Nutrien Ltd.'s (NTR) Management Presents at Bank of America 2021 Global Agriculture & Materials Brokers Conference (Transcript)

Nutrien Ltd. (NYSE:NTR) Bank of America 2021 Global Agriculture & Materials Conference March 3, 2021 2:00 PM ET

Company Representatives

Pedro Farah - Executive Vice-President, Chief Financial Officer

Jeff Tarsi - Senior Vice President of North American Operations

Conference Call Participants

Steve Byrne - Bank of America

Steve Byrne

Welcome back, everyone. My name is Steve Byrne, and it's a pleasure for me to host a fireside chat with Nutrien. We have two from the management team with me today, Pedro Farah is CFO and he is with us, he is to my right up on the screen. He’s been the CFO for two years. He previously has been with some very large companies, Treasurer of Walmart, he was at Walgreens, Dell, General Motors, so glad to have you Pedro.

And we also have Jeff Tarsi. Jeff is down in Memphis and he is Senior VP of Nutrien Ag Solutions North American operations. They have 800 retail facilities in the U.S. and 300 in Canada and we will have plenty to talk about with the retail business of Nutrien. I toured a cotton farm with Jeff about 15 years ago, I want to say. It was the only cotton farm I've been to, but Jeff knows it very well and I learned a ton from him. That was back in his UAP days. So it’s a pleasure to have you both with me today and welcome.

Pedro Farah

Thank you.

Jeff Tarsi

Thank you, Steve. We look forward to it.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Steve Byrne

Good. Let me start us off with a retail question being last Friday, we published a Ag retailer survey that we run with – through Purdue University and we've been doing it for many years. We collaborate on the questions and then they blast it out to the retail channel and I get the data and then we analyze it, and we published it last Friday. And it's probably been the fifth year that we’ve run the survey through Purdue. And this one was by far the most constructive and differentiated from all of our previous surveys.

The - it wasn't just us a leaning towards optimism, it was by far the overwhelming majority of respondents responded to questions about their expectations for increased fertilizer applications, increased crop chemical applications, increased pricing, more or less a mix shift up in seed pricing, crop chemical mix shift up, so pretty positive across the board for well, your retail channel - your retail business sells. So just wanted to bounce that off of you. Does that seem reasonable? Is that consistent with what your own expectations are for the retail business for 2021?

Jeff Tarsi

Yes, Steve, and so, if I think about it now, I looked at the survey as well and really didn't have to have a survey, because we're out working with growers on a daily basis. We have a very relationship-driven business, as you know, when you've been out visiting with us before.

But if you just take, when we see and say what a difference a year makes, and if you look at commodity pricing and where we were sitting a year ago versus where we’re sitting today and it's basically across all broad acre crops, whether you're talking back corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cotton, sorghum.

We get into Canada and we look at barley and canola. We're seeing drastic price changes from a year ago. And if you think about it, we've been in a, what I would call a commodity pricing slot really since sometime in late 2013. So we've been about seven years or longer in what we would call – under a lot of pressure from a commodity pricing standpoint.

So to see these commodity prices respond back like they have, to see the ending stocks of where we are on corn and soybeans and even cotton inventory being depleted some, is cause for great optimism with our customers. And I like to refer it to going into a year like this is where we go into – a grower goes into a mindset of swinging for the fences, and they want to hit a home run. And this is an opportunity as we say to make hay with higher prices, they are going to try to produce every bushel of yield they can on a given acre of land.

And so we're either confident or not, we do a lot to help them with a lot of their planning. From a crop planning perspective, Steve, and so I think we saw last fall, it started with that they were eager to get P&K out and in a large part a lot of areas get a lot of nitrogen out from NH3 and we'll see them go into this season with our seed bookings. If I look at our book-to-date, it looks very healthy.

These guys want to play out the best germplasm, the best trade packages, and they are going to give these plants all the nutrient they need to produce. They are going to take care from a weed control standpoint and a nutritional standpoint. They are going to protect it against disease. And those are the things that we expect them to do in times like this.

And so yes, we do feel good from that standpoint. And look, it's all about return on investment and we want to try to lead them to the best path forward to take advantage. We don't know how long these prices stay this way. There is a lot of opinions out there today, but it looks like a good period for agriculture state.

Pedro Farah

Yes, the only other thing that I would add, Steve, if you don’t mind to – certainly probably modesty from his side is that, retail is also aimed to reduce their cost structure through this year and continues to do so. So I think that is independent of prices in the future, that kind of lowers the break-even or lowers the cost structure for the business. And there has been margin expansion as there have been a penetration of private brands as well. So well, prices may fluctuate, I think those are sort of heavier variables that are probably going to help us in whatever price environment we have in the future.

Steve Byrne

And so I’d like to hear the views from both of you on further acquisitions or bolt-on’s in retail and maybe have different views. But how much bigger could your market share get in retail, where we kind of have you penciled in at roughly a 20% market share of U.S. retail, maybe it's a little bit north of that, particularly in Canada? But where do you think it could go? And I guess one of you is - could address it from the perspective of the commercial benefits of having a larger footprint or more facilities? And maybe from your perspective, Pedro, are these bolt-on acquisitions generating high returns?

Pedro Farah

Yes, maybe I can kick this off and I’ll pass it on to Jeff. But obviously, we see no impediment for growth into much larger percentages, of course. We have been gaining market share about 1% on a year over the past five years and part of that has been tuck-ins, but part of that has been organic growth. I’ll say in a kind of a 50/50 basis as we go forward. So a much higher penetration in the U.S. is still possible, of course, to get to a number like 30% we’ll probably need to do a larger acquisition.

But the gradually increase, the rate of 1% is possible. And just to – before I pass it on to Jeff, in terms of the profitability of that, of course, all the purchases that we have made for tuck-ins are not homogeneous. So we look at those from time-to-time and we look at them and all-in-all we are kind of very happy with the returns that we have found. There has been a previous – we have been buying at much lower multiples than our retail business would command. So we are happy with the acquisitions that we have.

But in the future, we have other means to grow it as well. So I think we can do less tuck-ins and do - and grow more traditional, more through other products, more through greater penetration of accounts and more with services, including financial services as well. So that is more related to the U.S., but we also have acquisitions outside of U.S., but maybe I’ll park it here and let Jeff comment on the U.S.

Jeff Tarsi

Yes. In our past, Steve, we’ve been very active in the acquisition side of things and retails dating back to 2008 when Agrium and UAP came together. And so we've always been a big player in that market. I think we'll continue to see those tuck-in opportunities. The pipeline is still pretty decent right now. I get a lot of questions with the market's moving up like they are. Does that diminish the opportunity? And in some cases, it can.

On the other side of it, it’s offset a little bit from the standpoint that we got a new administration that went in, in January. And so a lot of these independent business owners asking themselves what you think is going to happen with the tax structure there? So they - those two things kind of counter balance each other out in my opinion.

With it, obviously, as Pedro just said, we get a lot of benefit, especially on tuck-in acquisition opportunities. Most of the time or nearly all the time, these independent businesses don't have their own proprietary arm of the business. So we're able to integrate our proprietary offerings like Dyna-Gro and level of the products into those businesses immediately. We have some supply chain efficiencies that we are able to bring to the table as well, and they help us as well from an OpEx standpoint and a branch rationalization standpoint as well.

So as these things come up, we continue to look at them. And if they make sense, we continue to be aggressive and act on them and such and they've been a nice part of our growth. As Pedro says, we’ve made a lot of other growth opportunities outside of that, especially as it relates to organic growth, and I'm sure we'll get into some of that this afternoon as well.

Pedro Farah

And, Steve, if I just could comment on acquisitions outside of North America, because we have made a significant acquisition in Australia, and we have made a number of small acquisitions in Brazil, and I think we are particularly happy with those. I mean they have performed extremely well. We're very happy with the integration process that we have had in Australia, which exceeded our original expectations.

So if you look on a year basis, even in a tough year like 2020 with COVID and all that, more than 60% of our growth in EBITDA actually came from outside of the U.S. So those are positions, even though they are small businesses to grow a margin and the growth potential have been fairly robust and we intend to continue to grow those as well, especially Brazil where our share is miniscule at this point.

Steve Byrne

Jeff, you’ve made a – you commented about a few things that are attractive about these tuck-ins. You mentioned the proprietary products, so you get a higher margin out of that than the original owner of the retail even had access to. So that's really more of a margin expansion driver.

But then you also have the benefit of being able to carve out some of the back office costs and so forth of a facility. And then you also have, I assume, the benefit of increased density. So that if you have a competing retailer surrounded by Nutrien retailers, that acquisition has some obvious benefits to you. How would you rank those in terms of value creation?

Jeff Tarsi

Yes, and they all play a part in that value creation. I think when, look, I worked at the M&A side of our business for 12, 13 years. And I always thought that these opportunities, probably if I had to rank them, I’d say that proprietary products opportunity to inlay those products into that business would be number one.

I think the supply chain efficiencies would probably be number two, and relationships that we have with the basic manufacturers and such and being able to create some additional opportunities within that customer base, and then you mentioned the OpEx side of it yes. So a lot of these businesses might have someone working in accounting. They might have someone working in inventory management and we do that on a centralized basis, so that brings efficiency as well.

So it all adds up to me and to a really nice advantage for us. And - but if I had to rank them, I’d rank them along that proprietary products play and that supply chain side of the plays well. And then, Steve, another thing that we don’t factor is, in a lot of instances that business might have an asset that we need or an asset that we would have to go build. And I'm always in favor of not having to add infrastructure to the business if we can find an opportunity like an acquisition and we don't have to put another asset into that network and such.

So all that plays very favorable for us. And like I said, we’ve been that aggressive for a long time. And we think over the years, we've done a really good job of integrating these opportunities as well into our business.

Steve Byrne

So let’s drill into the proprietary products a bit, and you know Pedro you're in Loveland, Colorado right now. That is certainly one of the proprietary product line, the crop chemicals, and Jeff you mentioned Dyna-Gro the proprietary seed business that Nutrien has.

On your last call, your last earnings call, made a target of how much of the – I forget if it was EBITDA or gross profit, that would be from the proprietary products as a contribution to the retail segment, is currently 23% and been flat at that level the last couple of years and you want to go to 29% in two years. My question for you is, how you're going to get there? The value proposition seems pretty obvious, but how are you going to get there?

Pedro Farah

Yes, I think there are two questions, and I’ll let Jeff speak specifically about the U.S. portion of it, because obviously in the U.S. we continue to or in North American general Jeff, we continue to expand and increase that percentage. But also and I think as Jeff alluded to, both in Australia and Brazil we have not only acquired more businesses and more licenses, but also all the licenses are proprietary products we have available, as soon as we make an acquisition as big as Realco [ph] all those products flow into the new network that we have acquired.

So there is like an immediate lift that we gain as we increase and make contact positions of size outside of North America. But we have been fairly successful in also increasing the percentage in the U.S. Maybe Jeff, I’ll pass it on to you to speak to that.

Pedro Farah

Yes, I think the unique thing and I talked a little bit earlier about we’ve been successful in integrating and you know if you go over to Australia, you look at that, the landmark business that we started with there. So we got a really good track record, that's what excites me about that Realco opportunity. We know we’ve integrated that our level of products and proprietary business into that landmark based business and now we've got the Realco business and that will make that same integration into that business Steve. The U.S. businesses is a more mature business Steve as you know, but we still have a lot of opportunity as it relates to proprietary.

I'll start off with the seed side of the business, and whether we are in Canada or whether we’re in the U.S., and if I look at our Dyna-Gro business or our seed business in the U.S. today, we are very balanced along our fertilizer shelf and our crop protection shelf. Where we are unbalanced is that seed shelf of our business and we think there's a lot of growth opportunity. We don't think, we know there's a lot of growth opportunities there. And as we continue to reach out and expand share across that seed platform, we’ll be bring Dyna-Gro at the same base of that business. So that’s going to help us from the seed side of the thing.

We've backed integrated ourselves really nicely as it relates to the nutritional markets. You know if we look at what we've done with Active Growth and that acquisition and the investments we've made CHVow and Agrison, we think that nutritional market is steadily a growing market for us and so we're going to be able to expand ourselves around plant nutrition and around soil health and soil science.

We bought Waypoint Analytical which is a soil and plant tissue lab that’s headquartered out of Memphis, one of the largest in North America and we’ve seen our soil sampling and the [inaudible] analysis really increased over the last year and that's going to yield – the more testing we do, the more analysis we do and the more expansion on those products we just talked about that we see coming along.

And the other naturally lift we are going to get year is the last two years Steve, and I know you follow production really close, but in ‘18 and ‘19 we had really tough years, as far as getting our crops in and how we got started on those markets. And so when things get delayed, we see a lot of products either get delayed or get left off and especially as it relates to some of the pre-products and such. And a lot of those are products that we have that are priority to us in our Loveland offering.

And so it’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2021, is with that fall we had last year we are prepared to plant today, no matter where you are in North America, and I think we're going to see just some natural expansion on that proprietary side of our business, just from picking up some markets that got, that either got minimized or just didn't get used at all. I’ll think we’ll have an excellent burned down market and with burn down comes a lot of our proprietary adjuvants and surfactants and drift control agents and stuff like that.

So this is not a – that number that you talked about, that's not a number pulled out of there. We very carefully looked at it and we've got a plan for how we want to get there.

Steve Byrne

And would you say that the growth in Proprietary Crop Chemicals is getting a supply – getting more supply agreements from your big suppliers, you know i.e., you carry a, you know a branded funded side which you get a supply agreement that you could then incorporate into our Loveland brand. Is that the type of Proprietary Crop Chemical opportunity or is it that Nutrien establishes your own registration for products and you have producer economics, because you can pull the product in from India or China and you formulate it yourself. Which of those is the growth engine for you?

Jeff Tarsi

I think it's a combination of all of them Steve. You know we obviously work very closely with what I call our original registrant or our big suppliers and you know when the lifecycle of the product, you know products go out path and they can compost that and those companies bring out new products. They start putting their emphasis on the new chemistry that's coming into the place and as that lifecycle and exchange takes place, we’ll bring those, some of those products into our Loveland brand.

And a lot of times Steve, we like – you know we are not an R&D company, but we are doing a really good job with this is reformulating products, and looking for ways to take older products and make them better, make them perform better, make them give better ROI for our customers and such.

So we have taken products like that, we’ve got a number of products in our arsenal, where we've done that. And look, where we can on a post patent product, where we can work with the original registrant or sourcing that active ingredient, we do. And where we can't, then we can also go offshore and pull-in active ingredients in each. We’ve got our own formulating facilities where we can go in and formulate those products as well.

But we've got, you know our platform is really wide as it relates to proprietary starting with the seed, the seed treatment. Whether it’s burn-down products or pre-emergent or post-emergent herbicides, you mentioned the plant health fungicides, and then I certainly don't want to be emphasized that nutritional product portfolio that we have and what that bring to the table. So it’s really from start to finish and across a multitude of crops as well.

Steve Byrne

Pedro you mentioned you know Brazil, and we had the pleasure of Andriy Dias on an event that we had last fall, and just curious as to your view about whether you can grow that retail business in Brazil as fast as it has been growing over the last year. Is that your expectations?

Pedro Farah

Yes, I think there are a few things about Brazil. Number one, our relative size is very small, so we have less than 1% share. Number two, is of course the market continues to grow incredibly fast and not only its growing, but it's a profitable market. So the margin structure of the market is good.

What also that forwards us to do, is to not have a shotgun approach, but more of a rifle approach Steve, in a sense that we can focus on an addressable market within that market that plays to our advantages. So our approach is an approach that has a selection of certain kinds of growers, certain regions and certain crops. So that is what we can add the past value to our customer there.

And even with all of that, we see a lot of growth and that has already, all the acquisitions that we have done as of recent has performed extremely well, which gives us more confidence to book more there, because we have announced fairly having investment on our board and our investors will like to know that you know the investments we have made has been returning and they have.

So in addition to that we have a very robust pipeline of acquisitions in Brazil. We of course are very careful of not overpaying. So we are – and Brazil is of course a market that has a lot of risk and volatility. So we are very careful in our due diligence process in Brazil, but we have a number of different companies where we have been very successful. Our corporate development team here, it’s very good and I think it’s – we are also getting much better integration into Brazil as well. So it's prospecting, deal making, integrating and operating all things that we have done very well elsewhere, and I think in Brazil we have demonstrated their as well.

So we are very positive about it. I think there are also many avenues to grow. So have a plan A, a plan B and a plan C. So if certain things don't pan out there are different alternatives to get to what you want to get to, no matter what individual deals get done.

So I think that gives us a lot of confidence. The infrastructure in Brazil is great. You met Andriy and I think he's putting together a phenomenal team in Brazil as well. So in Brazil you need to have a very – you need to have a very competent team, because it's a tough market to navigate through.

Steve Byrne

I received a question on the portal, asking you to comment about your, you know this carbon capture opportunity or regenerative soil or carbon sequestration opportunities. Can you give us an update on where that whole imitative stands and how do you think you might be able to benefit from this initiatives?

Pedro Farah

Yes Jeff, do you want to speak about that or do you want me to speak about it?

Jeff Tarsi

Yes no, listen, I’ll say it’s a – Steve, you know it's probably one of the most talked about things in agriculture today. You know the last 12 to 18 months, digital’s kind of been at the forefront and now sustainability and carbon really take up a lot of air time and I see it in our retail network and I see it as a real opportunity. And I see it as an opportunity because we provide inputs to our customers, but really at the end of the day what we do is we provide solutions for our customers.

You know as much as this sustainability piece is talked about and as much as carbon is the forefront, whatever's going to happen in that market is going to actually have to happen down at the ground level to feel with the producer and so that's going to involve a lot of education at that level, and it gives us an opportunity to sit with that producer and strategize about what's the best approach to fulfill you know kind of what society wants out of this piece of it, and what parts of agriculture plays in this side of it.

And so we’ll use a lot of our digital tools to sit down and do a field plan and as it relates to carbon and sequestration, you know what cover crops do we want to plant? What crops are we going to follow that up with? What's the fertility program that'll go around that? We have a lot – you know we've been talking about our proprietary products, but we have a lot of products in our arsenal Steve that play right into that carbon, into that carbon strategy as it relates to that.

And looking at our grower season opportunity as well – that you know most of these programs, that a grower has got to be able to see a way that it benefits him to some degree, to monetize. There’s some some extra efforts that have to be made here and I think the way these programs and the pilots that we’re running, you know you could say that there are some dollars attached to that.

And I like you know federal from a big nutrients standpoint. We’re kind of playing the middle man in this piece of it and connecting the grower with what that business gets out trying to purchase those carbon credits. And so again, if at the end of the day for me, it just makes us even more sticky with our customer, and look, our customers, our growers, I can't think of anything that they value more, of trying to take care of our planet in ways that they can do things and they can feel good about what they're leaving for future generations in this business, and I think we're very – I don't think – we're very proud of the part that we play as well, but you know when I look at it purely from a retail perspective, I see it as an opportunity for us, I do.

Pedro Farah

Well said Jeff, and I think – the only thing that I would say is that there are a number of different political stakeholders there, I mean in terms of [inaudible], farmers, suppliers and all of that and we're in a very good space to actually connect all those dots. And we have line of sight for 100,000 acres in our pilot program this year, when we’re intending to expand this in following years and pretty much like Jeff said, is working with all of them, establishing the baseline, providing all the solutions that will reduce their carbon footprint and then capture some of the credits and see how we can facilitate the trading of those carbons at a later point time in too. So almost like the three stages of that and we think we can help in all of those.

Steve Byrne

I guess one of the mechanisms to drive more carbon sequestration in the soil is no-till as opposed to you know cultivating. Does that generally mean more burn down and is that generally favorable for you?

Jeff Tarsi

Yes, and look, we've – you know if I go back Steve to the days when I was on the farm, you know tillage in general has probably been reduced 70% since I left farm in the mid-80’s. I mean it's remarkable just how much less tillage we do today and sometimes when we're doing tillage, we’re doing strip tillage on that side of it, but I don't see it affecting what we do from an input side of things. It might change up the approach that we take a bit from that side of it and work – you know a surface applied pre-emergence of burnt down versus an incorporated chemistry or whatever with it.

But we’ve got those tools out there to-date, they exist. I don't think they have to -- they won’t take away from yield in my opinion on it and you know we're getting with our digital tools that we have today and that's where that today the piece of digital is so vital to our business, because we can overlay layer after layer after layer of data and have – be able to provide good direction to our customers on what's the way that’s most beneficial for the environment and at the same time creates a good ROI for the customer and a good yield.

You know we are trying to do two different things here. We are trying to build some stocks back up on the grain side of things, and we are trying to treat our planet much more carefully as well with it and I think we can do both.

Steve Byrne

And I'd like to ask a question about the Dyna-Gro seed business that you have, the proprietary seed business. Is your share of the seed that you sell through your channel, that proprietary, if I understood you correctly Jeff, did you mean that your share of that proprietary seed is low relative to your share of proprietary crop chemicals?

Pedro Farah

No, that wouldn’t be accurate. What I meant Steve is that our share of seed in general is much lower that our share of crop chemistry and nutrients across our retail, across our retain business. There is a lot of reason for that, that market strategy in the mid-west, you know if you’re looking at the pioneer model, it’s been quite different than go-to-market strategy with crop chemicals and fertilizers and stuff with it. But we do a good job on a percentage basis of putting our proprietary seed.

Now I’ll tell you this, to get to growth that we want to get in that seed platform going forward, it won’t come just with Dyna-Gro, we need to do a better job. You know there’s a lot of things that have change in that seed arena. You know obviously there’s been a lot of consolidation and mergers in that side of the business, but it also creates some additional opportunities for us as well with the pace of it.

Look, we’ve done an exceptional job I think with Dyna-Gro again. We don’t take second seed to anybody or a germplasm standpoint or a trade package standpoint. So we’ll be introducing this year, it’s not a big acre crop, but it's a big deal for us. We’ll be introducing this year commercially our first Dyna-Gro rice product, and it's going to be a great product for us, because we got an extensive network or retail facilities.

I think when you travel down, we were in the Boothill and Arkansas and we got a very extensive network of retail branches in that area where about 90% of the rice is grown in the U.S. So we continue to bring really good product offerings to the market in that proprietary brand and I think we take a lot of pride in selling them wherever.

Steve Byrne

So Pedro, how do you look at capital deployment from here? You got fertilizer pricing that has just ripped and you know your phosphate business got written down in the past, but it was pretty darn close to the trough and phosphate has really rallied since then. Do you look at those as wholesale fertilizer businesses, as areas where you might put some more capital in that you have in the past to debottleneck or increase some capital in some way versus where I think a lot of capital has been directed and that is into retail. How would you look at it now?

Pedro Farah

Right Steve, I think our priority, our locating is still on retail and digital growth, because we think that has tremendous potential for the future, not only in the U.S. but outside. But to address your point about the other nutrients, our view of phosphate even though it had a tremendous job this year, we think that structurally the market it's still, it's part of the CVD investigation. It is still structurally for the long term. Of course when we do impairments and all that, we don’t look at the near term, we look at a short, at more structural prices. We think that it hasn’t changed.

So we think that even this price – this price jump that we have seen as of recent years is going to invite some significant volumes from other producers in Russia and Saudi and so we think this market will continue to be challenged. So our location would not be on phosphate. As you recall, phosphate is only about 5% of our EBITDA in total.

Now, when we are talking about nitrogen and potash, in nitrogen we do – we have been making some high return investments in, I would call debottlenecking of Brownfield, same nitrogen, and you have seen some of that capacity already being kind of a on the market right now and I think – we think we are going to continue to do those.

We operate at very high operating rates right now, at 94%, 96%, which I think is what we kind of communicated in our Investment Day. And so we like to continue to debottleneck and those are very good return projects for relatively little capital and they have less risk as well, given that we are doing this on a Brownfield basis.

And for potash, we have six vines. We have essentially 5 million tons from this year of paid for capacity. So there is no real need for a great investment there. We have vital capacity that we can bring at virtually no investments for the next 5 million tons and then after that we have another 5 million tones that will be a very low investment as well in terms of Brownfield. So we have a long way to continue to utilize the kind of good minds that we have as the first quartile by cost for quite a number of years to come.

So, we'll bring – we’ll obviously bring those as the market needs. We don't want to basically flood the market. We’ll bring them responsibly over time. Our interest is that the markets continue to be affordable for the grower and more stable as opposed to shoot-up and shoot-down. We don't think that that's very good for us.

So we’ll continue to be here and as you’ve seen before in terms of – in potash whenever there was a surge and there has been a smaller one in Q4 that we increased our production, but in the past when there were floods we are able to quickly surge our capacity by 1 million tones or more to provide the market capacity as they needed. So I think that's still the plan. We have we have plenty of capacity available that’s very, very little incremental cost.

Steve Byrne

Well fellows, we have run out of time and I would just want to say thank you to both of you. I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. Best of luck to you this year! We’ll be following your progress very closely. I look forward to catching up with you soon. Until then, my best to you.

Pedro Farah

Thank you very much for the invitation Steve.