Welcome all to the Bioceres Crop Solutions Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results. My name is Drew, and I'll be the operator on the call today. [Operator Instructions] With that, it's now my pleasure to hand over to Paula Savanti from Investor Relations to begin. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bioceres Crop Solutions Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Our prepared remarks today will be led by our Chief Executive Officer, Federico Trucco; and myself as Head of Investor Relations. Both of us will be available for the Q&A session following the presentation. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. I refer you to the forward-looking statements section of the earnings release and presentation as well as the recent filings with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect no or changed circumstances. Please note in today's presentation, we'll be making references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release. The conference call is being webcast, and the webcast link is available at our Investor Relations website. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Federico.

Good morning, and thanks, everyone, for participating in today's call. Please turn to Slide #3. I wanted to start today's call by looking at this year's performance considering the trajectory of our company since 2019. 2019 is the year we launched Bioceres Crop Solutions to the public equity markets. As you can see, this is the first down year in the series and one that comes with important lessons in terms of risk management and financial prudence, which I'll address towards the end of the presentation today. We are reporting a very disappointing final quarter to an extremely challenging fiscal year. Challenges in fiscal '25 cannot be attributed to a single factor, but we understand rather stem from a combination of circumstances, including most significantly the macro shift in Argentina, our main market. In fiscal '24, clients anticipated a significant devaluation of the Argentine peso and as a result, hedged against this event by prepurchasing some of the input required -- inputs required for the following year. In contrast, with no expectation of currency devaluation for fiscal '25, clients in Argentina had no incentive to maintain high inventory levels. Adverse on-farm economics also led to reduced spending on ag inputs, further exacerbating the company's exposure to the shifting cycle. These circumstances coupled with deteriorating financial conditions for the sector in general and our own shift in strategy around the HB4 seed business, landing us in the position we are reporting today. I will now ask Paula to go over the specifics of the quarter and the year before we discuss lessons learned and next steps. Paula?

Thank you, Federico. Let me take you now through our financial results for the quarter and for the fiscal year '25. Let's turn to Slide 4 to begin, please. In the fourth quarter, we reported revenues of $74.7 million, a 40% decline compared to the same period last year. This decline is explained primarily by 2 factors. One is a winding down of our seed business. As you can see in the composition by segment of our quarterly revenues. Sales in the seed segment were $25 million lower than last year, accounting for about 50% of the quarterly year-over-year decline. The other 50% of the decline is roughly equally split between crop nutrition and crop protection, with both segments affected by the weaker demand for crop inputs in Argentina given the dynamics that Federico has just explained. In Crop Protection, we didn't see in Q4 the typical pattern of preseason sales ahead of the spring planting season as producers continue to operate this year and/or more just-in-time purchasing modality. In this sense, we expect activity to pick up as planting season begins this spring. The decline in sales in Argentina eclipsed the fact that international sales of some of our core technologies grew strongly in the quarter with, for example, adjuvant sales in Brazil, almost doubling and bioprotection products in the U.S. growing almost 40%. In Crop Nutrition, sales declined by 34% for the quarter, driven by lower micro-beaded fertilizer sales in Argentina as well as lower inoculant revenues in other markets due to the calendar-based timing of the Syngenta agreement which costs some misalignment with our reporting quarters. For the full fiscal year, revenues came in at $335.3 million, down 28% year-over-year, with declines in all 4 of our reporting -- all 3 of our reporting segments. In Crop…

Thanks, Paula, and please turn to Slide #11 for an overview of our current financial strategy. As we discussed in our last earnings call and revisited a few slides prior, we continue to focus on cash generation and improving our working capital profile where we are targeting a running rate of between 5 to 6 months of sales, which will better reflect our current business model and product mix priorities. Also, we have accelerated adjustments to our cost structure, targeting operating expense savings of around 10% to 12%. These savings will average about $3 million to $3.5 million per quarter as we started to see in the last quarter of fiscal '25. And we have reduced our rate of incremental CapEx and R&D investments by 50%, lowering it from nearly 6% of sales to between 2.5% and 3% for fiscal year '26 and '27. Importantly, we do not expect this slower pace of investment to affect near-term growth as we already have the key registrations and manufacturing capacity in place to deliver on our 3-year plus business plan. Finally, and without undermining the current financial challenges, we'll continue to work closely with our creditors to comply with our existing financial obligations and roll over part of our upcoming debt maturities as we have done in the past. Where do we want to land? Please turn to the next slide. With these actions, a more normalized ag input market in Argentina and continued positive momentum in the U.S. and Brazil. to agricultural geographies, which are key, where last year, we grew 17% and 29%, respectively. We expect to improve our EBITDA margin levels and steadily progress towards a more robust balance sheet, preparing us for the next phase of growth. Our main focus will be on scaling up our biological initiatives, including using our key actives such as Rinotec and UBP to functionalize and further differentiate important revenue generators for us, such as adjuvant and micro-beaded fertilizers. On the seed front, we'll continue to support our key partners in Latin America, Florimond Desprez in wheat and GDM in soy, while we onboard new partnerships in other geographies, mainly the U.S. and Australia. I will pause now and open up the floor for Q&A. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from the line of Kristen Owen from Oppenheimer.

I want to pause here on the slide that you left us on here Slide 12 with the looking ahead. And understanding that the 40% gross margin, 22% EBITDA margin, this is sort of where we are targeting over time. But as we think about the transition of the business, what are the metrics that we should be focused on, say, the next 6 to 9 months initially, it was this top line growth and EBITDA dollars, cash generation? Just want to know what we should be focused on, on this interim term at this stage of the corporate evolution.

Kristen, thanks for joining the call today, and thank you for your question. I think, obviously, cash generation will continue to be a focus, a strong focus for us as we try to get leverage ratios back to more normal levels. I believe that top line growth is less of a priority under the current circumstances and that expansion of our profitability will be basically dependent on our ability to scale up the most profitable products in our portfolio. Remember, we've recently achieved registration of Rinotec in the U.S. and Brazil, and we're starting to generate revenues from that new family of insecticides and nematicides. Also, most of the pain from the shifting of the seed business away from the identity preserve scheme that we had has already occurred. So I think that will be an important contributor to going back to sort of the plus 40% overall gross margin profile. And with the cost reductions that are sort of meant to rightsize the organization for the current business opportunity, I think that we will get to these kind of metrics sooner rather than later. But I would say working capital, making sure we're below 5 months of sales, moderate top line growth but expanding profitability at the EBITDA level and gross margin level are key indicators as we track progress towards sort of a more stabilized situation.

Okay. And if I could just add as a quick follow-up there. It sounds like these targets are not reliant on sort of any real growth beyond market growth in the portfolio. It's just growing those products, which are new and differentiated, not necessarily a robust return of the end market?

Absolutely. So what I would say is that part of what we need is the rebound to some extent of the input market in Argentina, which is not something that is affecting us specifically. In fact, we have lost market share in any of our key products. So if we see that tracking positively, I think that will do a lot in terms of us achieving these metrics than the type of growth that we need in the other geographies as the portfolio scales up, the new product opportunities scale up is not different from the one we saw last year. So that is, I think, what is required for us to get to this more stabilized, more profitable numbers.

Okay. One final question for me. If you could just say more about the cost savings initiatives. I think you said the cadence beginning in fiscal fourth quarter here was about $3 million to $3.5 million a quarter, and that's going to be pro rata across 2026. Just help us with a little bit of how you're thinking about those cost savings initiatives.

Look, I have my sort of own sort of back-of-the-envelope numbers. I think if we were between $28 million and $30 million a quarter in terms of overall OpEx to get to closer to $25 million. It's where we think we are with the things we have already done. So what I'm talking about are the results that we will obtain from streamlining workforce and rightsizing sudden capacities that has already occurred. A contributor to that is obviously the shift in the set uses strategy, but we have also done changes on other aspects of the organization to give us those levels of savings on a per quarter basis. So we should see that reported every quarter on a forward-going basis because we have already seen some of that in the final quarter of the fiscal year we just reported.

Our next question comes from Ben Klieve from Lake Street Capital Markets.

First on the Syngenta agreement. I understand that last year, $16 million was the recognition of that upfront payment. What was the gross profit within fiscal '25 from that agreement?

Ben, thanks for joining us today. Paula, do we have a specific number there?

So we don't have -- so those $16 million were from the upfront payment, which this year is 0, right, because that's already been done in the last 2 quarters. So this year, we don't have any. This year, although we're having from the Syngenta payment for the full year is the what comes from the profit sharing that we've been doing, not the upfront payment, right?

Yes. But then we have a minimum profit sharing of how much. So I think Ben there, what we have is probably that the profit sharing from Syngenta comes on a calendar basis. So it's -- we can give you that number. But I think the -- for fiscal year '25, part of the calendar is still not done because I mean, half of the year is still remaining. So we know from '23 and '24, they were on target based on the minimum payment requirements. Now the Syngenta has been selling probably at a slower pace than anticipated so that the minimum payment requirements are considered in terms of gross profits that we are materializing and not -- we're not seeing results in excess of that.

Yes. For the full year, we have somehow something like -- for the fiscal year, which is not -- which doesn't correspond to the calendar year targets with them. Look, for the fiscal year, we have about $18 million gross profit from them.

Yes. Sorry, 1 8 is the number then.

Okay. That's helpful. I'm sorry, you broke up a little bit at the end there, but I think I caught it, and I'm sure that was on my end. Okay. So next question, the HB4 outlook. I understand this is a fluid situation and the -- you've got a lot of different efforts here to try to extract some value from this. But I'm curious if you can look back over the last year, a year ago on this call was when the -- I think really the air began to go out of the balloon regarding HB4. What specifically has been done within HB4 over the past year that you can point to as efforts that are really beginning to get traction here that could give you a hopeful outlook here for the future of that product?

Yes. That's a great question, Ben. So I think the most important effort over the last year was the agreement with [indiscernible], which we announced in the February earnings in the February call. So even though that might have been a bit overshadowed by other things that were discussed during that call, I think the key there was that in soybeans, which was the one crop, where obviously, we have a huge opportunity in Latin America where we have struggled the note in terms of the ramping up of the HB4 technology, we achieved an agreement with them, where they now are using exclusively the technology in Latin America. And repositioning that technology, not just for the drought tolerance effect, but also a way to provide a weed control platform that should be attractive to farmers in the region. That new platform that is branded [ Wales ], that's the GDM brand for this new approach has already been launched. This is now being scaled up with a selective number of GDM multipliers and the different channels. And we'll be starting to generate revenues in the upcoming fiscal year, which is very meaningful to us, which we don't control the go-to-market effort there that's or the inventory ramp-up or less even less sort of destiny of the grain like we did in the entity reserve channel. But that, to me, it's kind of the most significant achievement over the last 12 months to reignite the opportunity around the HB4 event under a different strategy in soybeans. In wheat, what we have done is open up the business to some of our key customers in Argentina so that we wouldn't have to do the multiplication and the go-to-market ourselves. That is work in progress. But I would say that the most important achievement in wheat was the -- basically structuring of a master agreement in the U.S. with Colorado withdrawers, as an entry point to a consortium of different breeding programs. On a [indiscernible] partner, which we cannot disclose due to confidentiality purposes that will now scale that opportunity in the U.S. market. Even though this is still a few years away, I think that jointly with what we are doing in Latin America, with EMBRAPA developing the varieties for the [indiscernible] in Brazil and the major customers, as you said, is executing commercial in Argentina, that will completely reshape the opportunity behind the soy and the wheat events. That's what we have done. I think that, obviously, we've learned from the past, and we're not going to provide any guidance in terms of revenues. But I think it's a dramatic shift, one that can be managed with a small group of people that are dedicated to the regulatory staff and the technology demonstration work and not with an extended sales force that was trying to, if you will, scale this up beyond our capacities to [indiscernible].

Our next question comes from Austin Moeller from Canaccord.

I know you talked about earlier in the remarks about the plans for further diversification of revenues [indiscernible] to the U.S. and Brazil. But how should we be thinking about the upcoming spring planting season in Argentina? I mean it just looks like at least so far, there hasn't been a lot of advanced purchasing of inputs yet, and there's still a lot of currency and on-farm economic risk in Argentina.

[Technical Difficulty] Okay. I don't know if -- asking, can you repeat the question? We had some interference here with audio.

Sure. Yes. So I guess what I was just asking was, I know you had previously discussed looking ahead to a more promising spring planting season. But I guess what is your confidence in that just given there's not been a lot of advanced purchasing of inputs and there's considerable currency and on-farm economic risk in Argentina? And then could you just go into a little bit more detail on what you expect in terms of diversification of revenues into the U.S. and Brazil?

Yes. Thank you for your question, and apologies for the technical difficulties. So basically, in terms of Argentina, the situation here is a bit counterintuitive because whenever there is a risk of devaluation that tends to drive farmers to prepurchase products like they did in fiscal '24. So even though that was not an issue last year because of the more stable macro situation, after the elections of last weekend, I think it's becoming a bit of a driver. So we expect an accelerated pace of input sales just because of that. Most importantly, I would say, rain and weather conditions have been very favorable. So we are looking forward great planting season. And that, I think it's obviously a key factor in terms of our expectations in Argentina. And remember that we operate on a dollar-denominated business. And whenever there's kind of devaluation potential that tends to accelerate our sales and eventually dilute part of our fixed expenses, which are the peso-denominated salaries we pay in countries. So that's in terms of the Argentine dynamics. In terms of diversifying away from Argentina, we've seen good growth last year in the U.S. and in Brazil as well as in the rest of the world there. The key drivers are the biostimulant platform, which is important in Europe as those products go into the Americas, the U.S. and Brazil will see revenue increases from the UBP derived technologies. Also the recent registration of Rinotec in both the U.S. and Brazil is allowing us to become more competitive on seed-applied insecticides and nematicides. And that I think will also give us significant growth in those markets. So there's an aspect of these 2 products, which I also wanted to emphasize, which is the opportunity of selling them not as standalone biologicals, but as a way to functionalize some of our big revenue generators. So you can use UBP today in adjuvant, as we've discussed in the past to improve the recovery of herbicide applications on certain crops. And that is a very meaningful technological aspect that we're planning to seize importantly because we have installed capacity in adjuvant and a customer base to which we can translate this message. And on the Rinotec front, I think similarly, using that as a way to functionalize the adjuvants that are used in insecticidal applications is a way where we can see some revenues and growth without sort of the necessity of selling the product on a stand-alone basis. So those are the initiatives in play. I think they will significantly help us in those geographies outside of Argentina. And that is, I think, going to give us a more balanced geographical mix on a few years. It's not going to happen from 1 year to the next. But after 2 to 3 years, I think we can be less exposed to the type of ships that we saw last year in the Argentine market.

Okay. And just a follow-up. How should we be thinking about like the cadence of the Syngenta revenue ramp in the new fiscal year? Previously, you discussed that as sort of being a 2-year ramp process to hit what you expect to be the run rate over the term of the agreement for $230 million in minimum profits. But I guess, how much should we be thinking about in next fiscal year?

So basically, the $230 million are over the 10-year period, we started with smaller numbers, and that's why we had the down payment upfront to compensate in part for the gap in the first and second year. I think Paula recently alluded to the $18 million we had in fiscal year '25 coming from the Syngenta agreement. So we are not yet at the average of 23 per year, if you will. We expect that to be coming up in the current fiscal year as we continue to discuss the agreement with Syngenta and look for opportunities to fortify the relationship. So I think this is ramping up as projected without sort of undermining some of the challenges that we have seen in agriculture in general, particularly early on in the agreement in Brazil and other geographies where we are just now coming out of the down cycle in the ag-inputs market now.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Kemp Dolliver from Brookline Capital Markets.

Could you talk a little bit more about the current state or level of inventories held in the channel. There seems to be a, probably, one of the most significant obstacles other than improvement in on-farm conditions to your driving -- getting some growth, improving your profitability, et cetera.

Thanks for joining the call. I think in terms of Argentina, the inventory situation has been almost depleted. So that's been the case over the last 12 months. And I'll give you a very concrete example. For instance, in the micro-beaded fertilizer business, which is obviously one of the business that was most significantly affected over the last 12 months. If you go back to fiscal '23 and '24, in both years, we did about 30,000 tons. Of the 30,000 tons we sold in fiscal '24, 5,000 were in inventory. And this year, fiscal '25, I think we did less than 15,000. We were at 14,000. And consume the 4,000, 5,000 that were in inventory from the year before. So if you look at sort of the actual numbers, maybe in fiscal '24, it was 25,000 that were consumed, fiscal '25, 19,000. And we believe on a forward-going basis, we'll be seeing some recovery because those basically dynamics are indicative of 0 inventory in the channel. I think there might even be a supplied concern, if at the end of the day, product cannot be manufacturing time to fully address the planning needs of farmers. So I think that's been reverted fully in the Argentine market. And that is just one example to highlight a product line that is very meaningful for us. In biologicals, in general, inventories are less of a concern because of the self-life issues. You cannot keep inventories forever when you're talking about seeds or when you're talking about my crops, they have -- they declined over time. So in general, the sector -- or those products are less exposed to inventory situations. And in the U.S. and Brazil, I think the inventory problems were prior to last year. So this take back to the '23, '24, but mostly fiscal '23, so we see now that the level of utilization of product is consistent with our pace of sales. So that is something that we are tracking in both those geographies to make sure that we are not running into inventory hurdles as we execute on the current business plan.

Great. And do you have your accounts receivable and inventories and accounts payable at year-end at hand?

Give me a second, I'll pass it on to Paula for that information.

Yes, yes. Sorry, can you repeat what was the question? The level of accounts receivables?

At the year-end, also on payables and inventories.

Account pales at year-end are $145 million. Inventories were $90 million, rounding numbers, but fairly close. And trade receivables $170 million.

And then one last question and that relates to the changing role of the Chief Commercial Officer. what thoughts do you have with regard to what that position will look like -- should look like going forward?

Look, Kemp, that's a great question. I think we're still discussing with the Board whether this should be something that integrates operations more fully or be strictly dedicated to commercial the way it was before. I have to sort of also indicate that the departure of Mile Marinof, it's because he has accepted the CEO position of a company called Horizon starting September 1. So it wasn't something that was planned. I mean we were probably intending to continue with the current Chief Commercial Officer role. And because of that departures that we are reconsidering whether we should keep that format or have one that is probably more integral in its nature. And by that, I mean, have some incremental operating responsibilities beyond the commercial aspects of the company.

With that, that concludes the Q&A portion of today's call. I'll now hand back over to Federico for some closing comments.

Well, I want to thank everyone for participating in the call. And obviously, for the patients, we had some technical difficulties today. We are available to address further questions and hopefully, turn the page on a very difficult year as we look forward into a more normalized set of circumstances and a sort of a new path of growth for Bioceres Crop Solutions on a forward-going basis. Thanks, everyone, and have a great rest of the day.

Thank you all for joining. That does conclude today's call. You may now disconnect your lines.