Let's, let's kick things off here. Thank you for joining us for our next session. We're excited to host Phibro Animal Health Corporation. We're joined with Damian Finio, Chief Financial Officer. Damian, thank you. Good to see you, Michael. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Yes, skip that part. I'm Mike Ryskin on the BofA Life Science Tools and Diagnostics and also Animal Health team. I think we're just going to do a little bit of a fireside chat. Yep. Just a free-ranging conversation. I guess to start, you reported your fiscal 3Q results very recently. Just to sort of, like, set the table, maybe you could walk through some of the key points. Yep. We just hosted our earnings call last week, hot off the presses. As you mentioned, it was our end of our third quarter. We're a June 30th year-end, just six weeks from now, we'll be ending our year and starting fiscal year 2024. We had a decent third quarter. Sales were $246 million, which is up 3%. For year to date, we're up 5% in sales, $723 million. To hit our guidance which we've kept since August 2002, since we first went out, to hit the low end of guidance, we need to do $237 million in the fourth quarter. We feel pretty confident. Fourth quarter, as you know, is typically our strongest quarter, primarily driven by seasonality. Feel pretty good about the sales number and top line. On our EBITDA side, $27 million in EBITDA, which was 2% growth for the quarter, $80 million up 1%. A little less growth on the bottom line, both for the quarter and year to date, and for the reasons that you've heard other companies. Input costs are higher. We're also sitting on some inventory, which I'm sure you and I'll talk about. To hit our guidance on the low end, we would need to do $33 million in the fourth quarter, which is about a $6 million bump. On our call last week, we talked about some opportunities in the fourth quarter. In addition to seasonality, which would help, you know, quarter-on-quarter comparisons, we launched some commercial vaccines in Brazil and also opened up a new autogenous vaccine facility in Brazil. In between the seasonality plus the incremental and the vaccines in South America, feel pretty good about our guidance on the bottom line as well. Overall, good year to date, but we've got to close out the year with six weeks to go. Okay. Let's kick things off right there. You touched on, sort of the bridge from the fiscal 3Q or trailing nine months... Yeah. -versus fiscal year. What sort of deviated from plan in that fiscal 3Q? Because you identified a couple new challenges that you hadn't seen year-to-date. Yeah. Could you walk through that a little bit? We disaggregate our revenues into three segments. There's Animal Health, Mineral Nutrition, and Vaccines. It's our Mineral Nutrition business that's lagging a little bit and where we're seeing some of the impacts of destocking, which I know some of our competition has talked about as well. Just as a reminder, Mineral Nutrition's about 25% of our company. It's a U.S. business and has some exposure to the beef cattle feedlots. I think with the destocking that we've seen and the lower size of the feedlots, that's what we're seeing in Mineral Nutrition. If you do take a step back and look at the last five years, part of it is just the year-on-year comparison. The last five years, last year was a great year for Mineral Nutrition. When you look year-on-year, things are down. If I look at five years, it's actually the second-best year in five years. It's still a good year. I think what we're seeing from our side, although the year-on-year comparisons aren't good, is that that business or that part of our business is starting to normalize and inventory levels are coming back to what they were pre-COVID. Okay. That was actually gonna be exactly what I was gonna ask next, was how quickly does that change? You know, is there a scenario where that's just a one quarter blip and suddenly you go into fiscal 4 Q or maybe fiscal 1 Q and things are back to normal there? Just talk us through the dynamics of those stocking issues, specifically within Mineral Nutrition. Okay. Yeah. It's a trickier business in Mineral Nutrition than animal health is as far as inventory goes. As you know, we often say the sales run in parallel with the cost of the underlying raw materials. It's primarily we buy, you know, minerals, and vitamins, et cetera, and we sell them through the Mineral Nutrition in the U.S.. We typically stock up on inventory in the quarter ending September 30th because our facility is based on the Mississippi River, and it's north enough on the Mississippi River that we need to load up on inventory before the river freezes for the next couple of quarters of demand. If you look at our free cash flow over the last trailing 12 months, you'll see there was a negative blip in the third quarter of what was the September 30th e nding quarter last year. We're sitting on a little bit more inventory than we normally are, said on the call about a one-month worth of inventory. We need to make sure that we balance our inventory with the needs of the customers in this next quarter, not the quarter ending June 30th, but in September 30th. Mm-hmm. I think once we make that adjustment, you know, we'll be closer to in line with customer demand and then continue through the year. Whether or not, you know, the feedlot placements take a little bit longer to increase, I think we're seeing it more as just destocking. What about what's causing that decision from your customer base, customers to destock? You know, I'd say I'm speculating here, but I have to imagine same thing that we would do in our lower inventory is the cost of capital has just gone up. It's a lower margin business relative to our animal health, where we've really seen the growth. Okay. Is it based on where you exited fiscal 3Q and where you're sitting now in May, has it sort of like stabilized? Have they lowered it to a good stable point, or is there a risk they'll lower it again? I think there's still some risk of more destocking. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I guess we'll see as the quarter plays out. Again, you're only seeing that really in Mineral Nutrition. You're not seeing that in animal health per se. Yeah. Your question was about what have we seen that would surprise us a little bit, right? Yeah. It's in Mineral Nutrition. Performance Products, the other division, which is about less than 10% of our revenue, is on target. I guess the surprise on the favorable side was the performance of our animal health segment, which we highlighted on last week's call. Yep. All right, pivoting to animal health segment. Yeah, you saw really strong results in fiscal 3Q and year to date. Yep. in MFAs and other, in nutritional specialties Yeah. -and vaccines. Slightly different drivers in all three. Maybe you could just, you know, go through those one by one. Sort of like what are the tailwinds that you're seeing? Yeah. Okay. In animal health, which is our business, biggest segment, again about two-thirds of our business, we further disaggregate revenues into three product categories. There's MFAs and others, as you mentioned, nutritional specialties and vaccines. I think we've highlighted this the last couple quarters. This last quarter was the eighth consecutive quarter of quarter over prior year quarter growth for each of those three categories. I guess the good news is I can't say it's just one of the three categories driving it, 'cause it's really all three. Year to date, sales for the segment were up 10%, which we believe is above market. If I look at the product categories within animal health, MFAs and other was up 9%, nutritional specialties is up 12%, and vaccines were up 9%. MFAs and others, we've highlighted a couple times. We did a small acquisition of an ethanol company in Brazil, back, I think it was the quarter ending June 30th last year, last fiscal year. That continues to drive the other part of MFA and other. Mm-hmm. We still have strong demand for our medicated feed additives as well. nutritional specialties, it's really two drivers, I would say. Our companion animal product, Rejensa, is included. Mm-hmm. -in nutritional specialties, continues to perform well. Also our direct-fed microbial business, which started with the acquisition of Osprey Biotechnics in 2019, but we've continued to leverage the technologies and the products and moving some of the, some of those technologies to Brazil and capturing, you know, the market in Brazil as well. Those two are driving nutritional specialties, again, up 12%. Vaccines is what Jack mentioned on our call last week. We launched some commercial vaccines in Brazil that recently received regulatory approval, so we're excited about that. Brazil is a big poultry market, as you know. Think second only to the U.S. We launched a autogenous vaccine facility. That's a little bit of a different business. Rather than the commercial vaccines, autogenous are custom-made vaccines where we take a sample from a flock, bring it back to the lab, create a custom vaccine specific to that farm. It's smaller batch, but it's higher margins. We opened a facility in Brazil to capture that market as well. We see there's a lot of upside, I think, in vaccines, particularly in the South America region. All right. Maybe just sticking on the autogenous vaccine. What's the, what's the opportunity there? Are you converting customers or animals that would have been on sort of traditional vaccines and moving them onto autogenous, or is this sort of new market for you? Well, it's not new in that it's our second facility. Mm-hmm. We have the same business in the U.S. in our facility. Yeah. in Omaha, Nebraska. What it does is open up, you know, a similar business just in a different market that's also a big poultry market. It's some of the same customers that we call on for our other products. Mm-hmm. including the commercial vaccines. It's just one more, you know, product to have in our portfolio and another option to keep their animals healthy. Would you say that that market is outgrowing vax in general? I think we're seeing growth in both commercial and autogenous. Okay. We like autogenous because again, the margins are good. What's, you know, what's driving the overall demand in the market? I mean, like you said, feedlot placements have been a little shaky. We're seeing somewhat softer herd numbers. Poultry's been impacted by a few infectious disease outbreaks. Yeah. that we'll discuss later as well. Right. You're still seeing really strong growth, again, all three segments, all species. What's driving that? You know, I think some of it's our new products that we've mentioned. In nutritional specialties, I think, again, it's finding new ways for probiotics and direct-fed microbials in our existing product line and extending our product line that we have right now. It's also the companion animals product, Rejensa, continues to grow. Mm-hmm. These are both new product examples. Same with autogenous. It's the same technology, but again, it's opening a new market with products that we already sell elsewhere. I think it's a combination thing. You know, we've talked before about our R&D investments being split between companion animals, nutritional specialties, and vaccines. I think we're excited because we're seeing finally some returns from the nutritional specialty and vaccine investments that we've been making the last couple of years. Do you think, for some of these products, I mean, Are any of them blockbuster status or any of them are gonna be? You know, you've talked about Rejensa individually obviously in the past, and we'll get into that later. Some of those other vaccines, are any of them alone? Yeah. How do they define blockbuster these days? Is that $100 million? $100 million. I mean, $50 million. Yeah, I think that would be big. $100 million. Yeah, obviously. I think that'd be on the high side. You know, I think it depends. There is some disease outbreak in South America, which one of our vaccines could address. Depending on the model, you know, it could be a very good size product for Phibro. Mm-hmm. I don't know if it quite hits blockbuster status, but. Mm-hmm. A meaningful number for us. We'll give guidance on our August call. You know, again, I only have six weeks of guidance out there. Yep. -on different than some of my other companies that are gonna talk all the way to the end of the calendar year. Mm-hmm. We're only six weeks out from our year-end. I think we'll give an update on those things on our next call in August. Okay. Okay, great. I mean, maybe this is a great time to transition to some of the other, market factors we're seeing. Yeah. One I do wanna touch on, just given focus on poultry is avian flu. Yeah. Outbreak. Obviously, HPAI in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Yeah. sort of how do you see that playing out, you know, near medium term? It's not a new topic, not a new issue. Right. It seems like it's been, a lot noisier in the past year. Yeah. You know, our business is fairly diverse. We sell in more than 80 countries. We sell across species. If you were to look at where is our major concentration, it is the U.S. and it is poultry. It's a fair question. That said, within poultry, the flu, avian flu impacts turkeys and layers primarily, and our business in the U.S. is primarily broilers. We've actually seen very little impact and foresee very little impact, at least specific to that disease, on our business in the U.S. Is there a risk it becomes an issue for broilers? Sort of what's the epidemiological- You, you know, I think the difference is the life cycle of a broiler versus a layer or turkey. It's a shorter life cycle for broilers, so they're less exposed to some of the issues that cause the influenza. That's sort of the biology of it, I guess, right? Yeah. I'm sure the answer is it could, but it's less likely just given the life cycle. Makes sense. On the flip side, is there any opportunity there in terms of vaccine development? We have an active vaccine R&D, you know, effort. There is potential, but not nothing that would be baked into our guidance. Okay. you know, specifically. We'll continue to look for that. Even though it's not our business right now, doesn't mean it couldn't be in the future with the vaccine, progress that we've made elsewhere. Okay. All right. Sticking on the infectious disease front. Mm-hmm. it's topical. been a couple cases of BSE in- Yeah. in cattle, particularly in Brazil. Yeah. Latest we've heard is there's still some debate back and forth in terms of would imports or exports be banned to other countries, particularly China. Right. You do have some exposure there. You just talked about some of your LATAM growth. Yeah, we talked about this, you and I think back in March, right? We said at the time, I think there was already an embargo, so Brazil could not export to China. I think I'd answered, we were for planning purposes, we said 30-60 days. I think it ended up being a little shorter than that, right? It was about three weeks. Yeah. We saw it at the time as more of a timing delay, and it would just push sales out to our fourth quarter, which ends June 30th. I think it ended earlier, I think March 23rd was the exact date. That was a little less than what we thought. I think again, we think it's just a bit of a timing blip, and we'll see the demand in the fourth quarter, which is typically our strongest quarter in the beef cattle markets in Brazil. Okay. Just again, due to seasonality, that's how it typically works. I think we're glad that's behind us, and now we should have a strong end to the year. Okay. Last but not least on the infectious disease front. We've covered poultry, we've covered beef. What about swine? African swine fever. Right. I, you know, I think we all know there was a surge of ASF in China in March. You know, we still don't have a product on the market in China to address African swine fever, as does anybody else. We continue to work with another company on trying to find a vaccine. I think I mentioned last time progress had been slow, partially due to COVID, partially due to just strained relationship between China and the U.S., and nothing's really changed in the last three months. You know, we've read about some speculation of whether it'll mean production goes down and you start to see prices shift up or down. I've actually read both sides, so not sure what you've heard. Right now that doesn't impact us actually on our side. Just a curious, you know, to look at the market and see where it lands. But right now, there's a bit of an outbreak that they're trying to address, right? Are you seeing any impact from any other regional outbreaks? There's small flare-ups across Europe, there's flare-ups in Vietnam. Yeah. That's been going on for a couple years. There's some flare-ups in the Caribbean, but really the one you're still monitoring is China. The ones that you mentioned aren't real big markets for us to begin with, so not enough to have a material impact. Okay. Yeah. All right. Noted. on that front, let's touch on the companion animal portfolio. Yeah. You touched on Rejensa a couple times previously. I wanna make sure we spend a decent amount of time on that. Yeah, I mean, can you give us an update on growth trends? Sort of it's been multiple quarters now of that product on the market. Yeah. What are your learnings? Yep. Rejensa continues to do well. We had said when we put out our guidance back in August that we thought sales would double over the prior year, if you recall. Yep. I think we'll come up a little bit short of that target, but still really strong growth. It won't quite be doubling, but again, really strong year-over-year growth. That product continues to do well. We're picking up new vet clinics and we're seeing a good percentage of reorders as well. All good signs on that product. We're excited about the companion animal development pipeline. No products have dropped out and since we last spoke. We have a couple different projects that we're looking after. I'll just review a couple of them. Oral care, cats and dogs, it's a big market, about a $2 billion market. You know, for a company our size, even a modest 5% market share. Mm-hmm. Quick math, 5% to $2 billion, $100 million in sales, good margins. When our guidance is $113 million-$118 million of EBITDA this year, it could really move the needle for us again in the medium term. It's a big market, and we're happy with the progress we've made on the product that we're developing there. We've got pain and dermatology, both for canines, both about a $1 billion market. Again, happy with the progress that our project's made there. I think you and I talked before. We haven't given a lot of detail beyond medium term. They continue to be medium term and continue to progress. The other one we're excited about, which is the nearest term relative to the other products I just mentioned that are in development, is our gene therapy for Mitral valve disease. 8% of the dogs in the United States at some point in their life will get Mitral valve disease. That percentage is even higher in certain breeds of dogs, particularly smaller ones. We're working with a company called Rejuvenate Bio to progress this drug. At one point, they had mentioned conditional approval or conditional submission to the FDA, or I should say submission for a conditional approval, sorry, to the FDA by the end of the calendar year. They have in press release from what I know anything different than that. It's probably a little bit of an aggressive deadline, but somewhere around that's the nearest term. That's a smaller market, about a $200 million market. We have a deal with them. Where they're developing the drug, we'd be the commercial arm. We're excited about that. There's a smaller Lyme disease drug in the pipeline as well. That's about a $100 million market. Overall, we're happy with those five projects. They continue to progress. You know, for us, that would become the fourth product category under animal health at some point in the medium term. It'd be right alongside vaccines, nutritional specialties, and MFAs and other. Right now, since we only have one product, Rejensa, it's part of nutritional specialties. Really appreciate that color. That's really helpful. One thing we've discussed in the past, when you talked about your companion animal build-out and, you know, future investment is commercialization strategy. Yeah. you know, just going through some of those some of the ones you hit on, you know, gene therapy versus derm versus, you know, pain. Yeah ...versus oral care versus Rejensa. You can see slightly, you know, different strategies. Yeah ...pursue to go to market. What are you thinking there in terms of as you add to that portfolio, second, third, fourth, how that impacts your go-to-market, your commercial organization? Yeah, fair question. There's some overlap and some differences in the customer base of those, right? Versus vet clinic versus more like a specialist. Mm-hmm. As you know, I think with Rejensa, we took a unique approach, I think, in that although it's an over-the-counter product, you can only get it through the vet clinic. We have an exclusive deal with one of the bigger distributors in the U.S. We haven't named who it is, but it's one of the bigger ones. Right now, our sales force is a contract sales force through them. They get, you know, a portion of the revenue that we collect on Rejensa. That was a way for us to get in front of vets and for them to get to know the Phibro brand by being able to keep that revenue stream, you know, within their clinic, knowing that they're not competing with the Chewys of the world to buy that product. That's been pretty helpful. I think as we hit some of these bigger markets, the strategy, I'm sure at some point will change. Going back to my pharma days, it usually goes from contract sales force to a mix of contract and internal- Mm ...till you get to the point where there's economies of scale, and you bring it all in-house. Those are all decisions we'll have to make as we approach the market, and we see how this pipeline progresses. For right now, we're really happy with the distribution agreement we have for Rejensa, and it will evolve over time, I would say. You know, your comments on Rejensa ramp, you touched on new clinics, reorders. Anything you can say in terms of, you know, market penetration? I don't know if there's any stats you'd have. It's, you know, you can, you can think about it in terms of pads, you can think about in terms of clinics, geography, sort of how should we. Yeah, I don't have any fun metrics to quote. I'd just say we continue to expand the number of clinics where the product's offered and that growth has continued. Right. I think we're covering, and we continue to add reps to cover more clinics. We're finding the more clinics we bring on, you know, the higher the volume and the more demand that we have. It's been a nice, you know, growth over since the launch. What's the bottleneck from it expanding faster? Is it just you wanna have like a measured approach with that distributor or? Yeah, I think we've been doing our we try to keep it cash flow positive, really more, you know, better than break even as a standalone business and not be funded by the rest of the portfolio. That's been the, you know, the goal to keep it self-funding and keep it growing. Again, it's also, it's our first product in companion animals, so that relationship with the vet we think is really important in getting the Phibro name out there. In addition to the dollars and cents. Yeah it's just the relationship and getting to know the market and build out our companion animal team. Yep. I mentioned to you last time too, we added a new board member that, you know. Yeah Alejandro Bernal, who's the CEO of PetDx. Again, he brings that companion animal expertise to the board now. Yep. Absolutely. Any questions from the audience? All right, we'll keep going. Kinda just dovetailing that from, you know, your comments on investment in companion animal, let's talk about the P&L and OpEx in general. Mm-hmm. You know, you talked about what you're seeing in Mineral Nutrition. You touched on what you're seeing from a demand level broadly in animal health and in companion specifically. Can you talk about your investment priorities? There's only six weeks left in the quarter. You're not gonna guide to the next fiscal year. Still maybe just take a step back and. Right ...give us some broad strokes. I think the investments that we're making in the three areas I mentioned, nutritional specialties, vaccines, and companion animals, will continue into fiscal year 2024. We also, you know, we're talking about R&D projects at the moment, but there's also capital investment. In our facilities, we manufacture more than 70% of our products right now. Some of those are more capital intensive than others. In addition to maintenance CapEx, we're adding more manufacturing capacity at our facility in Quincy, Illinois. We have a project ongoing in Israel as well. We just added the autogenous facility in Brazil. We continue to make investments in the capital investments as well to expand capacity as the top line and volume continues to grow. I think that will, you know, continue into fiscal year 2024. Exactly how much we'll talk about in August and maybe go through a little bit more detail of where that money's going in capital allocation. Mm. Mm. I think it's fair to say that, you know, we'll continue on the same path next year. What about from a. Yeah. What about from a commercial organization, you know, SG&A type of footprint? Any particular areas? No. Our major driver has been the strategic investments. It's been the intentional increase in SG&A. I mean, the other biggest line item we have is labor and obviously there's labor increases. We have people, boots on the ground in I think 37 countries. There's different macroeconomic pressures in each of those, although some are global, not all are. There's hyperinflation in Argentina as an example or there's been issues with the economy in Turkey as well. You know, those continue to monitor. We continue to invest in our people. I think our headcount growth, if you could look, we just issued our ESG report, what's today? Tuesday? It was yesterday, actually, right? Just issued it yesterday. Our head count, I think year-over-year is up maybe 2% or 3%, so there's been a little bit of head count growth. part of that's with the acquisition of the company I mentioned in Brazil, and some of it's just regular growth and filling some vacancies that were hard to fill during COVID. I think we're doing a good job managing our cost base, and saving the incremental growth in SG&A for strategic investments rather than just OpEx. Okay. The other part of the, of the cost equation, pricing power. Yeah. Obviously inflation from a COGS perspective. On price, a lot of moving pieces over the last couple of years, both from sort of, you know, actual product ASP, but also freight surcharges. Mm-hmm. Things like that. Are we seeing a period where that's, you know, really normalizing, post-COVID? Yeah. I think our top line growth reflects the fact we've had the ability to raise price and done a pretty decent job with that. As I mentioned in my percentages I gave you in the opening comments, our percentage growth on the bottom line is less than top line. We've been able to cover some of those costs and have a little bit of growth, but not all of that price increase is dropping to the bottom line. If I looked at the sales growth and said, how much is price and how much is volume, it's roughly like 75% price, 25% volume. We've got volume growth, but we also have price. The freight, you're correct. I think we are seeing some of those lanes clear up and some of the freight costs start to come down. They were really at a height, you know, maybe this time a year ago. Some of those we were passing through, so you actually won't see any impact on the P&L because it's had a net neutral impact when we were passing it through anyway, right? Even if it goes down and we stop passing it through. Yeah. That increment was being passed through anyway. Overall, I think freight is a big part of our, of our, I guess, bottom line and, but a good portion of that again is, intercompany freight as well, which wasn't being passed through. We'll see some margin improvement as if I just was to isolate internal freight between our manufacturing facilities and where we sell. That obviously was not being passed through. Yeah. As those costs come down, that will help. Okay. All right. Yeah. I think we've also seen a few assets exchange hands in the animal health space. Yeah. In recent weeks, recent months. You know, whenever that happens, there's the opportunity to maybe, you know, bite off a product here and there. Mm-hmm. You know, you've looked at that in the past. I know you've, both for, the traditional, you know, livestock business, but also for companion. Yeah. Anything you wanna comment there in terms of opportunity to bolster via M&A? Yeah, I think there's a couple of concepts there. One is that, you know, maybe there is an opportunity to pick up a product or two, as I said, we'll see when the time comes. The other thing is maybe from a market perspective, you know, maybe there's less options now to invest in animal health for public companies. It's 1 more reason to invest in Phibro. Yep. As far as does it change our view on companion animals, the investment we wanna make and the products that we have in the pipeline, I would say no. Given it's a medium-term opportunity, between now and then, I think the market will continue to evolve, which often happens when there's an industry that's got good CAGRs versus the rest, right? I think there'll be more consolidation, more change, and we'll just continue to monitor it and decide how that impacts, if at all, our launch plan for any of the drugs I mentioned. I think from that term, nothing's changed from our strategic standpoint, and maybe it could be upside for Phibro. Whenever any of this consolidation does take place, does it result in any disruption? You know, meaning if an asset changes hands in that six months, a year while that's happening, is there an opportunity for you to maybe gain a little bit of market share in any specific products? Yeah, I think there's always an opportunity for that. I think, you know, when you look at our portfolio, though, it's so diverse. We're not heavily reliant on, say, one or two products, right? We have over 800 products, 80 countries. Although, yes. Yeah. Would we see that and would it move the needle, enough to mention? Probably not, I would say. Okay. That's the pro of the diversity of our portfolio, I would say. Any questions from the audience? Last poll. All right. With that, we'll close with our standard question, sort of, what do you think is underappreciated? What do you think is misunderstood? What's the take-home message you'd like to leave people with? Yeah. Thank you. I would say, you know, we know we trade at a discount versus our competition. We often say internally it's our pipeline's not being valued properly. It's not reflected in the share price. Part of that is because we haven't said a lot about the pipeline other than what you heard me say today. I think as we get more confident in the timing of some of those products and the potential market value of some of those products, we're hoping, you know, that will work its way into the share price as that anticipation builds. For right now, I would say that's probably the primary reason why we feel that we trade at a discount because the company's been pretty stable, been able to grow sales, grow the bottom line. We need to start building the, you know, the excitement, I think, in the portfolio externally that we have internally. Yeah. That's really interesting. Great. With that, thank you so much, Damian. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, everybody.