Earnings Labs

Arcadia Biosciences, Inc. (RKDA)

Q2 2017 Earnings Call· Thu, Aug 10, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Arcadia Biosciences Second Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. Today's presenters will be Raj Ketkar, President; and CEO and Matt Plavan, CFO. This call is being webcast and you can refer to the company's press release and slides at arcadiabio.com. Before we start, if you refer to Slide 2, we would like to remind you that Arcadia Biosciences will be making forward-looking statements on this call based on current expectations and currently available information. However, since these statements are based on factors that involve risk and uncertainties, the company’s actual performance and results may differ materially from those described or implied today. You can review the company’s Safe Harbor language and their most recently filed 10-K and again on Slide 2 of this presentation. With that, I will now turn the call over to Raj Ketkar, President and CEO.

Raj Ketkar

Management

Thank you, Takia and thanks to everyone who is joining us on the call today. I would like to begin with an update on the business and then Matt will review the financial results for the second quarter of 2017. At the end of the call, we will as always take your questions. The positive financial results we saw in the first quarter continued in the second quarter as a result of all the changes we made last year. We are really encouraged by this continuing momentum. Turning to Slide 3, in the second quarter and the first half of 2017, revenues increased, our operating cost decreased and the net loss improved significantly. Our key products continue to make great progress towards commercialization as we received important regulatory approvals and completed successful field trials. Before I update you on the progress of our product pipeline, I would like to talk about some recent very positive development. This week we announced an exciting agreement with Dow AgroSciences to jointly develop and commercialize a breakthrough wheat quality trait focused on improved nutrition. This is an expansion of our wheat portfolio which will leverage our non-GM TILLING development platform with DAS enabling technology, high-quality elite germplasm and global commercial channels. This collaboration will expand our access into the growing market of improved nutrition traits with an established leader in agriculture and it will accelerate the development and commercial deployment of products to deliver significant value to growers, food manufacturers and consumers. We also announced this morning that Verdeca, a joint venture with Bioceres received approval from the FDA for food and feed safety of the HB4 trait. This approval moves us a step closer to full approval of this drought stress tolerance trait and soybeans in the U.S. In addition, regulators around the…

Matt Plavan

Management

Thank you Raj, and good afternoon everyone. As Raj just indicated this was not only a good quarter for business milestone achievements it was also a continuation of our improved financial performance that is to say revenues were up and expenses and net loss were down from the prior year. As you can see in Slide 7 total revenues in the second quarter were $991,000 a 37% improvement over the prior-year second quarter and for the first half of the year revenues totaled $2 million an improvement of 28% over the same period in 2016. The primary revenue growth driver in both the quarter and the first half of the year is the increase in contract research revenues from our new origin Agritech agreement. The second biggest driver of revenue growth is from our SONOVA GLA sales which increased two-fold or 130,000 in the second quarter over the last year second quarter and up 25% as compared to the first half of 2016. These sales have been increasing due to our expansion into the new markets including pet foods, medical foods and nutritional beverages that Raj referred to earlier. The one area where revenues were down a bit for both the quarter and six months as compared to the prior year periods was our license revenue. As you may recall from the prior earnings calls we are now amortizing our upfront license fees into revenue over a longer period of time resulting in less revenue recognized per quarter. The effect of this quarter-over-quarter comparison anomaly will resolve itself in Q4 of 2017. Turning now to our expenses on Slide 8 as you can see here our research and development expenses are down by $547,000 or 25% for the quarter and $926,000 or 21% for the six months as compared to…

Raj Ketkar

Management

Thanks Matt. Before we get to your question I would like to summarize our results for the second quarter of 2017. Our positive momentum from the first quarter continued in the second quarter with increased revenue decreased operating costs and a reduced net loss. We made some significant regulatory achievements and together with our partners moved our trait an ingredient products forward in the pipeline. Our focus remains on advancing these products to commercialization and we are confident that we can continue this momentum through the rest of the year. With that I'd like to turn the call over to your questions now.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Tyler Etten with Piper Jaffray. Your line is now open.

Tyler Etten

Analyst

Congrats on HB4 approval it’s really a very good milestone for you guys. In terms of other major approvals do you have any sense of where we are on some of the more major ones like China and Europe I believe they have been submitted, but could you just clarify where we’re at on those?

Raj Ketkar

Management

So both China and Europe approvals for import of grain into those world regions are going to be key for allowing farmers to plant in Argentina or anywhere for that matter. So the China submission was made last November and that is now in the queue or in progress in China. The European submission we are targeting to make at the end of this year so there's a couple of studies we are doing right now to finalize the package that we will submit to Europe by the end of this year. So China approval is the most important because practically all of the soybeans are produced in Argentina go to China.

Tyler Etten

Analyst

Maybe if we could also go on the next steps for the water use efficiency trait I know it’s a bit early but safety evaluation is very important on us. Do you have any idea what a timeline would look like for that trait under FDA approval.

Raj Ketkar

Management

Right, so I think that’s still – again in process the full approval for water use efficiency is probably the still over more than a year away at least and that's the general approval for the water use efficiency trait. And then of course we’ll have to get specific approvals for the crop depending on the country that we are applying for.

Tyler Etten

Analyst

And then maybe if we could switch over to the Dow partnership, what would the partnership look like longer-term is there something that they have been interested in something more than the wheat quality trait. I know that you guys have work with Dow in terms of trials but is this – do you see this relationship evolving into a more intertwined with the other traits?

Raj Ketkar

Management

Yes so we have an agreement with Dow for our corn yield and stress traits. We're now in year three of that agreement so I commented on that we've got trials in the ground or I should say Dow has trials in the ground that we work with them collaboratively on. But that's a completely separate agreement than the Wheat agreement that we’ve just signed. And this is supported by the wheat business within Dow and currently it's really in early phase research. So this will progress through breeding and testing and then eventually commercialization, but yes these two are separate agreements. At this time it would be too early to say anything about intertwining these. We’ve worked with – we've got a good relationship with Dow and these are really two separate crop teams within Dow that we are working with.

Tyler Etten

Analyst

And then maybe a couple of questions for Matt on the model. Do you guys see this kind of sub $2 million run rate through the rest of the year for the R&D and maybe this is an obvious question, but there is a 2 million shares count drop. I was just curious on how that happened any color would be helpful?

Matt Plavan

Management

Sure I'll start with the share drop March 31 we executed a share swap with Limagrain as part of the LCS partnership, whereby we exchanged with one another our ownership in the LCS arrangement that we had. And as a result of that they exchanged with us 1.8 million shares of Arcadia stock which we then retired which resulted in that 1.8 share reduction at that time. With regard to your question about R&D I think it's fair to assume that for the foreseeable future the run rate will be relatively consistent with this quarter we had a lot of anomalies in that number and when we look at the four or five primary investments we’re making in our traits that's probably going to remain pretty steady for at least the balance of the year.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Raj Ketkar, President and CEO for closing remarks.

Raj Ketkar

Management

So to close, thank you everyone for joining the call and thank you for your continued interest and support of Arcadia. We look forward to speaking with you again during our Q3 conference call.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This does concludes the program you may now disconnect. Everyone have a good day.