Good day everyone and welcome to today’s Perma-Fix Fourth Quarter 2020 Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later you will have an opportunity to ask questions during the question-answer session. Please note this call may be recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn today’s program over to Natalie Redman..

Thank you Emma. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Perma-Fix Environmental Services' Fourth Quarter 2020 Conference Call. On the call with us this afternoon are Mark Duff, President and CEO; Dr. Lou Centofanti, Executive Vice President of Strategic Initiatives; and Ben Naccarato, Chief Financial Officer..

All right. Thanks Natalie, and good afternoon. We generated solid revenue growth and achieved profitability for 2020 despite the impacts of COVID-19 or a treatment segment. We attributed these results to the strength in our nuclear services segment and our ability to maintain fuel operations throughout the pandemic.

I'm very proud of the fact that Perma-Fix successfully implemented our revised COVID safety plan while continuing to meet the needs of our clients during a period of time which they were largely working from their own home.

In addition we have also improved our approach to worker safety and health programs in our plants and field operations throughout 2020 having achieved an important milestone of over 400,000 hours without an -- recordable incident.

This milestone is significant in our business as a safety record reflects the focus and dedication of our team to ensure conscientious work performance and attention to detail which directly drives productivity in the field..

Thank you, Mark. Beginning with revenue, our total revenue from continuing operations for the fourth quarter was $28.3 million compared to last year's fourth quarter of $22.1 million, that's an increase of $6.2 million or 28.4%.

The increase, as you said was led by our services segment, where revenue increased by $10.8 million over the prior year as the company continued to operate on numerous projects in both the U.S. and Canada.

The increase was offset by a drop in our treatment segment revenue of $4.6 million as waste receipts at our treatment plants continued to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For the year ended 2020, our revenue was $105.4 million compared to $73.5 million in 2019.

As with the fourth quarter, the service segment was the main driver of this increase as revenue increased $42.2 million or 127.5%. Despite the on-going COVID pandemic, our projects did continue to operate during most of the year generating increased revenue which offset the drop in our treatment segment of $10.3 million.

Following a strong start to 2020, the impact of COVID significantly impacted our waste received throughout both the second through the fourth quarters resulting in a year-over-year drop in revenue of approximately 25%.

Turning to costs of sold -- cost of goods sold, our cost of sales was $25.2 million in the fourth quarter compared to $17.4 million in the prior year, an increase of $7.7 million or 44.3%. This significant increase in project work in the service segment resulted in increased payroll, travel and subcontractor expense.

Headcount increased approximately 15% over the prior year, while per diem days paid increased by approximately 82%. Conversely, the treatment segment lowered costs and transportation disposal and material and supplies related to processing approximately 31% less volume in the quarter.

Year-to-date, the cost of sales was $89.5 million compared to $57.8 million in 2019, an increase of $31.7 million or 54.7%..

We'll take our first question from Howard Brous. Your line is open..

First of all, let me congratulate you on achieving $100 million in revenue. Mark, Lou, Ben in spite of COVID and everything else, so first, congratulations. And also Ben, congratulations on your joining the Board of Directors of Pyrogenesis. Excuse me.

So first of all, and hopefully everybody in the family as well and everyone in the firm, any COVID issues?.

No, it's good to hear from you no, everybody's good. We have zero COVID cases in the company right now, which you know, that wasn't the case several months ago. But we are to zero and many, many folks are getting vaccinated. So we're hoping to stay on top of that trend..

Good. Congratulations Mark. I'm glad to hear that. That's critically important. In your announcement today, and I just want to address one issue.

And I'm quoting from your announcement, we are rapidly advancing several issues when the treatment segment that we believe have the potential to significantly enhance our revenues, while establishing increased market share and large backlog for waste processing.

Can you be a little bit more granular in terms of that comment?.

Sure, Howard. We're always -- we always have initiatives going on in each one of our plants to upgrade them and add new capabilities that would expand our inventories and our more market share. So we have one an opportunity going on in each one of our facilities. Now, we have a new program in Florida, putting in what we call vacuum thermal desorption.

That will significantly increase our capability to take specific kinds of waste that are coming from the DOE with limited competition. That should be up and running by the end of the year, latest more like end of Q3. And that's running very well, very, very rapidly.

We're continuing to complete our construction program, DSSI is going to give us more storage capacity and allow us to expand our classified waste program, which we have a good backlog that we have not received yet, because we have gone to this space in this classified area. And then we also have expansion going on at our EWOC facility.

Some upgrades going along with that for several procurements that we have out there waiting to hear on and we have some minor modifications going on up in Richland. So altogether, I think that, we can see an expansion to start realizing revenue in late Q3 and Q4.

But really tee up 2022 for increased waste receipts along with those access to new technologies. We're also looking at; we're also seeing increased activity on the international front with several new waste streams being teed up for shipment in the next quarter or so.

We should start seeing some by the end of Q2, and getting some real sustainable waste trimmed internationally. So we're excited about the waste treatment side of the house. It has taken a beating as you know. It hasn't come back as fast as we'd hoped.

But we are seeing just in the last two or three weeks significant increasing shipments and notice of shipments and RFP activities, proposed activities that give us a lot of optimism that we could be back to normal on waste receipts by the end of Q2..

Can you find better the financial opportunities rather than the general opportunities in terms of potential revenue, and let's let's talk about third, fourth quarter and importantly, 2022?.

Third and fourth quarter is going to be tough to predict maybe a million or two, three in revenue impact into this year, but we're holding between 5 million and 10 million and additional revenue for 2022 as a base.

That's along with a lot of other positive trends we're seeing on different existing capabilities, like our water system, we're starting to receive some water now. It took forever to get that whole program rolling, but it's going good now. And we're doing good on the water receipt side and processing side.

So between the VTD and the classified waste and EWOC, I don't think $10 million is is a big stretch to assume for 2022..

And that's without any of the big opportunities that we've talked about in the past, correct?.

That's correct. That's just new ways to receive..

Last but not least, but still in the same vein, you've heard nothing because I've heard nothing on the other issue.

Have you?.

We have heard nothing. And we're supposed to be sort of seeing past quarters and any day kind of a thing so we have heard nothing bad in the past quarter. Yeah..

Again, congratulations, to yourself and the team on $100 million in revenue. And that's all I have for the moment. Thank you..

Right thanks, Howard I appreciate it..

My.

We will take our next question from Chuck Dickerson. Your line is open..

Dickenson that is. Thank you for taking my question here.

I wondered if you could talk in a little more detail or give a framework of how you're looking at translating or the opportunities to translate service work into additional treatment opportunities? I mean, are we talking here about you go and you do some service work and you discover that there's treatable waste is sort of a by-product of the service you perform that happened to come about? Or is it alternatively a situation where the customer say do we, or whoever is, let's say they're so satisfied with the service work that you perform.

And if it's done reliably, then then they come back to you and say by the way, we also have some treatment work we'd like to give to as well.

So how do you see that translation unfolding from service into waste treatment opportunities?.

You know Chuck, we do have several bids and several jobs I should say that have included extensive nuclear services work in the field that has resulted in shipment of waste to ourselves to process.

The job of the Harvard review hospital for example, we, we did the remediation packs away ship with our, our facility in Richland, Washington, processed it and got rid of everything, we're full service cut out a lot of inefficiencies, it worked really well.

Other projects we’ll typically do the remediation and the waste may or may not require treatment. In other words, if it doesn't require treatment, it can be shipped directly for disposal in a landfill.

That's normally the largest volume of the waste we have that’s the case, but we're bidding on several jobs right now that does include some treatment into processing. If there's any way we can ship something like large components, so our facilities and do the dismantlement off site, we'll do that, It doesn't always afford that an opportunity.

But to answer your question, most of the time, it's one of the other uses of doing a waste treatment, or we're doing the services. And in the field, we're doing the services, the integral services types of jobs, you're typically shipping the waste direct to disposal, and it doesn't have the opportunity for the treatment, overall.

But what we do, what we do is when we're the real discriminator comes in for our company, because we have the waste management people, the professionals engineers, that we put on the services projects that that are able to manage the waste and minimize treatment as necessary, and the packet and optimize the packaging, so you can go directly to disposal and save money..

Okay, great.

The only other question I had was, do you have a sense of what percent of your workforce is in the field that has been vaccinated already for COVID? And is that sort of the key item to look at? Or is it more you have to look at vaccination across all of your client base as well? And maybe all this is academic come the end of May or June, as you say things are expected to start ramping up then.

So maybe it's not a question that's really that important, but just kind of a curiosity as to what percent is already vaccinated?.

You know, said it was I'd be just guessing that we have not pulled, we do plan on pulling at some point just to see what percentage we're talking about. But we have not done that yet. In East Tennessee, here, where we have about a third of the company is running around at 20% as a population. And I so I have no idea or where our folks are.

I do know, my office here. It's much higher than that. And we have about 40 folks in our office, you know, an administrative side of the house. But as far as the plants good, I've just been guessing I have no idea I'm afraid..

Okay, but the waste receipts that you started -- starting to see trend up, although not back to a normalized level, but starting to trend up a little bit in this month. That may have some correlation, I would guess to people are being vaccinated..

That's correct. I would, I would assume that as well..

Okay, thank you..

Thanks..

It appears we have no further questions at this time..

All right. I'd like to thank everyone for participating on our fourth quarter conference call. As I mentioned earlier, we remain bullish on the outlook for the full year. We appreciate the continued support of our shareholders and look forward to providing further updates as developments unfold. Thank you..

This does conclude today's program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time..