Okay, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to the Universal Corp presentation. We're thrilled to have them here presenting for the company. We have Preston Wigner, who is the CEO and President. I'll turn it over to you, sir. Thank you, Reid. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming. We're thrilled to be here to tell a universal story. Those of you in the room, thank you for attending. Those of you on the webcast, thanks for dialing in. As Reed said, I'm Preston Wigner. I'm the CEO of Universal Corporation, not to be confused with Universal Studios down the road. Universal Corporation, we're a global business-to-business agri-products company. We've been delivering innovative solutions and quality products to our customers for well over 100 years. We're actually getting close to our 100-year anniversary listed on the New York Stock Exchange coming up next year. One of our strengths and our competitive advantages is our global footprint. We operate in five continents, over 30 countries around the world, all in the strategic markets where we need to be, where our customers need to be. Our roots are in tobacco supply, so we're the world's leading leaf tobacco supplier. We contract with growers. The majority of what we buy is contracting through growers, 200,000+ growers around the world. And we process and sell that to our large portfolio of customers. That business has generated strong and consistent cash flows for us over the years, year over year, and I'll talk a little bit about our financial performance towards the end of the presentation. It's an exciting time to be at Universal. I'm a relatively new CEO, about a year and a half. We've got a lot of exciting things going on on the tobacco side as we proactively grow our tobacco business, and we've got a new segment for food ingredients. It's Universal Ingredients, a new, really new for us ingredients company selling into the food and beverage markets in the U.S. and around the world. When we talk about Universal, we always talk about sustainability as well. It's also a strength and a competitive advantage for us, especially on the tobacco side, and I'll just touch on sustainability a couple of times today so you have some sense of how important that is to us and what it means to us and what we do with it. In simple terms, we're the vital link between international farmers and suppliers and international customers. We link local growers to a global marketplace for their goods, and we link customers to the world's agri-products that they need to meet their needs and objectives and to meet the evolving needs of their customers. We're led by a simple but strong three-pillar corporate strategy. First is to maximize and optimize our tobacco business. Second is to grow our ingredients business. And third is to strengthen our company for the next 100 years. When I talk about maximizing and optimizing our tobacco business, really talking about growing that business with all of our strengths and capabilities and leading position in the market, we want to increase volume with our customers, increase market share with our customers, perform more supply chain services for them, and participate in their next-generation product supply chain. When I talk about optimizing, we also look inward. We're making sure that our footprint is strategic to our customers and it's operating, giving us the returns that we expect and that we're operating efficiently, cost-effectively. For growing ingredients, which is a new section of our company, we've acquired businesses, we've invested in the tools and resources to grow, and now we're looking to grow that business both organically as well as through acquisitions. And for strengthening the company, we look at how we perform. And we think we're performing really well. We've been in business a long time. We do things really well. But there's always areas that we can improve. We always want to be better one year after the next. So we want to look at our financial resources, how are we managing our financial resources? Are we managing them effectively, efficiently to maximize our profits? We look at human capital management. Are we empowering our employees and training them and developing them for the future? And we look at technology. How can we use technology to be more efficient, make better decisions, whether it's robotics, whether it's AI? And we look at our two segments. And in the future, we figure out how we can find synergy between those two segments. How can they both work together, leverage their strengths and capabilities to improve our performance? So I'll start with our tobacco operations and give you a kind of high-level overview of our tobacco operations. And the first thing to understand is for tobacco, tobacco is not a commodity. It's a varietal. So the tobacco that's grown around the world, it's all a little bit different. There are different types, different styles. What's grown in the U.S. is different than what's grown in Zimbabwe or Brazil. And on a plant, the plant might have 20 separate leaves on a tobacco plant. All those leaves, all those different positions are slightly different. And all those different leaves and positions, they satisfy our customers' needs. And I'll talk about why that's important and what our role in this process is and why we're so valuable to our customers. If you think of buying all the leaf in the world, ex-China. China is a huge market. All of that leaf is primarily used domestically. So for the rest of the world, the total leaf supply is purchased by essentially three groups of competitors of ours. One is global leaf suppliers like Universal. The second is vertically integrated customers. And a number of our large customers are vertically integrated. And the third is local and regional suppliers. They may be in one market. They may be in multiple small markets. We've got competitive advantages and benefits over all of those three groups, which will allow us to continue to grow our business. On the global leaf supplier side, there's only one other global leaf supplier. They are similar to us. They're smaller. They're based in the U.S. They aren't invited to ICR, so I'm not going to mention their name. We are larger. We think we've got programs that are a little bit better. We're financially stronger. Our financial strength gives us the ability to perform well, to invest in ingredients, to invest in growth in our tobacco business, as well as provide value to our customers. We're very proud of that. The vertically integrated customers, they have operations in some of the key strategic markets where we also operate. Remember I talked about that plant. One of the big benefits that we have that we provide to those customers is that those customers mainly need certain types of leaf positions. They don't need that whole plant. But when we buy that plant and when they buy that plant from farmers, they have to buy the whole thing. So for us, we buy the whole thing and we disperse it across our broad customer base. When they buy it, they may have pieces that they can't use or they have to force into their blends. So it's not as efficient, not as cost-effective. We also operate, of course, at scale. We're a huge company in all the major markets around the world. So we think we can pick up additional business through our customers as maybe they decrease their vertically integrated operations. And the third are the regional and local suppliers. They don't have very many of the same things that we have. They certainly don't have all of them. If you think about sustainability programs, which are critically important in the tobacco business, if you think about support for farmers, which is important, factories, multiple operations, and multiple markets, so they de-risk for weather or for geopolitical environments, they don't have any of that, and we've certainly picked up market share over the years through that group. With that, you look at our segment operating income; we've gone up, and that's on the slide. We've gone up over the last five years showing our performance on tobacco, which we're really excited about, and we think there's more that we can do. Our strength as a supplier, in addition to all those advantages I just talked about, which are also barriers to entry for new entrants into the market. We really focus on how we source agronomy, processing, and logistics, and sourcing, we source strategically in a diverse global market. It gives us the access to the tobacco that our customers need. It also de-risks some of the issues that have come up, weather, tariffs, whatever it might be. We have really strong local operating teams who are experts on the ground, and they really know those markets, and those markets will be very dynamic, and we have a broad customer base, so anything that we're buying around the world, we're buying it, making sure we have a place to sell to those customers. We don't buy on a speculative basis. On the agronomy side, really important for Universal, we support those farmers. Farmer success is our success so we want to make sure those farmers are following good agricultural practices so the quality and the quantity of what they grow is what's needed and we also want to make sure those farmers are complying with our sustainability programs. We have strict sustainability programs. We expect them to follow. Our customers expect them to follow. Some of our investors expect them to follow so we have agronomists that work with those farmers to educate them on those programs, to help them comply with those programs, and then to monitor their compliance and collect the data so that we can report transparently on their progress and on processing, we've got processing facilities on all the key markets. They're large processing facilities. They're built for volume. They're efficient. And they can meet our customers' demanding specifications. And finally, logistics. I talked a little bit a second ago about being the vital link between our growers and our customers. On logistics, we're experts at logistics, in particular places that are difficult to operate in rural areas around the world. We're experts at helping move tobacco from farm to factory, factory to port, port to customer. All of those strengths help defend our leading market position and have given us the ability to grow and perform as well as we have for over 100 years. On the ingredients side, a sort of a different story. Long history on tobacco, market leader, everybody knows us. Universal Ingredients, new company on the block, new segment to our market. And we're really excited about what we're doing in Universal Ingredients. I'm really proud of what we've done just since 2018. 2018, we had a strategy. Now we've got a segment and a real operation integrated acquisitions that we've made since 2018. We sort of thoughtfully, carefully acquired companies to give us the functions that we thought we needed for a platform. We've invested in that platform to give them the tools they need to grow and succeed, and now they're operating, and now what we're looking to do is to grow organically while we think about our next acquisition for the group. Those acquisitions, they gave us the ability to process fruit so we can do fruit juices, fruit purees, essences, dry byproducts, all sort of functional ingredients on the fruit side. On the vegetable side, we have dehydrated vegetable capabilities so we can process dehydrated vegetables in practically any sort of form from granules to powders and everything in between and blends. And we acquired a company that had botanical extracts and flavors. And with that company, the ability to, through botanicals, green label, plant-based extracts, produce extracts, produce flavors. They had a flavor profile, flavor library. And we've bought that and added to that. To give them the tools and resources they need to grow, we invested in commercial sales and marketing. So the commercial sales helps us sell products across that platform. Instead of three separate companies selling three separate products, we've got commercial sales that can sell across the platform. In addition to existing customers, we can sell all three companies' products to one customer. We can sell combinations to existing customers. And we can find new customers in new markets where we're targeting. We've also invested in R&D and product development, so important on the ingredients side. We understand the science behind the products that we produce, their functions and what they can do. And on the product development side, we can be proactive with our customers and combine products and present products that are in their products to help solve their problems, help give them advantages. And with our marketing group, understanding trends in the market, consumer trends, customer trends, market trends, we can help them stay ahead of the curve on those trends while they develop products with our ingredients included. And finally, we've invested pretty heavily in expanding the capabilities of the group, including most recently, a $30+ million expansion into that extracts and flavor company. And that expansion gave them additional extraction capabilities, different types of extraction, bulk blending capabilities, and aseptic packaging capabilities, all under one roof, which is relatively unique. That provides some logistical benefits and some sustainability benefits to some of our customers. So now where we are with Universal Ingredients, we've built it. We've invested in it. Now we'd like to see a return on that investment. So now we're looking to scale up. We need scale so we can generate the volume going across the factory floors, generate the margin and income coming in to cover our costs and start adding even more significantly to Universal's performance. We are leveraging our diverse product portfolio, giving us flexibility to meet the changing trends with customers, changing trends in the markets. So we want to have fruit, vegetable extract, flavors, blending, tea, coffee blending extracts, all of that available to our customers. In addition, we're looking at the research and development, always looking at how we can be better, more technically proficient, how we can produce what those customers need, understand the science behind it, and being proactive. We want to co-create products with our customers. We're always happy to take orders from their procurement group, and we'll fill those orders. But what we're looking at is value-added products with higher margins. We want to work with the product development teams of our customers and co-create products that help them keep up with current trends. So if there's a current trend for flavors, we want to show them how our products, our flavors, can help them introduce products into their lines and make them profitable and achieve their own growth goals. And finally, on packaging, I talked about aseptic packaging, an efficient, especially under one roof, some efficiencies, especially logistics efficiencies for our customers. They can get extracts. They can do bulk blending. And then instead of having to freeze that and move it or move it in refrigerated trucks for aseptic packaging somewhere else, it's all right there. Once it's aseptically packaged, it's shelf-stable. And based on the packaging and the types of packaging varieties we've got, it's also reduced packaging usage for our customers on their shelves, a little more efficient. I talked about sustainability just a second there with aseptic packaging and all the benefits of aseptic packaging. Sustainability is important to us. And we're really focused on, to date, on sustainability of our operations, our actual factories, sustainability for our tobacco farmers. Again, those sort of direct contracting with farmers, direct access to farmers, how they're performing. For those of you who speak sustainability, Scope 3 for emissions, for example, that's Scope 3 for us as our farmers and making sure they're operating the way we need them to operate so we can meet our goals and also supporting the communities in which we operate around the world. We set high standards for ourselves, and our customers on the tobacco side also set high standards for us to meet. We take this very seriously. It's good business for us because our customers value it, but it's also good stewardship for the communities where we operate, and it makes our farmers better and more successful. We also spend a lot of time collecting data, and we've got different forms and different systems we use to collect data, and we think it's important to report that data consistently and transparently, so we're very proud of our sustainability reports. And the most recent sustainability report, I think, went out last week. So visit our website. You can see our sustainability report and see our goals, our progress against those goals, and the data for our sustainability. And we think that that's going to be very important for our tobacco customers. I also think sustainability is going to become more important on the ingredients side. Certainly, if I've been sitting in some of the conference presentations, I've heard a little bit about sustainability. But I think other than price to the consumer, once some of that's figured out, I think sustainability is going to become more and more important in the food and beverage markets. And I think with our sustainability expertise from the tobacco side and what we've been able to accomplish in our systems, I think we can leverage that and tailor it to our ingredients company for Universal Ingredients and give us a competitive advantage there as well. Financial overview. So I've talked a lot about how great Universal is. How have we done? So we've done well. If we look at the last five fiscal years, we made progress on all those five fiscal years. Adjusted EBITDA has gone up each of the last five years, 9% CAGR over those five-year period. Free cash flow has also gone up year- over- year over the last five years. Again, especially on the tobacco side, we generate strong cash. We've been using those strong cash flows to invest in our company for growth, both on the tobacco side and on the ingredients side, as well as paying down debt. We acquired those three companies. We used our credit facility to buy them. Now we are paying that debt down. We're really fiscally conservative on our debt levels. It's around two and a half times Adjusted EBITDA. That will give us opportunities in the future as we pay down that debt. We're really focused on our debt level, keeping that down low, taking it down lower, and also maintaining our credit grade or our credit rating with rating agencies. That's prudent, yeah, just prudent management. Also, not on the slide, but very important to us is our return to our shareholders. This past year, we've had our 55th consecutive annual increase to our dividend. We're very proud of our dividend history and our ability to generate the funds to reward our investors for investing in our company, and they'll only benefit in the future with where we can take Universal Ingredients. Really exciting to see where that can go, as well as our strong tobacco business that continues to perform well and should continue to perform well in the future, so I'm going to wrap up and say the why Universal. I think it's a lot of excitement at Universal. Certainly, exciting time for me to be in a position to lead a company that's so strong, doing so well, great strategy. We're putting in the work to make this work, to make it profitable, and to make it sustainable long term. We're building this for our next 100 years, so we're trying to build a really solid base to start from. We've got leading tobacco business. We're the leader in the industry with all of our strengths and capabilities and those barriers to entry. We can go up with our business on the tobacco side. The ingredients side is really exciting. There's a lot of work to do. It's a lot of work getting our name out there so that customers, vendors, they know who we are. We partner with them. They trust us. We can grow with them, so we're putting in the work. We're getting progress, and again, we're building scale. Lots of excitement for the future for Universal Ingredients, and we're really proud of our sustained performance, both on the cash flows as well as returns to our shareholders, so thank you all very much for your attendance, and maybe we'll see you next year.