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Operator
Greetings. Welcome to CVScience's first quarter 2024 conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Brendan Hawkins with Investor Relations. Brendan, you may now begin your presentation.
Brendan
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. With us today with prepared remarks are CD Science's Chief Executive Officer, Joseph Dowling, and Jorg Grasser, Chief Financial Officer. After the prepared remarks, we will take questions from the analyst community. We'd like to remind you that on today's call, management's prepared remarks may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause the actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by CV Sciences at this time. When used in this call, the words anticipate, should, could, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, project, and similar expressions as they relate to CV Sciences are, as such, forward-looking statements. Finally, please note that on today's call, management will refer to non-GAAP financial measures in which CV Sciences excludes certain GAAP expenses from its GAAP financial results. Please refer to CVScience's press release from earlier today for a full reconciliation of its non-GAAP performance measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. This morning, the company issued a press release announcing its financial results. Participants on this call who have not already done so may wish to look at the press release as the company provides a summary of results on this call. The press release may be found at CVSciences.com. I'd like to now turn the call over to CB Sciences Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Joseph Dowling. Joe?
Joseph Dowling
Thank you, Brendan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. This morning, we issued a press release reporting results for our first quarter ended March 31, 2024. We are pleased with our continued progress as we move closer to profitability and generating free cash flow on a sustained basis. Some of the significant financial highlights during Q1 included, we achieved revenue of $4 million, a sequential improvement from $3.8 million for the fourth quarter of 2023. Our Q1 gross margin of 46.3% represents our best gross margin in the last 12 quarters. We continue to maintain our number one position in the natural product retail channel, and we have also increased our market share in this important sales channel as well. We continue to execute on our M&A strategy. And just yesterday, we disclosed in a press release our acquisition of Elevated Softgels, a Colorado-based soft gel and tincture manufacturer. Before I continue, a few comments on the execution and implementation of our M&A strategy. As we have communicated for the last couple of years, we have actively reviewed numerous inbound and outbound M&A opportunities. We are looking for opportunities to increase revenue profitably and increase cost efficiency with transactions that can leverage our assets, including our brands, our people, and process, and our distribution. We know it is important to investors to achieve greater scale profitably. The same is true for CV Sciences to have an opportunity to list on a major stock exchange. We must have greater scale and be profitable. We are making progress. Over the last six months, we have now completed two strategic M&A transactions that are both components to increasing revenue and scale profitably. During Q1, we made progress in preparing cultured foods products for launch in the U.S. market. We have worked on branding, packaging, messaging, and product formulation for the U.S. market. We expect to launch the first phase of products sometime during Q3 of this year. We are also supporting our EU team in expanding sales in the EU and other non-US markets. Our most recent transaction of elevated soft gels provides us with operational flexibility, allowing low to large minimum order quantity production runs. allowing for efficient use of capital and the ability to increase speed to market of new product development for our customers. Elevated Softgels is a GMP certified and FDA registered facility. This acquisition creates opportunity to further increase sales to current and new clients of Elevated. We also intend to in-source production of certain of our key products creating potential for significant cost efficiency. Now, moving on, during Q1, we also achieved numerous other operational objectives, including our new product development efforts continued during Q1 as we are planning to launch several new products throughout the balance of 2024 that we anticipate will contribute to the organic growth of our flagship plus CBD brand, as well as other non-CBD products. And our cost efficiency efforts continue to result in a lower overall company cost structure with efficiency gains and cash savings in numerous areas, including SG&A. Our improved gross margin of 46.3% in Q1, again, our best margin in the last 12 quarters, demonstrates our commitment to continuous improvement in operating a cost efficient company. On the revenue side, our goal is to increase the scale of our company through organic growth and through our M&A strategy. Brand contraction continues to help us take market share in B2B channels as retailers continue to remove slow moving brands. In the natural product retail channel, we are the number one selling brand and continue to see market share concentration of the top four brands in the 60% range. Customers are sticking with or changing to brands they know and trust, and we are at the top of the list in the natural product retail channel. Our B2C sales channel continues to improve. We continuously invest in advertising, merchandising and marketing to optimize our B2C return on investment. We are seeing good results in all critical B2C KPIs, including new visitors, increased subscription orders and average order value. We believe that further brand contraction, increased education and consumer trust in our company and our strong brand will all help grow the B2C channel. We are prepared to grow the channel and take market share as the category evolves. Product development will continue to be important for our growth strategy as new product sales generate a significant portion of total revenues each quarter. Consumers are demanding high-quality brands like our PlusCBD products but they increasingly want multi-active ingredient products that carry a structure function claim that can be trusted. We continue to proactively address this trend and have several planned product launches during 2024 to complement products under our wellness line, including our sleep, calm, and relief products and our over-the-counter topical lines. We will continue to innovate and launch new products that are responsive to our customers and their specific need states, including for anxiety, pain, and sleep disorders. We believe that strong science supports our product claims and will win the trust and loyalty of our existing and new customers. On regulatory matters, there continues to be a lot of activity. We have seen progress at the state level and remain optimistic regarding further progress. Inaction by FDA and Congress is frustrating, but we continue to be actively involved in pushing Congress to make progress on a hemp and cannabis regulatory framework, including the possible rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III status. Incremental legislative progress helps advance our industry and creates an environment where quality companies and products can be trusted to grow the industry in a responsible way. We believe our drug development program and treatment of smokeless tobacco use and addiction continues to be an undervalued asset. This technology, which is patent protected in 10 countries, covers methods of treating smokeless tobacco addiction by administering pharmaceutical formulations containing CBD and nicotine. We believe this drug development program has significant value, and even though we have paused development of this program internally, we continue to seek collaboration partners on this program. Our industry has challenges, but we are positioning ourselves to compete in the current environment. We are doing this in numerous ways. including by streamlining our operations and increasing our cost efficiency to align the company for growth and profitability. We have made great progress in structuring a lean, cost-efficient organization that is positioned to leverage our company's strengths, our employees, our products, the trust in our brand, and the strength of our distribution. Our strong operating platform has allowed us to utilize an M&A strategy to acquire assets that add revenue, increase our scale, and provide operational efficiency. Our acquisitions over the last two quarters, including Cultured Foods in December 2023 and just recently, Elevated Softgels, will add revenue to the top line and promote cost efficiency as we move toward profitability. We will continue to evaluate inbound and outbound M&A opportunities that support our strategic plan of increasing revenues and cost efficiency. Our immediate goal is to achieve profitability and cash flow positive as we continue to make progress toward that goal. Let me pause now, and I will turn the call over to Jorg.
Brendan
Thank you, Joe, and also good morning to everyone. During the first quarter of 2024, we saw the results of several of our key initiatives, which we talked about in previous earnings calls. We maintained our top line revenue at $4 million in a very competitive market where most of our competitors are experiencing sales declines. We also continue to see a positive financial impact of our cost efficiency measures, mostly in our gross margin improvement, but also in several other functional areas of our company. Over the last several years, we have made significant reduced cost structure without significant productivity losses, and we are well positioned for operating leverage as we continue to increase revenues, all with the main goal of creating shareholder value. Our first quarter revenue decreased slightly by 4% to $4 million compared to 4.1 million in the first quarter of 2023. On a sequential basis, we were able to increase our revenue by 5% compared to 3.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. Our unit sales declined by 15% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 2023 offset by higher average sales prices per unit of 12%. The average sales price per unit increased due to channel and product mix. We were also able to take market share from our competitors across all of our sales channels, including the natural product channel and B2C. Our new product introductions were successful and our team is doing an effective job on executing on our go-to-market strategy. New products introduced since the beginning of 2022 represented almost half of our first quarter 2020-24 revenue, which shows the importance of new product innovation. The overall CBD market continues to be fragmented and very competitive. We don't see this changing anytime soon, but we see further brand consolidation and brand contraction which are opportunities to further increase our market share and our revenue base. Our direct-to-consumer business continues to perform well, and associated sales represented 44.2% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 41.2% a year earlier and 46.5% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Our B2C revenue for the first quarter 2024 increased by 3% on a year-over-year basis and remained flat on a sequential basis, despite reduced digital marketing spend. Our team continues to make solid improvements to our main digital KPIs. We were able to grow our B2C sales on a year-over-year basis as a result of improvements to our subscription and loyalty programs, and increased our overall customer list. All good signs for sustainable and continued growth in this channel. Growth margin for the first quarter of 2024 was 46.3%, our best growth margin in the last 12 quarters. We recognized growth margin of 43% in the first quarter of 2023 and 45.8% in the fourth quarter of 2023. The improvement in gross margin compared to prior year is mostly due to our product and channel mix and lower inventory losses. We continue to work on further cost efficiencies, especially in the area of shipping and fulfillment, in order to further improve our gross margins and increase our gross profit. SG&A expense for the first quarter was $2.4 million, slightly up from $2.2 million a year ago, representing an increase of 13%. The increase in SG&E expense is mostly due to additional legal and professional fees, partially offset by reductions in sales and marketing expense. For the first quarter 2024, we generated an operating loss of $0.6 million compared to an operating income of $5.8 million a year ago. mostly due to the reversal of accrued payroll taxes of $6.2 million in the first quarter of 2023. Our adjusted EBITDA loss for the first quarter was $0.5 million compared to $0.2 million in the first quarter of 2023. On a gap basis, we reported a first quarter 2024 net loss of $0.6 million compared to a net income of $5.7 million in the first quarter of 2023. Now, let me turn to our balance sheet. We ended the first quarter of 2024 with $0.7 million of cash compared to $1.3 million at the end of fiscal 2023. We used cash from operations in the first quarter of 2024 of $0.5 million. We continue to manage our overall cash position with improved cash collections on our outstanding AR, and daily management of our inventory and vendor payables. We continue to adjust our cost structure to be in line with our expected revenue with the overarching goal of generating positive operating cash on a continuous basis. We anticipate some modest cash usage in the second quarter of 2024 before generating positive cash flows in the second half of 2024. Our inventory was 5.8 million at the end of the first quarter compared to 5.7 million at year end. And as we continue to focus on efficient cash management and converting our raw materials into cash. Our raw materials mostly consists of hemp oil, which we previously purchased and continue to convert into finished products. Our raw material balance was slightly decreased from the end of 2023. We continue to be essentially debt-free and have working capital of $1.4 million. We consolidated the results of cultured foods into our financials for a full quarter, and cultured foods performed in line with our plan for 2024. During the second quarter of 2024, we will start consolidating elevated soft shells into our financial statements, and we anticipate to see the results of the associated synergies in the second half of 2024. With our improved balance sheet and our reduced cost structure in place, we have the financial flexibility to continue executing our growth plan and look forward to improving trends as the year unfolds. Now, I will turn the call back over to Joe.
Joseph Dowling
George, thank you. As George and I have discussed this morning, we continue to align our company to the scale of the industry to achieve profitability and positive cash flow. Investors are looking for leaders like CV Sciences to consolidate the industry so that a healthier category can evolve. where financial fundamentals such as profitability and free cash flow can be achieved. We continue to make tough decisions to ensure that we are scaled properly, operating efficiently, and are focused on adding long-term shareholder value. We believe that our M&A strategy, including the acquisition of cultured foods and elevated soft gels, are examples of long-term shareholder value potential. With Cultured Foods, we are making progress to bring these great sustainable plant-based food products into our U.S. B2B distribution network while working with our EU team to grow this business in the European market. The global vegan food market is expected to grow five times by 2030 with millennials and flexitarians as the driving force behind soaring vegan food sales. We also plan to leverage the cultured foods European infrastructure to introduce select products from our flagship PlusCBD brand across Europe as laws allow, providing a nice growth opportunity for our core CBD business. With elevated soft gels, we are excited to help grow the revenues of this business and to selectively in-source production of certain plus CBD products. We will continue to participate in the contraction and consolidation of both the cannabis and hemp industries and will evaluate both inbound and outbound M&A opportunities that have strategic value and help scale our company profitably. We are optimistic about the long-term opportunity for our company to remain a competitive force in the health and wellness industry. We have made decisions to ensure that we are focused on adding long-term shareholder value. Our customers and retail partners love our products and they trust who we are. We are a company of dedicated employees that produce safe and high quality products that meet the needs of our customers at value. Now, I will turn the call back over to the operator for any calls from the analyst community.
Operator
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1 from your telephone keypad and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions.
spk02
Thank you. Once again, we press star one if you have a question. Thank you.
Operator
We've reached the end of the question and answer session, and I'll turn the call over to Joseph Dowling for closing remarks.
Joseph Dowling
Thank you. I would like to thank everyone for being a supporter of CV Sciences and our great products. We look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you.
Operator
This will conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.
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