Universal Corporation

Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Tiffany and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Universal Corporation fourth quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session with instructions for participation provided at that time. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Wushong Ma, Vice President and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Good evening and thank you for joining us. President Wigner, our Chairman, President and CEO, and Johan Kroner, our Chief Financial Officer, are here with me today. Our agenda is for President Johan to provide an update on our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2025 operating and financial results. and share some strategic thoughts about the company. We will open up the call for questions. During the course of this call, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on our current knowledge and some assumptions about the future. These are representative as of today only. Actual results, performance, and achievements could differ materially from the anticipated results, prospects, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. and we assume no obligation to update any forelooking statements except as required by law. For information on some of the risks and uncertainties related to the forelooking statements, please refer to the report we filed with the ICC and under cautionary statements regarding forelooking statements in our current earnings press release. Finally, some of the information we have for you today may be based on unaudited allocations and may be subject to reclassification. Our comments today may also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. For details regarding these measures, including a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our current earnings press release and other public materials. This call is being webcast live and will be available for replay on our website through August 28th, 2025. Other than the replay, we have not authorized and disclaim responsibility for any recording, replay, or distribution of any transcription of this call. This call is being copyrighted and may not be used without our permission. I would like now to turn the call over to Preston.

Thank you, Woosh. Good evening. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. I am new to the CEO role, but not new to Universal, having joined the company over 20 years ago. Over the last 20 years, I've seen many stages of our company's evolution, complete with both triumphs and challenges. Our ability to adapt to change and to turn challenges into opportunities have helped shape Universal into the company that we are today. I'm honored to lead such a strong company and excited about the opportunities ahead of us. Our fiscal year 2025 was a good example of how our teams around the world adapted to change and executed our strategies. We had an exceptional fiscal year, with revenue and operating income 7% and 5% higher, respectively, versus our strong fiscal year 2024. We navigated weather-impacted tobacco crops in certain origins and historically high green tobacco prices, while at the same time we continued the development of Universal Ingredients, our plant-based ingredients business. We were also pleased to have declared our 55th annual dividend increase. Our quarterly dividend of 82 cents per share equates to an annualized rate of $3.28 per common share. This reflects our ongoing commitment to returning value to the shareholders through consistent performance and operational excellence. As we will discuss today, fiscal year 2026 is well underway, and it will present new challenges and changes for us. If we can continue to execute our business strategy I believe we can once again navigate those changes and challenges and pursue the resulting opportunities and continue to strengthen our company for the future. Our business strategy focuses on three pillars, maximizing and optimizing our tobacco operations segment, growing our ingredients operations segment, and strengthening our organization. First, in our tobacco operations segment, We continuously look for opportunities to increase our sales volumes and market share, expand services across our customer supply chain, participate in the evolution of next generation products, and pursue efficiencies in our operations. Universal provides unparalleled access to tobacco that is supported by our farmer relationships, agronomy expertise, and sustainability practices. and back by our investment grade credit rating and access to financing. We are capable of handling all varieties of tobacco, commercializing all stock positions and sourcing and supplying from all major leaf tobacco exporting regions. Reliability, service and predictability are all the hallmarks of our tobacco business. As our customers look to optimize their capital allocation and seek supply chain efficiencies, or to expand their next generation product business, we believe that we have an ability to play an increasingly important role in supporting them while generating additional earnings. I believe that our geographic diversity, local expertise developed through decades of hand-in-hand work with farmers and suppliers and global relationships with multinational customers are the keys to our ability to continue to generate stable cash flow and deliver unique value proposition for our shareholders. Turning to our ingredients operations segment, we intend to seek opportunities to grow universal ingredients, both organically and through measured acquisitions to provide our customers with a solution-based portfolio of value-added product offerings. Since we set our strategy in 2018 to build a plant-based food and beverage ingredients business, we took a proactive but deliberate approach in recruiting a management team, making acquisitions, and setting and executing commercial strategies. We paced ourselves as we integrated the three acquisitions to form a coherent platform, and we made key investments in expanding platform capabilities and capacity. As a result, operating income grew in fiscal year 2025, despite broader headwinds in the consumer products market, and the platform has given us a firm foothold and a very deep multi-segment market. We strive to leverage our strong reputation for quality and service as well as our long-standing relationships with customers to be a premier player in this space. The third pillar of our strategy is strengthening our organization. As a corporation, we will pursue strategies and initiatives designed to support and strengthen our operations for the future. These strategies and initiatives will focus on areas such as efficient financial management, effective human capital management, optimal utilization of technology, and operational synergies between our business segments. Ultimately, our goal is to position Universal for long-term success and value creation, and I look forward to sharing more about these initiatives in the quarters to come. I cannot talk about our strategy, without talking about our strong regional and local management teams around the world. While our operations span five continents and over 30 countries, the coordination between our executive management and our regional and local management teams makes our decision-making quite nimble. We are not afraid to make the right calls, like when we and our South America management team decided to accelerate green tobacco buying in Brazil last year. That decision temporarily increased the level of debt on our balance sheet, but established a favorable cost position and secured the green tobacco needed to supply our customers in a very tight weather impacted market. These types of decisions and the ability to execute on them are key to our success. I'd like now to hand it over to Johan to provide details of our financial and operational performance, after which I'll have a high level outlook for fiscal year 2026 and share a few additional thoughts.