Conference Transcript - PAHC 2026-05-27

Operator

Good morning, John Block and Stiefel, and next up we have Fibro Animal Health. We're welcomed by the company's EVP of Corporate Strategy and CEO-designate Danny Bentheim, Glenn David, CFO, and COO Larry Miller. I'm going to turn it over to the Fibro team. We're fortunate to have them join us again this year. Guys, we really appreciate it. I think they're going to go over some slides, a lot to talk about, and then earmark some time at the end for Q&A. So all yours.

Larry L. Miller, COO

Thank you very much. It's great to be here, and thank you for taking your time to spend it with us this morning. Before we begin, I just want to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement. Basically, the text on this slide outlines the information presented today may contain certain forward-looking statements or projections, which may be subject to certain risks or uncertainties. Please note the legal disclaimers in this slide, including the disclaimer related to the use of non-GAAP financial measures. So a little background on Fibro. First of all, we have been in business since 1946. We have currently about 2,500 employees with several major manufacturing sites around the world that produce our products. And we produce about 70% of all the products that we sell go through one of our plants around the world. Customers in nearly 100 markets or countries now. And we listed on the NASDAQ as PAHC back in 2014. and we have a growing business our revenues for our last financial year which ended June of 2025 were just over 1.3 billion dollars so a little bit about our business as we look at it by specie first of all or by segment we'll talk more about this in the coming slide but we have three main animal health categories the first is what we call our animal health business then we have our mineral nutrition business and performance products so the mineral nutrition business is a primarily a North America focused business this is largely mineral nutritional products that are used either in customized premixes that we may make for any of our key customers or sale of mineral or metallic based trace minerals that go into animal diets and then performance products is more of a legacy business that we've had in the past that sells products to basically large manufacturers, particularly in the area of dental and hygiene. When we look at our species mix, poultry is our largest. So in poultry we're talking about broilers, and we also do business in egg layers, as well as turkeys, which is an important market in North America. second species is designated the maroon or the the brickish colored here that's our beef segment so beef in primarily feed yards animals that are finished on high concentrate diets dairy products represent 14 percent of our business and swine about 12 percent in the all other category we have many other businesses including some of the mineral businesses the performance products ethanol and our companion animal business. When we look at geographic mix, the United States is nearly 60% of the business. We have a very important business as well in Latin America and Canada. In Yima, which is a Europe and Middle East region, and APAC represents about 7% of our total sales revenue. When we look at the animal health products, so again, three main categories that we classify as our animal health business, the first is medicated feed additives, the second is nutrition specialties, and the third is vaccines. In the medicated feed additives, so these are in-feed products, a key segment here is the anticoxidials. So these are products that are fed to animals, and in most cases, coxidiosis is most prevalent in broilers as well as in cattle. So we have a nice following the acquisition that we did about 18 months ago. We have a really comprehensive set of products that we offer here. In these products, there are categories called ionophores. There's also synthetic products. So we're able to provide, in many cases, people, particularly in broilers, will do rotation programs. And so they will want to use, you know, every six months or so, do a rotation. So we are able to offer a number of products, including combination products, to help them manage coccidiosis in their operations. The second is antimicrobials, and these are products that are active against bacteria. These are used for both the treatment and control of diseases in livestock. Third segment in the medicated is the anthelmenics and rumen function. So some of these are parasiticides for internal intestinal parasites. as well as products that help prevent bloat in cattle. And then the other, we have several products here, including MGA, which is a really important product that's used particularly with finishing feedlot heifers. In nutrition specialties, the ruminants category, most of these are focused at dairy. And then we have monogastric, both for swine as well as poultry. These are phytogenic products. They're non-medicated products that are used in feed, and we have some mineral-based branded products that are used across all species, and then very importantly, the companion animal We have two products that were categorized here as a nutrition specialty family. Within our vaccine, we have conventional products. These are all poultry vaccines that are marketed internationally. They're not in every country with the exception of U.S. The U.S. has different regulations than Europe and many other jurisdictions. So these are conventional registered products for broilers. We also have autogenous. These are custom-made vaccines. So we isolate a virus or bacteria from a veterinarian from one of their farms, and we produce a customized vaccine for them. These two businesses are based in the United States, the TaylorMade Products, and Fisheild in Brazil. still. And then we have MVP adjuvants, which we use in adjuvants. These are novel adjuvants that we use in our own vaccines, but we also supply these to several of the key manufacturers of animal vaccines. As I mentioned, 70% of our products we produce in one of our plants. This is a snapshot, an overview of our 15 primary facilities. These are all global facilities that provide products to our network, and of these medicated feed additives, about eight of those 15 vaccines, four nutrition specialties, one, and mineral nutrition, two. So now I'll turn it over to Glenn.

Glenn C. David, CFO

Thanks, Larry, and thanks, everybody, for joining us this morning. I'm just going to cover a few financial slides, starting with a little bit of a view of our historical revenue growth. So if you look over the past five years, we're very proud of our performance that, on an organic basis we believe we've been outpacing the overall market growth for the livestock industry if you look over the last five years our historical KGAR is about five percent and this is five percent reported growth which includes all impacts of foreign exchange so a really strong performance in terms of our overall growth if you look at this slide this just summarizes our net sales and adjusted EBITDA and it really shows the impact of the Zoetis MFA portfolio acquisition that we completed last year. Really stepping up our revenue from a billion 18 in 2024 to a billion 296 in 2025 and you can see our guidance this year is from a billion 460 to a billion 500 in revenue. So a big step up in revenue and even more important a big step up in EBITDA. If you look at fiscal year 2024 about 111 million dollars and the guidance this year just two years later, $247 to $255 million, so significant growth. Just a few weeks ago, we reported our Q3 earnings, and we also updated our guidance for the full year, and we essentially raised the lower end of our guidance range, so essentially raising the midpoint. Our revenue guidance, as I mentioned, $1.460 to $1.500. At a midpoint, that's about 14% growth in revenue. EBITDA, 247 to 255. At a midpoint, that's about 37% growth in revenue. And our adjusted net income of 122 to 127, that's about 47% growth in revenue this year. Again, benefiting from the acquisition of the Zoetis MFA portfolio, but still strong performance in our legacy business. On the previous slides, I talked about that our historical growth on an organic basis has been about 7%. For fiscal year 26, year to date, we're going at about 6% on a legacy basis as well. So strong performance in the legacy business as well as very strong performance with the acquired portfolio. And then just looking at some of our key capitalization metrics, I'll start with leverage. We're currently at about 2.8 times net leverage. When we announced the acquisition a while ago, we expected to get to under three by fiscal year 27 because of the strong performance from an EBITDA perspective we've been able to do that at a much more rapid basis the other thing I'll point out here is our free cash flow for the trailing 12 months it's been about 13 million dollars that's been negatively impacted by a buildup of inventory a due to the transition with the Zoetis MFA portfolio but also you know some areas in advance of the impact of some tariffs as we move forward we do expect you know significantly greater free cash flow generation moving forward and then And finally, we do pay a dividend as well of about $0.12 per share. So with that, I'm going to turn things over to Donnie.

Donny Bendheim, CEO

Excited to be here. I'm taking over as CEO beginning July 1. I think historically one of the things about Fibro is we've taken advantage of the safe harbor within animal health as far as not necessarily talking about our pipeline. I think one of the changes you'll see as we go forward is we will slowly but surely become little bit more transparent about what we're working on um and and look forward to sharing that with with everyone in the community here first i want to talk a little bit about um so some of our product innovation our nd pipeline um on the vaccine side um you know we're very excited about our new newcastle strain of the genotype 7. so it's it's actually it's a re-emerging strain historically genotype 2 has been kind of the dominant strain but you're seeing now throughout the world genotype 7 we have a really good uh couple of vaccines there and we're actually seeing a lot of interest one of the things about the vaccine industry or the vaccine business that i think um if you follow you'll see is it's it's a very strong and steady growing business and there's also like an optionality to it because every once in a while there's a pop on the on the disease and we've seen that in brazil um with our uh you know infectious bronchitis disease and ibvar 206 and that has been one of the drivers in the past few years and we look at Newcastle G7 as potentially being a similar pop so we are excited about our products there and the pipeline there we're expanding to new markets and adding manufacturing sites, I think you saw on Larry's slide there, we have Sligo we acquired that a number of years ago, it's taken us a little bit longer to get that up and running but we're about I mean we've started our sales now and we're reaching the point where actually that will become a significant part of our vaccine business And then finally, we have inactivated aquaculture vaccines. I don't think we've actually talked about that in the past. That's focused on med marines, so those are the Mediterranean species. We think that there's a real opportunity there. It's not as big as salmon, but it is a largely unmet area relative to the other producers out there. As Larry touched on, MFAs. On MFAs, there's more development than there is research. one of the idiosyncrasies about the United States is that if you have if you're looking as a producer to use multiple vaccine, multiple MFAs at the same time, multiple Medicaid feed additives, you actually need what's known as a cross clearance and if you are using a competitor's, if a customer is using a competitor's product the competitor has to decide whether or not to give you the cross clearance or to give you access to their safety file in order to get the cross-clearance. So as you can imagine, sometimes if you have a limited portfolio, you don't have the ability, even if your product works, to get it into a feedlot or something of that sort because there's a competitive product that's also being used at the same time, and they don't give you a cross-clearance. Well, with the Zoetis acquisition, as Larry mentioned, we broadened our portfolio significantly, which now allows us to a certain extent to get cross-clearances among our own products. It also gives us more to talk about with competitors out there as far as cross-clearances with their products. So it is something that we look at as an area we are able to leverage, and also, as Larry mentioned, within rotations, which is not using at the same time, but that's also an area where we can bundle and able to give our customers a full solution. On nutritional specialties, we are working on sustainability. We'll talk more about that in a second, and pathogen defense. We have a relatively new facility in Menden, Illinois, that is a farm, a research farm It's also a BSL level 2 facility, and we see the ability to, you know, get our products faster to market now that we have that facility. Finally, companion animal, small part of our business, but we are growing. We have two products on the market, and then we have an in-licensed molecule for canine periodontists. I was hoping that the previous panel was going to name that as the unmet need. And then we have a gene therapy for mitral valve disease. Those are both not near-term items. Those are a little bit further away. But we do believe that those will be areas that we will succeed in later this decade. And finally, again, on sustainability, we'll talk about that soon. One of the areas that Glenn didn't really talk about, But at the same time as we did the Zoas MFA acquisition, we internally have gone through something we call Fiber Forward, which is a transformation process. And the growth that you've seen over the last couple of years, we haven't given separate guidance as far as the financial impact. But some of the above average impact you've seen on the legacy business has been through the Fiber Forward initiative. And just here, we want to touch upon a couple of areas. Now, when I look at Fiber Forward, it's not just the kind of the bottom line impact. I think it's really taken us from being a big, small company to being a small, big company. And it's really given us the ability now to seamlessly integrate an acquisition such as this OS acquisition and future acquisitions, I think. Going through here, we've strengthened our strategic alignment. We have a strong vision, purpose, and values that cascades through our company, cascades through our customers. All initiatives are tied to our priorities. And that's something that we've seen now over the last couple of years. We've strengthened our commercial policies and tools. We have skew rationalization, pricing governance. We have a churn desk, key account management. I think historically, if you went back five or six years ago, price was not something that we looked to raise. We looked to grow by volume. Now there's volume and price as really part of our regular cadence. We've improved our cross-functional collaboration. We've gone from siloed functions to an integrated global supply chain, procurement, and technology organization. We've established and are establishing SNLP process that's taken a little bit longer than we had hoped for, and we've seen a little bit of a rise in our inventories as we go through this process, but it is something that we are working very hard on and integrating throughout our business. And finally, we've made a lot of investment in our digital platforms. Our learning and development platform, we've added Viva for R&D and regulatory. We have a new T&E process, and our transportation, our TMS, the transportation management system, has been implemented for North America. Let me just touch on this before we get to the sustainability. A couple of business updates, these are all things that we discussed that came out after our last quarter, but before our last earnings call. I think the biggest one, and this unfortunately is a headwind, is a Brazil regulatory update. About a month ago, Brazil announced that they are looking to phase out the use of growth promotion, of molecules for growth promotion. We have a couple of molecules that have growth promotion claims within Brazil. One of them has therapeutic already. One of them does not. So virginia mycine does not have within Brazil therapeutic. Around the world, Brazil is the last shoe to drop. Almost every other country has done this already and has shifted to therapeutic. Brazil is making this shift now. The last couple of years, as we've worked with them, they promised us that once they announced this, they would then move us to therapeutic. They have not done so yet. We have five more months of this grace period to do it. You know, as we look to outline kind of the, you know, the risks and the headwind for us, obviously the worst case scenario would be that, you know, we can't get the therapeutic by day one of the transition. We are sales in 2025, in fiscal year 2025, we're $26 million. It has a, but we don't reveal gross margin, but it's above average gross margin. Assuming we get the therapeutic, and that's very much our belief, there still is a headwind for us next year. What's going to happen is that whereas producers were able to buy this product without needing a script from a veterinarian, now they will need a script. For our poultry customers, that should be fairly simple. Most of them have their large integrators. Most of them have vets on staff. For our cattle customers, though, that is much more of a lift. And cattle is the bigger of our two markets there. And we do anticipate in the beginning that it's going to be customers who have historically not needed a vet to use our product will now have to get a vet. They can't afford to put their own vet on staff, so they'll be revolving vets. We have set up an online system to help them called FibroVet as a platform. But this is something that will take a few years for us to kind of build back up, assuming, you know, that the transition happens as we expect. and we still don't know exactly what the claims will look like we know what they look like around the world but we don't know exactly the duration of use and the claims the brazilian authorities will give us so we just want to highlight that um in the spirit of making sure that everyone understands kind of the the bookends of and the impact for next year um and then the other the other area i would like to mention is we we did you know with this news have a revolving credit facility upgrade 125 million dollars it was it was oversubscribed um and i think you know it's a good indication of how the financial community is looking at our business so let me talk a little bit about the scope three opportunity this is our product called veritain um and what you know why we're really excited about this um i know you had elanco here earlier today um they have a product that they've introduced into this market for methane this is slightly different so i want to just kind of build some background here um so for those of you familiar with um environmental sustainability there is three different levels of of your emissions as a company you have scope one which is your direct emissions scope two broadly that's your utility so if you're buying from a coal-based utility versus from a solar-based utility you'll have you know in the former case you'll have higher emissions in the latter case lower emissions and then finally you have scope three emissions which is your supply chain and for almost every protein product almost any product you have, 90% of your emissions are from your supply chain, and that's the hardest thing to kind of mitigate. So you have companies out there making pledges, and then one of the surprises to us, I think to most people, is despite the fact that the political atmosphere right now is very much anti-ESG, we are seeing increasing number of companies voluntarily sign up with pledges of setting targets. And typical target you'll set is a 30% reduction in scope three by 2030 versus your baseline year and a full reduction in net zero by 2050. So, you know, while we had quiet quitting during COVID, we have quiet volunteering now, you know, during the Trump administration of people signing up for these targets. So it's a surprising statistic to us. So just to give you a sense of what this means, right? So we just chose five different companies that have publicly announced Scope 3 targets. And listed on the left, some are dairy, some are poultry. When you come to these targets, this is not just methane-based. This is all of your CO2. So these five companies combined have about 18 million metric tons of CO2. And then if you look at it, they're all based on science-based targeting initiatives. that's the gold standard for what people sign up for and they will tell you SBTI will say internally if you're looking to mitigate your carbon output or your scope 3 you should assign a cost of $40 to $100 per ton so kind of do the math take the midpoint here this is a billion dollars of spend that these companies have signed up for now I say that and then note that this is voluntary For the most part, these are companies that have voluntarily set these limits and have set these Scope 3 targets. So whether or not they do it is up to them. And I say that because last week McDonald's announced, I'm not sure if people saw this, that while they've met their Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets, they are only 3% towards their Scope 3 targets versus their 2018 baseline. So they announced that they're not going to hit their Scope 3 targets. At the same time, they announced that they're planning to spend a billion dollars over the next 10 years on their supply chain emissions. So that gives you a scope of the spend required as well as the problem. So it's very hard to mitigate your Scope 3, right? It's feed, it's other things, and there's not many solutions. And that's why we're so excited about this. We've partnered with a company called Vaxa. It's based in Iceland. they basically are producing algae and algae byproducts at a geothermal facility and uniquely they have a carbon negative product and this microalgae then becomes two products a spirulina product which is basically a protein and omega 3 and those carry carbon negative values to them so what we offer and I think the McDonald's is a good example that's hard to get scope 3 it's hard to meet your scope 3 targets we offer a product that will drop in to every diet basically out there across every protein and allows them to put in a negative carbon source right and the math the way that works within carbon accounting is you kind of just add it all up and if you have a negative source that detracts from other stuff right so you can get to zero by using a Volvo truck and you know not having emissions from the tailpipe of the truck that you're using on the farm but more impactfully and this is very impactful is using our products so we are extremely excited about this this is not just in dairy this is across poultry, this is across swine this is across aquaculture it's across pets, it's in pet food you can use this product across all those all those industries and we have worldwide exclusive distribution rights for the animal feed and animal health and pet and this just shows you a little bit of the number of audits and validation you need to go through this. It's a heavily, heavily audited process. And because of that, we're not expecting an impact in our next fiscal year, 2027. We're looking at trials and breaking into places. Most companies have set 20, 30 targets. Though we're going to see in 2027, we're going to start hearing a lot more about this. California has two regulations that begin to impact in 2027 where companies with over a billion dollars of worldwide revenue and the presence in california which is basically every company in the world right um has to start announcing where they are on their scope 3 emissions right and then and if you've made a pledge which again most companies have you have to announce where you are relative to that pledge so that will start in 2027 there'll be a lot more focus on this both at the board level as well as at the consumer level and we are we believe as well positioned as anyone in this area with that um want to just again talk about you know the company as a whole advancing animal health to meet global protein needs we've grown historically through strategic acquisitions and and you know i think our balance sheet continues to allow that we have a diverse products for livestock and increasingly for companion animal we're worldwide and i think we're you know most importantly we're focused on innovation and customer centricity thank you fantastic thanks guys we got about five minutes maybe i'll just kick it off look the company execution has been really, really solid.

Operator

The MFA acquisition certainly worked out, and from what you guys laid out, the Brazil headwind seems pretty small, whether you get the therapeutic claim or not. The stock had a great run, but did pull back pretty significantly on the quarter, so just anything else that's out there? Was it more concerning the livestock market where you lead in or dominant? Maybe if you could just talk to the livestock market overall, the durability of growth that you see in place over the next couple of years.

Larry L. Miller, COO

Larry, you want to talk about the livestock? So we continue to see growth in the livestock sector, particularly with the demand growing for protein. And I think whether you're talking beef, pork, chicken, etc., eggs, that there's continuing in the United States and many other countries demand for high-quality proteins.

Operator

And when you balance that also with some of the trends that we've seen for quite a long time is emerging markets. start to develop and people have higher income they're able to move up the food chain and consume more proteins so you know we see good um continued run in as far as demand for proteins okay and even when we hear about you know herd sizes and maybe shrinking here in the u.s the comments that you just made seem to imply you see some durability behind those growth rates is that is that a fair assumption yes okay um maybe i'll just bounce over to scope three because you were just talking about it is the point there like look how the exact timing and when this unfolds is a little bit unknown but the ball's rolling it's moving in the right

Donny Bendheim, CEO

direction you're uniquely positioned to capitalize on it and do we think of that as sort of as like gravy in terms of that was a pretty robust slide on the R&D pipeline you know that's gonna drive growth for fibro and then when this hits whether it's 28 or 29 or maybe even later it's additive on top of that is that the right way to frame it I think that's fair yeah the train has definitely left the station and it's gonna happen and but you know we can't we even internally don't know you know how big is big and and so we I think we internally frame it just like you did of saying hey we've got our pipeline as you see as we showed there and that's gonna drive you know kind of the the growth

Operator

that we've guided to over time and you know this will be you know gravy on top with that okay guys if you have any questions to throw up your hand a couple more for me there was a huge step function on growth on the mfa acquisition i mean that slide that you threw up there on not only the revenues but obviously the profitability as well when we think about that r d pipeline slide that was up there i know there's sort of limited disclosures that you may want to give but what are the timelines behind some of those projects and how do we think about you know part of me like avoiding that air pocket right that has tripped up some other animal health companies what do you think about the cadence of the r d pipeline yeah i think when you look at it john right some of the things that we talked about the life cycle enhancements geographic

Glenn C. David, CFO

expansions things of that nature those are in the shorter term term cycle right the companion animal opportunities some of the sustainability solutions as donnie mentioned that's probably you know sort of later in the decade and as we look at it you know when we look at our long-term you know view of how our revenue is going to grow right so you know supported by the r d we see the mfa sort of growing in that low single digit range we see vaccines in the mid to high single digits and we see the nutritional specialty as well in the mid to high single digits and that's supported by the R&D pipeline and then to your point things like Veritaine companion animal those are sort of on top of that and will help us drive even even faster growth in the long term and do we think about that R&D pipeline I know there's a lot of projects up there but is for all the gross margin accretive to where Fibro is today yeah absolutely I think when you look at in terms of the vaccine portfolio companion animal nutritional specialties. The areas that we're investing in most significantly from an R&D perspective do come at higher margins than the MFA portfolio.

Operator

Okay. And maybe just even, you know, it's a good time to maybe talk strategic as well. That was a big step function for the company on the MFA acquisition. You put the balance sheet to work. I think maybe some people were hesitant on the leverage, but it seemed to all go very well. You quickly paid it down. I think you alluded to 2.8 times net leverage. Where are you willing to take that? Are there opportunities out there where you can sort of run a similar play, which was obviously seemingly very successful for the company?

Donny Bendheim, CEO

You want to talk about the opportunities? I mean, there's constant opportunities. I don't think there's another Zoet SMFA acquisition that was a unique set of circumstances. But, you know, I think historically we've grown through kind of smaller bolt-on acquisitions and I think we continue to look for that and if something transformational came along we would entertain it but I think long term we do want to get back down to keep it under three so it would have to kind of pay for itself fairly quickly.

Operator

Any other questions? We're at time. Guys, thanks very much for the presentation. Appreciate it.