balance sheet and liquidity profile. Simply put, we delivered phenomenal results across the business in the third quarter, despite the macroeconomic challenges that prevailed. Aviation continued to rebound from the pandemic and has recovered nicely from the backwardation impact in the second quarter. Marine delivered another solid quarter, a very solid quarter, and land performed well across the business. On the back of record gross profit and solid cash flow, our operating margin was strong and our quarterly return on invested capital exceeded 10% for the first time since 2019. While we will experience a sequential seasonal decline in the fourth quarter from our record gross profit performance in the third quarter, our full year results will reflect a significant recovery for 2021. Our team worked very hard through unprecedented circumstances during 2020 and 2021 to ensure we were well prepared to execute for our customers and suppliers who depend on us as markets recovered. And 2022 is a testament to such efforts. Also, our balance sheet and liquidity profile has further strengthened, providing us with significant liquidity to support organic growth and fund acquisition opportunities in our core fuels business where many higher margin, higher return opportunities still remain, as well as invest in World Connect and our growing suite of products and services that support our customers and their energy transition journeys. Thank you very much. I'd like to now turn the call back to our operator, Victor, for Q&A.

Thank you. And at this time, I'd like to remind everyone, if you would like to ask a question, please press the star key followed by the number 11 on your telephone keypad. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before entering your request. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And our first question will come from the line of Ken Hexter from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Sorry. Hey, it's Ken Hexter. I think the operator went blank there. But I think he called on me because I heard just Bank of America. Ira. Hey, good afternoon, Mike and Ira. So you talked a bit about the fuel price decline and what impact that's going to have on results. Maybe talk about economic activity as well. right? You know, how should we start thinking about this, or have you already started to see it on each of the segments, maybe just run through marine aviation and land in terms of the impact you've seen in historic downturns?

Well, you know, as we said, you know, in the past, you have a lot of contract business in aviation that's generally, you know, full year in duration. Obviously, we renegotiated some of that related to backwardation in Q2. We have some even longer-term contracts in parts of land. The marine business is the one where you see the most movement as fuel prices move significantly upward and downward. We saw a significant increase in margins as prices marched up. And while it may not happen overnight as prices decline, you clearly would expect that those margins would come back down to more normalized levels. And effectively, we're already seeing a bit of that in the tail end of Q3. It's early Q4, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks. Marines' average fuel prices were down probably 30 percent from where they were in Q2 and Q3 on average. say we would see it the most. And of course, you know, the jury's out on the aviation side in terms of, you know, what the economy may be moving towards from a recessionary standpoint, what that could mean for air travel. What we've seen so far is air travel has remained not only very strong, I'm not sure the last time you traveled, Ken, but Plane tickets are still really expensive, so they're not begging people to show up and take seats. And we're seeing a lot of strength. We saw unbelievable strength in the European markets over the summer. We'll see very soon whether we're going to have another really strong holiday season in Europe, as we did last year, and, of course, the U.S. as well. And in the land business, to finish off the segments in relation to your question, I You know, we're seeing nothing in particular that would say the needle is moving, you know, in the wrong direction. You know, the business remains sound. We've seen year-over-year growth. The flyers business continues to, you know, chug along really well. Our retail business, as you know, delivering fuel to 2,000-plus C-stores around the country is doing pretty well. So, you know, overall, the biggest move of note really relates to the marine margin. The other thing to note is as prices do come down, that obviously reduces our working capital requirements, and that working capital costs more today. Today's, you know, the highest rates we've seen in a very long time. So if prices come down, we can get something up on margin, but hopefully we'll be able to reduce interest expense as well. Not necessarily dollar for dollar, but there is, you know, there is a bit of a correlation there.

And I don't know if it's, I guess my follow-up, just it looks like you had a big step down in accounts receivable. Is that, you know, I know your bad debt expense phenomenally low at just over a million, but is that, shrinking the payment terms in terms of a shifting economy to bring down the terms? Maybe you could talk about if those have changed at all as we maybe get into a slower economy.

No, it's not that really, Ken. If you remember what I said earlier, prices are down, let's say, around 15%, 16%. As compared to the second quarter, we were at about $4 billion in Q2. You take 15% off of that, you're not that far from where we wound up at the end of the third quarter. We did a little better. We brought our trade cycle down a little bit. Of course, we always try to manage our working capital as efficiently as possible. But when your interest rate increases by 10, 20 basis points every week, you're focusing on that even more. So the team did a great job on the collection side, on the payable side, and on the inventory side to make sure that our working capital was as low as it could be because it's obviously costing us a lot more money than it did a year ago from an interest expense standpoint. Our networking capital, the way I defined it, dropped about $260 million quarter over quarter. So we'll work hard to keep that number as low as possible and thereby keep our debt lower and our interest expense as low as possible. If you have any more questions, Ken, you can feel free to ask another one.

Nope, that's my two. I just wanted to clarify, you said that the operating expenses went from 221. What was your number? I just didn't catch the number for the fourth quarter.

198 to 204, so it should come back down in Q4.

Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that.

Thanks, Ira. Thanks, Michael.

Appreciate the time.

Thanks, Ken. Victor? I'm here.

Let's see. And once again, that's star one one for questions. Star one one. One moment. And Mr. Caspar, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to you for closing remarks.

I think we may have Ben.

Yeah, we have one person trying to dial in. He just was interpreting the instructions. I believe he's, let's give him another minute. Ben Nolan from Steeple.

Not a problem. Hold music. Jeopardy music. Yeah.

Yeah.

no birthdays just weddings yeah so uh yeah no we were very very excited to tell you about our my tankering fuel and um and flight optimization app so that helps pilots with their flight plans and fuel optimization and weather airport lookup. You know, they used to carry a big flight bag, and now they've got, you know, an iPad. Very convenient. They can look up six airports in six seconds and figure out their optimization. It's part of our family of My World applications. So I'm pretty excited about that. It's just sort of a continuing delivery of more products into the marketplace. So we'll continue to report out to you on those as they materialize and there's more in the pipeline. So that's a big part, as I made in my comments, of continuing to provide more value, make it easier for our customers and our suppliers to transact business and figure out how to manage their operations.

Victor, do we have Ben in the queue?

Still no sign of Ben. Okay.

All right. I think he's on his way. He's on his way. So I know back to the news, there's been a lot of talk about the shortage of diesel, particularly on the East Coast. And one of the things that is a benefit, and I think that was – manifested or exhibited within our ability to respond to some of the shortages and some of the spikes in demand in terms of moving product around the country. You know, having our own distribution assets and, you know, strong network of partners enables us to respond to those types of surges with burst capacity.

I'll be going to... Oh, there we go. We got him in.

It's not Ben, but we do have one person in the queue to ask a question. Luring Nikita from Bloomberg. Your line is open.

Press.

Yeah, no, it's me. You got me. Can you hear me? This is Ben. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The... These having to dial in remotely things don't sync well with my calendar, so it's the nature of the beast these days, I guess. I do have a few questions, and I appreciate you kind of hanging out and chit-chatting until I figured it out. The first one is, as it relates to, obviously, the gross numbers were fantastic. But Ira, you talked a little bit about the interest expense. The taxes were quite a bit higher than they were last quarter. Just trying to get it, and I know you mentioned the tax rate should be similar for the fourth quarter, but first on tax, what was sort of the culprit for the higher rate relative to what we had seen in the first half of the year, and how do you see that playing out next year? And then on the interest expense, obviously interest rates are rising, but Um, uh, is there anything that you can do other than, I guess, just paying down debt to help mitigate that at all? Maybe a little bit less factoring or, um, you know, anything that can, you know, help to, uh, um, help that interest expense line a little bit.

Yeah, well, I'll cover the taxes first and we get the interest. So on the, on the tax side, you know, a couple of things come to mind, um, which, uh, weren't necessarily in our mindset in the earlier parts of the year. Of course, in the second quarter, we had the impact of backwardation. We knew that in Q2, but we had some offsets to that. And now you have the significant increase in interest expense. Both of those items are in the U.S., right? So both of those items affect our domestic income. And the marine phenomenal performance is principally offshore. So you had... a pretty significant shift in the distribution of earnings for 2022 compared to where we would have planned and forecast the beginning of the year. And that clearly, just because of the way the wonderful tax code works, has an impact on our tax rate. If you look out to next year, by the way, even though we're at 30% this quarter, we're probably in the same ballpark in Q4, our rate for the year will still only be, you know, 22%, 23%, which is still much better than, or a few hundred basis points better than where we were last year. I would say when you look to next year, we don't expect to have a massive backwardation impact. The interest piece is a question, so that dovetails into your next question, but we hope that the rate will be a few hundred basis points lower than where we're coming out in the second half of the year next year, so call it, you know, 26, 27, 28%-ish. So, you know, going to interest, which affects that analysis that I just described, yes, we're obviously like any other company that has debt on their balance sheet and relies on, you know, short-term funding, whether it be, you know, the receivables program or bank lines, you know, everyone is facing similar issues and trying to, you know, find ways to mitigate that. the rising cost of interest. And, you know, Glenn, who obviously intros the call, but is also our treasurer, him and his team work closely together with myself and many other people to identify, you know, all areas of our capital structure or anything related to that that have opportunities to have a positive impact on the interest line. Could be getting more more interest for the money that we do have on hand around the world, could be reducing factoring a bit, could be the strategic use of letters of credit to reduce some cash going out the door. There's lots of things that we're focused on day to day, and literally dozens of areas that we're focused on. But again, every win in that department winds up getting offset by another 75 basis point movement by the Fed. But again, we worked really hard in Q3, generated over $250 million of operating cash flow. Had we not done that, our interest expense would have been even higher. I don't anticipate that we'll generate nearly that much cash in the fourth quarter. But again, we are focused on a bunch of initiatives to keep a level of interest expense in the same neighborhood. and try to start bringing it down next year, depending upon what's happening with the economy and what direction the Fed may continue to take or not in 2023. So something we're very focused on. The good news is there is a pretty reasonably tight correlation between the tremendous success we had in marine and the fact that we're experiencing higher interest costs. And the net of those two still produced a really nice result for us this quarter. But we don't necessarily want to be spending $34 million in interest every quarter, so we'll do everything we can to manage that number as best possible.

Great. And given sort of where interest costs are all in with short-term, long-term receivables, etc., from your perspective right now, is sort of the highest and best use of the cash flow that you are generating to sort of keep it in the business, keep from having to borrow in order to fund the business. I mean, is that how you're thinking about what to do with the cash flow that you're generating at the moment?

Look, across the business, it's a daily education process because there's a lot of people that are out there working really hard trying to generate revenue for us that probably haven't spent a lot of time in their career in a high single-digit interest rate environment. We're trying to make sure all the business we're doing makes sense, that we're getting rewarded at the level we think we should be in an interest environment like this. We'll obviously keep investing in the business where it makes sense, where we believe we could get returns well above that short-term cost of capital. There are I think you were hinting at this, so I'll answer part two. There are still a lot of strategic opportunities for us that currently have a higher cost of capital associated with them than they did last year, so it's a little more difficult to find the right answers there and get the return that we're comfortable with, but there will be opportunities despite the interest rate environment that we're in to supplement our organic growth over the next 12 to 18 months with with some additional strategic investments.

The other part of that, too, is services and businesses that don't have large working capital requirements. We've developed some of those ourselves. We've acquired some, so that's very much a part of the mix within our traditional legacy commodity business. Decommoditizing the commodity and basically wrapping a lot of services that customers are asking for and we're providing and just very salutary to the overall offerings of the company.

Right. That's helpful. I appreciate it, Mike. And then lastly, just bigger picture, and again, appreciating that it's a little probably early to look too far out into 2023, but To the extent that you can, and is there anything that outside maybe of a really challenging macroeconomic environment, is there anything that you guys are seeing that causes you to think that there might be any change in the momentum that we're seeing at the moment? obviously energy prices are going to move around a little bit and you're going to have seasonal shifts or whatever. But from a broad perspective, do you feel like the momentum that you have at the moment can be sustained over the course of next year?

Well, you know, if you break it into a few pieces, I think the answer is yes, depending on how you define momentum. You know, remember aviation, you know, took it on the chin pretty heavily in the first half of the year. if we agree that we don't expect that to happen again, there's significant upside for aviation next year, even if it was a low-growth environment, depending upon what's going on in the economy, just because we're not expecting to take a $50 million-plus hit again in the second quarter of next year or any quarter of next year. Marine is a question, Ben, because it really depends on what happens with prices. Marine will likely continue to perform well ahead of where they performed in 2021. But in order to match their performance in 2022, you're most likely going to need prices to remain relatively high. It won't be as easy to hit those same numbers in a lower price environment. But again, prices go down, we generate more cash, pay down debt, and we get some relief, as I said earlier, on the interest line. And I think, you know, land, look, we're just getting, still getting no flyers. We're nine months in. We're learning a lot that, you know, where we could drive more efficiencies across the fuels part of the land business. So I think we're actually really just gaining momentum there in a serious way. And we're also just gaining momentum in our connect business on the sustainability side, whether it be renewable fuels or the various product and service offerings that We keep growing in that part of the business as there's a tremendous interest from our customers for assistance in that regard. So I think land certainly has the opportunity for an uptick in momentum. Aviation, certainly. Marine is the question mark, again, just because it all depends so heavily on price. So overall, we're looking to grow next year.

uh interest may get in our way a little bit but we're working hard to you know again to mitigate that uh that line item in the p l all right just just additional color uh obviously presence in aviation and marine uh the ability to uh the different dynamics as i described within both of those businesses and then growth and market share you know and landed connect we still have very small market share in those businesses So those are areas that we definitely have a pretty good runway and certainly has demonstrated within aviation our ability to fill out the offering and continue to add to the offering I think is pretty impressive. And I think there's opportunities to do that in marine as well, but certainly there's a pretty good runway within land and connect. And we do want to continue to bring in more digital offerings to the marketplace. I think that, you know, obviously, you know, running the business and looking at, you know, price and, you know, interest and, you know, some of, you know, depending on who you talk to, you know, things are going to look a little bit rough. But I think certainly the thing I said in last quarter or previous with what we've gone through in this company, and I don't want to say we're going to laugh at a recession, but, we've certainly demonstrated that we are built for turbulence and we've got the resilience in this business and you've got a hell of a lot of grit. You've got an organization that's got a burning desire to succeed and provide value. I think we're entering a phase here where you've got a better portfolio, you've got increased quality of earnings, obviously a number of different things in front of us, but you know, a far better position company.

All right. Well, I appreciate the answers. And again, sir, for the minute.

Anything else, Ben, you want to talk about?

Oh, I mean, we can talk baseball, but I don't want to talk about that. I didn't think so. Great.

Thanks. Thanks very much, Ben. All right. Appreciate it. All right. Bye.

Thank you. And Mr. Kasbar, there are no further questions at this time.

Thank you. Thank you, operator. Appreciate that. And thank you to everyone who is listening. We appreciate the support. We enjoy what we do. And thank you to all of my colleagues around the world. Appreciate and enjoy working with you and look forward to talking to everybody next quarter. So stay well, stay safe, and talk to you soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line. Everyone have a great day.