Burcon Nutrascience Corporation

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Bercon NutriScience Corporation's fiscal 2025 first quarter results ended June 30, 2024. Joining us today are Kip Underwood, Bercon's Chief Executive Officer, and Robert Pitts, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Following the remarks, we'll open up the call for your questions. To join the question queue, you may press star and then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the call, you may signal and operate by pressing star and then 0. Before we conclude today's call, I'll provide the company's safe harbour statement with important cautions regarding the forward-looking statements made during this call. I will now turn the call over to the CEO of Ocon, Mr Kip Underwood. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Fiscal 2025 first quarter marks the beginning of Berkahn's journey towards becoming a market-leading plant protein innovation company. We are pleased to record commercial revenue from our hemp protein sales. This was a significant achievement as it marks the first direct commercial protein sale for Berkahn and the world's first sale of hemp protein isolate. In addition, during the quarter, we officially launched our canola protein, expanding our protein offerings to meet the market demand for better for you and better for the planet specialty ingredients. With production capabilities established, we believe we are on the cusp of moving beyond a company that creates technology to one that derives profit from our innovation. We will review these milestones and update our commercial progress on today's call. In regard to market demand, we are encouraged by the growing customer interest for our protein ingredients. Direct customer feedback for our proteins continue to be positive with over 50 prospective customers in various stages of product evaluation and trials. Our sales strategy targets innovative, new consumer brands that are on the cutting edge of food trends. These brands' size and scale align perfectly with Bercon's current capabilities. enabling us to achieve speed to revenue, a key component to Bercon's success. We have a sound strategy in place and continue to build out a robust customer sales funnel. We look forward to discussing in more detail our strategy to capture a part of the multi-billion dollar total addressable market for Bercon's high purity protein ingredients. We are off to a fantastic start to our fiscal year. Our top priority is to ramp commercial production to meet the growing customer demand for our proteins. As of July 1st, Robert Peets joined Bercon as its new chief financial officer. As a seasoned financial and strategy executive, Rob has brought his extensive experience in capital markets to Bercon. We are excited to have him on board as Bercon transitions to a revenue-generating company. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Rob Peets, to provide an overview of the financial results for Q1, after which I will return to provide an outlook for our current fiscal year. We will open the call to questions following our remarks. Rob, whenever you're ready, please go ahead.

Thanks, Kevin. Earlier today, our financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2024, were issued in a news release and filed with CDAR, as well as posted to our investor relations section of our website. In the three months ended June 30, 2024, we recorded revenues of $237,000, as compared to nil recorded in the year-ago comparable quarter. ERCOM reported a net loss of just under $1.9 million or $0.01 per basic share and diluted share for the first quarter of fiscal 2025, as compared to just over $1.9 million or $0.02 per basic and diluted share in the first quarter of the prior year. Research and development expenditures in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 decreased by $253,000 over the first quarter of fiscal 2024. The decrease is driven by the receipt of $140,000 of government assistance from Protein Industries Canada received in the current period, as well as the intellectual property expenses, which decreased by $71,000. Following a strategic patent portfolio review undertaken during the prior fiscal year, Bercon focused its intellectual property spend on patents that are essential to these strategic objectives and ceased maintenance payments on the non-core patents, resulting in a decrease in IP expenses. G&A expenditures in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 increased by $267,000 over the previous year's comparable quarter. The increase is driven by a combination of increased stock-based operations external consultants and an increase in investor relations costs as the company resumed its investor outreach activities. These increases were partially offset by lower salaries and benefits expenditures at the same period, driven by lower stock-based compensation and staff changes. During the first quarter of fiscal 2025, Bercon recorded funding from Protein Industries Canada for about $400,000, which has been applied to reduce R&D expenses, P&A expenses, inventory, and property equipment. As of June 30, 2024, the company had $2.2 million of cash, plus access to up to $4 million of undrawn capacity on Tranche 2 of the secured loan. In the prior year, Bercon received funding approval from PICC for the scale-up and commercialization of hemp seed and sunflower seed proteins. The $6.9 million project led by Virkon includes funding of $3 million from PIC. If I may add a personal note, from my own point of view, I'm very excited about the opportunities which Virkon has currently underway and in development. The upcoming quarters hold incredible potential, and I'm really happy to be part of all of it. With that, I'd like to turn it back to you, Kip.