The Mosaic Company (MOS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the next session. It's a pleasure for me to host a fireside discussion with Mosaic. I have Bruce Bodine, the new CEO. He's been with the company for 25 years or perhaps more than that. Jenny Wang is also up here. She -- I refer to her as Head of Commercial Operations at Mosaic. I relied on her extensively over time. She's been with Mosaic for quite some time, but she, prior to that, had a 15-year career with Syngenta as the Company Director in China. So she's always my go-to person about what's going on in China agriculture. So I'm sure we'll get into that here.

But Bruce, you've been in the role a couple of months now, been in the company a long time. I'd like to hear your view on how you think you can move Mosaic in a different direction. I thought your comments about Joc on the last earnings call were very appropriate. But it's a fresh view for you. Where do you think you can take this company from here?

Well, Steve, let me start maybe a little bit about me and my background just real quick. But to your point, I entered the industry in '94, so going on 30 years. Just been over 25 years with Mosaic [ or ] predecessor. But right out of school, engineer coming in, worked in engineering and operations in our Phosphate business for about 18 years. Made a pretty career impactful move in 2012 to go to Potash. And I got approach to go to Saskatchewan, Canada, and I can't even spell Saskatchewan. I haven't -- didn't know where it was. But ran our Esterhazy operation for a couple of years, and that was a pivotal career move for me. I don't think I would be where I am today without the opportunity to have seen that part of our business and to see how we transformed that business in part of the time I was there. Also, I had the opportunity to run our global supply chain, which included international distribution in China and Brazil at the time. So I've had an experience that I'm really blessed to see kind of all corners of our operations across the globe in Brazil, in China and North America, north of the Canadian border and south, and yes, really been blessed. And been on the [ SLT ] for 8 years, you mentioned, Joc, but been with him for most of his era as CEO and been there for decision-making on our strategy. And you talk about strategic direction, and I'll get into that in a minute. But Joc really set the table pretty well in his era. And he transformed and strengthened Mosaic in a way that I think Jenny and I and the rest of our executive team are blessed to have the opportunity to do that. He's been a great mentor to both of us, but me in particular. The Vale acquisition that we did in 2018 really broadened our geographic diversity. It brought access in that key agricultural region in a way that we didn't have before. Joc helped transform potash. And if you think about in 2012, when I went up there, we had brine inflow still going on in K1 and K2. Now we're doing a proving run on the first kind of part of the expansion at Esterhazy. K3 had just been approved, and we just started sinking the shafts around that time. And you look at the landscape today and Esterhazy and the Esterhazy complex has really transformed our footprint up there and derisked. So credit to Joc and his leadership there. And then the financial focus that he had with our CFO, Clint Freeland, over the last couple of years really strengthened our balance sheet and set us up for success. It allows for me to really come in with a strong foundation and focus on now what I think is, what we haven't quite got to is optimizing our portfolio, looking for further efficiencies in our cost structure changes and all to deliver higher shareholder returns. My first focus is going to be and high priority is on getting our phosphate production back up to where historical levels have been. Post-COVID, we've really struggled. There's reasons for that. I won't get into them all now, but maybe we'll talk about some more later. Growing our product portfolio. And I think we've had great success. We've talked about that a lot in the past. But I think that differentiates Mosaic and it's something that's going to continue to be a focus of mine and my leadership team, is how do we further decommoditize our portfolio. And we've done a great job of that over the last 15 to 20 years, particularly in phosphates, but also in potash as well. And then cost efficiency is really a place that we're going to focus. We've talked about $150 million of cost reduction that you'll see through G&A and our segment costs. CapEx efficiency, we talked about a $200 million reduction from kind of our high point last year in 2023. All of these about better discipline, continuing to work with our CFO, again, Clint, he and I are very like-minded in this regard. And I think my history and the past is going to serve me well going forward as how do we continue to transform, wring out cost where we can in our global structures and look for ways to deliver more value creation and higher shareholder returns.

Very good. Thank you. Let's start with phosphate. When we look at historical pricing over the last couple of decades with phosphate, nitrogen, potash, and phosphate pricing right now is -- seems quite robust. Can you just talk about the supply and demand fundamentals that are so supportive of phosphate right now? And do you think this could continue?

Yes. Maybe, Jenny, you want to talk a little bit about the market first, and I'll talk about what we're doing on the supply side.

Sure. Phosphate market has been very strong over the last many quarters. One of the reasons on demand side is really the very tight global grain, oilseed stock-to-use ratio, and that has supported a pretty robust farm economics. Some of you may say, well, today's corn prices or soybean prices seem to be under pressure. But I also wanted to remind ourselves, globally, only 30% of phosphate and potash are applied on corn, soybean, and 70% of the phosphate and potash are applied in other crops and some of the major crops like rice, it is at the historical high prices. So that level actually supported very strong demand for phosphates, specifically. Last year, after a very big supply disruptions in 2022 post the conflict in Europe, last year, we saw a very strong demand recovery. Globally, we saw the recovery of the demand of phosphate over 6%. And this year, we're going to continue to see this recovery of the phosphate demand. On the supply side, however, on phosphate, it is a very different picture. The supply disruptions partially happened in 2022 was due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. A bigger driver was really the restriction of Chinese exports on phosphate, and they largely reduced exports almost by half -- by 50% in 2022 versus the previous year. Last year, it recovered a little bit. And then this year, we -- was the announcement out yesterday, we believe this restriction of phosphate exports out of China is going to continue. Very quickly, why the Chinese government is -- has been restricting phosphate export? The first driver is they wanted to keep phosphate and other [ fertilizers ] cheap, available in country for the Chinese farmers to be able to use. So that is really the primary driver for the restriction. The second driver is really the ongoing phosphate industry restructuring in China. So if you recall, the environmental policy change in -- during the 2015 to 2020 years, there were 25% of the phosphate capacities, were permanently shut down by the Chinese government because of the pollution. And then from 2021 to 2023, there is a major shift on the production from phosphate rock, phosphate asset, instead of producing fertilizers and that has shifted to lithium iron phosphate battery. So that battery interest is a net increased demand in China and globally that has shifted to production from DAP, which is the fertilizer phosphate, to LFP, which is the battery. So we reduced production in China and that the government has been very clear. They want to keep their farmers access to affordable and available fertilizer and in the meantime, shifting production to highly -- higher value-added products, LFP. So that basically drives the whole export reduction and restrictions out of China. With the new announcement yesterday, we believe this market is going to continuously to be tight. There's no new major expansion project for phosphate in the pipeline, therefore, this tight supply situation is going to continue.

And so given that, Steve, I mean, Jenny summarized the market well, but tight phosphate S&D, we think very constructive. Just realized stripping margins for Mosaic to be very good going forward. You might see some seasonal dips here and there, but on the whole, very constructive. As for what are we doing about it, we talked about getting back to our historical production levels. We've got to get back to our 8 million ton kind of run rate, and we proved that in '18, '19 and '20. Post-COVID, we haven't done so good for various reasons, but we've been focused on that over the last 12 months. And going into the end of 2024, we should be at that 8 million ton run rate once we get through some turnarounds that we're focusing on, some of the last of kind of the maintenance actors, bad actors in our fleet. And the other one is, I talked about earlier, continuing to focus on our premium performance products, right? We've got a MicroEssentials expansion that is completing as we speak at Riverview, which will bring another 850,000 to 900,000 tons of MicroEssentials capacity to the market. We've tapped out kind of the existing capacity, and we're seeing continued growth in North and South America. So that is an important focus for us. We realize better margins on that, on the production side. And then when we sell it through Brazil, we gain the distribution margins in addition to that. So again, it's a differentiator, I think, that isn't necessarily appreciated as much about our portfolio of products versus just pure-play commodities. And then we did announce last year as well, a little bit of a tangent, but the announcement of our Mosaic Biosciences. And I think, again, further decommoditizing our portfolio and looking for higher value. And we see that segment in time -- I know you have a panel discussion later on biologics, could be significant in earnings growth contribution to Mosaic in time.

Okay. Just two things that I want to follow up with you on, Bruce. One of them is operations. We are going to have the pleasure of touring operations up in North Florida tomorrow. Anything that we might be able to see to highlight just improved efficiency or reliability?

Yes. You should see in the facilities, we've done a lot of work in sulfuric acid. That's been a place that post -- when COVID hit, sulfuric acid plants like to run continuously without shutdown and have 3-year turnarounds. We had to push some of those things out because of just labor constraint, supply chain constraints, and with a fleet of 12 to 14 sulfuric acid plants in Central Florida, you get out of sequence, it's hard to get back in sequence and it takes some time. Throw into that some things outside of our control, which were hurricanes, making the hook into Tampa and threaten our operations and having to shut those down cold at times, we've learned a lot through that. But we're back on track. You should see some shiny, stainless, cladded converters and things like that, that have been replaced, new boilers. So we're feeling very good about where we are from an asset health standpoint on sulfuric acid. You think about it, without sulfuric acid, you can't digest the rock, you don't have heat to do evaporation for phos acid. And then you actually don't make as much power, you don't evaporate as much processed water, our cost structure gets impacted. There's a whole host of cascading events. But look forward to looking at those on your trip. But we're very confident that in the end of this coming year will be at that kind of historical 8 million ton run rate.

Very good. And you mentioned Biosciences, the panel discussion we have after lunch is on biologicals, one of the panelists is BioConsortia, who you have a relationship with. I'm kind of interested in where do you see that going forward. And as a fertilizer producer, do you see the potential for these biologics being blended with P&K and that they could be distributed in bulk that way as opposed to, I think, most of the industry that's heading down this path of biologics? It's more of the crop chemical industry move in that direction where it would be more of an application, a spray application or a seed treatment. How would you -- how would this work for Mosaic?

Let me answer the question a little bit differently. But I'm going to turn the biologics side to Jenny because she oversees Mosaic Bioscience. But first, we're looking at it as kind of our specialty fertilizers. We haven't branded at that yet, but that's kind of how we think about it internally. So there's two parts to that. One is our performance products and then the other is the biologics that you're talking about, is two kind of major things. And the performance product side, all of which enhance either soil health or yield for farmers on the same fixed amount of acres. So we're very proud of those products. But on the performance products, we're launching a new one called MicroEssentials Pro, that is our next generation of MicroEssentials product. We're seeing -- we're doing field trials right now in Brazil and getting results. Seeing above last generation MicroEssentials, it was a 3% increase in soybeans, generation-to-generation, on MicroEssentials, which is about an 8% increase versus the commodity approach, right? So good value on the farm. We haven't yet decided when we're going to launch that product and where, but we want to get through these field trials and make sure we're comfortable with the results. But that also will provide us patent protection on MicroEssentials out through 2038, which again kind of differentiates us and protects us in the marketplace on that more phosphate performance product. And I'll let Jenny talk about the biologics.

Sure. As you mentioned, Steve, that we actually started the investment by partnering with some of the companies that you mentioned on R&D side, 3 years ago. These relationships are still ongoing. We are looking into nitrogen-fixation materials. And we are making some progress, and we are aiming for solid robust data in order to support our commercialization. So that is ongoing. We acquired a small company 2 years ago with -- along with their technology platform they call PGPR, Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacterial, as a consortia of the [ bacterials ]. What that [ bacterials ] consortia do was really to help to improve the uptake of the new transpired crops and eventually improve the yield. And we launched that -- two of the products from that platform over the last 2 years, we made some significant progress. Steve, probably we will be able to share with you more specifics later in the year, but very significant growth on these two products, especially one of them called PowerCoat. You mentioned the coating products. This is basically a coating product, the coating including [ bacterials ]. The [ bacterial ] coating product can be sprayed on dry fertilizers, NPK. And then that is going to -- that actually improved the uptick of NPK for the crops, therefore, to improve yield. So coating on the dry fertilizer is one of the way that we are commercializing our biological products. And that's the space we are at. We are the major player in North America, and we are the biggest distributor in Brazil. So the space, the market access, the fact -- the access to the customers give us this opportunity to have the coating biologicals applied on the fertilizers. And you mentioned on the seed treatment and also foliar application, we have the products that are going to be applied on seeds, especially wheat seeds that we're looking at, seed coating, the biological products, and also fully application [ bypass ] is one of them. So all in all, our current market access to the majority -- the big part of the North American market and Brazil and also China, India give us confidence that we will be the one to commercialize this biological microbial product in the near future and really adding value to our business and differentiate ourselves from other commodity producers. In fact, we launched this platform in Brazil last week. So -- yes. So expect to have more updates going forward, Steve.

Very good. Thank you. Let's switch to another business of yours, potash. That kind of historical price chart that I mentioned earlier, potash price is not where phosphate prices are right now. Why is that? What would you say is driving global supply and demand fundamentals in potash that are not as constructive right now?

I'm going to turn it to Jenny, maybe just like we did on phosphate, talk about the market first, and then we'll talk about what we're doing on the supply side.

Yes. There are dynamics between phosphate and potash. And phosphate, it's very tight, driven by this restriction of supply out of China. Potash, it's relatively balanced. If we think about the demand destruction in 2022, that was purely driven by supply disruption. And that demand got recovered in 2023 last year. The demand recovery on potash globally was over 13%. And that recovery last year on the demand side really happened in four of the five major potash markets. So these four markets are North America, the recovery was up to 27% last year; Brazil, 18% recovery; and India, 18% recovery; China, 22% recovery. So last year, four out of the five potash markets got a strong demand recovery. And this year, we are going to continue to see the recovery really in the rest of the market that usually people don't pay attention to. One of the major pent-up demand market, which has had underapplication of potash over the last 2 years are Malaysia, Indonesia, the palm plantation and rice market. We are seeing very strong response starting from Q4 last year and Q1 this year. And we are expecting to see some major recovery in the rest of the Asia, the countries that I didn't mention, and most of the Central American market, along with European market, which was also underapplication on potash. And we have seen the yield impact from the data from FAO. So on the supply side, there were some recoveries of potash export out of FSU. Russians made their exports recovered pretty strongly starting from the second half of last year and so has Belarusians, and through rails to the ports in Russia and through the rail to China. So to your question, Steve, on why we haven't seen a stronger price reaction on the supply-demand reaction, I would say the major supply recovery out of FSU was starting from Q4 last year. So that actually added pressure to the market while the demand was recovering very strongly as well. We believe this market is going to be balanced out. And Mosaic is playing a role in that. If you -- I think Bruce is going to talk about our announcement made last week. We are responsible that at the market -- when the time -- when the demand is there, and we are meeting our customers' demand. But in the meantime, we are looking for value, the value to the shareholders as well. So back to the overall S&D, we believe potash market is a relatively balanced market this year. The demand is going to be strong. And as I mentioned in this market, much-needed replenishment of potash in this market. And on the supply side, we expect the Russians will be back to the pre-war level, and Belarusians will back to 80% to 85% of the pre-sanction level in 2022. And lastly, I would want to say, with all the sanctions against the Russians and Belarusians and also all the troubles they've gone through on the logistics that has added significant cost to serve for these producers, so if you think about cost curve of all the potash producers, it's pretty flat. But if you think about the cost to serve, moving the tons produced in Belarus and Russia and out through 7000, 8000 kilometers railway either to China or to the ports in Russia, that adds significant cost to their cost base. So with that, we believe the base for the overall potash market are much higher than people like to see, just see back to 4, 5 years ago. So...

Steve, bottom line, we see things being constructive in the short term. The economics were a little difficult for our [ Calanti ] operations. So we've built a potash business in Saskatchewan to be flexible and agile. We've exercised that before, and we exercise that again today. And we can quickly shut that facility down. We can quickly ramp that facility up. It is our highest cost facility. And given the economics of the day, it just made sense to take action on that, if not now, when is kind of one of those deals. But we'll continue to watch the market, watch value, as Jenny said, prepared to ramp right back up as market and shareholder value intersect in the right way. In the meantime, we continue to free the runway, if you want to look at that way for our two horses, which is Belle Plaine and Esterhazy, those are our solid low-cost producers, Esterhazy being the largest potash mine in the world. We continue to look at some brownfield optimization there. We're doing a $55 million investment at K2 mill to add what we call hydrofloat technology. That takes out prior to crushing for flotation the [ mids ] size and floats that right out. So that debottlenecks, all the downstream equipment and actually provides more milling capacity through the mill, that floated material becomes a crystal granular product, which is a highly coveted product in North America as well as China, and we do see a premium on that in certain markets. So excited about that, which, again, if you think about Esterhazy, the cost and scale, incremental cost for 400,000 additional tons, which is what this is going to get at $55 million, is over 75% unlevered after-tax IRR. Kind of one of those no-brainers, what are you waiting for. But the incremental cost is so low, almost free, if you want to look at it that way to get those tons out of there. So that's what we're doing on the supply side.

And let's get on Fertilizantes here at the end, your outlook for that business down there. It's production, but it's distribution and you're continuing to expand the distribution model. Is that the future of that operation, to continue to get more and more market share in distribution in the country?

Well, Steve, we are extremely happy with that acquisition. We're extremely happy with the distribution business in Brazil. We see a lot of synergies. And the way we operate, we're quite integrated with our North American and South American production into -- once we satisfy the North American need from the North American production, Brazil is our next biggest area to go. And to have that market access is a strategic focus for us. And I think it works well for us from an economic standpoint in that large growing region. And we've been in that region for over 2 decades in distribution. Our brand is extremely well. We've got world-class assets in the right locations. So what we can do with that network is extremely advantageous to us. We have struggled with some inflationary pressures on the production side, primarily, but it's affected everywhere, We're looking at the $150 million of cost reduction to help offset some of that. We've had some production issues in South America similar to what we've seen in North America, not at the same scale. We're getting back to full production there. We think that the inflationary pressures, we've got a good path to offset a lot of those and continue to be very competitive and advantaged in Brazil. And the distribution, as Jenny was talking about earlier, with our biologics and our performance products really brings to scale access in that key market, and we see a lot of growth there. So we'll continue to invest there. We are investing in a 1 million ton distribution in the north in Palmeirante. So today, it's 9 million tons of distribution at a $30 to $40 kind of average distribution margin. And then we are expanding that million tons, which will be done in 2025. And then we also, and I think it's underappreciated, to have $100 million of EBITDA contribution in coproducts down there. So we sell gypsum. We sell excess sulfuric acid and other coproducts. So you think about on the EBITDA of that business, that's a significant portion of the earnings power down there.

Any comments on capital allocation. Anything changing for you there?

Yes. No, still the same, Steve, and real brief, I mean we've got a great policy that we've been working through and approach. It's invest in the business. It's strengthen and optimize the balance sheet. And then it's to give all our remaining free cash flow to shareholders. I think we've demonstrated that very well over the last several years, particularly last year with $900 million debt refinanced and we've given $1.1 billion back in share buybacks and dividends, increased our dividend last year at 10%. So that focus remains the same, and those three pillars are going to be where we focus and concentrate.

With that, we are out of time. If you want to catch up with them, come up here. But please join me in thanking them for this presentation.