Oil-Dri Corporation Of America

Welcome to the annual meeting for Oil Dry Corporation of America. Our host for today's call is Leslie Garber, Director of Investor Relations at Oil Dry. I will now turn the call over to your host, Leslie Garber. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to Oil Dry Corporation of America's 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. My name is Leslie Garber, and I am the Director of Investor Relations at Oil Drive. Similar to last year, we are conducting this meeting virtually via live webcast, a format which enables you as stockholders to attend and participate fully and equally, improves efficiency, increases our ability to communicate effectively and engage with stockholders, and overall reduces costs. On your screen under Meeting Materials, you will find the meeting agenda, rules of conduct, the list of stockholders of record, oil drives proxy materials, and annual report. During the meeting today, we will be covering two proposals, the election of directors and the ratification of the appointment of oil drives independent auditor, followed by a financial review, business presentations, and lastly, time for Q&A. We ask that you submit your questions online under the ask a question field on your screen. Only stockholders of record are able to ask questions during the meeting. Stockholders will be able to vote online by clicking on the Vote Here button on your screen. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Tony Parker, our Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary. He will conduct the formal portion of today's meeting.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I now call to order the 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Oil Dry Corporation of America to conduct the formal business set forth in the Notice of Meeting and Proxy Statement. Commencing on October 28th, 2025, a notice of internet availability of proxy materials or a copy of the proxy materials was mailed to all Oil Dry stockholders of record as of the close of business on October 13th, 2025, which is the record date fixed by Oil Dry's Board of Directors for the determination of stockholders entitled to notice of and to vote at this meeting. Broadridge Financial Solutions has delivered an affidavit confirming the foregoing. Oil Dry has appointed Richard Kretz of Hagberg Associates LLC to serve as the Inspector of Election for this meeting. He is present on the webcast and has taken the oath of office. As of October 13, 2025, the record date for this meeting, there were 10,373,000 180 shares of oil dry common stock and 4,269,856 shares of oil dry class B outstanding. Holders of our common stock are entitled to one vote per share and holders of our class B stock are entitled to 10 votes per share and generally vote together without regard to class. A quorum is present at this meeting if holders of a majority of our capital stock outstanding are present in person or represented by proxy. Thus, the number of votes necessary to constitute a quorum at this meeting is 26,535,871 votes. Mr. Kretz has informed me that there are more than such number of votes represented at this meeting. Therefore, I declare there's a quorum present for purposes of transacting business. Now, I will present the matters to be voted upon. each of which is described in the proxy statement. If any stockholder would like to make a comment regarding any of the proposals, please submit your comment through the Ask a Question field in the web portal, and we will provide any comments on the proposals themselves after all proposals have been presented. The first item of business is the election of nine directors. The proxy statement listed oil drives nominees for director, Each of them currently serves as a director of the company. Those nominees are Daniel S. Jappe, Ellen Blair Chubb, Paul M. Hinesley, Michael A. Nemeroff, George C. Roth, Amy L. Ryan, Patricia J. Shmita, Alan H. Selig, and Lawrence E. Walshaw. The second item of business is the ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton LLP as Oil Dry's independent auditor for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2026. The Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of OilDry has appointed Grant Thornton to serve as the company's independent auditor for fiscal year 2026 and has directed the appointment be submitted for ratification by the stockholders at this meeting. At this time, we will check and review any comments on the proposals that have been submitted. It looks like there have been no comments received, so we will proceed with the opening polls. It is currently 935 a.m. on December 9th, 2025, and the polls are now open. Any stockholder who hasn't yet voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking on the Vote Here button on your screen. Stockholders who have sent in proxies or voted via telephone or Internet and who do not want to change their vote do not need to take any further action. While we allow time for stockholders who haven't already done so to complete their voting, I'd like to remind you that the business presentations and any other commentary by Oil Dry's employees who we refer to as teammates today may contain forward-looking statements of expected future performance. Any such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially. We highlight a number of important risk factors that may affect our future performance and our SEC filings, including our annual report for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2025. We urge you to review and consider those risk factors carefully in evaluating the company's comments and in evaluating any investment in oil dry stock. Copies of our SEC filings are available through the company or online. All right, one last moment to finish voting. Okay, at this point, the polls are closed. I will now report the preliminary results of the voting provided by the inspector of election. We will be reporting the final vote results in a form 8K to be filed within four business days. As described in the proxy statement, A director may only be elected by plurality of votes cast. The nine nominees who receive the largest number of votes will be elected. We have been informed by the inspector of election that the preliminary vote report shows that the nine candidates nominated by Oil Dry received the largest number of votes. Regarding the second item of business, an affirmative majority of the votes represented at this meeting is necessary for ratification of the appointment of Grant Thornton as Oil Dry's independent auditor the fiscal year ending july 31 2026 we have been informed by the inspector of election that the preliminary vote report shows that such ratification received more than a majority of the votes represented at this meeting this concludes the business to be conducted at this meeting there being no further business to come before the meeting the 2025 annual meeting of stockholders of oil dry corporation of america is now adjourned I am happy to introduce Dan Jaffe, our president and chief executive officer for our business presentations and financial review.

Great. Thank you, Tony, and thanks for walking us through the vote. Always happy when we get reelected. I want to thank, you know, really our shareholders and our global team. We always say winning at oil dry is a team game, and the team really delivered in fiscal 25. Record-breaking performance. and lots of momentum, you know, heading into 26 and beyond. Thought it'd be nice to look back, because Susan's going to look at more of the recent results. So I'm going to take more of a long-term perspective and walk you through what we call Moneyball, which is our version of Moneyball, which is bringing data analytics to our decision-making here at Oil Drive. And had I gone to you as the investors back in 2003, and I'll remind you who have been around a long time, in 2002, we actually lost money for the year. So we lost a million dollars for the entire year, and we're doing over a million tons. And if I had said, look, we're going to adopt a new mission, we're changing direction, we're no longer going to chase tons, we are now going to create value from sorbent minerals, And in effect, what you're going to see is over 23 years, we're going to reduce our tons from a million to 800,000. I'm not sure how many investors would have said, okay, that's the kind of stock I want to buy. But what happened was underneath it all, there was a lot of disparate profitability. Yes, we lost money on that million tons in fiscal two. But we made money, a good amount of money on about 600,000 tons and lost a lot of money on 400,000 tons. So the devil was in the detail. And we started to implement Miney Ball, which basically was the equivalent of saying we're no longer going to swing at every pitch or we're no longer going to stay in every hand to lay in poker. Those are guaranteed losing strategies. Instead, we're going to be a lot more discerning and figure out who values us and let's get closer to them. And whoever doesn't value us, let's let them go find someone else because they're clearly not our, whatever we're doing, our product or quality was not resonating with them. And they were viewing us as a commodity, someone who could be, you know, swapped out for a penny. So while the tons did decline by nearly 20% over that 23 year period, which is very important because we do sell a non-renewable resource and And it's important that as we use up our reserves, we put them to their most valuable use. And those of you who haven't followed us long will be happy to know that we keep at least 40 years of proven reserves in every single product line at any given point in time. And it's actually been easier to do because our denominator has gone down over this 23-year period. Had we tried to grow linearly... we'd be already out of clay is my guess. It just would never have worked. But you can see, look, even though our tons are down, our net sales have grown nicely, Tager of almost 5%. Our net sales per ton have grown by 6%, and that's a combination of both pricing but also mix, selling more of the stuff that our customers were valuing. And then when you get into the profitability lines, you see even more dramatic slopes. The gross profit per ton has grown by 7.6% per year for that entire 22-year period. That's pretty powerful. And so it's enabled us to generate cash, pay down debt, and return dividends to our shareholders. So you can see we've raised our dividend 22 years in a row and have actually accelerated those increases in the last couple of years. And the market... has rewarded that or been aware of that and rewarded us with an increased stock price. Because you could have bought oil by shares back for $4 back in 03, and now it's up to $56 at our 731 close. So that's what that number is. So I didn't want to take up too much of your time. I did want to turn it over to Susan, because obviously you care whatever the recent results and what's coming down the pike. But I did want to do this because it does show the power of creating value from sorbent minerals and executing our Miney Ball strategy. So I'm going to turn it over to Susan Cray, and she'll walk you through the more recent history.

Thanks, Dan. So let's take a look back to some of the things that we said when we were here a year ago. And what was that? Well, we talked about our objective using Miney Ball to grow the top and bottom lines. via improved volumes and product mix, exactly what Dan described. We talked about continuing to invest in our manufacturing infrastructure, not only to enhance operational efficiency, but also to support some longer-term growth. And Aaron Christensen is going to talk to us about that a little later. And we talked about integrating what was then our new acquisition of UltraPET Crystals. So what are some of the highlights that we accomplished in fiscal 2025? Well, as Dan said, we sent new records in net sales, in gross profit, and in net income. It was a really strong year for the oil dry teammates. But building on that, it'll make it a tough comparable moving into 2026. In 2025, we significantly expanded the renewable diesel business. And Bruce Pacey will have some great color on that when we get to his section. And we also successfully integrated the UltraPet business and achieved the synergistic benefits that we used in the business case to make the acquisition. We continued our capital investment strategy and we raised the annual dividend increase, the amount we increase it every year from $0.04 per share to $0.10 per share giving more value back to our shareholders. And we'll talk more about debt and cash and our strong balance sheet as we go through the presentation. Talking about a record here, we saw records by many of our principal products. And if you take a look at this chart, you see three years, cat litter growing nicely at a CAGR of 6.3. And in the B2B segment, the star in the middle is fluids purification. making that a very tough comparable for that business here in fiscal 2026. This set of charts has two full fiscal years on the left, so fiscal 24 and 25. And then on the right, to acclimate you, it's quarter one of fiscal 25 and quarter one of fiscal 26. And again, our first quarter of fiscal 25, as we go through these charts, was our best quarter ever. So it's going to make for a tough comp. But taking a look at the right here in fiscal 26, we had revenue net sales of $120 million in the first quarter. So we are off to a good start. If I think about where the growth came from last year, this chart lays it out nicely. It was a combination of price and mix, improving that mix. It was also volume both from our organic businesses growth and from the acquisition of Ultra Pet, all contributing to that 11% year-over-year growth. Now this year, where's the volume coming from? Well, actually the volume is down in Q1, but we still had a strong quarter. If you see 203,000 tons, And you compare that to last year when we had a full year of 811,000 tons. Our net sales per ton are actually virtually flat at 592 in this quarter versus 594 in the same quarter last year. When we get to gross profit per ton, you see that first quarter gross profit per ton is $175. And that compares to a fiscal 25 full year average gross profit per ton of 176, so very much in line. And actually the gross margin percent is dead on Q1 fiscal 26 at 29.5% versus the same number for the full year of fiscal 2025. When we get to net income per ton, In the quarter, $76 is an exact match to the first fiscal quarter of 25, our best quarter ever. And EBITDA coming in strong at $24 million here in Q1 of fiscal 26, and compare that to a full year of $90 million in fiscal 25. So things are going well from a cash standpoint. When we look at diluted earnings per basic common share at $1.06 per share in Q1, that compares to a full year last year of $3.70. So also off to a strong start. And our paid dividends per share in Q1, as Dan mentioned, we have been raising our dividends every year for 22 years. You see the $0.18 per share versus the $0.155 last year. If we think about significant cash outlays the last couple of years, fiscal 24 was the year we acquired UltraPet, and you see the significant cash outlay for that. Then the second largest one is our CapEx, continuing to invest in our businesses. That's the largest slice of the pie in fiscal 25, and Aaron Christensen will show you some of the key projects that that went into when he does his presentation. Also note that in fiscal 25 we had a substantial debt repayment, and that was paying down the variable rate debt that we had used to finance the acquisition of UltraPED. So speaking of debt, our debt has gone down after we've made payments to $39.8 million at the end of our first fiscal quarter. But if you net that against the cash, we actually are net cash. We have more cash on hand at the end of Q1 than we do debt, meaning our balance sheet is in a very strong position to enable us to continue investing in our business, investing in our facilities, and we have capacity to make other investments were they to become available to us. So taking a look at our fiscal 2026 outlook, We're going to continue to use the Mighty Ball approach that Dan described to improve volumes and product mix and improve our bottom line. Part of that is we continue to strengthen and invest in our digital infrastructure, and that is software, that is people, that is process, that is governance. We are tackling it all so that we can enhance our Mighty Ball approach to generating data-driven, better results. We'll maintain and return value to our shareholders, and we will execute opportunistic share repurchases if the value makes sense. Finally, we will continue to invest heavily in manufacturing facilities to support the second half of the year growth that we expect and to support growth beyond that. And that seems like a good time to segue over to... Aaron Christensen, our Vice President of Operations, to talk about continuing to invest in our manufacturing foundation.

Thank you very much, Susan. You did a great job of teeing me up a number of times. I appreciate that. Today, for what's probably the third or fourth year in a row, I get the chance to talk about our capital reinvestments in our manufacturing base. For investors paying attention, they probably recognize these images that I've shared in prior years. That's deliberate. What I'm going to talk to here is a consistency of purpose, a consistency of strategy, and a consistency of message. We're committed to continue to invest repeatedly year in and year out in our manufacturing base. As Susan talked to earlier, fiscal 25 was our highest year of capital investment back into our manufacturing plants, very similar to the prior year. As I've shared in prior years, we're continuing to look for ways to invest in pure infrastructure maintenance, while also finding capacity, flexibility, responsiveness, things that improve our working conditions, our cost structure, and as well as protect the environment. I'm about to talk to four examples of themes of investments made in the past year. These might be the types of things that are not intuitively obvious to investors that a well dry needs to spend money on. All four also provide great examples where we're not just purely investing in the infrastructure of our manufacturing plants, but also finding other benefits in workplace conditions, costs, and environmental improvement at the same time. We are absolutely committed to continue to do this and to invest in these levels over a period of the years ahead. Our manufacturing foundation is essential to take care of our customers in the decades that are in front of us. The first thing that I'd like to talk about is investments in our rail infrastructure. Oil Dry moves more than 200,000 tons per year of clay around our manufacturing plants. Much of this is headed directly to our customers in the form of our fluids purification products and our ag carriers, some of which is handled between our manufacturing plants or within our manufacturing plants for multi-step processing. In some cases, we buy material that is integrated and formulated with our own clay. The amount of clay that we move around via rail is rather significant. This past year in several plants, we've made investments to stabilize and improve the rail conditions themselves and buy equipment that can more safely and efficiently move rail cars through our facilities and position them in a place where they can be prepared to be picked up by local rail companies and moved throughout the nation. Another theme where we've invested over the past number of years is in compressed air. I often like to say that stable power and electricity is the heart of a factory. Where stable electricity is the heart, compressed air are the lungs. Modern packaging equipment and much processing equipment runs off clean, dry, inefficient compressed air. Healthy lungs make for a healthy body. Longevity of packaging equipment can be extended by reliable clean and dry compressed air. In addition, modern compressed air equipment can be made more efficiently, requiring less power and electricity to generate that compressed air, which is often a very large consumer of electricity in any modern manufacturing plant. Speaking of air, in addition, we've invested in cleaning up the air that leaves our facilities, air that's used in our dryers, many of our processing areas, packaging equipment cleanups. Oil dry is committed to protecting and maintaining environmental controls. Bag houses and scrubbers are key pollution control devices that remove particulate matter and other contaminants from that air as it leaves our facilities. Over the past year, we've made investments, or actually over the past several years, we've continued to make investments in modernizing scrubbers and bag houses, both to maintain the highest level environmental compliance but also at the same time using more modern equipment that requires lower horsepower, which reduces electricity usage and makes us more cost effective and cost efficient while protecting the environment. We're very proud of what we've continued to be able to do in this area. The last theme I'll talk to you is the use of modern robotics. Robotics are often viewed as ways to improve cost structure, and reduce the number of teammates. I do not like to think of the use of robotics only in this way. They create a safer environment that reduces ergonomic risks, makes many jobs more engaging, easier to attract and retain teammates in those positions. This particular application that you see presented here is a great example where we've partnered with a key supplier of ours. Through the use of several robots that we have in our own facility and robots at our partner provider, These jugs that you presented on this page are not touched by human hand until they're touched by your local or online retailer and their stock person in the back room. Very proud of the ability to move product throughout our supply chain in a way that is efficient, cost-effective, creates high quality by lower touch of the packages themselves, and makes the workplace more hospitable for our hundreds of oil-dried teammates. I hope you've enjoyed those examples that are hopefully unique and maybe eye-opening about how Oil Dry is committed to reinvest our free cash in ways that are strategic in the years ahead. And with that, I'd like to hand you off to one of our commercial leaders, Bruce Paetze, who's the vice president of our fluids purification business.

Bruce Paetze Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate the introduction. Fluid Purification Division had a very strong year in fiscal 25. A lot of this was driven by new business in our renewable diesel sector, as well as we've had increase in our vegetable oil customers as well, specifically in North America, which we consider our blue zone. Fiscal year 24, we've made a lot of capital investments, which helped really strengthen us to supply in 25 as we grew. Aaron talked a little bit about the rail investment. That was significant for my business. But we also increased capacity to make bleaching clay products at our plant in Georgia, which also helps service our customers. We have superior technical support in the field to grow this business. It's one of our number one strengths that we have in our division, is that we can go in and work with customers and help them to use our products efficiently, better than our competitors. When looking at the sales, you can see we've had another strong year of growth, almost 20% growth from fiscal 24 to 25. Again, a lot of this was driven by the renewable sector and the vegetable oil business. As we look at future requirements, we know that the EPA released recently increased domestic biofuel production for biomass-based diesel And our bleaching clay products are used in the filtration of renewable diesel, biodiesel, and sustainable aviation. And so we fall under this sector, and we do expect some increased business in 26 from these EPA rulings. We are well positioned to service this potential business as we increased our capacity, as I recently just said, and imported biofuels feedstocks from other countries coming into the U.S. will be reduced as there's not as many credits given to them. However, we do think that they'll still be used cooking oil coming in from China and other locations into some of these markets. As we look forward into 26, we continue to focus on growing the vegetable oil business and the renewable diesel business. We're going after some new plants that will be coming on in F26. to help strengthen our business. We'll be expanding more into foreign markets. We have a couple targets that we're going after now that will increase our business nicely. And then we're leveraging our high active products to go after poor oil quality conditions in the marketplace. Our clays have the ability to better absorb the contaminants in these poor quality feedstock oils when compared to competitors. And lastly, we're going to be, again, using technical support to promote the growth of our business. We have some very high-level people in the field that walk into our customers and really help them run their businesses better and help them reduce the cost of use of our products. So we look forward to F26. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Laura Sheelan, who is our Vice President and General Manager of our Consumer Products Division. Thank you.

Thank you, Bruce, and good morning, everyone. Today, I'm excited to share how our team is driving growth in the lightweight litter segment and capitalizing on new opportunities in crystals. I'll start with a slide that we've shown over the past few years. As you can see, our domestic cat litter business continues to grow across multiple segments, sales channels, and both brand and private label products. with a 10% CAGR over the past five years. A significant milestone was our acquisition of UltraPET in May of 2024, which allowed us to add crystal litter to our expanding product portfolio. If we look at our strategic priorities of lightweight clay and crystal litter, we have realized a 16.7% CAGR, surpassing the growth of our overall domestic litter business. For years, we've emphasized our commitment to expand lightweight litter due to its clear value for consumers who get the convenience of carrying less weight home and easier handling, as well as for our retail and e-commerce customers who benefit from logistics and fulfillment cost savings. Our latest Crystal product offerings align perfectly with our lightweight strategy, delivering the same benefits to both consumers and customers. Taking a look at the lightweight opportunity, we've been saying for years that our strategy is to grow the lightweight segment because as the lightweight pie grows, our piece of the pie grows. Well, in the past year, the lightweight pie did just that with an explosive 10% volume growth. Much of this year's momentum can be attributed to our competitors' trade and advertising, which has helped drive trial and educate consumers on the benefits of lightweight litter. And this is great for our long-term strategy. But this year's growth is not just a recent phenomenon. The lightweight segment has consistently outperformed the overall litter category in each of the past four years, with a CAGR of 5.2% versus 1.8% for the cat litter category. And to look at the opportunity, you can look at the chart on the right. the lightweight segment has generated $118 million in additional value over the past two years, demonstrating its increasing importance in consumer demand. Looking at the chart on the right, you can see that oil dry maintains a strong presence across the lightweight segment with a number one unit share in private label and a number two unit share in branded. Our strong share enables us to leverage our strengths to drive further lightweight growth and capitalize on the growing lightweight demand. Our strategy in the lightweight segment is anchored on three core pillars, innovation, marketing, and partnership, which I'll review a little more closely. We are committed to ongoing innovation to enhance consumer value and support growth within the lightweight segment. During the past year, we expanded our product portfolio with larger value-size offerings to provide consumers with greater convenience and value and help mitigate e-commerce fulfillment costs. Our leading cast-pride scoopable jug is now available in pails at Walmart, and our antibacterial litter is now available in value-size bags on Amazon and Chewy. Looking at marketing, we leverage a full funnel strategy to drive consumer awareness, encourage trial, and build lasting loyalty. Our multifaceted approach includes a range of digital platforms, including streaming TV, digital display ads, social media, and paid search campaigns, as well as key influencers and retail integration programs to further amplify our message and reach. Our consumer messaging continues to emphasize the dual benefits of lightweight and performance, with odor control as the number one consumer benefit. Our message is clear. Our lightweight litter delivers results with no compromise on performance. I'm now excited to share our new lightweight commercials that go big on the lightweight plus performance message. and emphasize our superior instant and long-lasting odor control.

Please play the video.

Okay, I hope you enjoyed. We had a lot of fun with making those with the very large cats. Our digital display banner ads also showcase the same lightweight performance message as part of our 360 media campaign. The ads reinforce our message of shrink the stink, maximize odor control, and make litter care easier for consumers. Additional part of our lightweight strategy is focusing on driving distribution in key retailers and growth channels, such as Walmart, Amazon, and Chewy. These three customers have large market share and reach over half of consumers and are growing rapidly. With strength at Amazon and Walmart and making great progress on Chewy, our brands have great opportunity for future growth. With respect to Chewy, since the launch of our premium lightweight jugs in 2024, our Cast Pride branded products have demonstrated consistent growth with ongoing expansion of additional products, including our value-sized lightweight bags and our antibacterial jugs and bags. Moving to our second major strategic initiative, is driving innovation and expansion in crystal litter, which is also anchored by the same three core pillars of innovation, marketing, and partnership. Regarding innovation, we recently launched new and improved Cask Pride crystal litters that leverage our total odor control variety name from our clay portfolio and have stronger product claims, including superior odor control. that really leveraged our R&D resources and know-how from our clay to bring superior performance to crystal litter products. We also recently launched a new Cats Pride Ultra Clean Crystals, which is low-tracking for clean paws and home. This new item offers the same number one odor control with strong messages of convenience and further strengthens our crystal litter portfolio. During the year, we also conducted extensive research to redesign our Cat's Pride crystal packaging to increase appeal and shelf impact. The new design communicates bigger, bolder benefits and claims and creates a stronger emotional connection with cat owners, which tested very well in research. We have also redesigned our Ultra Brand packaging to add the Cat's Pride logo and to leverage both of our brands of Cat's Pride and Ultra. The new packaging retains Ultra's signature elements and incorporates Cat's Pride's green equity with enhanced communication of the claims and benefits. So how is our crystal expansion going? Well, in our first year since the Ultra Pet acquisition, first full year since the acquisition, our team did an amazing job of adding crystal distribution. And our brick and mortar distribution is up 58% since the acquisition. And where we have gained new distribution, we've achieved a 45% dollar share of those customers' crystal business. So our crystal brands are winning with retail customers and we're poised for even greater growth. And there's still room to grow. This chart shows the significant opportunity gap between our distribution of our existing clay products and crystals. And you can see the opportunity gap for us to use our clay relationships and customer partnerships to expand the distribution of our clay crystal products. So we're very excited about leveraging these partnerships and adding distribution opportunities in the coming year. I will now turn it over to Wade Robey, Vice President of Agriculture at Oil Dry and President of Amlin International.

Thank you. Thank you, Laura, and good morning, everyone.

I'm calling you this morning from Jakarta, Indonesia, so hopefully everyone can hear me clearly. I've been fortunate to be traveling around the Asia Pacific region over the last 10 days, visiting with our customers and our distribution partners. and have been very gratified by the excitement they have in the Amlin business and the potential we have to grow in the future. I'm going to be talking this morning about Amlin and sharing a little bit more about our current results as well as some of the prospects we have for the future. So hopefully you'll find this information very exciting as we do. I'm going to start with a little bit of a graphic that shows the history of use of our animal products in the industry. I'll start on the left side of the figure and move around it to the right side. As I show in the figure, we have a long history of commercializing value-based solutions with really strong customer ROI to the animal production industry. I'd show on this graphic that we were founded as Animal in 2007, but Oil Dry actually provided these products to the agricultural industry and animal production industry well before that time. We focus on our core technology, our core mineral. We leverage our vertical integration to ensure the quality, the consistency, and the efficacy of our solutions. which give our customers confidence that the products that we deliver to them will be consistent and will show real value in their operations. We're global in our focus. We serve the North American, Latin American, and Asia Pacific regions, as I've mentioned, and we sell across a whole range of species that are important in those industries. We focus on delivering natural solutions, solutions that our customers want as we move away from some therapeutic antibiotics or other products that are not as beneficial as ours to the productivity of our customers or to animal welfare. Here's a look at our current portfolio, and it's very broad in its relevance. We sell both in the North American market and international markets, as I've indicated. We have a new set of brands in North America that we launched about three years ago in the feed additive category. And further on the right of the chart, I show our global brands that we sell internationally. All of our products are manufactured within OilGry and our partners and are under strict quality and compliance standards. Again, giving our customers confidence that they'll be consistent and they'll bring real value in their operations. We have a multi-species focus in animal, and as I mentioned, we sell in the poultry industry, the dairy industry, and beef, swine, and aquaculture. In this chart, I show the CAGRs of growth of those respective industries, and you can see in all cases, they're very strong. Poultry is our largest market, and we sell into that market in all world areas that we cover. Some of the Predominant trends we see are the reduction or removal of some therapeutic antibiotics, which give the way or lead the way for animal's natural products to be better solutions for our customers. In the dairy industry, that's growing at a fast figure, as I've indicated as well. We focus principally in the U.S. and China. While in beef, we target North America, Brazil, and also Argentina. The swine industry has been up and down over the last couple of years with African swine fever, ASF, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. But we're seeing that industry rebound as customers deal with ASF and begin to repopulate their herds. It's a prime target for ambulance premium solutions, and we're excited about the growth opportunity the swine industry will offer. In aquaculture, we're currently targeting both fin fish and shrimp. It differs by region. In Asia, it's both a combination of tilapia or fin fish and shrimp in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. While in Latin America, it's principally tilapia production in Brazil. If we look at the last five years, this is a chart you've seen other division leads provide. You can see that we've had a strong figure of growth over that period, double digit. And that's in spite of a difficult year for the agricultural industry in total in fiscal year 2024. In spite of a down year, we came back very strong in fiscal year 2025 and got back on a good growth curve. This is really the result of a couple of changes that the organization made in how we go to market in AMLIN. We focus on our mineral now more acutely, bringing forward that technology to our customers. Secondly, we've redesigned or realigned our strategy globally, focusing more with our distribution partners on more efficient delivery of solutions to our customers. And thirdly, we've really focused on bringing forward solutions that are a strong demand pull from our customers. Again, as sub-therapeutic antibiotics are removed, as they look for more natural solutions, our products fit that niche very, very well. I'm going to talk a little bit about a product spotlight that we have with a new product launch we're conducting now in North America. It's a product called Ambio. We're launching that in the current fiscal year. It's based on Barium, which is a decades-long product of Ambium that has been sold really worldwide. Barium is a product that saw really strong emergence as customers began to remove subtherapeutic antibiotics as it provides not only the core value of our mineral, but also benefits from other formulated additives that help customers see strong performance and replacement benefits as they remove the antibiotics from their rations. I'm going to talk specifically about barium and help you understand how that product is targeted globally, and then I'll finish up with some examples with Ambio in the U.S. So barium is really a formulated product based on our core mineral. It has three constituents, the mineral, a source of whole yeast cells, and an amino acid that we blend in the formulation as well. A combination of those three additives allow us to bind biotoxins both of fungal and bacterial origin. It also allows us to target specific pathogenic bacteria to remove them from the gastrointestinal tract of the animal while enhancing the animal's immune function. This promotes optimum gut health and a healthy gut microbiome. All of these lead to a stronger gut epithelial and better absorption of the nutrients that our customers provide in their rations. These allow customers to remove antibiotics with confidence and still maintain the strong performance that they expect. In the United States, we'll be launching this product this year. It's Ambio. The regulations are a little bit different in the U.S., so we have to position it differently in the market. But it contains that same synergistic formulation of components that allow it to provide those strong benefits to our customers. It helps poultry and livestock reach their optimal performance for growth and really delivers strong economic performance for our customers. As we look at future opportunities, the animal production market is growing strongly every year. It's at a CAGR now above 5%. And actually, the use of feed additives, which Animal provides, is growing at an even higher CAGR as customers continue to become more sophisticated in their rations and look for better solutions to optimize performance. Animal products are natural and provide a range of benefits to customers, allowing them to ensure that the diets they provide will give the type of economic performance and support the health of the animals that they expect. Our unique position in the market because of Royal Drive's vertical integration and the benefits that our corporation brings allows animals to provide truly differentiating solutions to our customers and be a leading supplier of these technologies to the animal production industry.

I'll now turn it over to Leslie for the Q&A portion.

Thank you, Wade. And thank you, everyone, for listening to our presentation. I will now open up the floor to questions. In addition to those who just presented, we also have Chris Lampson, Group Vice President of Business to Business and Strategic Growth Initiative, and Mervyn D'Souza, VP of Research and Development on the line. Please submit your questions using the ask a question field on the webcast. Questions or remarks must be relevant to the meeting and pertinent to the matters brought before the meeting. I will now read the first question. It comes from Robert Smith, and he asks, back in early October on the last conference call, you previewed a softer first half. Are you now more or less confident of recovery in the second half? Do you have a realistic possibility of a profit gain for the year as a whole? Dan, I'm going to turn that over to you.

Great. Thank you, Bob. Great question. And we'll take it in pieces. So regarding the first half, we did signal that we're going to be up against a very tough comparison. In our 80-something year history, we've had 330 quarters. And this quarter beat all but one of them. And that was last year. But it still was a great quarter, but was softer than last year. And this was just a quarter we've signaled that we expect to be behind. through the six-month turn of the year, and we are. The good news is, this gets to the second half of your question, are we more or less confident of recovery in the second half, and do we have a realistic possibility of a profit gain for the year as a whole? The good news is we actually beat our plan for the first quarter. So we plan to be down, and we were, but we actually are ahead of our plan. And if all of the divisions and all the supply chain and the whole company delivers on their plan, which, again, I'll remind you we were ahead of in the first quarter, if they all just deliver on their plan, we have a very realistic possibility of a profit gain for the year as a whole. So, so far tracking exactly as we thought, if not even a little better. So thank you for your question.

Okay, the next question comes from Ethan Starr. are oil-dried bleaching clays currently being used to filter sustainable aviation fuel, and to what extent is that a potential growth market for oil dry? Bruce, will you take that, please?

Sure. Thanks, Ethan, for the question. Yes, sustainable aviation fuel is a growing market, and we will see increased sales of our bleaching clay products into this market. The sustainable aviation fuel is produced by the same renewable diesel producers, and they have to clean the fuel up before they can then convert it into sustainable aviation fuel. So you should see some growth in the future with our business in this market.

Okay, thank you. The next question comes from Robert Smith. What are the headwinds for Amlin this year, and how will you overcome them? Wade, please answer that for us.

Yes, thanks, Elizabeth. That's an excellent question, and there are a number of factors that we have to be cognizant of as we continue to grow our annual business. One of the key issues we've faced over the last year that persists into this year is the situation with tariffs. That has caused a lot of customer uncertainty and has certainly in certain markets slowed or made customers a little bit more cautious. We saw that in the first quarter in Brazil, where the back and forth between President Trump and President Lula of Brazil actually brought the orders there to a stop for a period of time. Customers were nervous about the high cost of tariffs that might impact their ability to acquire our products when they landed. We've seen that now lots of, and we now have orders on the books for Brazil for the balance of the year. It's one of the things we have to watch very closely.

Great. Thank you. Another question from Robert Smith. Will we see new products this year? What color can you give? And please touch on the overall R&D budget in areas of emphasis. Mervyn, will you please handle that?

Sure, Leslie. Thanks for the question, Robert. Oil Dry continues to invest in R&D and innovation. We balance our investments between base product improvement and new product development. We continue to execute on our R&D strategy, which mirrors our oil-dry division's growth strategies with lightweight catheter, fluids purification, agricultural solutions, and animal health and nutrition. To give you some color on new products, as Laura Sheeland highlighted, we're excited to have new and improved crystal solutions with stronger claims and low tracking through collaboration with our catheter division teammates.

Wonderful. Thank you. The next question that came in is the press release noted a record-breaking quarter for agricultural product sales. Can you please provide some color around the growth for that part of the business? Wade, can you please answer that?

Yes, thanks, Leslie. So coming out of a down year in 2024, fiscal year 24, we really saw the whole industry rebound pretty significantly. But that was especially true in fiscal year 25 in the sales of our Verge product. Verge is an engineered granule that we sell that has multiple applications both for biologicals as well as for herbicides and pesticides that can be applied in broad acre agriculture. The result of those higher sales of Verge, which is one of our premium products, allowed us to see improved product mix. We also did generally, again coming out of fiscal year 24, experience good growth not only with new customers but also with our existing customers as their businesses continue to improve. Finally, where possible and where it was reasonable, we have continued to raise prices to ensure we maintain appropriate profitability for the organization. delivering, again, big value to our customers, but also making sure that we're pricing our products to value in the marketplace. All of those factors have really contributed to the strong quarter we saw this year in fiscal year 26.

All right. Thank you. The next question is from Robert Smith. What are the prospects for a rebound in fluids purifications for the remainder of the year? Bruce?

Hi, Robert. Thanks for the question. First off, fiscal 25, the first quarter was our strongest quarter in the history of our division, which mirrors kind of what Dan was saying. We had a real strong first quarter. So our business really is doing very well still. We're above our plan of where we're supposed to be this year. We expect to have a good back half of the year. So we look to have a good year in both the renewable and the vegetable oil business as we move forward. Thank you. Excellent.

The next question that came in says, last year at the annual meeting, you talked about service levels. Can you please provide an update on company-wide service levels? Have they remained the same, increased, or decreased? Aaron, can you please respond to that?

Absolutely. Leslie, I love to talk about service. So first, the really simple answer is service levels have actually improved slightly from when we talked about it a year ago. We're now 12 quarters in a row that both our fill rate percentage and on-time percentage have met goal. Fill rate hovers around 99.8%. A reminder that our most demanding customers expect 99. So that's mathematically only one in 500 pallets that we don't have available to sell. On-time arrival to customers hovers in the mid-90s, 94 to 95 commonly. I can't help myself but take a moment to talk about why. Everything we do is essentially built around maintaining high service levels. What I presented earlier in our capital reinvestment, it's all about flexibility, capacity, and responsiveness in our manufacturing plants to deliver high service. Culturally, I know we've got many of our teammates listening right now in the supply chain that are investors. Our customer service team, our planning team, our operating team, culturally we have built a service-minded foundation. Everything we do is ultimately built around taking care of our customers at the highest level.

Thank you, Aaron. And thank you all for submitting your questions. We got through all of them. The queue is empty. And so I'm happy that we were able to answer all the questions that were top of mind for our shareholders. So we'll look forward to being with you again in 90 days. Have a happy and healthy holiday season and see you next year. Thanks. The meeting has now concluded.

Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day.