Ceres Global Ag Corp. (CRP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Annual Meeting of Ceres Global. Please note the meeting will be recorded. I would like to introduce Carlos Paz, President and CEO of Ceres Global. Mr. Paz, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. I am Carlos Paz, President and CEO of Ceres Global Ag. As you are aware, for the fourth year in a row, this is a virtual meeting. Ceres Global has decided that this virtual format allows us to reach the greatest number of our shareholders in the most convenient way possible. We thank you for joining us. Before turning the meeting over to the Chairman for the formal business of this Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Jen will provide you with the following cautionary statement regarding forward-looking information.

Thank you, Carlos. In the course of today's meeting, representatives of Ceres Global may in our remarks or in response to questions, make certain statements which are forward-looking statements and provide certain information, which is forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information are prospective. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information are neither promises nor guarantees but are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Ceres Global or developments in Ceres Global's business or its industry to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, achievements or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. A more detailed discussion of these and important risk factors can be found in our most recent annual information form and Management's Discussion and Analysis for the 12-month period ended June 30, 2023, both of which are available under our corporate profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com. Thank you. I will now turn the meeting over to James Vanasek, Chair of Ceres Board of Directors.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Shareholders of Ceres Global. I'm James Vanasek, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ceres Global. Before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the directors and officers of the company. Carlos Paz, President and Chief Executive Officer and Director; my fellow directors, Harvey Joel, Harold Wolkin and David Rotenberg; Blake Amundson, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jennifer Henderson, Vice President, Corporate Secretary and General Counsel; James Mowbray, Vice President and Director of Operations; and Holly Dammer, Vice President of Human Resources. Today, we have 4 business matters to conduct. One, to present the audited financial statements of Ceres Global for the financial year ended June 30, 2023 and the auditor's report; two, to elect the Board of Directors; three, to appoint Baker Tilly WM LLP as the auditors of Ceres Global; and four, to vote on a resolution to amend the director's share and deferred share unit plan. Once the formal business of the meeting has been completed, Ceres Global Management will provide a presentation and will be available to answer questions from shareholders. I will now call the meeting to order. I'll preside as the Chair of this meeting, and I ask that Jennifer Henderson act as Secretary of the meeting. Unless there is an objection, I shall appoint TSX Trust to act as scrutineers for the meeting through its representatives, Jordan Shafi and Lori Grinton.

I am not seeing any objections.

The secretary has advised me that calling this meeting, together with the form of proxy and Management Information Circular and the financial statements of Ceres Global for the financial year ended June 30, 2023 and the auditor's report have been provided to each director of Ceres Global, the auditors of Ceres Global and each intermediary and registered holder of common shares of Ceres Global as of record of September 29, 2023, the record date for this meeting. Additional copies of these materials are also available under our corporate profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com. The scrutineers have provided me with the preliminary report, which will be updated in our final report after the meeting regarding shareholder attendance at the meeting. The scrutineers report that there are present at this meeting in person or by proxy shareholders holding 18,311,892 common shares of Ceres Global. Accordingly, I declare that the requisite quorum of shareholders is present, and I declare that the meeting is duly and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct the comparation of the mailing of the notice of the meeting received by TSX Trust and the scrutineers' complete report on attendance to be annexed to the minutes of the meeting. There are several matters that must be dealt with during this formal part of the meeting. In order to expedite these matters, I have requested certain people to make and second formal motions, and I'll call those people at the appropriate time. Given the virtual format of today's meeting, we request that registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have specific comments or questions on a formal item of business, make such written submissions now by clicking on the messaging icon, typing in and submitting their question. Please clearly identify the applicable item of formal business to which your comment or question relates. During the course of this meeting, at the appropriate time, such questions will be addressed. Following the formal part of the meeting, we will have a question-and-answer session with Carlos and myself. If you have any questions not specifically related to an item of formal business to be discussed at today's meeting, please feel free to submit those questions at any time during the meeting, and we'll do our best to ensure that such questions are addressed at the conclusion of the meeting. We will do our best to answer all questions. But if for any reason, we're unable to do so during the meeting, we'll endeavor to follow up afterwards if you haven't provided your contact information with your question. Given that this is a virtual meeting, voting will be conducted by online ballot for all matters. If as a registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder and if you are using a control number to log in the meeting and you accept the terms and conditions [indiscernible] with the opportunity to vote by online ballot. If you've already voted by proxy and you vote again during the online ballot during the meeting, your online vote during the meeting will revoke your previously submitted proxy. If you've already voted by proxy and do not wish to revoke your previously submitted proxy, do not vote again during the online ballot. The polls will be open for all items of business to be voted on at the same time. This will allow you to vote on each item immediately or if you prefer, you may wait until the conclusion of discussion on each item prior to casting your vote. Once the polls have been opened, the items for business to be voted on and your available voting options will be visible on the voting panel on your screen. To submit a vote, please click on the voting choice displayed on your screen. Once discussion has concluded on all items of business, the polls will close. I now declare the polls open for all items of business. The first item of business is the presentation of Ceres Global's consolidated financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2023 and the auditors report, both of which have been previously provided to shareholders of the corporation. Unless there is an objection, I will dispense with the reading of the auditor's report to the meeting.

I'm seeing no objections.

We'll now proceed to the election of directors. The number of directors to be elected at the meeting is 5. I'll ask someone to nominate each of the nominees listed in the management information circular delivered with the notice of this meeting.

I nominate those persons specified in the management information circular delivered with the notice of meeting, namely Carlos Paz, Harvey Joel, Harold Wolkin, James Vanasek, David Rotenberg, to serve as directors of Ceres Global to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed in accordance with the articles and the bylaws of the corporation.

Thank you, Blake. Ms. Henderson, have any nominations, questions or comments come in from shareholders specifically on this matter?

No.

Hearing none, therefore, I'd now declare the nominations closed. In order for each of the nominees to be elected, he must obtain a majority of the votes cast at this meeting. The election of directors will be conducted by online ballot. As noted, if you previously submitted a completed proxy and you vote again during the online ballot part of the meeting, your online vote during the meeting will revoke your previously submitted proxy. If you've already voted by proxy and do not wish to revoke your previously submitted proxy, please do not vote again during the online ballot.

I would ask that all registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders complete the online ballot now by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on their screens. Please complete the online ballot by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on your screens.

With that complete, we will now proceed with the appointment and remuneration of the auditors of Ceres Global. May I have a motion that Baker Tilly WM LLP be appointed as auditors of Ceres Global until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until a successor is appointed and that the Board of Directors are authorized to fix the auditor's remuneration.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Ms. Henderson, have any questions or comments come from shareholders specifically on this item?

No.

With that, the appointment of auditors will be conducted by online ballot as noted. If you previously submitted a completed proxy and you vote again during the online ballot during the meeting, your online vote during the meeting will revoke your previously submitted proxy. If you've already voted by proxy and do not wish to revoke your previously submitted proxy, please do not vote again during the online ballot.

I would ask that all registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders complete the online ballot now by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on your screens. Please complete the online ballot now by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on your screens.

Okay. With that complete, the next item is as described in the Management Information Circular, the shareholders of Ceres Global have been asked to consider and if thought advisable, to pass a resolution to approve an amendment to the corporation's amended and restated director share and deferred share unit plan, increasing the maximum annual fair market value of deferred share units that may be issued to any eligible director from CAD 150,000 to CAD 200,000. Details related to the proposed amendments are contained in the Management Information Circular. In order for the foregoing to be approved, the resolution must be passed by at least a majority of votes cast at this meeting. May I have a motion that a resolution in the form of a resolution attached as Schedule A to the Management Information Circular approving the amendment to the amended and restated director share and deferred share unit plan, increasing the maximum annual fair value of deferred share units that may be issued to any eligible Director from CAD 150,000 to CAD 200,000 be passed as a resolution of the corporation.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Ms. Henderson, have any questions or comments come in from shareholders specifically on this item? .

Mr. Chairman, I confirm that we have not received any questions or comments from shareholders on this topic.

Thank you. The vote with respect to the approvals related to the amended and restated directors' share and deferred share unit plan will be conducted by online ballot. As noted, if you have previously submitted a completed proxy and you vote again during the online ballot during the meeting, your online vote during the meeting will revoke your previously submitted proxy. If you've already voted by proxy and do not wish to revoke your previously submitted proxy, please do not vote again during the online ballot.

I would ask that all registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders complete the online ballot now by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on their screens. Please complete the online ballot now by selecting the applicable voting options on the voting panel displayed on your screen.

Thank you. Ms. Henderson, has any other formal business come in from shareholders that may be properly brought before this meeting?

Mr. Chairman, I can confirm we have not received any questions or comments from shareholders, specifically relating to the formal business of the meeting.

Thank you. As there is no further business, I now declare the polls closed. The final report of the meeting will be made available following the meeting under our corporate profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com. This concludes the formal business brought before the meeting. I wish to thank you for attending, and I'll now declare this meeting to be terminated. At this time, I'll now ask our management team to make a presentation on the developments of Ceres Global over the past year. Following the presentation, we will provide an opportunity for questions from the floor to both Carlos and myself.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. We'll go through the presentation here. Obviously, we already went through the forward-looking statements. And I would like to introduce the meeting by introducing the purpose of Ceres because everything that we do and everything that will be discussed in this presentation, should be aligned with our vision, our mission, our culture and values. So at the very basic, our vision, why are we here? We are here because we enable our customers do great things in the food, agricultural and energy space. Ceres is essentially an enabler. What do we do? Our mission. We partner with growers and suppliers to provide high-quality products and supply chain solutions to agricultural, energy and industrial customers, using our diversified asset base. How do we work? Our culture. This is the engine of what we do. We want to make sure we're safe because we want to make sure every employee goes back home in the same shape or better relative to what they came that morning or evening to work. We are a focused company. We are flexible. We are fun. Nobody wants to work 18 hours a day and do not have fun. However, we do hold each other to a higher standard. How do we win? These are our values. This we hold very high. We have many businesses, many functions, so it's extremely important that we collaborate. It's very important that we're precise not only for trading and positioning, looking at businesses, but we're going to make sure our employees operate under high integrity and follow all the rules and regulations in the markets and businesses where we operate. We want to create value, and we [indiscernible] very important. Everybody has to own the outcome here. No one is going to blame anyone for not doing their job. Everybody owns the part of Ceres' success. Again, I felt important that I wanted to go through this first before we start talking about the business, and this should make sense to all of you going forward. But what is Ceres? We consider ourselves a market leader. We are top 3 by volume, serving U.S. and select international customers with our core ag commodities, which are durum, oats and spring wheat. The company has evolved from a terminal asset infrastructure to a strong, stable and customer-driven merchandising network to enable repeatable earnings. As we started and we can see in this picture, we started with a terminal asset base around Minneapolis area and Duluth. After that, significant improvements in adjusted net income [indiscernible] grain origination assets to complement this terminal network. Our terminal network is extremely important, but without our origination assets starting with Northgate in about 2015, then we added Delmar, which has [indiscernible] in Manitoba, then we added Nicklen Siding, and then we added the latest 2 JVs in Thief River Falls, Minnesota and Berthold, North Dakota. And this cannot take place without a diverse and experienced team across our business units. Again, we are an enabler, but no company in North America has the position that Ceres has been able to establish. We're enabled by connecting farmers and suppliers to customers around the world. We have deep customer relationships, both in the U.S., Mexico and around the world and a strong market reputation. We have a unique and diversified asset base with origination assets both in the U.S. and Canada. Most companies, most of our competition are either Canadian-driven or U.S.-driven. We operate in both. We have direct farm origination and procurement now. We operate in an attractive market. We have consistent and high-quality demand for our products. And we have and developed the ability of long-term regenerative agriculture solutions. We have optionality across our supply chain. [indiscernible] the importance of precise trading and risk management. We have to understand what's going on in our markets in order to be successful. We add value across the agricultural, energy and industrial supply chains and now through regenerative agriculture initiatives. Well, we're going to make sure our businesses are complementary to each other. And as you see, we are truly a North American supply chain. We operate and create value in every country, Canada, U.S. and Mexico. There is no other company that has origination assets in this 2 origins and shifts as much as we do to Mexico. We also have a global supply chain outside North America, mainly Western Europe and North Africa. Complementing our business, we have a nonagricultural supply chain, which is essentially we transload industrial products. And in the energy space, we've created a JV called the Gateway Energy Terminal. I will get into further details about these businesses later in the presentation. What is Ceres by numbers today? We have about 170 employees. We have 11 company-owned locations. We operate 4 joint ventures. We have storage capacity about 1 million metric tons. We have 3 million metric tons, which we handle per year, and we surpassed the $1 billion mark as far as sales. And last year, in a difficult year, we generated over USD 47 million in gross margins during fiscal year 2023. What are our business segments? We're divided in 2 sites. We have grains and oilseeds merchandising side, and we have value-added operations. Our real focus of our business is our core commodities. Our products are 3: durum, spring wheat and oats. What's the commercial activity, essentially, we originate and merchandise these products. The complementary at commodities is our second segment. Our main products there are canola, rye and organics. We originate a merchandise as well. Most of the time, we do not use our terminal asset base. We go directly from either our own place or third party to a destination, but we leverage our core product infrastructure for these products to do well. In our value-added side, we are processing, which is essentially a soy-crushing business in which we process soybeans and produce soybean meal and soybean oil. We have a small seed retail business today. Our commercial activity is essentially to originate, processes beans and merchandise the product. All these 3 segments are and will be closely interconnected by regenerative ag. We're striving to create sustainability solutions in these 3 segments via regenerative ag. That's the reason that is in the middle of this business segments. On the non-ag supply chain services, we manage non-ag products. Natural gas liquids or NGLs, lumber, fertilizer and industrial products. What do we do? We essentially inbound truck from Canada, transload in our facility in Northgate and ship it by the BNSF to the U.S. or inbound by rail into Northgate, and we ship products into Canada. We also have our Gateway Energy Terminal joint venture with Steel Reef. Let's look over our grain merchandise and overview. We have a robust network of strategically positioned assets, which allows Ceres to operate as a low-cost provider with extensive access to the U.S. and Canada. This enabled us to offer customized solutions in the supply chain area and regenerative ag. What are our objectives? Our objectives are clear in our core products. We want to be the #1 durum company, servicing U.S., domestic market and U.S. export gateways. We want to be the #1 oil supplier to the nonintegrated market in North America. And in the spring wheat, we want to be the #1 supplier to Mexico and mid-tier U.S. mailing market. These are simple or clear objectives that we have. We also want to maximize other related businesses and opportunities near the origination areas of our core products. In the graph here on the left, you can see how much we've grown strategically. We started with our terminal assets, and then we've added origination assets in the areas which is products have grown and we added destination assets where we believe we can help distribute the products from these origins. So we added Nicklen as a tremendous [indiscernible]. We added Delmar, TRF, Thief River Falls and Berthold Farmers Elevator. We also have access in [indiscernible] in Saginaw, Texas, Louisville Kentucky with a joint venture with CGB where we can distribute oats. We also have a put-through agreement to do export business out of Houston. At times, it's better to export out of the Gulf versus export out of the lakes where we have access to European or North African exports when the lakes are closed, via our put-through in Houston. Our strength in the grain merchandising side, we have a competitive position in our core ag commodities. We have -- we need to compete with the big companies, and we are extremely competitive to be able to do so because we are focused on these 3 core commodities. We have an on-terminal infrastructure that gives us stable volumes for serving these large customers. We do a lot to just-in-time inventories to segregate qualities. That's how we create value. And we want to be a low-cost operator, utilizing our [indiscernible] assets and utilizing its complementary businesses to further reduce costs. And now we want to -- we are able to offer tailored regenerative ag solutions to our strategic customers. In the soybean crush on the non-ag supply chain services, essentially a soybean crush works around our Jordan soybean plant, you have a picture there? It's the largest soybean crusher business in Manitoba. We expanded its capacity by 50% in 2021, but we also added storage for meal and oil [indiscernible] and provide better service to our local markets. We essentially buy the beans and distribute the product locally to an extent. We position ourselves with local farmers and provide solutions to our strategic customers in the local markets we operate. We have established key strategic initiatives regarding sustainability and regenerative agriculture solutions with this customer. One important aspect is that we added renewable fuel customers as an outlet to our soybean oil. We believe to be the only crusher in Manitoba that has that access. And as we all know, this is a market that is growing, and we're going to have the optionality to sell our oil either locally or to renewable diesel refineries in the U.S. The Supply Chain Services, which is non-ag products, something to add that is a newly expanded pipeline connected to a Steel Reef's fractionation facility in North Portal, Saskatchewan. There's a picture there when we inaugurated the facility, and those are the storage bullets, where we start propane and butane, and this is how we have evolved as a gateway joint venture, which allow us to increase and be more efficient loading NGLs, increase our capacity, and we're extremely well positioned to satisfy the expected demand coming from the United States for these products. Lumber and travel volume provides additional outlet for Saskatchewan producers, and we believe this is going to continue to be a steady growth. We have a fantastic business with Coke industries on the fertilizer side, and we're experiencing stable growth. We transload chemicals for the petroleum industry and this will continue to have incremental growth with our ability to expand potential storage capacity in Northgate. We're very proud of our team because they are very agile and equipped to accept these new challenges and opportunities as they emerge in our facility. And I would not be doing justice to talk about our supply chain services without showing a picture of our facility at Northgate. It is impressive as it is strategic and it borders the U.S. and has the direct access to a Class 1 railroad on the BNSF. It is extensive, there are 1,300 acres. As you can see, we have a grain operation with a super-efficient 2 loop tracks that can load unit trains of grain. We have a big fertilizer warehouse, which is leased to coke. There's our chemical transloading business. There's an LPG or NGL transloading. And to the right, you have an updated picture is what we showed before. The Gateway facility here is to the right below, where we now are connected by pipeline and we're transloading the NGLs into railroad cars to go to the U.S. market. And we also have our industrial products where we handle the material on the same site. What is impressive is the amount of open space, and that is our job of our team to continue to develop and evolve the facility. There's plenty of things that we can do here and there's plenty of things that we're working on, given the strategic location of Northgate. How does the Ceres' strategy progress? And I think we saw this in last year's presentation, but it's nice to update because it's an upward trajectory. Everything started in 2015 when we established our Canadian [indiscernible] Northgate. We hired talent, we sold some assets that were underutilized and we established compliance and risk management procedures. We define the identity of Ceres from being from just storing grain in Minneapolis terminal assets and selling it later, but the market changed and we need it to be something different. And that's what happened. By 2018, we became a traditional grain marketing company and a return on equity, we're not -- we obviously identify what customers are needed. We increased trade flows, both in the U.S., Mexico and abroad. We see origination to support our terminal assets. We established the strategic JVs and we added complementary businesses to leverage and lower efficiency plans. All I have to focus on what we've done in the last 2 years, which we've taken this traditional grain marketing model, and added a solution-based grain marketing model because we start with a customer, you remember our mission starts with the customers, which really enable them to achieve great things. We want to deliver superior value to customers as a lean execution-focused company. We can now be on competitive servicing these customers. Therefore, we have rationalized our asset base and the businesses that we operate. We sold [indiscernible] business. We sold our business in Manitoba, our seed business. And we also sold assets last year in the form of Port Colborne. We want to be a solutions-oriented partner with key customers and suppliers. You saw Northgate, we want to maximize Northgate's full potential. There's plenty to do there. And we want to be clearly to be an enabler of regenerative ag practices. We also further refine and develop a more robust compliance and risk management programs. How are we going to grow from here? By being creative. We're going to have strategic partnerships as the ones that we've done today. We're on to divest of underutilized non-core assets and core businesses, and we will establish margin protective trade flows. For [indiscernible], regenerative ag will be a great enabler for us to achieve this. And obviously, our return on equity has trended higher by becoming a solution-oriented company. This is another way to tell the story around adjusted net income, which we believe historically shows what our operations can do. We had some big costs in the past but are not reflective to the true operations of the business. And we also have the gross margins around that. So the trajectory is good. Well, not always, the price of our stock has reflected that trajectory. But for the most part, we're trending in the right direction, tells you the major things that we accomplished during those years, which I have spoken. But I think the nice thing this year that we have a great start. We already have higher adjusted net income relative to last year for 2019, '20, just after finishing Q1, we're looking to build into that great start this year. How do we do last year? And we presented this during the meeting. How do we score? We wanted to be the safest place to work. Given the metrics that we use, we did okay. We were very close, but we were not below [indiscernible] that we set up to accomplish. We say we want it to be the most preferred place to work. I think we did a tremendous work here. We promoted from within for key positions given the caliber of talent. We are very proud of this and you'll see when I show our executive team, most of us were promoted from within the company, which tells you the caliber of people that we are producing here at Ceres. We wanted to simplify our business model. We divested our non-core businesses and nonstrategic assets, as I already spoken to. We wanted to achieve gross margin objectives. Here we did okay. I think we achieved adequate margins despite a very volatile macro environment. And it's still happening today. Russia and Ukraine was a big input for us, an unexpected input and it continues to bring random volatility [indiscernible] but until the conflict is resolved, it could always get worse. We wanted to develop supply chain solutions driven by regenerative ag initiatives. We're doing this. We have acres already signed. We've made meaningful progress in a growing market, partnering and enabling customers in meeting their regenerative ag goals. We want to reposition our brand, focusing on Ceres grains, our core products supply chain and regenerative ag practices. I am very happy to report as we have 10 meetings in the U.S. and abroad, Ceres is recognized as a market leader for the core products we handle. Customers, the market wants to hear from us, wants to understand what we're doing. And in many ways, we lead the industry. What are our strategic initiatives for this coming year? And I will expand on them in future slides. But they're very simple. We continue to identify and create partnerships to expand grain origination. We will continue to deploy regenerative ag solutions across the supply chain. Nothing happens without maximizing the earning potential of our assets, which are many, and they're not cheap. So on the way on creating partnerships to expand a grain origination. Greenfielding anything today is extremely expensive. That's why we need to partner and be creative, how do we grow. We are going to partner with the strategic suppliers where we originate our core products. And in areas that have a stable production that we can potentially expand that and good access to rail logistics. We will partner with the independent growing comparatives for projects and key origination areas. That's what we did with our JVs. We'll continue to expand and leverage our existing assets to increase volumes and efficiencies. We did that in Thief River Falls. It was a small elevator, now is a state-of-the-art unit loading facility. Same with our crush plant, we expanded by 50%, which is significant. We will continue to deepen our relationships with existing suppliers and joint venture partners to form farther and stickier long-term partnerships. We'll continue to optimize our asset mix, potentially selling nonstrategic assets to generate capital to invest in our core products or pay down debt. We will continue to deploy regenerative agriculture solutions across our supply chain. Why are we doing this? Because our end-user customers are asking for them. They don't know where to start, and I think the industry don't know where to start in many ways. But we are providing solutions that helping meet our end-user regenerative ag goals. We want to keep it simple on providing tangible solutions. We will connect our growers to the end-user businesses. We have to make sure that they're confident in what we do with science-based outcomes. And this is very important to grow the business. What are they asked from the grower from the farmer? The one has to be transparent and very easy to implement. They don't want to be over-complicating things that they don't understand. And they want Ceres to advocate, to promote what they're already doing. But most importantly, why is this important for Ceres? Why do I talk about it so much? Because we will capture increased value in our core commodity portfolio. This enhances the 3 core products that we're dealing with today and where we're going to grow. It strengthens our value proposition to our growers, to our trade partners and our end users. This creates a significant opportunity to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. We believe we're ahead of the game, but everybody's catching up and we'll do everything we can to stay ahead of the game. That's our goal. And as I said earlier, this is very much aligned with our vision to enable our customers, achieve their regenerative ag goals through our proprietary offerings. That's why this is so important for us. And how we're going to maximize the earnings potential of our assets? As I said earlier, we need to maximize revenue. As you say, our trajectory has been really good with precise trading and positioning and high asset utilization of our core products. We remain a cash trading entity, and we have to make sure that we're reading markets right, and we're executing on that. We want to leverage our key terminal asset network to maximize the throughput of our origin elevators. Our terminals should be viewed as an extension of our interior elevators. Very few companies have the luxury, especially doing harvest as we did this year. A lot of we move, plenty of facilities were full. We were able to move that volume to our terminal assets. We're going to continue segregating identity preserved and regenerative ag volumes to meet the needs of our customers. And we always focus on our core product lines to maximize the increasing value of our assets. These are the products that were high volume that is going to allow us to reduce the cost, and it's going to allow us to bring new opportunities for us and our customers. And we need to manage the overall fixed costs, capitalize on incremental revenue opportunities. What is the team that is going to help us do that this year, and I am extremely proud of our team. It's a very dynamic executive team. It's commercially driven, but all our functions are represented here. As I said earlier, five of the members here were promoted from within. We are very proud of that. And for this year, we have 2 new faces, James Mowbray, our VP and Director of Operations; and Jennifer Henderson, the Vice President, General Counsel and our Chief Compliance Officer. They are great additions to our team, our culture and our values, and this is a team that is going to lead Ceres to achieve what I just discussed. With that, I'll open the floor for questions.

Thank you, Carlos. This is Jen. I am reviewing the questions box. Currently, there are none. Can wait for a moment. There appear to be no further questions, so I can turn it back over to our Chairman, Mr. Vanasek, to close the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for attending today's meeting. You may now disconnect.