Bioceres Crop Solutions Corp. (NASDAQ:BIOX) Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 12, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Federico Trucco – Chief Executive Officer

Enrique López Lecube – Chief Financial Officer

Rodrigo Krause – Head of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Ben Klieve – Lake Street Capital Market

Brian Wright – ROTH Capital Partners

Kemp Dolliver – Brookline Capital Markets

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Bioceres Crop Solutions Fiscal Third Year of Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. My name's Amarin, I will be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] I would now pass the call over to Rodrigo Krause to begin, please go ahead.

Rodrigo Krause

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us. Presenting during today's call will be Federico Trucco, our Chief Executive Officer, and Enrique López Lecube, our Chief Financial Officer. Both will be available for the Q&A session. Before we proceed, I would like to make the following safe harbor statement. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, and I refer you to the forward-looking statements section of today's earnings release and presentation, as well as in our recent filings with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new or changed events or circumstances. Also, please note that for comparison purposes and a better understanding of our company's underlying performance, and in addition to discussing as reported results during our presentation today, we will discuss comparable results, which exclude the impact of hyperinflation accounting in Argentina. Additional information in connection with the application of the rule IAS29 can be found in our earnings report. Finally, this conference call is being webcast. The webcast link is available at the Bioceres Crop Investor Relations site. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Federico Trucco. Thank you.

Federico Trucco

Thank you, Rodrigo, and thanks to everyone in the call for joining us today. Please turn to Slide 3 for a quick overview of the quarter's main highlights. Our third fiscal quarter has been historically our weakest and less eventful quarter for various reasons. Most importantly because it overlaps with Latin America summer, not an important planting period for any one crop. The third quarter of fiscal year 2022, which we are currently reporting, deviates from these historical role. And this is not only because of the great momentum we continue to observe in our sales with revenues increasing 72% on a comparable basis, but also and significantly due to the business development and regulatory milestones that we have achieved during the period and subsequently thereafter. As we announced in March, we are pursuing a transformational merger with Marrone Bio Innovations to become an indisputable leader in the biological space. And recently in April, we have received the long-awaited regulatory green light from China that allows us to move HB4 soy into its commercialization phase. With regards to the MVI merger, we were able to file F4 documents with the SEC this last Monday, and we continue to be on track for our first quarter closing in fiscal 2023, and it is between July and September of this year. In terms of HB4 soy, we are today providing guidance for fiscal year '25, where we expect HB4 soy to contribute between $20 and $25 million of incremental EBITDA. We expect this contribution on the asset two prior commercial seasons in Latin America, as we will describe in more detail in a few minutes. Outside from these important milestones. We're taking advantage of the current momentum in wheat interest to advance commercial agreements for HB4 wheat within Latin America and expand outside of the region. Among these, our wheat subsidiary [Indiscernible] generics has reached our preliminary understanding with S&W seats of Australia to acquire a majority of its wheat bringing program and efforts. This agreement is reached at the time when a positive recommendation is obtained from regulators in Australia regarding the use of HB4 Wheat in food and feed. We'll discuss these and other HB4 Wheat related developments throughout the presentation today. Please now turn to Slide 4 for a deeper discussion on our current HB4 Soy timelines. The Chinese approval for HB4 Soy does two immediate things.