So those are the teammates who moved into senior roles during the year. I would now like to turn it over to Susan Kreh, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer. And this came through in one of the comments, but I would like to highlight it here. She is also the CFO of the Year for Chicago for Midcap Public Companies, a very exciting event, and as she always says, it is recognition of the whole team and her leadership there. But we are very proud to have Susan be that recipient and be our leader. So, Susan, you are up.

Thanks, Dan. And it is the whole team, and these financial results also reflect the strategy execution and the efforts of the whole team. So Dan, feel free to jump in and add color. I am going to just go over a few highlights, then we will go through a bunch of bar charts that show a really nice trajectory as we continue to benefit from the execution of the strategies that we have laid out for you. So the highlights include continuing to set records in terms of net sales, gross profit, and net income. We did so in fiscal 2023, in fiscal 2024, and the first quarter of fiscal 2025, which we released after the close of the market on Monday, continues to show strong results. We also, during fiscal 2024, completed the largest acquisition in Oil-Dri's history with the acquisition of Ultra Pet Company, and you will get to hear some more about that when Chris Lamson goes through the business update. Very exciting. And speaking of other exciting business initiatives, Bruce Patsey will walk us through the significant growth in fluids purification, where we definitely have a tailwind from the renewable diesel business. And part of all the success is sharing it with you as the shareholders. So we did double our dividend increase from $0.04 per share to $0.08 per share, and that is prior to the stock split. We will talk about the stock split a little later. In order to keep some capacity in case there are any other opportunistic acquisitions for us, we actually upsized our revolving credit to make sure that if something comes up, we are ready to go. We also integrated the Ultra Pet acquisition into our ERP during the quarter. We made that cutover on October first, and…

Susan, go back. I would add one thing on the animal health side, which was a year ago in the first quarter of fiscal 2023, we made the decision to no longer be a direct entity into China but work through a distributor, and we transferred all that inventory over to that party. They are doing great, and they are working it out, but that transfer occurred a year ago in the first quarter, and it really had nothing to do with the first quarter per se. Maybe a quarter of it did, but not the whole thing. And so I can just tell you that the animal health and nutrition division did, the way I look at it, like same-store sales like they do in retail, had a very strong first quarter. It was great.

Absolutely. Alright. So there you see the nice five-year trend. And as we continue on, you see the strong net sales, record net sales here in the first quarter of 2025. You will get to hear more about those stories when Chris and Bruce share their business updates. What was driving it? Well, you see the pricing, but there is also significance in that. So actually, volume was down a bit, and this is the year-over-year from 2023 to 2024. We pointed to the agricultural a minute ago. And then you see the uptick from the successful acquisition of Ultra Pet, which occurred on May first. So we do not have a full year fiscal 2024, but we will have that in fiscal 2025. That continues to do well. So this is one of my favorite slides to talk about, and it is the tons sold. You can see that they have peaked in the last five years in this fiscal 2022. And that is in line with when we really started talking about something inside Oil-Dri called Mindy Ball. So it is Moneyball from Mining Company. And really focusing on products that add value and actually peeling some of the things out of the portfolio that are not profitable. And you see the volumes moving down, but you saw the results. Right? So tons sold going down over that period of time. And net sales per ton going up. So that is the focus on improving the mix, and you see that that continues into fiscal 2025. Where our net sales per ton have risen to $594 per ton. Again, that is being influenced not only by the focus on, we talked a minute ago about the strong first quarter in agricultural products and the strong first quarter in fluids purification, but also the focus over in the cat litter business as well. So lots of good stories, and they have all been part of the strategies that we have been sharing with you. And you see that falling through to gross profit per ton doing very, very well, not only the improvement in mix, the additional sales in our high-value-added products, but we also had a strong, and we will bring in the first quarter, we also had a very strong quarter here in Q1 because the volumes were very high in our plants. And then we end up realizing production efficiencies based on those high volumes. So a lot of things going very well for Oil-Dri during the first quarter, which then see the improvement in the gross margin.

Hey, and Susan, dovetailing on that, I hope everyone had the chance to read my President's letter in the annual report. If not, I encourage you to do so because I highlight exactly what Susan was talking about, which is our supply chain, which really helped us deliver. You know, we sell a daily reusable. So when we put on an account, if we do it well, if the product is in spec, on time, invoiced correctly, the quality is there, services there, they reward us with another order. And you can see they are continually rewarding us because we take that part of our business very seriously. So much so that our global sales meeting, where we have almost two hundred teammates there, only about forty of them are direct salespeople or direct customer contact. But the other one sixty are in the supply chain, and we actually give out sales awards to our supply chain because these people helped us get those repeat orders. So we always say the first order is the sales team, but two through infinity is the supply chain, and they are really working well together. So it is a hats off to the entire team there.

Yeah. Great. So we see the benefit flowing through to net income. I like this chart. The earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization tells a really good story for Oil-Dri coming out of the time period when we have really been focusing on Mindy Ball. And you see another strong measure here for the first quarter. This is a non-GAAP measure. So for those of you who love the details, we have put the reconciliation back to the GAAP financial statement measurements in the appendix for you. And earnings per common share, you see the continued growth in strong performance there as well. And I do want to make a comment that I have made publicly before, but it is very important for the investment community. Look, I have been at the president. This is now my thirtieth year, which is ridiculous. So I was the president in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 when things were going south. And happened to be the president too in 2023 and 2024 came. The big difference is the team. It really is. I have not changed that much. But we have, you know, we have implemented SNOP. We have integrated business planning, we have forecasting, the team works together very well to make sure that we meet or exceed our customers' expectations. And you are seeing it in the numbers. So this is just my time to thank the team and let the investors know that is really what is driving the results here. It is our global team of almost a thousand people pulling together and playing Mindy Ball and delivering value every day.

We definitely are seeing the benefit of that, and so are the shareholders. Speaking of benefit, and we continue to focus on our dividends.

And twenty-two, twenty-one years in a row of increases. Did I steal your thunder?

No. No. I just love it when you do the color.

Oh, okay. Another look at the business, and this is really the capital allocation and how do we think about it. Note that in fiscal 2024, there was a significant investment, as we have mentioned, in an acquisition. That we funded partially in cash, partially in debt that had a variable rate, and partially in debt that had a fixed rate. And we will talk about that in just a minute. So you see the debt going up, and yes, we took on twenty million dollars in debt to help fund that, and the rest had come out of, and here is a good story. Our first quarter was very, very strong, as we have talked about, and we were able to pay down five million of the variable rate debt that we used to fund that acquisition. That was one of our uses of cash here in the first quarter. And so we can take a look at net debt and free cash flow. These are all related, but still very, very strong. And we have a lot of ability to fund our capital. I believe Aaron has a slide in his deck, ping him up a little bit, that shows that as our business has grown, we continue to use cash to support that growth and replace aged infrastructure. And, obviously, with the performance of the business, we can do that easily here. Share price, this one is already outdated. Right? The share price was, I think, about eighty dollars at the close of March. Eighty-four forty-nine right now. Yeah. So good market acceptance of our first-quarter results. And part of that comes with that is we are no longer considered a small reporting company for SEC purposes, which means there you will see more disclosures in our filings going forward. Both our 10-Qs, our 10-Ks, and our proxy. So that is a good one. And then I will just close with a few things here. You guys can read, but we do continue to invest in our manufacturing infrastructure. As well as make investments to help improve cost and operational efficiencies. We are seeing the synergies that we expected begin to unlock the Ultra Pet acquisition. And Dan mentioned earlier, and Tony, of course, read that both, we will have implemented a two-for-one stock split. Record date will be December twentieth, and we will trade on a post-split basis beginning January sixth. And thank your shareholders for supporting that because, as we mentioned, the B-side, we all voted for that was going to happen. The common side voted independently and came in overwhelmingly in favor of the split. So thank you for supporting that initiative.

And with that, I am going to turn it over to Aaron Christensen, our Vice President of Operations.

Thank you, Susan. That is going to be a very tough act to follow. And thank you, Dan, for some kind words of recognition in advance. I am Aaron Christensen, the VP of Operations here at Oil-Dri. I have the pleasure of getting to lead our supply chain and operations functions. Today, I am going to spend some time discussing our strong service results here at Oil-Dri, as well as revisiting our ongoing capital investments in our infrastructure. At Oil-Dri, our mindset regarding customer service is stated very clearly in our lessons learned doc. Great customer service leads to customer loyalty. Strong service results, or what I would consider world-class service results and performance, have become a part of who we are and what we all strive for every day. It is a foundation for everything that we do in the supply chain and often is the motivating factor to drive operating performance improvement. What does strong service mean? How do we measure service results? I will reference two primary common industry metrics, those being case fill rate percentage and on-time arrival percentage. Case fill rate is a measure of pallets shipped relative to pallets ordered. Order on-time is a measure of the percent of orders that arrive on time. We commonly have a twenty-four to forty-hour window for orders to arrive. Being early, late, or missed entirely negatively impacts this measure. So how does Oil-Dri measure up against industry and what do our customers expect? Let us see. Over the past ten quarters, Oil-Dri has exceeded the highest customer expectation of ninety-eight percent fill rate. And we are now regularly performing at ninety-nine point seven percent. An aside here, that high-level fill rate brings freight cost compression, improves cost structure with customers, and, as Dan alluded to, puts us…

Thanks, Aaron. You and your team have done an incredible job for our Fluids Purification team. With that, I would like to talk a little bit about our business. We have three major areas that we focus on, our team does. One is in vegetable oil processing. We sell several products that are used to purify vegetable oil so that it stays stable on the shelf and in your homes. We also provide absorbents for jet fuel processing. These products help remove things like metals, surfactants, and moisture to improve the stability of the jet fuel that goes into the airplane. And lastly, where we are getting a lot of growth, as Susan had talked about, is in the biofuels, which is the renewable diesel and biodiesel market. We had a few products that we introduced a few years back that are also helping grow our business. As you look at our business, you can see that we have had really nice growth over the last five years. We had a record year last year with $92 million in sales. And this has continued as you look into the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Really on a record pace. We expect this to continue through the year and into the future. Hopefully, we will have continued growth. I want to talk a little bit about renewable diesel and SAF. These are areas that are really driving our business today. Renewable diesel is a drop-in fuel that is used for diesel trucks. One of the benefits of it is a low carbon footprint. And if you take a look at the picture on the slide, you can see that renewable diesel fuel burns much cleaner than petroleum diesel. This fuel can be put in a hundred percent. So, basically, they are…

Thanks, Bruce, and good morning, everybody. I think Aaron used the same term, tough act to follow. I call Bruce "Bruce Almighty." That is his internal nickname, and certainly his almighty business last year, Susan, CFO of the Year. You know your strengths. Right? So I have got videos with cute kittens. So that is what I would rely on today, but you are going to have to wait a few slides for it. For those of you that are, you know, kind of frequent flyers with our annual meeting, you might recognize the first half of the title slide. The exact same one as last year. I actually believe a year ago. The year prior to that. So a three-peat, if you will. So, you know, are we being or am I being lazy or boring here? No. Really not at all. Our focus here is really about strategic consistency and the enormous opportunity for Oil-Dri to make lightweight as mainstream in the market as well. You know, traditional heavyweight litters. But just to ensure that, you know, we do have some new material folks have alluded to, Susan and Dan talked about. The Ultra Pet acquisition last half of the presentation will be focusing on that. I did that a bit in our last earnings release too, but we could bring you up to date on the progress that we are making. Overall, we share these charts every year. This gives you a picture of our overall growth on our domestic litter business. You can see that the CAGR over the five-year period is running in double digits, which is fantastic. We feel good about it. That is really a combination of overall growth in the category in litter, the lightweight segment growth that I am going to…