Hello and welcome to 22nd Century's Second Quarter Results Conference Call. Joining me today are Larry Firestone, CEO; and Dan Otto, CFO. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our results for the second quarter of 2024. The release and Form 10-Q are available in the Investors section of our website at xxiicentury.com. Today's call will include prepared remarks from Larry and Dan, updating you on 22nd Century's business, operations, strategy, and financial results through June 30, 2024, and subsequent. Before we begin, a few reminders for today's call. Some of the statements made today are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Additional information regarding these factors can be found in our annual, quarterly, and other reports filed with the SEC. During today's call, we will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, which we define as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization as adjusted for certain non-cash and non-operating expenses and net debt calculated as total principal amount of debt outstanding, less cash and cash equivalents. For more details on these measures, please refer to our press release issued earlier today. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Larry.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining 22nd Century's second quarter 2024 financial and operating results conference call. This is my third call as your CEO and our second quarter results show just how significant and positive the changes have been over the last nine months since I joined in December. Much has changed even in the last 90 days as we continue on the path to turn our company around to be a profitable cash positive business. One thing that has not changed, however, is our commitment to using our unique position in the tobacco industry to confront the harms of nicotine addiction among tobacco users and to offer a meaningful option to those who want to take control of their smoking habit and addiction. Before I get into the operational updates, let me give you a summary of our financial turnaround efforts. As you see in our financial results release, we moved our company from a consolidated net loss of $21 million in the second quarter of last year to just $1.6 million this year. This was no small feat. But we won't be satisfied until those numbers turn solidly positive. But I will caution our shareholders, this is a bumpy ride getting there. The revenue growth initiatives we've been communicating, including adding volume to our factory, repricing key customer accounts, our lean operating model, and cost improvement initiatives have taken shape nicely in Q2 and will continue into the latter half of the year as we make progress against achieving our goal of net income in Q1 of 2025. Dan will cover the details on our key financial metrics. We have touched every part of this organization and business, and we're still shaping it. Perhaps most important now is our company is quickly…

Thank you, Larry. Good morning, everyone, and thanks again for joining our discussion today. I'll walk through additional details on our second quarter financial results. As a reminder, all financial results in our earnings release are presented on a continuing operations basis, which excludes our former hemp/cannabis segment. Net revenue was $7.9 million in the second quarter 2024, increased sequentially from $6.5 million in the first quarter 2024 and compared to $8.1 million in the second quarter 2023. Included in the second quarter results was a significant one-time order of our Spectrum product, which are low nicotine research cigarettes, helping boost both top-line revenue and gross profit. As seen in our product line revenue results in discussion in our earnings release, overall carton volume declined slightly in the second quarter 2024 compared to the prior year comparable period, which reflects the message that we've been communicating over recent quarters regarding product mix changes between cigarettes and filtered cigars. Reaching sustainable gross profit in our CMO business is critical to our success and why we're highly focused on ensuring the appropriate pricing for our key customers and exiting any business where we are losing money, such as certain negative margin filtered cigars. We have served price increases to our customers effective in April 2024 and added new volume in the second quarter. The ramp in volume will accelerate more significantly in the latter half of the year as we continue to demonstrate to our customers the high quality production capability we possess and we secure additional wins in the CMO business, as well as working through the relaunch initiatives related to VLN. I will, however, echo Larry's earlier remarks. Expanding our volume at the scale to reach profitability will take time and patience as we navigate the challenges of the regulatory…

Thanks, Dan. I would like to thank everyone for joining our call today. We are now nine months into our turnaround at 22nd Century and I hope you can see the fruits of our hard work by everyone on our team. It's been a challenging process, but the numbers have changed significantly to the positive. Our balance sheet is stronger. Our operating costs have been cut and more closely aligned to our sales. And our CMO business is producing positive margin and growing and we are building out a new branding and strategy on our reduced nicotine content products to drive growth opportunities ahead. In short, while we are not fully out of the woods yet, 22nd Century is on track to becoming a self-sustaining and profitable company for the first time in our history. The posture inside the company is quickly turning from defensive to offensive as we continue to shed the obligations of the past and focus on the future. We will be participating in investor conferences later this month and throughout the fall and look forward to updating you again as new developments occur, including branding, new contracts, and our next results report. If you have any questions or would like to arrange a follow-up, please contact Matt Kreps, Investor Relations for the company, using his contact information provided on the press release. And we'd like to wish you to have a great rest of your day. Thank you. End of Q&A: