Astarta Holding PLC

We can see positive pricing environment for wheat and oil seeds such as sunflower seeds and rapeseeds. That allowed us to register higher revenues for these crops. Acreage for corn was down as we focus more on growing soybeans for processing and revenue for wheat remained stable despite lower pricing environment. The yields last year were less positive than in 2023. 23 was a bumper harvest year, and due to the natural climate cycle, we don't expect it to repeat too soon. But our crop acreage remained mostly stable. We remain focused on our strategic crops, which is sugar beet, soybeans, also wheat and oilseeds. We already started our spring planting and very soon we will be announcing our final acreage. The pricing environment is much more positive to Ukrainian agricultural producers than in the previous years. And this is because Ukraine managed to ensure stable supplies of grain and other product volumes through the greater Odessa ports. And that is fully reflected now in the pricing differential between global prices and Ukrainian ex-works prices. The gap widened, and now we see the situation more resembling pre-war times.

Sugar.

The margin is down on lower pricing, but production levels are intact at 380,000 tons. We are an active exporter of sugar out of Ukraine. The production campaign lasted longer than in previous years. It's over 130 days. And the output actually reached an all-time high in the last seven years. If we're talking about general market trends, Ukraine increased sugar production, which is flat in the last several years at 1.8 million tons. And Ukraine emerged as one of the key exporters of white sugar to the European market as well as to the global markets. There were defensive measures introduced by Europe against Ukrainian white sugar, but the overall quota, which was approved by the EU until June this year, was still five times higher than under the previous trade association agreement regime between Ukraine and EU before the war started. And there is now a licensing regime according to which producers of sugar in Ukraine receive their water on the basis of the production to the EU. Soybean processing is our key areas of focus. We manage to keep our margins intact. There is supportive soybean growing environment in Ukraine, not only us increasing acreage under soybeans for own processing, but we also see Ukrainian agricultural producers are now planting much higher acreage than in the previous years. The oil price is also up. That helped us with the margin. And we also have two major projects for developing this segment further. In the Poltava region, there will be further processing of soybean meal into concentrate. And this project is in the construction phase, should be launched next year in production. And in the western part of operation, we intend to build a new multi-seed crusher to replicate our success in the central part of Ukraine with crushing soybeans and also adding rapeseeds to the mix. Cattle farming is another area of growth for us. We see a positive price in environment despite decline in live cattle numbers in Ukraine. This is because the larger producers with economies of scale like us are winning market share from small-hold farmers. Our milk is of consistent high quality for processors and producers of dairy milk in Ukraine. So we continue to grow our livestock. We have an increase in daily milk output, as well as we also started exporting milk. meat, which is a byproduct of dairy farming as far as Middle East, which is also a noticeable export effort from our part. Our strategy remains intact. We are operating during a full-scale war, so we are focusing on resilience, on ensuring the safety of our operations and personnel. But at the same time, we continue to invest into development projects, especially in Europe. oilseed crushing, and plant protein area. In agriculture, we continue to expand scale of regenerative agriculture, and our efforts are also recognized by various partners and off-takers. We listed only one of them, such as Agrina. We started a carbon farming project with Agrina several years ago, and now we are at the stage that we obtain carbon certificates. We also have several projects where we do joint investments into reduced tillage and cover crops with one of the global off-takers. And they partly finance CAPEX related to conservation agriculture. We also... have our product of takers prepared to pay premium pricing on our products, providing we can verify traceability for our production in the field of regenerative agriculture. So this remains our key focus, and that ensures not only stable market share, premium pricing, or additional payments from our off-takers, but also positively impacts our GHG footprint, which we also report on an annual basis. And we also announce our decarbonization strategy. And in the area of agriculture, we remain fully on track to meet the requirements of our strategy. This is all for the main part of the presentation. We can switch to the Q&A. We already have the first set of questions starting with Marcin. The first question is why fourth quarter sugar segment EBITDA was so weak? I would like to pass the floor to our CFO, Lilia Lemanska, to comment on EBITDA in the sugar segment in the first quarter.