World Kinect Corporation

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the World Connect Corporation second quarter earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Elsa Ballard, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to WorldConnect's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call, which will be presented alongside our live slides presentation. Today's presentation is also available via webcast on our Investor Relations website. I'm Elsa Ballard, the new VP of Investor Relations here on the call for today, the first time. I am thrilled to be here. With me on the call today is Michael Kasper, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Ira Burns, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to review our safe harbor statement. Certain statements made today, including comments about our expectations regarding future plans and performance, are forward-looking statements that are subject to a range of uncertainties and risk that could cause actual results to materially differ. Factors that could cause results to materially differ could be found in our most recent Form 10-K and other reports filed with the SEC. WorldConnect assumes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included in our press release and can be found on our website. We'll begin with a few minutes of prepared remarks, which will then be followed by a Q&A period. At this time, I'd like to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Kaspar.

Thanks, Elsa. Welcome to you, Elsa, and welcome to all. This is Elsa's first call, and you may notice some new elements going forward and more communications in a variety of mediums as a commitment of World Connect. I would like to thank Glenn Clevitz for his work over the years on investor relations, and now he has the opportunity to focus on our important global treasury requirements. Thank you, Glenn, for all of your work over the years. It's been an exciting few months for us here at WorldConnect, importantly that I can now officially call the company WorldConnect. I want to begin my remarks with why the name WorldConnect and what that means for the company and for you as investors. For nearly 40 years, we have been providing energy, logistics, and finance solutions, creating value for both suppliers and consumers of energy. When we went public on the New York Stock Exchange over 30 years ago, we were a small reseller of petroleum products, primarily in the US. When we rang the New York Stock Exchange closing bell last month at our official rebrand, it was as number 70 on the Fortune 100. with nearly $60 billion in sales last year and maintaining and growing an energy ecosystem of thousands of customers, suppliers, partners, and experts around the world fulfilling energy in 200 countries and territories. Our mission was then, and still is today, to meet our customers' energy needs in the most efficient manner possible and to provide our supply partners with a world-class distribution platform. While we are not in the business of producing or refining the energy we supply, we work every day to improve access and deliver value to our global network of customers, suppliers, and partners. The changing of our corporate name to WorldConnect is part of our ongoing commitment to that mission and more clearly reflects our future facing businesses that anticipate and adapt to our customers and the market's evolving requirements. One of the ongoing challenges our customers face today is the need to source and consume a diverse energy diet that is affordable, reliable, and increasingly lower carbon to achieve their sustainability targets or satisfy regulatory requirements. At World Connect, we are not only serving our customers' conventional energy needs today, but also expanding our portfolio to provide customers with greater access to sustainably sourced energy across aviation, land, and marine. As an update on the renewable energy front, during the second quarter, we announced an expansion of our partnerships with two of the largest sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, providers, expanding our ability to supply SAF to over 40 airports in North America and Europe. Additionally, we also made a minority investment through WorldConnect Sustainability Ventures in a commercial mobile EV charging company, providing charging as a service to fleets and other consumers. These are all excellent examples of WorldConnect's strategic evolution as we seek to leverage our extensive supply network to bring value to our partners and customers alike. So while we are very focused on supporting our customers' energy transition journeys, we recognize this part of our business today remains small relative to our conventional energy business. However, this business has been gaining traction, growing year over year, and creating synergies with our conventional fuel offerings. Our commitment to growing sustainably related products and services is evidenced first by our continued investment in people supporting these activities with headcount of 250 across the globe. We are also working to drive organic growth in related areas, including digital and technology-enabled data management for what is a relatively complex, specialized, and evolving space. Second, we have a dedicated team focused on a growing pipeline of inorganic investment opportunities. Importantly, we aren't looking to make investments for the sake of making investments, but rather carefully identifying innovative future solutions that will strategically enhance our customer offerings and satisfy their requirements for today and tomorrow, while driving incremental and long-term shareholder value. Furthermore, we are also selectively investing in certain early-stage ventures that show promise of delivering innovative future solutions as the market continues to evolve. One such investment is Producers Trust, a digital platform supporting regenerative agriculture for small and medium-sized farmers in developing countries. This investment brings us closer to nature-based solutions and is a reflection of our commitment to bringing high-quality, high-impact carbon offsets to market. We will also continue to roll out technology-enabled solutions to drive value and operational integration with the marketplace, automate as many of our internal processes as makes economic sense, and continue to logically deploy AI on use cases with the best business and organizational outcomes. We are on course to be a cloud-first company by year end. meaning all of our systems and infrastructure will be in the cloud, giving us greater security, resilience, and the flexibility to expand and scale our global offerings. Finally, in the same way that we built the world's first and largest independent marine fuel services business and the most diversified independent aviation supply and services business, we will build our land and renewable energy supply and carbon management businesses. While aviation and marine took longer to build, We expect these two will take considerably less time because we already have the global footprint to leverage together with knowledgeable and experienced professionals executing with better tools. The foundational principles of return on capital cashflow and risk management upon which world fuel services built our base businesses will continue to govern our evolution as world connect. We are laser focused on driving efficiency and returns within our global platform and improving the consistency of profit contribution from all of these activities. And so, in summary, we believe our recent name change to World Connect is very meaningful. While we will continue to meet the critical fueling requirements of our customers day in and day out, this change is intended to emphasize our ongoing transformation alongside that of our customers and suppliers, further solidifying our existing relationships and trust we have built in the past with enhanced and expanded relationships in the future. Therefore, World Connect more clearly reflects our future facing business as we continue anticipating and adapting to the evolving needs and capabilities of our partners in the markets we serve throughout the world. It's certainly exciting times for us. As I turn the call over to Ira for a review of our financial results and business results, I want to conclude with a thank you to the over 5,000 members of our global team who work every day to ensure the success of our company. It is only because of their hard work, your hard work, that we will continue to drive our long-term growth strategy and deliver on our mission. It is truly a pleasure and privilege to work with such a talented, dedicated and passionate group of people who make coming to the office every day an engaging and meaningful experience. Thanks very much, Ira. Let's hear all the good stuff.

Thank you, Mike. Good evening, everyone. As Mike noted, I'm about to share all the good stuff. It's clearly been an exciting several weeks for us, considering the World Connect name change and the recent convertible offering, et cetera. But now I'll get into some of the details specific to the second quarter. For starters, as always, I'd like to note that our non-GAAP results for the second quarter reflect limited adjustments to GAAP results with no EPS impact this quarter, which is consistent with last quarter. However, the comparative prior year numbers do exclude the impact of certain non-operational items, which are highlighted in our earnings release. To assist you in reconciling the results published in our release, the breakdown of last year's non-operational items can be found on our website and also in today's webcast presentation. So getting into the real numbers on a consolidated basis, while total volume of $4.47 billion was down slightly year over year, consolidated gross profit increased 11% to $282 million from last year's second quarter when we experienced the impact of extreme backwardation in our aviation segment. Speaking of aviation, as I mentioned last quarter, we have been laser focused on driving efficiencies and solid returns in the face of the current elevated interest rate environment. While we experienced organic growth in many parts of the aviation business, including international passenger activity and business in general aviation, these volume gains were offset in part by weakening cargo demand. And we also made a conscious decision to reduce our exposure to certain working capital intensive activities, which while resulting in some volume reduction, contributed to overall margin improvement as well. Considering all this, aviation volume of 1.85 billion gallons in the second quarter was only up slightly year over year. However, second quarter aviation gross profit of $128 million was up significantly when compared to the second quarter of 22, which was materially impacted, again, by inventory losses driven by significant price volatility and extreme backwardation. And again, we also benefited from our heightened focus on margins and returns during this year's second quarter. As we look to the third quarter for aviation, we expect a traditional summer seasonal increase in aviation gross profit with an anticipated further improvement in margins benefiting in part from our recent contract renewals. Now turning to our land segment, the volume was just over 1.5 billion gallons down slightly year over year driven in part by some lingering weakness in our North American commercial and industrial activity, offset in part by a further increase in volumes associated with our natural gas and power trading activities. Consistent with last quarter, approximately one-third of total reported land volume relates to these natural gas and power activities. From a profitability standpoint, land generated $111.5 million of gross profit in the second quarter down approximately $11 million or 9% year-over-year. As forecast on last quarter's call, the principal portion of this year's year-over-year decline relates to our UK operations, where prior year results benefited from significant market volatility. We also experienced a year-over-year decline in profitability in our North American commercial industrial business, offset in part by an increase in gross profit from our sustainability-related service offerings. As we look to the third quarter for land, we expect a modest year-over-year improvement in volume and gross profit driven principally by a somewhat stronger summer driving season in North America aided by a significant year-over-year decline in fuel prices at the pump, as well as continued year-over-year growth in our sustainability-related service offerings. And lastly, our marine segment volume of 4.2 million metric tons was down approximately 14% from the second quarter of last year, driven primarily by declines in activity in the container market. In terms of profitability, marine gross profit was $42 million in the second quarter, down from a record $78 million in the prior year when bunker prices were approaching record highs and market volatility was quite significant. While year-over-year results were down as expected, marine margins remained well ahead of historical averages. As I mentioned during my aviation commentary, We also remain focused on ensuring we generate margins in marine, which enable us to maintain acceptable returns in the current interest rate environment. For the third quarter, while marine gross profit should be generally flat sequentially, gross profit will again be down year over year, similar to the year over year decline we experienced in the second quarter. Moving on to expenses, consolidated operating expenses were $205 million in the second quarter, which is at the lower end of last quarter's guidance. As we look ahead to the third quarter, we expect operating expenses to be in the range of $214 to $218 million, which will be up sequentially, principally driven by seasonality, but will be down year over year. In the face of what remains an uncertain macroeconomic environment, as well as persistent inflationary conditions, one of our primary priorities is vigilant expense management with heightened scrutiny on areas such as hiring and travel, as well as all other expense categories. Our primary objective is to deliver the best possible outcome for both our valued employees and shareholders this year. Looking beyond the third quarter, we reiterate our commitment to further enhancing operating efficiencies, reaffirming our operating margin target of 30% or higher by 2025. As a reminder, this target relates to our adjusted income from operations, as a percentage of gross profit. This strategic focus is expected to contribute positively to overall returns and drive incremental earnings per share progressively over time. We've talked a lot about interest expense over the past year, and we continue to focus on managing working capital and capital expenditures, generating positive cash flows, and optimizing the terms and conditions of our liquidity facilities. These efforts have been paying off with second quarter interest of $32 million down $2 million sequentially and down more than $3 million from our peak quarterly interest expense in the fourth quarter of last year. Looking ahead to the third quarter, we expect interest expense to decline again to the range of $28 to $30 million with a further reduction principally related to the benefit of the lower interest rate associated with our recent convertible note offering, which I'll talk more about in a few moments, and also outstandings under our liquidity facilities have been trending lower. Our adjusted effective tax rate for the second quarter was 24%. That's a bit higher than expected. However, we continue to believe that our 23 full-year tax rate will remain generally consistent with 2022 at approximately 20%. On to cash flow. After delivering very strong operating cash flow in the first quarter, we generated an additional $44 million of operating cash flow this quarter driven by, again, carefully managing all related balance sheet levers. That brings year-to-date operating cash flow to $186 million, keeping our liquidity profile strong and positioning us well to continue pursuing growth opportunities while maintaining solid financial flexibility and enabling us to continue focusing on opportunities to drive incremental profitability. More specifically, as we often receive questions about capital allocations, I wanted to quickly touch on our flexible capital allocation framework and remind you how we make decisions about our uses of capital. Our guiding principle remains supporting the growth of our business while carefully managing balance sheet leverage, all with an eye on delivering incremental shareholder value. In the growth bucket, our primary focus is on organic growth and accretive M&A, which can include opportunities like the Flyers acquisition last year, which expanded the breadth and depth of our North American land business, as well as opportunities to continue building our sustainability-related product and services platform, where we continue to make good progress organically thanks to our growing and talented team focused on this part of our business. On the balance sheet side, again, we prioritize low leverage through prudent capital management and work to maintain ample liquidity throughout all business cycles. And on shareholder returns, We want to remain an attractive holding for our investors, which is why we have consistently returned capital to our shareholders through both buybacks and dividends. Speaking of buybacks and dividends, we've returned $67 million to shareholders year to date, paying $17 million in dividends and repurchasing $50 million of stock in conjunction with our recent convertible offering. Just to note for your models, our recent $50 million buyback reduces our share count by approximately 2.2 million shares or 3.5% going forward, effectively starting with Q3. And we have now repurchased more than 10 million shares over the past five years. As mentioned earlier, we issued $350 million of convertible notes maturing in July, 2028 at the end of the second quarter, which diversifies our capital structure and immediately reduces our annual run rate of interest expense by approximately $10 million. Again, This is one of the many opportunities being focused on to reduce interest expense in this elevated interest rate environment. As we entered into a series of related bond hedge and warrant transactions simultaneous to the convertible offering, it is important to note that there is no equity dilution related to the convert upon conversion unless our stock price exceeds $40.14. And whatever value may be created when our stock price does exceed this conversion price can be settled in cash or shares or a combination of the two at the company's option. This was a very successful transaction for us, and we are very happy to welcome so many new investors to the World Connect story. With the maturity of our bank facility recently extended to 2027 and the new convertible notes maturing in 2028, we have significantly strengthened our financial position with our liquidity well secured for an extended period of time. So in summary, Despite a tax rate a bit higher than anticipated going into the second quarter, we delivered solid overall results. We delivered additional cash flow contributing to strong year-to-date operating cash flow and free cash flow. We diversified our capital structure with our first-ever bond offering. We continue to find ways to reduce interest expense with sequentially lower interest for the second consecutive quarter. We repurchased $50 million worth of stock, reducing our share count by approximately 3.5%. And we should deliver strong results in our seasonally strong third quarter and remain intently focused on driving profitable growth and carefully managing expenses to ensure we deliver strong results for the full year 23 and into 24. And finally, as Mike mentioned earlier, we remain proud of our team and we are excited about the continued evolution of World Connect and the growing opportunities that lie ahead. Thank you. I'd like to now turn the call back over to Liz, our operator, to begin the Q&A session.

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Our first question comes from the line of Ben Nolan with Stifel.

Is it me? It just went quiet there. Hey guys, Ben Nolan from Stiefel. I have just a couple of questions. The first, I think I already mentioned on the aviation side that you reprice contracts and I think that's usually something that happens around this time of the year. Can you maybe talk to how those are being repriced both with respect to the trajectory or the incremental pricing and how those conversations are going? What portion of the business is price sensitive or not?

Sure. Well, hey, Ben, thanks for joining us today. No simple straight line answer to that question, so I'll try to give you a broad one to help as much as possible. Considering the current interest rate environment, I probably keep repeating myself about the fact that we're focused on meeting our hurdle rates that have increased considering the environment that we're in. With that in mind, as we've gone through some of our contracts renewed in the spring, many of them renewed on July 1st at the beginning of the third quarter, that's a factor that the very well-experienced team that's been doing this forever takes into serious account when deciding their strategic position with each and every account. You have to take into account the interest rate environment, competition in certain markets being stronger than others, et cetera. And as a result of that, the easiest way to answer your question is some business that you know, didn't necessarily meet those hurdle rates, which I alluded to in my prepared remarks, which will result in a little bit of, you know, volume decline, you know, versus the organic growth that we've seen in the areas that I mentioned. But also in many cases, we've seen, you know, a bit of an increase in our margin compared to the contracts that were expiring in the spring or at the end of June. So that's one of the reasons I mentioned that we should see an even stronger margin in the third quarter, uh, than we did in the second, because we, we should have some uplift there. It's not massive, uh, but the teams did a great job in finding whatever opportunities possible to bring, to bring those margins up. So, you know, we'll have several million dollar annual, uh, you know, incremental benefit from, you know, from, from those margins net net of anything that we, that we may have given up.

Okay. Uh, and then changing gears. As it relates to the buyback, the $50 million buyback, I'm curious, for you guys, buybacks have been sort of episodic. Would you characterize that as just sort of a one-off, or are you thinking about something a little bit more continual with respect to your buyback activity?

So episodic, I'll remember that word. We've actually, you know, bought back on average, you know, a couple million shares a year quite, you know, ratably over the last several years. That's why I mentioned on the call, you know, 10 million shares over five years. We targeted a number very similar to the number that we went up buying back in conjunction with the convert, as that's a number that ensures that we're at least at a minimum offsetting the dilutive impact of employee-related equity awards. So that's an amount we probably would have purchased anyway. There was a strategic value to doing that in conjunction with the convert because it helped reduce what the type of volatility some companies would often see when issuing a convert before closing the deal. It actually worked very well for us as our stock only moved about 4% on the day that we were in the market. That's considered pretty immaterial on a comparative basis to other transactions. So it's unusual that we get it all done in one day. It was kind of efficient to do it that way. It all got done at the same price. But going forward, we'll be going back to the same rationale we've always had of trying to combine that with our dividend to return $60, $70 million a year to shareholders between those two items. There are times we fought back a bit more defending our stock when it, you know, it got, you know, beaten up to levels that really, really disappointed us. But I would say generally, you know, the $50 million number is a good metric to think about, you know, going forward, you know, plus or minus for, you know, for future years.

Okay. So in other words, an annual number of $50 million is a good annual number. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Okay. All right, I appreciate it. And that's my questions, but did want to say also I appreciate the deck. It's good work on that.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Pavel Mokhanov with Raymond James.

Thanks for taking the question. So you talk about sustainability kind of expanding within the revenue mix Can you maybe put some specific numbers, kind of Q2 contribution versus previous year or any historical comparisons along those lines?

I mean, if you look at everything that we historically defined as World Connect, which is our, you know, NatGas, power, sustainability-related services, businesses, it's grown to about 10% of revenue. And that's progressively increased, you know, year over year by, you know, by a few percentage points. But, you know, second quarter, year to date, you know, full year expectation, somewhere around, you know, somewhere around almost exactly 10% of gross profit.

Yeah, just to clarify, did you mean 10% of top line or 10% of EBITDA?

I'm talking about 10% of net revenue. And the EBITDA contribution is also very similar to that number, so it's pretty close to 10%.

Okay. And maybe kind of zooming in on one aspect of that, you guys recently announced a sustainable aviation fuel deal with Neste, and I think you said that your SAF volumes will be up 20-fold this in 2023 versus last year, obviously from a pretty small base. But just talk about what you're seeing as you talk to airlines about their interest in SAF.

Yeah, Pavel, all of the airlines have got commitments that they have to meet. And I think it's pretty well known that the demand far exceeds the supply. It's a feverish pitch of a lot of folks looking to build manufacturing and production. But I mean, the truth of the matter is that it's woefully inadequate for the amount of demand. So this will continue. Certainly, the support in terms of LCFF will help the cause. And you'll see the cost of that being distributed. But this is going to be a slow burn. We're participating in it. And particularly in any of the businesses, any of the sustainability businesses that are using the same infrastructure, we're going to participate fully. So drop-in fuels are a beautiful thing, and we'll invest in projects that we think make sense. We've done that over the history of the company, and we'll continue to do that. So we started this journey in 2011, well before anybody was really talking a whole lot about it. And we've just continued to accelerate it. You know, it requires a certain amount of logistics capability, which is right in our wheelhouse. And we'll continue to do that. So that's our commitment. We're following what our customers are looking for and helping them achieve, you know, their targets and their goals. You know, we'll invest in projects and help, you know, make it happen. But it's going to take a little bit of time.

Okay, last question for me. I hope I can get your kind of macro perspective on this. In the last four weeks, we've seen pretty notable escalation in oil prices, you know, still lower than a year ago, but certainly the steepest increase in oil year to date. Is there any resulting demand impact that you've observed since the beginning of July? Well,

I'm not sure it's directly related to price. I think there are probably larger macro issues at play that may be just more fundamental economic sort of trends and cycles. In fact, on the retail and the gasoline side, we feel that we'll probably... benefit from the relative lower comparative price. But I think some of the drop-off in demand in shipping and some of land-based, you know, some of the disruptions that you've got within air travel, despite the fact that you're seeing an increase in demand, certainly on the international long haul, which is beneficial. So it's a lot of swirling trends. And I I don't think you could really put your finger on any one thing. But I wouldn't say that price is really driving behavior so much right now. It's not, I think, a meaningful enough move to have impacted, you know, consumer or, you know, commercial activity. Okay.

Very hopeful. And Pavel, just to add to that, you know, we – you know, it is our seasonally strongest quarter. So you have, you know, you got, you got that impact, which, you know, maybe you would have a negative somewhere, but it's being masked by the fact that you're, you know, you're seeing growth because it's the summer, especially in commercial passenger activity and cruise and areas like that are more consumer oriented, if you will. So, and we're seeing that we're not really, we're not seeing any any significant headwinds to that seasonal pattern that we expected going into the quarter. Appreciate it. Thanks, Pavel.

Our next question comes from Ken Hexter with Bank of America.

Hey, good afternoon, Ira and Mike. Just want to talk about the sustainability of aviation gross margins, obviously pretty key here. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit.

You know, Ken, I think, you know, it's been a pretty wild ride. I mean, nobody knows this better than you. You've been following us for quite some time. But, you know, if you go back from 2014 to 2022, from the implosion of the energy complex to the recovery in 2019 – you know, to COVID and then, you know, the Ukraine and the disruption of oil supply market and what that meant in terms of the pricing profile. You know, it's been quite extraordinary. You know, the mix of our business, I think our aviation team should be extraordinarily proud of what they've been able to accomplish, both in commercial and business aviation. And, you know, we've got a, you know, material business aviation practice now, which, you know, is sort of exemplary. So it's a combination of both the business mix and I think tremendous discipline on the team, you know, and as Ira commented, you know, earlier, you know, from, you know, interest rate hurdle rates and really being more discerning in terms of, Where are we showing up? You know, all supply is local. And, you know, some local supply was, you know, rather expensive, long transit times, difficult to manage when you've got all sorts of whipsawing, you know, market pricing. So it's been a combination of things. And I think that... you know, volume growth, obviously, and some of our services growth, you know, is something that we obviously want to focus on. I'm not sure that if you look at sort of historic norms, it would be prudent for us to continue to think that, you know, we can flex on some of these, you know, items because, you know, we're at, you know, reasonably you know, healthy levels. But I think going back to, you know, Ira's comments and what we're really focused on, you know, is the efficiency of the organization and bottom line sort of returns and working on cost and looking at, you know, where we're spending money, what we're doing on headcount, and just taking a closer look at those areas and, you you know, looking at return on a broader sort of holistic perspective. So I don't know if that kind of helps you think about the business.

Just to add a little bit to that, you know, Ken, if you go back to pre-COVID, you know, this is kind of a, you know, bit of a, you know, thank you to our phenomenal team in the aviation business. You'll remember, right, we had a lot of government-related business. It was obviously higher margin. So you would think that it would be hard to achieve the unit margin that we had back then, considering those dynamics, which are now all gone. But over the last few years, you know, with some COVID-related interruptions, our mix of business has really changed a lot, right? We've got a growing... Business aviation business, Mike mentioned, we bought UV Air 20 minutes before COVID started. But now a couple of years later, that's really kind of returned to where we expected it to be and beyond. Our business that's now five, six, seven years old, principally in Europe on airport, the business that really started out from the acquisition from Exxon, that's a bit more physical, higher margin business as it's Travel's come back in Europe. That's become a bigger piece of the pie. Uh, and then of course, just on the core commercial business is Mike mentioned, you know, greater focus on margins. So what's, what's pretty remarkable to answer your, you know, your question. I think the general zip code where we're at today is sustainable. Uh, and it's better than where we were in 19 with the dynamics again, that, you know, that have been gone now for the next last couple of years. so, uh, So that's pretty cool. And there's some seasonality, right? So our margin always peaks in the third quarter. It'll probably be lower in the fourth quarter than the third quarter. But these levels are sustainable. It's not that we have some short-term blip in an apples-to-apples comparison. The overall mix of all the contributing factors, and Mike even mentioned some non-fuel offerings that have grown to contribute to our margin. So, yeah, it's just a great job. And, you know, we're at levels now that we should be able to hang on to.

So, Ira, would you would you break it down into buckets in terms of, I don't know, passenger versus, you know, small private jets versus other? And is it a mixed shift that's occurring within that or just?

culling of different business that you like absolutely if you go if you go back a few years or you know three four five years i would say that the business in general you know the private jet market as you would you would call it was maybe 20 22 of the business you know now it's closer to 50 right um so that's a big shift and then we had we were zero you know five six seven years ago the type of business we have at over 100 airport locations today uh that was zero we weren't at any right and that's just because of the nature of the beast where we're on the ground with the truck and the driver and the fuel and the tanks, that's a much higher margin business as well. So now that's a bigger piece of the mix, right? So yes, you've had a mix shift. You lost the government piece, but those two pieces that were relatively small back then have become much bigger pieces of the pie that have arguably more than offset what went away.

And then just one on land, right, which is you talked about 30% is nat gas related. Maybe talk about how that is priced, I don't know, versus what we know on a per gallon, you know, diesel methodology. And it sounds like that part's growing faster. How do we think about that in margins there?

You know, great question. So they're both different, nat gas and power. There's more nat gas volume than power volume. Uh, you know, it's still, you know, I know it's grown as a bigger piece of the pie, about 30%. Um, if you, you know, it's a little confusing if you try to convert it to kind of a gallon equivalent margin, which makes sense in the analysis you're trying to do that, the, the net gas volume is much lower than our average volume, but as a much lower cost to serve, because that's a, a very small type, another fantastic group, but small. So we don't spend a lot of money to generate that profitability. the power-related volume is much smaller. That number is actually higher than our average land margin. But I would say if you split the net gas and power volumes, 75%, 80% of it is net gas and only about 20% of it is power. So that has arguably a bit of a negative impact on our average margin. If that outgrows our fuel business, that could have an impact. But, again, it's all dropping to the bottom line because of the extremely efficient cost structure that exists in that business. So, but good question.

Thanks for that. Last one for me, just a small one, just given all the move on the debt. You know, talk about balance of debt off balance sheet, receivables versus your long-term debt, what got paid off. Can you just abbreviate that real quick?

So the only thing that really changed at the June 30th date at the end of the second quarter is we took the $350 million minus all the associated costs of that deal and the $50 million buyback. And those net proceeds just repaid our revolver. So that's really all that happens. You have lower revolver borrowings. Now you've got the convert on average. The other part of your question on receivable sales, since that remains our most expensive cost of capital today, the average outstandings on that are coming down, which is one of the things that's contributing to reduced interest expense. So somewhat lower receivable sales, somewhat lower revolver costs, borrowings, and then, you know, the new $350 million, you know, line on the balance sheet for the convert. So, you know, net-net, our overall average interest rate has come down for two reasons, because of the convert and a somewhat lower mix of receivable sales. And then, Glenn, who Mike mentioned at the beginning of the call, our are now full-time treasurer as opposed to, you know, 80% of time treasurer, you know, he's done a great job, uh, you know, renegotiating some of those deals to even the receivable sales that are, uh, that are outstanding, uh, are, are coming with a, a, a somewhat lower coupon than they were back in the first quarter.

If I can just think a quick one in our, just the last couple of downturns, right? We've, we, not that delinquencies are a big part of your business. They're so small, uh, you manage that business really well. I just want to understand from an economic point of view, from your point of view, is anything shifting here? Do you feel like anything from your economic point of view, has anything changed? Are we getting closer to the end on that, or is it just too small part, just given how your risk department works well?

Yeah, so if I got the question correctly, I would say we went through the horrors of uh, of COVID and, and managed through that, you know, very well. There were a few bankruptcies, uh, most companies with, you know, whether it would be governmental support or otherwise did a really good job and rebounded phenomenally. Well, obviously the market's really strong, but, you know, you, you, you know, I, I would say, uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't set off the fire alarms, but, but certainly there's, there's a lot more focus today on, you know, certain parts of the, the business where, um, you know, customers, you know, balance sheet strength may have weakened a little bit. I don't think it's anything, again, I don't think it's anything alarming, but we're, you know, we're paying close attention to certain elements of the market and customers, knock on wood, you know, no issues on the horizon that we're aware of. Our team's done a great job avoiding a couple that it could have become a problem, which is something we've repeatedly done well for decades. So, you know, overall, I would say, you know, 90% of the portfolio is just as strong as it was, you know, a year ago. The other 10% is weakened a little bit and we're looking at it very carefully. But as you could see from our results again, you know, very limited write-offs.

No, I know. Thank you for that. I know you've always had low write-offs and that's because you guys manage it and you take down the day sales. I just didn't know if there was like a,

if you were seeing that tighten or if you were seeing it rewiden because things are getting better, that, that was, that was actually, if we look at, if we look at something like our metric on past dues, we've actually, you know, that that's come down. Right. So our part of that is our team doing a phenomenal job, but we haven't seen a deterioration at all in terms of something like past dues. Yeah.

That was just the portfolio continues to get better. You know, when you look at our service offering and, the service offering we have, you know, speaks to, you know, the largest and the best companies. So, you know, that obviously has its own benefit to it. You know, that wasn't always the case going back quite some time ago, but, you know, the portfolio is significantly better and that's, you know, that's, That's where we do our business.

No, I know. Yeah, I was just trying to see if you had a more macro view after the company stuff. But perfect. I appreciate the time and the answers. Thanks, Mike and Ira.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.