Green Plains Inc. Q1 FY2022 Earnings Call

Good morning and welcome to the Green Plains, Inc. and Green Plains Partners’ First Quarter Conference Call. Following the company's prepared remarks, instructions will be provided for Q&A. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Boggs, please go ahead.

Alright. Thanks, and good morning everyone. Welcome to Green Plains, Inc. and Green Plains Partners, First Quarter Earnings Call. Participants on today's call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Patrich Simpkins, Chief Financial Officer, and Leslie van der Meulen, EVP, Product Marketing and Innovation. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find it on the Investor Page under the Events and Presentations link on both corporate websites. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's press releases, and the comments made during this conference call and in the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Form-10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone and thanks for joining our call today. Our recent announcements demonstrate that our ongoing transformation continues to gain steam as we achieve milestone after milestone. Achieving 60% protein concentrations is an event that we have been aiming for and discussing with you for some time, and we announced our success a couple of weeks ago. Our commercial progress on protein and high-value ingredients is exceptional as the team has added new customers across multiple species. We also encountered significant challenges in the quarter. Overproduction from the industry resulted in high ethanol inventories, which led to an extremely challenging margin environment. We had 36 distinct individual operating days where we could not get adequate rail service to operate one or more of our plants and increased corporate costs due to one-time reclassification of compensation, along with additional one-time legal fees. This all impacted our quarter negatively and should not be recurring, other than wage inflation which Patrich will discuss later on. Overall, our ethanol crush margins were a negative $0.07 per gallon in the quarter. However, I am happy to report that since the end of the quarter, things have changed for the better. Ethanol margins have improved significantly from the lows we experienced in the first quarter. Today, on paper, second quarter margins exceed $0.25 per gallon in the crush margin, factoring in strong renewable corn oil values and our protein business. We have locked in about half of our open gallons for May and June towards the recent highs. In fact, for the first time in over three years, all of our plants are currently capable of running at capacity. Our multi-year upgrade and modernization program is finally complete with our Madison and Mount Vernon locations returning to full rate, and we have completed necessary grain bin repairs at York. Madison and Mount Vernon are capable of running at rates that we have never seen there before, which is great for the rollout of our protein technologies. We anticipate that second-quarter utilization levels should be strong, subject to rail service, which so far this quarter has been somewhat better. Operating our plants safely and consistently is crucial to our long-term success as we deploy MSC technology across our platform. Construction at our MSC facilities in Central City, Mount Vernon and Obion continue to make good progress. We will continue to post new construction update photos, so I encourage you all to check them out. Current construction schedules now show two of the facilities coming online in the third quarter with Obion in the fourth quarter. This financing allows us to streamline how we fund our business internally, expand access to working capital collateral, while also linking our capital structure to our sustainability goals. Green Plains Partners increased their distribution for the third quarter in a row, rising another $0.05 to $0.445 per unit. This is supported by the partnership’s long-term minimum volume commitments and optimized balance sheet allowing for stable operating results. Green Plains ended the quarter with over $620 million in cash on the balance sheet, leaving us in a strong position to execute on our transformation plan. I would like to turn the call over to Patrich to review both Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners’ financial performance.

Thank you, Todd, and good morning, everyone. Green Plains’ consolidated revenues for the first quarter of $781.4 million were higher than the same period a year ago of $553.6 million, driven mainly by higher prices and run rates. Our plant utilization rate improved year-over-year, with an 83.1% run rate during the period, comparing favorably to the 71.1% run rate in the prior year first quarter. As Todd indicated earlier and consistent with our message in Q4 of 2021, we are now in a position to achieve higher utilization rates across the platform, mainly due to the completion of our modernization programs. The partnership’s stable operational performance and low leverage enabled the partnership to enhance returns to unitholders by increasing the quarterly distribution to $0.445 per unit while maintaining a 1.06 times coverage ratio for the quarter. We continue to anticipate CapEx for the year of $250 million to $300 million based on our 2022 plan and current construction schedules. Our SG&A costs for all segments were $30.9 million compared to $23.5 million reported in Q1 of 2021. The increase of approximately $7.4 million was not indicative of the normalized SG&A run rate for 2022, but it’s driven mainly by a number of one-time corporate expenses. The normalized SG&A run rate for all segments should be around $23 million to $24 million per quarter through 2022. I would like to return the call back over to Todd.

Thanks, Patrich. We have often pointed out late 2022 and 2023 as an inflection point for our company, and we are on track to achieve our transformation. Our protein trial at Wood River was groundbreaking and exceeded all of our expectations. Within five days, we were producing near 60% protein. Our engineers and operators quickly took those learnings from the early days of the trial and began to dial in the mechanical processes. In addition, our learnings also resulted in the ability to achieve record high renewable corn oil yields. The market validation efforts are now underway in earnest, and we are providing quantities to numerous customers across regions. This is a really unique product and a unique opportunity. Currently, we anticipate having additional partnerships on our protein products over the next several quarters. We look forward to keeping you all updated on these efforts in the quarters ahead. While first quarter experienced weak ethanol margins, currently, the balance of the year looks much stronger.

Morning, all. You had a lot of exciting recent news, but successful trials for safety pro and the yields you were able to achieve there and you talk to new protein customers. But broadly, clearly, there is a ton of caution, even fear in this market. So my question is, how can you use what you’ve already accomplished being the completion of Project 24 now, High Pro at Wood River, Shenandoah as tangible as to show the markets that these base numbers you’ve talked to – for 2024 plus are achievable or even have some upside potential to them?

I think the key here is going to be obviously, running at full rate. Completing not just Project 24 but some of the modernization updates post Project 24 will be helpful as well. Also, we just got a new major pet food brand that has approved to supply them products after extensive audits. We are seeing success there, and after we announced the 60 Pro success, we received calls from around the globe from producers in aquaculture and swine who want to use this 60 Pro fermented product. The last time we discussed pricing comparisons, low-quality fish meal in Peru is trading around $1900 a ton, with high quality around $2300 a ton. Opportunities to start to displace other products in those markets are increasing. This is just a matter of not if, but a matter of when.

I just wanted to follow-up on the discussion about the outreach from the aqua feed. What do you see, based on what you are hearing now as the timeline for validation contracts in place to validate the ASPs in a J curve that has been sketched out the last couple of years?

There will always be the need to test and validate the product within the systems of the farmers, but traditionally, you could see still a time between three to six months to really get to the optimal inclusion rate of the product. We believe we are on track for that.

From our standpoint, what we’ll get capital allocation is recurring and predictable cash flows. Capital allocation first and foremost will go against predictable, recurring, and expanding initiatives, which will expand our gross margin percentages. We are still going to make a lot of fuel for a while. So it’s great to see some expanding opportunities there. Our first choice was really around the best location for what we want to show as the future of the bio refinery.

Can you just give updated thoughts if you were to roll out the 60% plus yields across the platform? What that would do to your EBITDA plan?

Yes, if we can execute the 60 Pro strategy, we believe we are going to have a significant opportunity. The real opportunity with this technology is why we made the investment into not only the assets but in the technology itself. If you think about where we are going to have 700,000 tons of a 60 plant base fermented product, that’s really not that much product relative to the demand that is waiting for more products. It’s still not going to be an if but when. I think we are well positioned to execute. Thanks everybody for your participation today. We are looking forward to the next quarter where we will provide further updates. We believe we are in a great place, as all of our plants are back to rate. Our margins have come off the lows, and we are excited about what lies ahead.