Astarta Holding PLC

level at 24%.

If we switch to our balance sheet and cash flow.

We continue to maximize our operating cash flows, which were well above 100 million euros in 2023. If you can put yourself on mute, please. Thank you. This is Robert. Can you put yourself on mute? Thank you. Investing cash flows were at 40 million euros as we started to invest into expansion in the soybean processing and also modernization in sugar production. Some of this investment is related to our decarbonisation strategy and targets, which we announced at the end of the year. However, with all these investments, our leverage and the balance sheet remain rather helpful at 1.1% in the debt to EBITDA. Now, turning to every segment details, we start with agriculture, where unfortunately the pricing situation became less favorable for Ukrainian producers. The global prices went down and the domestic prices available for the local producers were further lower because of the high logistics costs of getting grain and oilseeds harvest out of Ukraine. Nonetheless, the company had record-breaking harvest last year on account of favorable weather conditions. We also did inland trading and our grain and oilseed sales were one and a half times higher. The following page gives data for the last three years on our yields compared to average Ukrainian, as well as what we are doing in terms of the crop rotation. It is no secret that getting wheat and corn out of Ukraine is a very costly exercise. Therefore, we changed our crop mix in favor of soybeans and sugar beets which we process internally in our downstream operations while we are reducing acreage under corn from 40 000 hectares just two years ago to 6 000 hectares this year This is the key statistics for the market in general and also to show the price differential between international commodity prices and Ukrainian prices available to domestic producers such as Astarta. This pricing gap is due to very costly logistics of getting produce over land and through the seaports. Odessa port was the main gate for Ukrainian harvest, and the volumes increased due to the efforts of the Ukrainian Navy, which reopened the sea corridor for Ukrainian goods. And this time it was opened not just for agriculture, but also for the steel and other sectors. Sugar production, the output is increased. We continue to serve domestic market, our key clients, but also expanding our exports geography to cover EU. which was open to us since the new free trade regime was introduced by Europe at the beginning of the war. The sugar price was also quite favorable domestically and internationally, although one can see that the selling and distribution costs are higher last year because of the higher exports volumes. first of all to the EU. And EBITDA was at 20%, which is only slightly lower than last year. CAPEX reflects our switch to bioenergy fuel in sugar production, as well as modernization of existing plants. Market fundamentals remain difficult domestically in Ukraine. But since the reopening of the European market, Ukrainian farmers and producers increased acreage on the sugar beet. And Ukraine was able to export over half a million tons since the European market opened for trade. The key markets within the EU were South European countries, including Romania, Italy, such like. Soybean processing remains very stable on the, top line and also on the margin level, despite significant decrease of price for soybean oil, which reflects the efforts of a startup commercial team to manage crushing margin and the costs. CapEx, which was significantly increased last year, is related to our expansion in the processing, which we announced with introduction of the new product in the next couple of years, soybean concentrate. Cattle farming largely stable on the margin side, but we increase output as well as herd of our cows and the milk sales were up by more than 10% last year. We continue to produce premium, quality premium price milk for domestic dairy processes. And that also required heightened CAPEX into expansion of premises for a larger livestock size. On the strategy side, obviously, the war has been waging for the last several years, and we are pleased to report that our strategy did not change. We would like to move into more value-added products, We embarked our journey on decarbonization despite the environment in Ukraine, but we continue to put every effort into the safety and security of our personnel. First of all, physical security. Within our maintenance CAPEX, we are building shelters, bomb shelters for our employees. And also we have more than 500 people serving in the army. We have our employees coming back from military combat zones and they continue to be employed during their service and they come back to peaceful jobs at Astarta and we provide all support for them to continue to contribute to our business. The rest of the presentation is a short update on our non-financial matrix. We reported most of it publicly, including the first ever sustainability linked loan we received from the BID last year. We are pleased to report that our standing within carbon disclosure project was upgraded from D to C and we continue to expand our regenerative agriculture practices in upstream operations as well as increasing share of renewable energy in downstream operations. With this, we would like to invite your questions. If it is possible, we would like to see them in writing. I can see already in the chat box, which I'm going to read out very quickly. The first one comes from Marcin. What is the scale of current energy supply disruptions? I would like to start to answer these questions. Yes, of course, energy, especially thermal generation in Ukraine, is severely hit by the recent missiles. And according to the largest thermal operator, DTEK, their capacities were impacted the most. However, If we look at our business model on a segment to segment basis, we remain to be mostly energy independent from electricity distribution grid. Because our sugar processing plants generate their own electricity from gas, plant pellets during the sugar processing season, which lasts only several months per year. Our soybean crusher and one sugar meal. Consume biogas. Which we increased to more than 10. 10 million cubic meters per annum in the natural gas equivalent. And in soybean crushing and sugar mill, which is located nearby, we were able to replace almost all natural gas consumption with in-house produced biogas. our grain storage facilities have backup diesel generator backups and our field machinery operates on conventional fossil fuel so we are not really dependent on the national electricity grid but we understand the importance of using renewable energy in our fuel mix. And we would like and we are increasing alternative fuel consumption. Where do you see local sugar price over the next few months? Is it roughly one third below summer 2023 peak? I would like to first ask our commercial director, Vyacheslav Chuk to address the first question before we turn to the next one.