4/14/2021

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Welcome everyone to Atlantic Sapphire and the Miami Blue House. Today we have released our annual report for 2020 and our ESG report for 2020. I'm here today with the Chief Financial Officer Carl Høyhau. My name is Johan Andreasson, I'm the Chairman and the CEO of Atlantic Sapphire.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Before we go over to the presentation of the operation update, the highlights from the ESG report and the annual report, we'd like to show you a little bit of footage here from the Miami Blue House. We're actually standing right now in the test kitchen of the Blue House where we're looking forward to welcoming many of you in the future.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

The Phase One Blue House which we are standing in now is an integrated facility with a capacity of 10,000 tons of head-on gutted fish per year. We are starting with the egg and we are shipping out consumer-ready fillets in the other side of the building. This is by far the largest blue house and land-based salmon facility in the world. Thousands and thousands of innovation hours and design hours has gone into this tremendous facility. Let's have a look.

speaker
Corporate Video
Promotional Video Narrator

In a world full of challenges, Change is for the brave. For those that believe in a better way of life. Breaking the norms. And are willing to swim against the current. The ones who believe the tides of progress are near. And for those brave enough to believe they can change the world. Atlantic Sapphire.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

So we're standing here on the ground zero for phase two. We have excavated out approximately 20 acres of land. The elevation where we're standing now is about six feet above sea level. And underneath us, we have the Biscayne aquifer just a few feet down, followed by the Floridan aquifer, which we're sourcing the salt water from, and then the boulder zone in 3,000 feet. The farm building for phase two is going to be similar in size to the phase one building, but we're only building out what we call a grow out systems for medium sized fish from about 300 grams to three kilos. So the life cycle is going to start in the existing phase one facility where we have additional capacity on smolts. and we also have additional capacity for harvest and processing. So it's going to be an integrated production plan that is going to yield out approximately 25,000 tons of salmon per year.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

We expect to see the ramp up in harvest volumes from the Phase 2 facility in 2023. More details on the budget for Phase 2 and the construction timeline will be ready later this quarter and we're looking forward to share that with everyone. Yes, good morning everyone and good afternoon for those of you in Europe. And thank you for joining. And the call is to kick things off with going through a presentation. The operation of it that was also shared through news web and on our web page. Afterwards we will open up for a Q&A session so. until that we would ask all participants to remain muted and at the end of the presentation we will open up a minute or so for for those who have a question to unmute we will take down your names and then every one of you that chance to ask your question in a new course so with that i'd like to give you the word and kick things off today thank you carl and was a stitch to the conference page

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

So here's a brief overview of what we're going to touch upon today. We're going to start with the Q1 operational updates. We're going to talk specifically about some of the challenges that we have faced. Then we migrate into an update on the phase one, construction, and furthermore to the phase two, design and construction. Then a few remarks on product quality and customers, and then touch upon some highlights from the ESG report and the 2020 financials. And then we're going to sum up and open for Q&A. So even though the outlook and the long-term value proposition for Atlantic Sapphire has never been better in our opinion, we have met some bumps in the road and the first quarter of 2021 is what I call a lost quarter. It's hard to find the highlights here, but here we are. For the quarter, sold our fish in the US for an average of $6.8 per kilo. That is much lower than our long-term budget. The good news is that the fish that meets our superior three kilo plus was sold for $12 per kilo, which is very strong in the current market. It's actually 90% higher than the fish pool commodity price for the same period. In Denmark, our price achievement is more in line with the European spot market. As you can see there, the delta between the total harvest and the superior tree plus harvest is much less, because we have less downgrade on the fish, less maturation. When we updated the market in January, we gave a heads up that the batch one, our frontrunner batch, had a lot of maturation. During the quarter, that batch has been harvested out and concluded, and it had even more maturation than what we anticipated at that time. Good news is the second batch that we have started to harvest now is much better and more in line with what we expect in the future, with less than 10% mature. So we should expect our net revenue for total harvest to go up in the months to come. Furthermore, as you all know, we have had some huge mortality issues in the quarter. We lost OG2 and these events, plus another couple of smaller events, these events combined is making it a lost quarter and thus a negative net biomass gain in the US. We harvested 420 tons in the US and 300 tons in Denmark. In Denmark, we also have a disappointing biomass gain quarter. The main reason for that is that our lead batch, that is currently taking the most of the tank volume in Denmark, has some gill issues that originate from the freshwater, where we had an incident about a year ago with the supersaturation of oxygen. So these gills, which is affecting the lungs of the fish, has been impaired, so they are not able to eat as much and convert the feed as much as a normal batch. So that is unfortunate. We expect to harvest that batch out over the next couple of months and be back on track for steady state production starting from the third quarter. After the mortality events here in the United States, we still have quite a lot of fish in the farm. approximately 1.1 million fish that will be harvested for the rest of this year. At this point, we cannot guide on how we will harvest that over the year, but we want to maximize the biomass gain, playing with higher average harvest rates because we have space in the farm to grow them bigger. Also keeping an eye on having a steady supply for all our customers throughout the year. Karl, do you have any other comments before we move on? I think you wrapped it up well, Jan. We're going to go more into details on what we have experienced in Q1. The root cause of all the issues that we're facing has to do with mechanical and non-functioning critical equipment. I can start with the first one, which is the new scented rains. From the July incident of last year, we have learned that when something is off in one of the systems, a small percentage of the fish in the system will tend to die. But the first mortality is dragging with it the rest of the fish in what we call a chain reaction. These scented rains are designed to avoid that from happening. Effectively, making sure that even if we have five or 10% portality, the flow in the tanks are undisrupted. These center drains should have been in place a few months ago, but due to delays related to COVID and general delays, we have not been able to install them yet, aside from in a few tanks. These are arriving here in Miami in a container next week, and we are planning to install all of them by the end of this quarter. And that should significantly reduce the risk of a total wipeout in a future event. Furthermore, as we have been talking about a lot of times before, it's the splitting of the systems, the grow-out systems to reduce risk. We have at this time, five out of six systems split. Unfortunately, the mortality in OG2 that we we had in the first quarter that happened in a system that was not yet split. And that's why the impact of that specific incident was rather big. Also in the quarter, we had a very big incident with our internal chiller plant that broke down. This is effectively the facility that keeps the entire farm cold. It's all the water cooling. This chiller plant has been has been having issues since it was commissioned more than a year ago. It's a lot of design weaknesses, it's a lot of poor workmanship into that plant. But in January of this year, we experienced a large leak in the pipe and we had to shut it off. Fortunately, we were able to commission temporary chillers to keep the fish alive and to keep the temperature down, but we had couple of weeks of disruptions in production where we have to hold back feeding and take low risk. These temporary chillers are capable of keeping the farm cold even through the summer. They're currently running primarily on diesel generators but we are in the process of electrifying them to save cost. This is a clear claim that we will have towards the people that built it. Currently we are carrying the cost of it but we have a path to to go after the appropriate people. Furthermore, in a well-functioning RAS you need certain specific components to work. The drum filters are what I call the city walls of any RAS farm. If the city wall breaks you're exposed. The design of the drum filter area has not been up to par and we have had issues with overflows of particles and feeds going into the biofilters and the trickling filters, which is not good. During the quarter, we have been modifying these drum filters to ensure that we don't have these overflows anymore. So we are in a much better position when it comes to that. The same thing goes for ozone and protein skimmers, very important component in a well-functioning grass. This has not been working for the last year. very lumpy at least, they have been on and off. And we have engaged with an American company that is now fixing those. So by the end of this month, all the ozone and protein skimmers should be running. We already spoke about batch one that has had problems. So to sum up here, basically construction and commissioning related issues has caused suboptimal conditions temporarily. and effectively reduced our biomass gain and increased our cost in the quarter. That being said, we have a clear path to get out of this. It's a temporary bump in the road. And we also know that when everything works the way it should, basically the fish harms itself. And the systems are capable of delivering the production they are designed for. So a little bit on phase one. We are wrapping up phase one. All the grow out systems are ready for fish. As I mentioned earlier, five out of six systems are completed. We currently have one system, OG3, that are stocked with fish that is currently not split. So until we have that done, hopefully by the end of this quarter, we will still have quite a lot of eggs in that basket. But we are taking measures to reduce the risk as much as possible while we are waiting for that. Once that system is split, we do have 19 independent RAS systems in our Phase 1 RUAS. The construction of the filleting facility is completed. The facility is ready for use. We are just pending some final permits tied to the water source and the potable water quality of the water that is needed to make fillets, and we expect that permit to be in place shortly. And meanwhile, we are doing third party affiliating, which is very costly. So we look forward to get out of that.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

So in conclusion, our phase one completion has taken more time. But for us, the focus is definitely switching towards phase two. Now that we are really at the end of the tunnel in finalizing phase two. So jumping to the phase two slide, do you want to share some thoughts on how we're looking forward?

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Yeah, so yeah, it's We're very honest that phase one didn't go the way we wanted. And we have a tremendous amount of learnings that goes into phase two and beyond. And we are currently on track to start construction in Q2. We have actually excavated and prepared the site already. So we have arguably started the construction, but the main construction is expected to start later in this quarter. We have elected Wharton Smith, which is a top southeast US contractor that specializes in the water treatment projects as our general contractor. The thing is a blue house, a salmon farm like this is very similar to a water treatment plant. So working with US large companies that doesn't do anything but building water treatment plants is their bread and butter. In addition, we have engaged with Haston Sawyer, which is a leading US engineering firm in water treatment. We've been working with them for a year to prepare for phase two. And they have overall responsibility for the design of the facility. And they're very happy with that relationship so far. Furthermore, by having this structure, Atlantic Sapphire will own its design and all the innovations created from this point on. And we think that is very important in terms of creating technologies and innovations that will put us in a very good position. I also want to add that we are, as a company, in a very different position now compared to when we started phase one. At that time, we were only five people in Miami in Atlantic software, versus today we are 150. So our in-house capabilities, our learnings, our bandwidth to deal with these large projects is in a totally different position. The approach will significantly reduce the risk for the cyclos, for poor workmanship, for delays and for cost overruns.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

I think also one thing we really want to stress here is that producing or constructing a Blue House facility is really not something that anyone else has done before. also when it comes to different designers and construction companies so by bringing more in-house we are confident that not only can we do this better because we are at the end of the day the ones with the most experience in doing both design and construction right now, but also we can secure what is going to be a big, big competitive advantage for the future, keeping more of our learnings in-house as one of our strategic advantages. So this is something that we feel is a very right move for the company as we head towards 220,000 jobs.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Yeah, so a few remarks on the product quality and customers. Not much news here. It's basically the same as we reported last time. Our US product has great taste, quality, and texture, and beyond our KPIs when the systems are working as designed. Furthermore, we have unmatched freshness. We are the freshest fish in the marketplace, and we have a much longer shelf life than other samples. We still have a very solid customer pipeline. More than 10,000 stores are committed to take on the product. Obviously, we are not in 10,000 stores yet because the harvest volumes are lower, but we see very good feedback from the customers and from the programs that we are currently running. Additionally, we are also working to to come up with more value-added products. We are actually about to launch our smoked salmon product, Blue Owl Smoked Salmon, which we are very confident is going to be a great success. We also see a very strong demand growth in the US salmon market in general. And particularly since COVID, the home consumption of salmon has skyrocketed here. And as restaurants are opening up again, we think the general salmon market is going to be very strong in the US for the rest of this year and also next year.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

We have now released our 2020 annual report and ESG report. For the first time Atlantic Sapphire has released those as one large integrated report really showcasing that we as a company see ESG risks and opportunities fully integrated also with our long-term financial performance. Here you can dive deeper into what our ESG risk and opportunities are in our materiality matrix where we dive into all of these and try to illustrate a little bit more in detail what we're doing and why we think this is the right way to approach salmon. Jumping to the financials for 2020, I will give you some highlights as well. If you look at 2020, the full year in US dollars, we had revenue in Denmark of 5 million. 2020 in Denmark was a year that was characterized by a lot of months of building up biomass after we had an incident in February of 2020. Therefore, the revenue was quite back-end loaded in the year. Also, as Johan has touched upon in one of the first slides, we have been working in Denmark with a very positive trend of building up a strong premium. As you remember, the Danish fish has historically, to a large extent, been sold to the US market, where it has fetched a big premium. Well, we have not spent that much time and resources on developing a premium product in Europe. That work is now fully ongoing and on track and we're very excited about seeing where this will end. We definitely think that due to the fantastic product quality and the unique story, the Danish fish, just like the US one, is going to be a premium product. US, on the revenue side for 2020, is marked by a year where we really started harvest in the fourth quarter, slowly ramping up volumes. Price achievement was good, as we've talked about before, but of course not enormous volumes. Here we expect more for 2021 and beyond, of course. On a consolidated basis, group revenue was $6.3 million for 2020. Looking at EBITDA, pre-fair market value adjustments, we ended up at negative $6.4 million in 2020. In the US, we ended up at 22.9 million negative EBITDA for the year, bringing the consolidated group level to negative $30.4 million. Especially on the US, the EBITDA, which is production cost related, is characterized by all the fish that was harvested in Q4 being from Batchelor. Batch 1 has a higher cost level. First of all, due to the fact that with the maturation issues that fish faced, it did have, on a relative basis, a higher cost of production, lower feed conversion ratio, lower biomass gain. But also, what's very important to note is Batch 1, which has been the leading batch throughout its cycle, has always been the biggest part of the farm's biomass. therefore also taking the biggest chunk of fixed costs. So batch one reported EBITDA cost is going to be very, very high for the first batch, and then it will gradually decline as we get towards steady state production and you get steady state biomass to divide all the fixed cost of this operation in between. As you know, our business is to a very large extent, a fixed-cost business, where, arguably, only feed is the really true variable cost. Therefore, at the end of the day, it's all about biomass gain. Jumping to the balance sheet, our total assets as of the end of the year were $321 million, and we had total liabilities of 65.5 million. Depreciation amounted to 6.7 million, with the biggest jump being in the US, where we started depreciating. CapEx for the year ended up at 54.5 million. With a little bit of phase one CapEx left in 2021, but the big, big CapEx commitments going forward, all are going to be related to our phase two construction. On the cash flow level, on a consolidated basis, we have cash flow from operating activities of negative $47 million. We invested $61 million in cash flow from investing activities. And lastly, on the financing side, at the $112 million on the positive debt. Jumping to the summary slide, Q1 2021 was characterized by some issues with operational performance and the J index due to construction related challenges that we tried to give you as much detail as we can about in this presentation. The three headlines for Q1 are the chiller plant breakdown, The March 23rd incident where we lost fish. And lastly, issues with the main lead batch in Q4-Q1-21, batch one, having maturation issues which led to a lower performance. However, we are very clear that these are temporary issues that we do not expect to see in the future. Strengthened organization is a very important topic to us across all layers of the organization. We've added more competence, structure the company in a better and better way to ensure we're not only perfectly positioned to deliver phase one, but also we're in the starting point for phase two and beyond, and have an organization that is ready to continue the growth story. Our stock systems, when operating as designed, are performing well. We're seeing good performance on JA Index, which back on the comment about what's important on the cost side, is biomass gain. and hence our focus on JA Index. When we also in Q1 have had parts of the farm, independent systems that have been running well, we're seeing that as long as the water quality is good enough, the fish is delivering its job. So it's all about getting that infrastructure up and running, and then we will deliver on our budget. COVID-19, of course, we cannot avoid mentioning it. It remains an operational impact that does cause some issues, especially on the construction side, when it comes to doing our punch list work. But we're very happy to see that here in the US, vaccines are being rolled out, our employees are healthy, and we hope to continue to see a positive trend there throughout 2021. Phase two, as you all mentioned, we are actually, arguably I had the first spade in the ground with clearing of the land. We're very excited to get started there and are on track for phase two construction. Lastly, stable retail prices for blue salmon has been the case since we started harvest and we expect it to remain the case going forward based on very positive feedback both from end consumers and from our buyers. Lastly, looking at a few milestones beyond what is pure operations, US phase two design and capex budget is going to be one important data point for us, knowing exactly what capital commitments we have in the future, but also the timeline of when we really can expect to see the ramp up of phase two harvest volumes sometime in 2023. And we do expect full construction start now in the second quarter. Also, the advanced plan for our current 160 acres of land and what we in turn refer to as the grand master plan and should also be ready before the summer so that's also something we are very much looking forward to sharing with the market so unless you have something to add you on no i think you wrapped it up um very well so we should jump into q a right let's do it So I want to thank you, of course, for your attention on the presentation. And I'll just take you quickly through how we were thinking about conducting the Q&A session. And what we will do is we will open up for around a minute or so for everyone who's interested in asking a question to unmute themselves. If you're calling in through the phone by pressing star six, if you're on the Teams app, by simply unmuting yourself with the mute button and then state your name. I will put them down in the order I receive the names and then give each one of you the word one by one. I will also allow for one more round at the end to see if there are any questions that have popped up while we were doing the Q&A. So please go ahead, unmute yourself and state your name if you have questions.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Alex Jones, Bank of America. Excuse me, could you repeat your name please? It was a little bit unclear. Alex Jones, Bank of America. Are there any more questions before we jump to the two I have written down? This is Ort Chen from Social Capital. Ort, I have your name. Thank you. Thanks, Carl. Very good.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

I think we'll start with the questions, and then, as I mentioned, I'll give everyone a chance again later to ask a question as well in the second round. And then I would like to first give the word to Anders from MintaFish.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Hi, I just want to know if Ville will come to Phase 2 in a way?

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

I think, if I heard you correctly, Anders, your question was if Byggen Aquaculture will be involved in Phase 2.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

The answer to that is no. If they do, it will be in a much smaller scope than in phase one, but currently that's not the plan.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Thank you. I also wonder if you'd like to talk about compensation. That we cannot comment on at this time, Anders. Okay. Very good. And then next up, we have Alex Jones from Bank of America.

speaker
Operator
Conference Moderator

Alex, please go ahead. Great, thank you. First of a couple of questions would be on the Danish incident. Is this something that you think would be repeatable in the US? Are you worried about it elsewhere? Or is it specific to the design and the water that you're using there, that you don't think it's an issue we should think about for Miami?

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Are you referring to the incident of 2020?

speaker
Operator
Conference Moderator

No, I'm sorry, the fish-gill quality issues.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

It's a good question. Let me put it this way, the risk factors in land-based are different from sea-based. In sea-based you have issues with sea lice, viruses, bacterias, algae blooms, bad weather and so forth. In land-based, you don't have those. What you have in land-based is a lot of factors tied to mechanical equipment that needs to work. And as a matter of fact, one of the big risk factors that needs to be managed is gases. So gases is a big topic, whether it's oxygen levels, CO2 levels, H2S levels, nitrogen levels and so forth. So GIL-health and making sure you have control of gases is definitely something that is very crucial for land-based farms in general. Can we have issues tied to supersaturation of oxygen in the future? Yeah, we can. But it's something that can be managed. The issue in Denmark is our smolt facility is rather old. We have done some some upgrades to it to make sure it's more stable. But as an analyst or as an investor, I think to understand that gases are important in the land-based is very important.

speaker
Operator
Conference Moderator

Great, thank you. The second question would be on the US. Would it be fair to say that by the third quarter you would expect to be close to steady state on biomass gain per quarter, if not on total biomass level? Or in other words, are there other issues that you expect to continue to drag on into the third quarter or are the ones that you've listed the key ones we should worry and think about?

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

I think the way to look at this is that we have north of a million fish that is going to be harvested for the rest of this year. Currently, we are working on a detailed plan on how we're going to harvest it, but the plan is to temporarily harvest larger size fish than what we have in the long-term business plan, just because we have a lower number of fish and we have space for them in the tanks. Arguably, the The second quarter is going to have a slightly lower harvest than Q3 and Q4, but we are very focused on making sure that we can harvest every week the rest of the year to make sure our customers get stable supply. Once you get into 22, we expect to be up to what I call more or less normal run rates, phase one.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

I can also add one comment there to Johan's point on why we expect somewhat lower harvest homes in q2 that is for the simple fact that we will focus in q2 on getting our standing biomass in the farm up as quickly as possible so that we for the rest of the year can maximize the growth on that fish so it's uh somewhat uh i think a little bit to your point the question yes we will be much more of a steady state operation in the second half than in q2 when it's still focused on getting as quickly as possible to full utilization of our tank volume.

speaker
Operator
Conference Moderator

Okay, that's great. Maybe just one final one, if I may, on the press reports a couple of days ago around a hospitalization of a couple of your employees or contractors. Could you just comment on that in terms of what happened, whether it's repeatable and how that situation has evolved? Thank you.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Sure. So these three workers in subject, they are part of a team from one of our subcontractors that are doing industrial cleaning in the farm. We have been working with them for a couple of years now. So they were doing routine cleaning in the bottom of one of our grow-out tanks when one of them actually took off his mask and was exposed to We don't know if it was low oxygen or if it was some kind of gas, but basically he fainted and the two other guys came to help him. So these guys, we called 911 and we got the first responders on site. They were taken out of the facility promptly and taken to hospital for checkup. Two of them were already out of the hospital as of last night. And the last report that we have is that the third person is doing well as well, is doing better. So hopefully he's going to recover soon. And yeah, it's just a reminder that, you know, when we have safety procedures, they are to be followed. So unfortunate event, one accident is one too many. And it looks like these people are going to be fine. Excellent, thank you very much.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Thanks Alex. And then I would like to give the word to to Orch Chen, please.

speaker
Ort Chen
Analyst, Social Capital

Hey guys, I'm just hoping you could help me better understand, you know how the maturation issues work. What were those issues and what can you do to kind of prevent those issues going forward?

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Sure, In Atlantic Sapphire, we haven't had issues with maturation in the last, I would say, four to five years. This is something that we know what needs to be done to prevent. It's a very complex way to answer it, but basically, as an animal, every animal has a need to reproduce. So when an animal is exposed to stressors, it can be a wide range of stressors, It says, hey, I need to mature to reproduce before it's too late. That's a general comment. These stressors can be everything from temperature fluctuations, it can be noise, it can be particles in the water, whatever it is that triggers them to go to maturation. In addition, batch one here was co-located with because we are running all females, all the fish in our farms are female fish. And that is also one mitigant to avoid maturation, because if you have female fish and male fish in the same system, hormones from the male fish goes and triggers the females to mature. Batch one was stocked together with another batch of mixed-sex fish the first year of the life, so they were actually exposed to some of these hormones. which is not the normal course of business, but it's a lot of factors that affect maturation, but this is nothing that we think is going to be an issue for us going forward. We know how to manage it, but we also know that due to all the construction issues we have had, where we have had the temperature fluctuations, we have had particles in the water and so forth, that's the reason why batch one was maturing to the extent that it was.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Yeah, and just important to repeat that when we look at the next batch, batch two, which we in fact have been harvesting since March and we do not see the same problem just to support why we really don't see this as a long term issue for us. Great, thank you guys. Thanks. Very good. Those were the three initial questions I had on my list. I will now open up again. If anyone has over the next minute raises their name, I'll give you the chance to ask a question. So I'll give everyone a minute to let me know.

speaker
Christian Norby
Investor

Christian Norby.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Christian.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Thank you. Anders. Anders again. Thank you. Maths, Inger. Written Maths, perfect. It sounds like those were the three questions.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

So then I would like to start with giving the word to Christian. Christian, please go ahead.

speaker
Christian Norby
Investor

Thank you. So I know you said you will come with a plan ahead of the summer, but I wondered in terms of CapEx distribution, at least for phase two, will it be very even or will it be front end or back end loaded? How do you see that?

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

We can comment based on what we've seen in phase one. And in phase one, you typically see that you start quite slow on the capex side because a lot of work has to be completed before you really see the large builds come in. So you can probably expect it to be quite slow on the cash flow side in the start and then have a high peak that lasts a while. And then just towards the end, you see the decline as more and more of the phase two broad systems are completed. And we will know more and share more details as soon as we've fully finalized our phase two budget and timeline. Thank you. You're welcome. Anders, please go ahead. Well, first of all, I would say that we of course cannot comment directly on that for obvious reasons, but we can of course share some general comments and that is that Atlantic Sapphire as a company, of course, has access to several sources of financing all the time. Things like banking, we have very supportive banks in place. There is a bond market and there is an equity market. Everything is available. But what is very important for us to stress here is that before we know the phase two capex figure, which is by far the largest liquidity input into our financial model, it is It doesn't make any sense to make any comments on that. So I think we can come back and have a better discussion around Phase 2 financing once we know what Phase 2 is actually going to cost.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Anders, I hope that answers your question, at least to an extent.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Thanks. Thanks, Anders. So lastly, I have Mads Inger. Mads, please go ahead. Hello.

speaker
Mads Inger
Investor

You said earlier that you have about 1 million fish that you expect to harvest the rest of the year in the US. Does that mean we can expect 3,000 to 4,000 tons of total harvest in 2021?

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

As I said, we expect to harvest, because we have space in the farm, we expect to run that fish larger. We are still doing the details on that, but between five and a half and six and a half kilo round weight should be... You can make your estimates based on that.

speaker
Mads Inger
Investor

One more thing, last year you experienced some troubles due to noise and vibration during construction. Now that you start construction of phase two, are you confident that you can avoid similar incidents?

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

Yes, you know, phase two is going to be built in a different building, right? And we are starting our, we are actually starting to introduce eggs into the current phase one for phase two purposes in just after the summer, in August, September. And the fish will stay there in phase one until phase two is ready for fish. You know, we are not going to be in the same situation as we have been in phase one, where we are doing heavy-duty construction works at the same time as we're raising fish. We are taking measures to avoid compromising the fish and exposing the fish to that kind of work.

speaker
Mads Inger
Investor

Okay. I can add one more question. Well, most of these maturity issues has been for batch one is what I understand. Are you through harvesting batch one or are you still on batch one? Yeah, we're done with batch one.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

It was concluded in March and we We are into batch two now. And as I mentioned earlier, batch two looks much better, with less than 10% maturation so far. So it's a dramatic improvement from one batch to the other.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Okay, well, thank you.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

You're welcome. Thank you. So I think unless we have someone jumping in here, we have been through two rounds of questions. I'll give 10 seconds if there's a last one.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

If not, we'll conclude the call. Sounds like there is no urgent question.

speaker
Carl Høyhau
Chief Financial Officer, Atlantic Sapphire

Of course, we're always available one-to-one also if there's anything that pops up later. I can say also that the video we wanted to share with you in the start We will make it available. I'm not sure what technical issues caused it to not have a sound, as we saw some of you commented on in the chat here. But we'll make sure that that becomes available there. You'll get some more footage from not only inside Phase 1 Blue House, but also from the ground of Phase 2. So hoping that will give some perspective of what we have ahead here. Johan, would you like to wrap up the call? Sure.

speaker
Johan Andreasson
Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Sapphire

I was just thinking to give you guys some food for thought. Every time you have a mortality event in a land-based farm, it reaches the headlines of all the newspapers, which is understandable, it's a dramatic event. It's something that we are attacking to prevent happening in the future and at least dramatically reduce the magnitude of these events. But I just want to put it into perspective. If you look at the Norwegian and Chilean salmon industry, they are averaging approximately 20% mortality in the seawater phase and has been doing that for years. When I looked into our own production data from the beginning of days in Atlantic sapper back to 2011 up until today, including all the big hiccups that we have had and the mass mortalities we have had, we are about 30% mortality compared to the 20 in NetPens. And we are a novel industry. We should not forget that. What we are doing has never been done before. And we have means to reduce and hopefully minimize mortality events in the future. So I just want people to put this in context. The reason why the mortality rates in NetPen farms doesn't reach the headlines is because they are constantly high. You don't have these dramatic peaks, so it's kind of disappearing as a day-to-day and week-to-week and month-to-month mortality. In a landless farm, you don't see any winter sores, you don't see any fishing sores, downgrades. The skin is perfect. The only reason for downgrades that we have is maturation. Keep that in mind. very disappointed in the short term, but nothing has changed in the long term. If it has changed, it has arguably changed to the better. So I just want to give that appeal before we conclude the call.

speaker
Alex Jones
Analyst, Bank of America

Very good. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thank you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-