Morning. My name's Colin and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Andrew Peller Limited Fourth Quarter and Year-End Fiscal 2020-2021 Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. Thank you. I'll now turn the call over to Mr. Steve Attridge, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, Mr. Attridge. Thanks, Colin. Good morning, everyone. Before we begin, we remind you that during this conference call, we may make statements containing forward-looking information. This forward-looking information is based on a number of assumptions and is subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those disclosed or implied. We direct you to our earnings release, MD&A, and other securities filings for additional information about these assumptions, risks, and uncertainties. I'll now turn things over to John Peller, Chief Executive Officer. Thank you, Steve, and g ood morning, everyone. It's great to be with you. I'm sitting in my office in Burlington, and we have a beautiful summer day here. We're definitely feeling great about returning back to a normal life as the COVID policies ease and we start to reengage with each other. I had the opportunity to get our executive management team together on Monday night this year down at the Riverbend Inn, which we've just purchased. It's the first time as a team that we've been able to be together now in more than a year, and I can't tell you how gratifying that was. We've spent more time with each other than we've ever spent in our life, and h aving said that, doing it virtually, I'm sure you can all relate to the fact that it's nowhere near as enjoying the company of each other. We had a great night, and we celebrated what has been a very great year for our company, and obviously the strangest year of business that we've ever experienced. Our results, in fact, were very positive for the year. We've managed to increase our sales 3% for the year and increase our net earnings by 18%. On the strength of that, we've increased a 10% dividend increase in testament to the strong performance. It also reflects our confidence in our positive future and our commitment to enhance shareholder value as we go forward. I just want to make sure that you appreciate what a difficult year this has been for our company, and first and foremost, our focus was on the health and wellbeing of all our employees. You know, a company of 1,600 employees, almost 80% of our employees worked throughout the entire year, either in our facilities or in our retail stores. They definitely were our frontline heroes, and we invested heavily in everything we could do to ensure their health and safety. I've never been more proud of our management and team for all they've done and we communicated carefully with everyone throughout the period. You know, it was a very unusual year, despite the fact that it looks like just another +3% in sales and another year of +18% in earnings. That in no way reflects the challenges that we faced, you know. A great portion of our business trade channels were closed. We lost all our restaurant business. We had major closings at our nine estate wineries in our hospitality division. All our export sales, our duty-free sales were reduced pretty well to nothing. Then, there was a huge amount of demand that came through our retail channels, and particularly in the early part of the pandemic, you know, the LCBO was slow to open. They had difficulties with their union and had partial service in some stores. They actually closed stores, and if you recall, they actually closed their entire system on Mondays, so that we had a very significant demand in the March through May period, which is the one we're just finishing now, and n aturally, we benefited from that. In addition to the challenges of these trade channels that were toggling open and closed in various levels of degree, it impacted severely, that the product mix that we sold as well. All the channels that focused on premium and ultra-premium products were closed. Naturally, the channels that were more value-priced products actually overachieved, and a lot of those, and particularly the four-liter bag-in-box, which as a segment was up over 30% over its prior year. It is the largest segment in the retail channel. It naturally has lower margins. We were impacted by those trends as well as the opening and closing of the trade channels. All in all, I think the other thing that's worth remarking is that while all this challenge was coming in, and we had to expedite products all over the world, we had a very, very disrupted supply chain system to manage while dealing with all of this change, we were still very focused on all the core strategies that we know will allow us to grow as we go forward. We invested more capital in this last two, three years than we've ever invested before, not just in our ERP system, but in our operations, in our vineyards, and our table wine group, so that while it was far from business as normal, while we still produced results that reflected increased revenue and earnings, we were busy investing in our future, and t hat's why our meeting on Monday night was a great way for us to acknowledge, be together, and feel great about our future. I'm going to turn things over to Steve right now, and then I'll have a couple of comments to make at the end. Thank you. Over to you, Steve. Thanks, John. Sales were CAD 393 million for the year ended March 31st, 2021. That's up 2.8% from fiscal 2020. Sales growth across provincial liquor stores and the strong contribution from the success of our recently launched e-commerce portal were partially offset by declines in revenues in our export licensee and hospitality trade channels due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic was announced since March 2020, the company saw an increase in sales as a result of higher consumer purchases due to the uncertainty around trade channels for beverage alcohol staying open. Furthermore, given the pandemic was announced in March of 2020, it had minimal impact on the company sales channels during fiscal 2020. As a result, sales in the fourth quarter 2021 decreased 3.6%, compared to Q4 2020. As we've communicated over the last year, our gross margin has been negatively impacted by purchasing patterns and other factors created by the COVID-19 pandemic. These include higher imported wine costs, an increase in consumption of lower margin products, and an overall change in sales mix as export, licensee, and hospitality channels were impacted due to COVID closures and travel restrictions. In addition, we experienced increased distribution costs related to the launch of our e-commerce platform and higher co-packing costs in our new and growing refreshment brands, including beer, cider, and ready-to-drink products. We expect our margins will strengthen in post-COVID periods as markets return to more historic patterns. Our sales and admin expenses were lower in fiscal 2021 as we made the deliberate effort to manage costs by temporarily reducing advertising and promotional spending and lower staff during the pandemic. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, we began to increase our staffing and marketing efforts in anticipation of more normal markets returning as the impact of COVID-19 eases. With the increase in sales and reduced selling and admin costs, our EBITDA increased to CAD 63 million for the year ended March 31st, up from CAD 61.5 million last year. Net earnings for fiscal 2021 were CAD 27.8 million or CAD 0.65 per Class A share, up from CAD 23.5 million or CAD 0.55 per share in fiscal 2020. Turning to the balance sheet, you'll note that in December, we restructured our debt facilities, increasing our borrowing limit to CAD 350 million, a nd combining our previous credit lines into one facility. Our bank indebtedness at the time was then transferred to a larger single facility. As the changes constituted a modification of our long-term debt, we recorded a gain of CAD 2.3 million net of financing costs in the third quarter of fiscal 2021. With this change, total debt was CAD 174.5 million at March 31st, 2021, compared to CAD 165.2 million at the prior year-end. The increase was largely due to the CAD 10 million paid to acquire the assets and properties of the Riverbend Inn and Vineyard on February 26th, 2021. At year-end, we had capacity on our revolving credit facility of approximately CAD 175.5 million. We believe this strong liquidity position will provide the capital and flexibility to meet our growth objectives for the foreseeable future. As you may know, over the past year, we implemented a new and highly scalable enterprise resource planning solution, an initiative we are confident will greatly benefit our production, logistics, and delivery systems going forward. This system successfully went live in early February, and we expect further investments in new systems we'll reduce going forward. In summary, as John mentioned, we're pleased with our results for fiscal 2021. We remain confident in this track record of solid performance will continue. Thanks very much for your time this morning and now I'll turn things back to John to wrap up. Thanks, Steve. Just a couple of quick comments. As we look towards the completion of this next year that we are in, it's important to note that this will be another COVID business disrupted year. In particular, we expect a soft first quarter, and the softness in this first quarter will reflect that the incredible pantry loading that we had in March, April, and May of last year. On the revenue side, we will fall below that, because there's no way we can achieve the extraordinary numbers that we did in that first quarter last year. Secondly, even though we had strong revenue last year, we had a reduced SG&A as we had significant layoffs and cost reductions that were imposed as a result of COVID. This year, we will have a full SG&A against a reduced, you know, expectation of revenue as a result of that load-in. Additionally, we've had to endure some estate winery and restaurant estate closures as well that we didn't anticipate in these first two months. All that being said, we still plan to increase our revenue for the year. We expect growth in revenue and we expect growth in our earnings. As I said, we've been busy investing in revenue growth in our business. I mentioned to you that we purchased a Riverbend. It opens actually tomorrow, and we hope you get a chance to come down and stay with us. When I was there on Monday night, I happened to overhear we had 1,200 calls on Sunday for people who wanted to come and visit our wineries. Naturally, our winery experience is now all our hospitality programs, tourism visitation are booked solid for the next three to four weeks, there's no way we can meet the demand, we'll be still operating under some restricted guidelines for at least the next month or so. We're very confident that as this business returns, it will contribute to what I expect to be a very successful year for the company. We have also entered several new business categories. Our core wine category, both wine under 15 and our ultra-premium business, are both poised for growth as we go forward. Additionally, we've been investing in the ready-to-drink segment that is very robust these days. We've had a very strong brand achievement with our No Boats cider and seltzers, which are performing very well as we speak, and w e have some more innovations. We have wine spritzers and cocktails that we'll be launching as well this year and in the next year and we have definitely some nice growth coming in that category to complement our core categories. Additionally, our entry into spirits is now starting to perform very, very well. Not just our Gretzky whisky, which has earned several new package sizes. Our launches of our cream whiskeys, both in the Wayne Gretzky brand, but also our Panama Jack brand, have performed very, very well and are growing exceedingly above the category growth rates. As I have tried to emphasize, as we return to a post-COVID new normal, you know, our premium trade channels will be opening up, and we have a lot of exciting things happening in both at the estate level, in retail with our wine clubs and our tour programs. We're going to do very, very well there. You've heard that we've had a very successful launch of an e-commerce platform, leveraging the strength of the new ERP system that we have put in over the last two years. It was the largest CapEx that our company has ever undertaken at around CAD 30 million to put that ERP system in. Our e-commerce system has performed very well. It's obviously a new pioneering world. I'm sure you've all heard that e-commerce is one of the major growth engines in all consumer packaged goods right now. We are investing heavily because we know that will be a critical trade channel for our future. Lastly, I'd point out that, you know, I think that the M&A field, mergers and acquisition, will be quite active in the next few years. Larger companies continue to perform well. We have a very strong balance sheet and availability to access capital. We are very diligent in terms of the opportunities that we look at, and we're excited at the prospects to strengthen our growth over and above the organic growth that we are going to make happen with some mergers and acquisitions opportunities as well. With that, I'm happy to open the floor for questions if there are any. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. You'll hear a three tone prompt acknowledging your request and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received, and should you wish to decline for the polling process, please press star followed by two. If you're using a speaker phone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from Amr Ezzat from Echelon Partners. Please go ahead. Good morning, John. Good morning, Steve. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Both of you sort of touched on it. Can we go back to the gross margins and the different drivers there? I'm assuming channel and product mix weren't very different over the past quarter or two. I'm just wondering what are the dynamics driving the decline this quarter relative to the last couple? I'm sure there's fixed cost leverage in there. Can you speak to the other drivers as we look at fiscal 2022? I think quite simply, you know, the answer is that premium products in the channels that they were most dominant in were reduced significantly. As I said, our estates are still not open as we speak, so that t he channels that had higher gross margin products have been heavily negatively impacted by COVID, and the channels where the margins are lower in retail have exceeded their normal revenue volumes, and those are value-priced wines and certainly four-liter products. Additionally, the RTD has kind of lower gross margins as well. That's really the long and the short of it and I think there'll be a bit of a drag on this as we go through a return to normal over the next nine months. Then I expect things to revert back to what we had seen previously as we exit and enter the post-COVID normal. Great, t hat's good color. Okay, s witching gears to SG&A. John, you mentioned, obviously, you were 10% lower year-on-year. Now, I think, you said in your prepared remarks, back to normal spend. There's also new moving parts with the addition of Riverbend Inn. When we're thinking about SG&A in fiscal 2022, would we go back to fiscal 2020 levels, or are you guys anticipating to spend a little bit more? No, I think that we'll still be a little bit below as a percentage of sales what we were in fiscal 2020, you know, w hen I know we creeped up over 27%, I think we're going to be more in the 25.5%. Okay You know, percent level, and then, you know, w e've had a lot of reasons for the SG&A increase. The easiest one was our ERP system. We had a lot of double hiring to cover people who were allocated to work on the project, and it was a significant administrative undertaking for us. As well, we entered new trade channels, spirits, RTDs. We launched a new e-commerce system so that there were SG&A costs that were investments in entering these new businesses as well. I think we've managed it well. We know that there's efficiencies and opportunities for us as we go forward. In the end, it's all about balancing your ability to grow and managing your bottom line responsibly. Our business plans for the next three years are focused on our growth and we're excited about those growth opportunities. Great, o n the CapEx, I guess, with the ERP now live, should we expect the intensity of your CapEx to go down significantly year-over-year? Is that fair? I don't think that is fair. I think we still have an expectation that we'll be investing capital at current levels, you know, in the kind of mid-20 million range. We're investing significantly in some new vineyard development, which is very capital intensive. We're doing some improvements to some estate wineries, things that we have put off to allow us to focus on our ERP investments. We've got some catch up to do in other places. Certainly, in our operations, we're having to add some capacity as well to accommodate our growth, so that it's something we will manage responsibly. There is a lot of demand in our system to accommodate our growth expectations. I'm happy to at least acknowledge that all the assets that we've purchased over the last 10 years, 20 years have increased significantly in value as well. It doesn't show on our balance sheet, but a lot of these assets that we have in our company have had material increase in value. Great, m aybe one last one. On the Riverbend Inn, is the long-term plan for you guys to run the hotel yourselves, or can we see you guys sell it and keep the 17 acres of vineyards? How do we sort of think about that? Then maybe you could give us an update on the M&A landscape. You spoke to investing more heavily in M&A over the next two, three years. How are things coming out of the pandemic, I guess, with sellers and their expectations? Well, first on the Riverbend, we have been increasing our investments in hospitality over the years as part of our estate winery tourism business, you know, w e run six, seven restaurants and tour programs now. We have corporate group hospitality sales teams. We run events that are everything from concerts to food festivals. Our capability in the hospitality sector of the ultra-premium wine business is considerable, so that in adding the Riverbend Inn, it really is an extension of hospitality and the services we're already supplying. I think in the short term, we're going through an evaluative phase as to what our options are in terms of how we might invest more into the Riverbend Inn. We'll complete that review in the next few months and report back to you. I see this as a potential area for growth for the business. On the M&A side, I think it's worth looking at the different segments and the opportunities that they provide. We're still in a very strong position to make smart acquisitions on the wine side of our business, both in premium and value products. You just have to be very disciplined around pricing when you make those acquisitions. I think in the RTD segment, in general, that is a very, very overheated segment right now. Small businesses are selling their businesses with revenue multiples, not earnings multiples. We'll be very thoughtful. I think importantly, we didn't sit on our hands watching this Donnybrook take place. We entered, and we've entered successfully. We're demonstrating to ourselves that we can grow significantly organically. At the same time, I expect that through all this incredible increase in marketing activity in the segment, that there are going to be some people who will be looking to exit, and we will definitely be evaluating opportunities there as well. We expect to be very engaged in opportunities across the board. Great. Thanks, John. I'll pass the line. Thank you. It was great to hear from you. Your next question comes from Nick Corcoran from Acumen Capital. Nick, please go ahead. Good morning and t hanks for taking my questions. Go ahead, Nick. The first question just is to do with gross margin. I think you called out that distribution costs through e-commerce and co-pack increase the gross margin. Can you give any indication what the dollar impact in the quarter was from those two things? Oh, jeez, I really don't have that number, Nick, you know, available to me right now. We grew significantly in e-commerce, and yes, delivery costs are very significant, and I think we're in a phase now where we're refining our policies around how we provide service in a cost-effective way. The only thing I can say about co-packing is that there have been a significant increase in the amount of facilities that are now offering co-packing services, so that there are more and more opportunities to lower costs in the co-packing space because of the increase in supply there. Unfortunately, I don't carry that dollar number in my head, but, you know, s uffice it to say that it is a significant part of that business. We always have the opportunities to add those packaging facilities to our business at some point. It's certainly part of our thinking as we're going forward, and it'll be an area where we invest a lot of time and attention evaluating what our best options are going forward. Good, t hat's helpful, and then m aybe just turning to Q1, can you give any indication what you've seen kind of quarter to date in terms of revenue and how gross margins should track? Yeah, I think basically, our revenues look like they'll be a little soft to last year, and it's what we anticipated as well. Last year, we had increases of 30%, 40% type thing through the retail channels, and it was extraordinary growth. We had trouble finding product in our supply chain system to meet the demand. We're up against that, and naturally, the gross margins that we've had in the last six months to nine months, they're going to continue because we're operating under the same trade channel closures, and so that the gross margins will likely follow that, that same pattern. Having said that, we're supposed to open up in the next week or two, and we expect that we'll make up for some of that volume in the rest of the year. Whether we get all of it or not, it's not clear. It's not something we're at all concerned about. We're very much focused in the fact that we have great growth opportunity in all segments of our business right now. We'll deal with COVID disruption for another year. We don't know how quick the travel industry will come back. It's still unclear how quickly restaurants will reopen and how many have been closed for good, and whether the impact of people eating at home more will make them less inclined to go back to restaurants. Having said that, we just basically toggle one trade channel on and the other one off. If restaurant volumes go up, it's likely retail sales will start to go down a bit. They're very difficult trends to predict the timing of, and some of this will be some new learning as well in terms of what behaviors have changed more permanently. We're pleased that, as we told you earlier, that the four-liter bag in box has had a whole new cohort of consumers who are very pleased with the convenience and the quality of those products, and we expect to benefit from that going forward. We're 100% confident that the premium wine industry will respond strongly. We don't know the timing and we can't be sure about exactly how the trade channels return to their new normal. Suffice it to say, we just know that they will, and we're investing to grow in all of them. Great, t hat's good color, and m aybe switching gears to RTD. How do you feel about the performance of that category and then relative to the broader category as well? I'm sorry, Nick, could you repeat that? Yeah, what do you think of the performance of RTD, and then relative to the category as a whole? I think our performance has been very, very good. I think, first of all, the RTD category is a very significant category. In North America, it will become the second-largest beverage alcohol category at the end of this year. There will be first beer, second RTD, third wine, fourth is spirits, and that's by volume. It underscores that this is a very significant category, you know. Even though it's already large, it's growing in the 30% to 40% range, which in a mature category is quite remarkable. I think the other thing to notice is that people are entering this category. Instead of it being the domain of one segment, all beer people are in it, all spirit people are in it, all the wine companies are in it, the cider companies are in it. This has become an incredibly intensive engagement of new products. I think there were something like 2,000 applications at the liquor board this year, and they took 25 or 30 new products. There's an intense level of competition, and I think you just got to be good with your brands and smart about what segments you play in. It will be very interesting to see how this category evolves going forward. We have some great wine entries. Our cider and seltzer entry under No Boats is a fabulous brand, and we know brands like Gretzky can compete effectively in this segment as well. We like the fact that our e-commerce, our e-commerce virtual channel allows us now to participate in this segment in ways that we couldn't before, because we couldn't break through distribution barriers either at the beer store or at the LCBO. It's definitely an octagon in terms of the competition that's going on inside the category. It's not our core category. We can participate intelligently and have it strengthen our core products as opposed to we're not betting the farm in RTD by any stretch. We're just playing smart and taking growth that we know is there, with brands that we know that will stay strong, and it's really a testament to our business model. We have great operations supply chain capability that allows us to participate in several categories. We have a national sales and marketing capability that allows us to market to every aspect of the retail and customer network. We're just leveraging those strengths and trying to do it in an intelligent and sustainable way. Then just the last question from me has to do with the land you have in the lower mainland. I see it's still an asset held for sale. Can you give any update on the sale process for that? Yeah, w e have two pieces of property there, Nick. One is in Port Coquitlam, and it's for sale for, I believe, around CAD 9 million or CAD 10 million, and it's received quite a bit of attention. It won't be any issue about its disposal. The larger piece is the five-acre piece in Port Moody that has been rezoned for comprehensive development. I'm sure you're familiar with the guidance that we've given on that in the past. You know, the development community for these types of projects was very quiet through the pandemic for obvious reasons. People wanted to see how financially these things would play out because the capital required to develop the Port Moody is in the several CAD 100 million, and we are engaged with a number of people right now. Both the commercial and residential values of real estate in Vancouver have increased significantly throughout this period, so we're feeling very, very positive about our ability to commercialize that investment in the next year or two. Great, t hat's all for me, t hanks again. Thanks, Nick. There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn it back to Mr. Peller for closing remarks. Okay, everybody. We wish you all a very pleasant summer with your families and friends. Please take time to come and visit us in the Okanagan or in the Niagara Peninsula. We look forward to engaging with you at our AGM in September. Have a great, healthy, and safe summer. Thanks very much. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.