Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Regina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Phibro Animal Health Corporation Third Quarter 2023 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Damian Finio, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead..

Thank you, Regina. Good morning, and welcome to the Phibro Animal Health Corporation Earnings Call for our Fiscal Year 2023 Third Quarter ended March 31, 2023. My name is Damian Finio, and I am the Chief Financial Officer of Phibro Animal Health Corporation.

I'm joined on today's call by Jack Bendheim, Phibro's Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Daniel Bendheim, Director and Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy. Today, we will cover our third quarter and fiscal year-to-date financial results before opening the lines for your questions.

I'd like to remind you that we are providing a simultaneous webcast of this call on our website, www.pahc.com. Also on the Investors section of our website, you will find copies of the earnings press release and third quarter Form 10-Q filed with the SEC yesterday as well as the transcript and slides discussed and presented on this morning's call.

Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those projections. For a list and description of certain factors that could cause results to differ, I refer to you the forward-looking statements section in our earnings press release.

Our remarks include references to certain financial measures, which were not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or U.S. GAAP. I refer to you the non-GAAP financial information section in our earnings press release for a discussion of these measures.

Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures are included in the financial tables that accompany the earnings press release. We present our results on a GAAP basis and on an adjusted basis.

Our adjusted results exclude acquisition-related items, unusual, nonoperational or nonrecurring items, other income and expense as separately reported in the consolidated statements of operations, including foreign currency gains and losses net and lastly, income tax effects related to pretax adjustments and unusual or nonrecurring income tax items.

Now let me introduce our Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jack Bendheim, to share his perspective on Phibro's third quarter and fiscal year-to-date financial performance.

Jack?.

Thank you, Damian, and good morning, everyone. We posted strong fiscal year-to-date sales growth. Our third quarter net sales were $246 million, which reflects 3% growth over the same quarter last year.

Despite the challenging market and economic conditions, our consolidated sales growth has been driven primarily by our Animal Health segment and with well-balanced improvements across our three product categories.

Our Animal Health segment has achieved a remarkable 10% year-to-date increase in net sales compared to the same period of the previous year. We are unfortunately seeing some signs of recessionary pressure in our Mineral Nutrition segment as our customers are seeking to reduce purchases and lower inventory.

We will take steps over the next few months to ensure our inventory is better balanced for our customers' needs. Overall, we have posted strong fiscal year-to-date sales growth despite the challenging conditions. We see continued opportunities for growth in our Animal Health segment.

As I mentioned, on a year-to-date basis, our Animal Health segment has achieved a 10% increase in net sales compared to last year, and this segment continues to present us with multiple growth opportunities. We have posted eight consecutive quarters of year-over-year sales growth in each of our three major product categories.

From a year-to-date comparative perspective, the product categories of MFAs and other is up 9%, while nutritional specialties are up 12% and vaccines, up 9%. I'm especially pleased with our vaccine growth in Latin America. We recently opened a new autogenous vaccine facility in Brazil and launched commercial poultry vaccines in the region.

And regarding the Seasonal Specialties, we continue to find ways to leverage our product and technologies we acquired with the 2019 acquisition of Osprey Biotechnics. I'm also happy to report that our companion animal's development pipeline continues to progress.

We see Companion Animal as a medium-term growth driver for the company, and we will provide updates as the pipeline progresses. In terms of profitability, on today's portfolio over time, margins should improve as input costs return to historical levels.

The Animal Health segment adjusted EBITDA margin was 20.8% for the third quarter, which is a 110 basis point improvement over last year. Although the year-to-date EBITDA margin is still 30 basis points shy versus last year, we see signs that input costs are returning to normal levels.

For margin improvements to continue, input costs will each continue to decline, and we will need to work through a higher price inventory on hand. We are taking other actions to manage working capital more closely, which we anticipate will help to improve our free cash flow.

We continue to focus on raising prices when market conditions allow, and we remain bullish on our business and our ability to grow sales given the strong demand for our current portfolio of products and the projected demand for the pipeline of future nutritional specialty vaccine and Companion Animal products we have in development.

Lastly, Phibro had a strong third quarter. And as we approach our fiscal year-end, we remain confident in our full year guidance. I will now ask Damian to review our third quarter financial performance and fiscal year 2023 guidance in more detail before opening the line for questions.

Daniel?.

net sales of $960 million to $1 billion, net income of $34 million to $38 million; diluted earnings per share of $0.84 to $0.94. -- adjusted EBITDA of $113 million to $118 million, adjusted net income of $49 million to $53 million, adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.21 to $1.31 and lastly, an estimated adjusted effective tax rate of 33%.

Guidance for the full year GAAP metrics assumes actual foreign exchange losses for the 9 months ending March 31, 2023, and the company's projected currency exchange rates for the fourth quarter ending June 30, 2023.

Lastly, on Slide 9, the momentum behind our ESG effort continues to build, thanks in large part to the enthusiasm and engagement of our employees. Next week, we intend to publish our second ESG report titled Health at the heart, which reflects the progress made in calendar year 2022. We will issue a press release when the report is made available.

In closing, we are pleased with our third quarter and year-to-date financial performance. Our Animal Health segment growth, despite the challenging market dynamics continues to outperform the market, and we are excited by the variety of opportunities for growth that we see for this, our largest business segment.

With that, Regina, could you please open the lines for questions?.

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will come from the line of Michael Ryskin with Bank of America..

This is Wolf Chanoff on for Mike. Congrats on the quarter. So I appreciate you guys flagging the recession and kind of macro impacts that you're seeing in Mineral Nutrition.

I'm just wondering how would you describe the possibility that these impacts spread beyond Mineral Nutrition to your broader Animal Health segment, just kind of a range of outcomes around this recessionary impact? And then I have a semi-related follow-up..

Thanks for the question, Will. I mean we view our business as recession resistant. We've been in the business a long time. We've been through recessions. And effectively, people eating protein is really among the very, very last things to go. I mean -- and we see changes. I mean people might give a stake and go to chicken or some combination.

But overall, our business is more tied to population growth and to general wealth, which the recession sort of again, it's sort of recession resistant..

Got it. I appreciate that. And then -- so sticking with Mineral Nutrition. Last quarter, you called out some kind of choppiness in the U.S. beef cattle feed lots. And I realize that it's only with a small part of your portfolio, but I was wondering if you have any updates on what you're seeing in terms of feedlot dynamics..

So for this last quarter, it still remains a very small part of our business. But what we're seeing is demand sort of is more driven by the fact that I spoke about in my opening remarks, that over last year when shipping was so difficult and people were very concerned about supply chain.

There was more of an increase in inventories, both at our customers and ourselves. And the worst thing to do is to be is to run out. So prices were better, volumes are better. And I think as the shipping lines have straight down and shipping has become less of a problem, less of a concern, there is this big adjustment.

And I think that's a bigger part of this than anything else..

Your next question comes from the line of Balaji Prasad with Barclays..

This is [Shaw] on for Balaji. Just a quick one on your Latin American business. China has recently lifted the embargo on the Brazilian beef imports.

Do you see this change as a potential tailwind for your Latin America Animal Health business, which had been performed well recently?.

So I think that is among the other tailwinds of Brazil being a phenomenal PDUs and a very big exporter of protein. So China removing any barriers to commerce is definitely helpful.

And the state and the health of the GILTI business as well as the other businesses as we see is continuing to help Latin America, but specifically Brazil in its production and export protein..

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Brian Wright with Roth MKM..

I was in you could remind us on the capacity of the Brazilian vaccine facility and what that could mean to grow?.

So the facility -- thanks for the question. The facility that we built is a small facility. It's involved with the otogenous vaccine business. Tasos vaccine business means it's a custom vaccine. We go on farms, we pick up -- we try to isolate the viruses and we make a custom vaccine for that. So it's literally it's a farm-by-farm business.

The prices you get is a higher price I would say it's more effective because we're dealing with farm-by-farm variances, but it's not a huge volume business. But beyond that, we recently received approval for some of our vaccines that we produce poultry vaccines that we produced in Israel, and we just started x4 to Brazil.

So that's a new start to our business, and that obviously is a much larger business..

Great. And then I just was hoping maybe we could kind of get some visibility on just the underlying like U.S. broiler volumes kind of how they progress from January to now.

Are they kind of higher now than they kind of began the third quarter?.

The U.S. broiler volumes, I would say, are maybe down to flat and holding steady. Yes, that's it..

Okay. And then just same question for maybe Brazilian cattle..

It's -- cattle is not overlaying our focus, even though it's a bigger part of our business in Brazil, I would say Brazil cattle business just remains flat to slightly up..

We have no further questions at this time. I'll turn the conference back over to Damian Finio, for any closing remarks..

Okay. Thank you, Regina, and thank you, everyone, for participating in today's call. We appreciate your time, attention and interest in Phibro Animal Health Corporation. Have a great rest of your day, and please be sure to check out our second ESG report when it's published next week. Thank you..

Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining..