Green Plains Inc. (NASDAQ:GPRE) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 4, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Phil Boggs - Executive Vice President, Investor Relations

Todd Becker - President, Chief Executive Officer and Director

James Stark - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Adam Samuelson - Goldman Sachs

Kristen Owen - Oppenheimer

Manav Gupta - UBS

Andrew Strelzik - BMO Capital Markets

Aaron Spychalla - Craig-Hallum

Jordan Levy - Truist Securities

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Following the company's prepared remarks, instructions will be provided for Q&A. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.

I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Boggs. Please go ahead.

Phil Boggs

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Participants on today's call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jim Stark, Chief Financial Officer; and Leslie van der Meulen, EVP of Product Marketing and Innovation. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find it on the Investor page under the Events and Presentations link on both corporate websites. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's press releases and the comments made during this conference call and in the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Todd Becker

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Concurrently, with our earnings announcement this morning, we announced an offer to acquire all of the publicly held common units of Green Plains Partners. We believe the proposed transaction will simplify our corporate structure and governance, generate near-term earnings and cash flow accretion, reduced SG&A expense related to the partnership, improve the credit quality of the combined enterprise and align strategic interest between Green Plains Inc. shareholders and the partnership unitholders by regaining full ownership and control of Green Plains total platform, including our terminals. All of this will allow us to be more flexible with our long-term asset and company strategy. This is as much commentary as we can provide on this potential transaction at this time. So let's get the first quarter results out of the way. As indicated, ethanol margins were very weak in the first quarter and began to recover too late for us to take advantage if we look backwards. But since we are looking forward, things have changed significantly from the lows we saw in January as market fundamentals look very interesting for the remainder of the year for all of our products, and we'll get to that later. This was further validated with yesterday's EIA data.