Astarta Holding PLC

higher revenues sales volumes in the agricultural segment, which allowed us to compensate slight decrease in the revenues in the other segments. On the profitability side, as cost of sales were going up and there was a price correction in the market, gross margin halved to 20%. and EBITDA margin came down to 15%. The bottom line was also affected not only by the operating results but by the forex movement of 4 million euro which gave us a loss at the bottom line. Going to the cash flows, our focus remained on maximizing operating cash flows, which were held by working capital release as we accelerated sales of grains and oilseeds. We kept our investments at maintenance CAPEX levels safe for residual investment into the SPC but lower profitability led to increased leverage currently standing at three times net debt EBITDA going into agricultural segment results one can see higher volumes of corn, wheat and sunflower seeds, but lower average prices compared to the previous period for all crops across the board. If we are looking at our harvesting results, we see higher yields for winter crops, the harvesting for which we already finished, at 5.4 tons per hectare in wheat and 3.1 in rapeseeds. We continue harvesting for late crops and the results will be known later during the year. If we are looking at the market situation, we see already a much widening differential between global and domestic Ukrainian prices because of the difficulty of getting grain out of Ukraine. 90% of soft commodities used to be transported via Odessa deep ports and these now do not operate at full potential. We see the alternative capacity at maximum two and a half million tons per month, which was a recent estimate by the Ministry of Agriculture. But the real Ukrainian needs for its annual harvest is five million tons per annum. and that resulted in significant decline for corn and wheat prices ex-works in Ukraine and the pricing differential between international domestic ex-work prices currently already exceeds 100 euros per tonne. Sugar, the processing season hasn't started yet. We are still selling stocks from the previous one. We have higher sales volumes and exports at reasonable levels with MENA region being the key export destination. But of course, Ukraine wants to utilize fully its EU import quota of 100,000 tons. Profitability is much lower than last year due to higher logistics costs. Part of sugar exports is also done by sea, so switching to Danube and other alternative routes have its costs. What we expect in terms of prices for next year, the situation might look brighter because the adverse weather conditions in Europe mean that there could be a deficit of sugar in the EU. So that might provide an opportunity to increase quarter for Ukrainian sugar next year. There is adverse weather conditions in Brazil, so we have to see how the situation will work out. But for the first six months, we see a 20% decline in average prices. Soybean processing is a stable production and sales picture. We see stable prices but profitability is lower due to higher energy and logistics costs. we are putting the last capex into the SPC project this year and we hope to launch it relatively soon in terms of the market outlook domestic crushing looks favorable despite 20% acreage downturn because of the limited exports routes. Very briefly on cattle farming, the price is down by 25% which created a very big one-off biological asset evaluation hit of 5.5 million euro and that translated into negative EBITDA. We sell milk domestically, but in terms of byproduct meat, we continue to be one of the leading exporters of live cattle out of Ukraine, and that generated 8% of the cattle farming revenues this year. This is all in a nutshell in terms of the presentation. I can see that there are already questions in the chat box. The first one is coming from Marik Lesnyak. Fair value of biological assets in agricultural produce increased in second quarter by 10 million euro versus 36 in second quarter 25. To what extent was this driven by cost to sell component? Considering the status of Ukraine exports volumes, our land transport routes, railway tracks are viable alternative to sea freight. I'm going to pass the floor to Ms. Liliya Limanska, the CFO.

The fair value of biological assets as of the end of June this year, of course, largely driven by high logistic costs, if you mean this by cost to sell component. It is based on our estimation of market price of goods at the date of harvesting as of the date of authorization of our financial statement to issue.

Regarding the second part of the question, land transportation, roads, railway and trucks are viable alternatives to sea freight. Capacity-wise, as I mentioned, the Ministry of Agriculture considers alternative road capacity to be half of what is required, up to two and a half million tons per month, as opposed to five required. So, whether this is viable, of course, we'll have to use all capacities required. We also need cooperation from neighboring countries for transit of Ukrainian Grey and we are pleased to see that Romania is the friendliest towards Ukrainian Grey in transit. And it has been announced recently that the Port of Constance takes Ukrainian cargo as a priority. So even this capacity requires good cooperation on European level. And we hope that this full potential will be realized. Next question from Marcin Nowak. Several of them. I'll start with the first one. What is the start-up's plan towards selling 2026 agricultural volumes with limited capacity of Black Sea terminals after recent strikes? This question is to Mr. Vyacheslav Chuk, the commercial director.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for your attention to our results. I'm replying to this question. I would say that we will use the routes we were using at the beginning of the full scale invasion. It was transit routes to the port of European countries, to ports of European countries. And of course, we will use railway logistic to direct processors of the oilseeds. We are not processing by our own to the European continent. I would say that we have and we have stable contacts with the partners in the EU territory and we are maintaining this relationship. So actually it will be slower pace of export, but stable from the perspective of volumes month by month. Thank you.

Related question from the same blog. Do you plan to resign from trading in third party volumes until export capacity increases?

Actually, we are right now in the process of pumping up our volumes. As soon as we see this logistics as stable, we are willing to help our ecosystem of farmers also to export these grains. So, depending on the pace, how we fix our own pace of export, we will try to take some volumes also of third parties.

How it will affect agriculture results? I think I mentioned it that the price differential between global and domestic prices is now just over 100 euros for the market in general and that can be an estimate of the cost of logistics at the moment. If we look at the picture for 2023-2024, we hope that this pricing differential will narrow and converge again as Ukraine is working towards resuming its maritime corridor. Next question is from Karl Adamski. Where are we with soybean crusher facility construction? We are in the last year of a three-year program of CAPEX in our project. We hope to launch the facility this year, but we would not commit or comment on particular date given the security situation in Ukraine. Please bear with us. That's unfortunately the situation we are now. Is a starter direct export product outside of EU? UA, UA, UK? Okay. Or company are using middle broker or company that take product from a starter storage directly?

Thank you very much for the question. We are using mainly or direct consumers and buyers or ABCD names. So it's mainly global traders.

Is the acquisition of Vedrol, Gennari and Malakos still on table for a startup? We postponed this acquisition given the current market environment. Next question from Marcin Novak again. What is the expected time needed to restore terminal capacity? Has Kernel provided any timeline? We cannot, unfortunately, comment on something which we are not in control of.

So this question should be directed at Kernel, unfortunately. I don't see any other questions coming.

I'll just wait for another 10 seconds and if there are no more questions we will complete this call. thank you for your interest and for your support and we'll talk again after the nine months results if you have any more questions you can drop us an email or we can set up one-on-one calls thank you bye bye