Conifex Timber Inc. (CFF) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Conifex Timber Inc. 3Q 2024 Conference Call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Ken Shields. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Thelma, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to this call covering our third quarter and 9-month results for 2024. My plan is to briefly update you on some topics that were discussed but not fully completed or dealt with on our last call. And then I plan to review our financial results for the most recent quarter and then will go on and address our funding plans and performance expectations for the remainder of this year and the following year. Our President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew McLellan is with me; and so is Chief Financial Officer, Trevor Pruden. And all 3 of us would be pleased to respond to questions analysts may have at the end of the call. Quickly dealing with the housekeeping item. We will be making forward-looking statements and references to non-IFRS measures and therefore, call your attention to the customary warning statements that are set out on the first 2 pages of our MD&A that we released yesterday afternoon. On our last call, we spoke quite a bit about the May '24, 2023 decision that the Chief Forester of British Columbia made establishing a new allowable annual cut, or AAC, for the Mackenzie Timber Supply Area, or TSA, the new AAC was set at 2.39 million cubic meters. And that was roughly 20% lower than the multi-decade harvest that -- where we have the information over the last 30 to 40 years. The harvest in the TSA is now being sourced from green stands because the beetle-killed stands no longer have any commercial value as sawlogs. And we operate the only sawmill complex at the Mackenzie TSA and our two-shift sawlog requirement is approximately 800,000 cubic meters. So you can see that the TSA is capable of producing 3x the consumption requirements of the only sawmill in the interior region. So in the third quarter -- in the most recent quarter, the Forest Minister released his apportionment decision, and he aligned the harvest levels of our tenures with the aggregate harvest level in the TSA. And harvest there is approximately 640,000 cubic meters more and it's a 19% reduction from levels formerly. But if you take a look at Page 2 of the MD&A we released yesterday afternoon, you can get further details as to the composition of our harvest. The main consequence of the apportionment decision is that our internal timber supply is now 640,000 cubic meters or 80% of our annual requirements while we have open market sawlog purchase requirement of 160,000 cubic meters. If you look at the other tenure holders in TSA today, you will see that there's 1.6 million cubic meters of annual harvest that is available to be sold to fiber deficit mills. So the sawlogs of 160,000 cubic meters that we require is only 10% of the available supply. And this brings us to our key point that the Mackenzie timber supply area has the largest surplus of sawlogs of any timber supply area in the interior region of B.C. And that's actually the reason that we do not anticipate any challenges securing sawlogs going forward. There are two other developments that have been impacting log costs in our region, the first is that Andrew and his forestry team combined with a leading independent forestry adviser examined the supply-demand balance for sawlogs in timber supply areas that abuts the Mackenzie timber supply area. And the conclusion from their analysis is that the sawlogs -- or pardon me, the sawmill closures have been so significant, and it now appears more sawlogs will be available and can be consumed by the remaining operating sawmills. The second development is that the Ministry of Forests has fine-tuned its methodology for determining cost allowances and stumpage charge impositions and corrected the minor inequities in the Mackenzie TSA. These adjustments which enabled us to achieve a modest reduction in our delivered log costs in the year-to-date period, coupled with the aforementioned change in supply demand dynamics, we believe these 2 factors have the potential to provide us a much more affordable log costs in 2025 and beyond. So summing up, the move to a green harvest and these other ministry initiatives are enabling our Mackenzie site to migrate to a lower and more enviable ranking on the North American industry cost curve for SPF lumber. And this explains why our EBITDA losses in 2024 were lower than those incurred in 2023, which, of course, all of the other public lumber companies have incurred higher losses in 2024 than in '23. So our Q3 results were entirely consistent with the guidance we provided to you on our August call. Our negative EBITDA of $3.9 million in the quarter was lower than the $7.1 million loss we reported in Q2, and lower than the $6.7 million EBITDA loss reported in Q3 of last year. This year has improved as the [indiscernible] and that translates to CAD 50 million, which is more than $1.20 per Conifex share, which, of course, is more than 3x our current trading price. I want to talk about strengthening lumber prices. We have solid evidence that Western SPF lumber prices are strengthening. Our average lumber selling price realizations in the third quarter were in Canadian dollars, CAD 436 per thousand board feet and we shipped 29.3 million board feet. Through the first 6 weeks of the fourth quarter, we shipped 12.2 million board feet of lumber. But the key point is that our selling price realizations are in Canadian dollars, CAD 512 per thousand board feet. And that's a 17.5% improvement over our third quarter. So that's where we are so far in the quarter. And this has all happened because I'm so pleased with the way the Conifex sawmill and sales teams have worked to boost our lumber selling price realizations. The green log diet, of course, is helping because we're selling way more lumber at price premiums rather than discount. But the one factor that takes a bit more investigation is that our sales realizations were up 17.5% and the benchmark SPF price was only up 11% over that same period. And the benchmark price is based on 2x4s. But when you look at today's lumber prices, you'll see that the wider width 2x8, for example, trades at a premium of $40 over 2x4, while 2x6 and 2x10 are trading at premiums of over USD 100 over the 2x4 price. So the 17.5% increase in sales realizations that we experienced reflects important progress our sales and manufacturing teams have made modifying our diameter outturns at the mill and capturing the price premiums that are available on wider wood products. So looking ahead to the end of this year, we expect lumber prices to remain firm mainly due to supply contractions coupled with some strengthening in demand as interest rates moderate. Given our expectations for lumber prices at a minimum, we expect to record a dramatically reduced EBITDA loss in Q4, while there's a real chance we could report positive EBITDA. Looking ahead to next year, our main objective is to move to a 2-shift operation at our sawmill complex. You'd all be familiar that a 2-shift operation makes it easier to achieve positive EBITDA because we've got double the shipments, and we're able to spread our fixed costs over a higher base of production. The main factor holding us back from migrating to a 2-shift operation is that we lack the borrowing headroom to double our investment in log and lumber inventories, which have to take place in Q1 of 2025 to sustain 2-ship sawmill operations when logging is curtailed in Q2 of '25. So we're working collaboratively and constructively with our existing lenders to explore how best to move to a 2-shift operation and concurrently maintain a liquidity cushion that's appropriate even after funding seasonally higher working capital requirements. Closing our discussion today with our recent legal challenges, our MD&A reports over the past several quarters have talked about the plans we had to leverage our power expertise to develop a complementary business that would boost the sustainable and predictable cash flow generation. We've talked about how our plans were halted in December of 2022 when the provincial cabinet instructed BC Hydro to suspend the electric power interconnection transactions that we were working on with BC Hydro. And we continue to believe that the moratorium, the provincial cabinet imposed against a certain class of customers and removing us from the interconnection queue are not legally valid and are unjustified. And so this is why we're appealing the decision of the Supreme Court of BC. We've made it clear that our primary focus in this area was on computationally and power intensive HPC or high-performance computing and artificial intelligence use cases, and we expect the BC Court of appeal will hear our case before the end of the year. So in conclusion, Andrew, Trevor and I, thank you for your interest in Conifex, and we all look forward to responding to any questions analysts and shareholders may have. So we'll turn our meeting back to our operator, Thelma. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] There are no questions registered at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Ken Shields.

Okay. Well, everyone that's on the call, thank you for your interest in our company, and we'll take the lack of questions as a sign that we covered off the key needle-moving points that are impacting our growth and profitability as we transition through 2025. So we have a bounce in our step. We like having the price improvement wind behind our back, and we're looking forward to a very successful closing quarter and 2025 year. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you for participating in the Q3 Conifex Timber Inc. conference call. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.