22nd Century Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:XXII) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 5, 2022 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Mei Kuo – Director of Communications and Investor Relations

Jim Mish – Chief Executive Officer

Mike Zercher – President and Chief Operating Officer

Rich Fitzgerald – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Harrison Vivas – Cowen

Brian Wright – Roth Capital Partners

Jim McIlree – Dawson James

Operator

Welcome to the 22nd Century Group’s First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode and the floor will be opened for questions following management’s prepared remarks, As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mei Kuo, Director of Communications and Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Mei Kuo

Thank you, Donna. Good morning and welcome to 22nd Century’s first quarter earnings conference call. Joining me today are Jim Mish, our Chief Executive Officer; Mike Zercher, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Rich Fitzgerald, our Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our results for the first quarter 2022.

We’ll start today’s call with prepared remarks from Jim, Mike and Rich before moving into a Q&A session. During our prepared remarks, we will be referring to slides which are available for viewing in the webcast and posted in the Investors section of our website at xxiicentury.com, under the Events subheading. We hope these slides will serve as a framework for management’s prepared remarks, reinforce key takeaways and provide additional transparency and insight into our business, strategy and objectives. Also, those of you joining by webcast can submit questions through the online interface, which we may include during the Q&A session of today’s call time permitting.

Before we begin, 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 this call, we may 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. For more details on these measures, please refer to our press release issued earlier today.

And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Jim, beginning from Slide 3.