Evogene Ltd (EVGN) 2022 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Evogene's Second Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded August 31, 2022.

Before we begin, I would like to caution that certain statements made during this earnings conference call by Evogene's management will constitute forward-looking statements that relate to future events, risks and uncertainties regarding business strategy, operations and future performance and results of Evogene. I encourage you to review Evogene's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and read the note regarding forward-looking statements in today's earnings release, which states that statements made in the earnings release and in a similar way, on this earnings conference call that are not historical facts may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

For example, Evogene is using forward-looking statements in this call when it discusses its expected paths to value creation, including potential fundraisings at the subsidiary level, it's in its subsidiaries, expected trials and their expected results studies, product advancements, commercializations, launches, pipelines, milestones, potential collaborations and other plans for 2021 and 2022, expected burn rate, the potential advantages of its technology and its anticipated entry into new fields of activity.

All forward-looking statements made herein speak only as of the date of the announcement of results. Many of the factors that impact whether forward-looking statements will come true are beyond the control of Evogene and may cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results. Evogene is under no obligation to update publicly or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law, we expressly disclaim any obligation to do so. More detailed information about the risk factors potentially adversely impacting our performance can be found in our reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

That said, I would now like to turn the call over to Ofer Haviv, Evogene's CEO. Ofer, please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2022 conference call. We are very happy to have you with us and review with you important recent events that took place in Evogene Group. The first patient dose in the Phase I clinical trial announced by Biomica, and the announcement on the strategic collaboration and the $10 million investment of ICL in Lavie Bio. We are very pleased with these developments, which we believe provides evidence to the value that Lavie Bio and Biomica have and continue to create, and I will cover this shortly. Today, joining me on the call is Russ Putland, EVP Commercial and General Manager of Lavie Bio Inc. to provide some additional color on their activities and go over some of the upcoming milestones (inaudible) themselves can be found in today's press release, and Yaron Eldad, our CFO will provide a short summary. Following that, we will all be happy to take your questions.

Before I start to review the recent events, I want to emphasize that we continue to strengthen Evogene's management team. As I (inaudible), we made a number of changes to expand Evogene management, and I'm very happy to announce the latest addition to our team. In June, we added Eyal Ronen as Executive Vice President of Business Development. Eyal brings us over 20 years of extensive business development experience with biotech companies. Eyal's focus is to create and bring us additional value by building new partnerships or forming new subsidiaries, leveraging our technology engines and expanding our activity into new areas. Evogene has significant untapped potential held within its technology engines, and Eyal's focus is to realize some of that value. I congratulate Eyal and trust he will be a key asset to Evogene. We are already seeing some of his positive impact.

I would like to now discuss the 2 important events took place in the last few months. The first event was reported on July 26 by Biomica, our subsidiary, focusing on developing drugs based on human microbiome. The company announced that the first patient was dosed in its Phase I clinical trials taking place in Rambam Healthcare Campus, a hospital in the north of Israel in Haifa. The trial is designed preliminarily to evaluate the safety and tolerability of Biomica's microbiome best immuno-oncology drug candidate, BMC128, in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor in patients with either non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma or renal cell carcinoma. The drug candidate is a consortium of microbes, which we identified and selected through a detailed functional microbiome analysis using PRISM tool, a high-resolution microbiome analysis platform, which is powered by Evogene's MicroBoost AI tech engine.

As the trial is open label, we expect preliminary results and the first data point read out in early 2023 as the such patients conclude their treatment programs. We are targeting to complete (inaudible) in the second half of 2023. This development demonstrates that our tech engines can be leveraged across multiple industries. While Evogene is traditionally leveraging its tech engines to (inaudible) cultures, Biomica's latest achievement is a proof that there is a huge market of human (inaudible) that we are uniquely positioned for playing an important role. The second important event was announced on August 17. A strategic collaboration and a $10 million investment by ICL in Lavie Bio focusing on developing Ag-biological. I would like to provide you some color on the collaboration and investment.

Lavie Bio and ICL engaged in a multiyear strategic collaboration to develop novel bio-stimulants. For those of you who are less familiar with ICL, ICL Group is a leading global specialty minerals company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and in Tel Aviv with a $13 billion market cap, (inaudible) create solutions for the global food, agriculture and industrial market, via its global resources of bromine, potash and phosphate. It is highly focused on technological innovation to create impactful solutions for sustainability challenges in the global food and agriculture markets, especially in a time of food scarcity, high prices and macroeconomic uncertainty, Lavie Bio and ICL's shared vision is to enhance global food quality, agriculture sustainability and increased productivity.

The (inaudible) operation is to combine the Lavie Bio's ag-biological expertise and MicroBoost AI power technology with ICL's fertilizer experience, enabling the development of new and innovative products for agriculture. As part of this collaboration, ICL has made a $10 million investment in Lavie Bio. The investment was structured under a SAFE, a simple agreement for future equity.

The $10 million investment that has already been received allowed Lavie Bio to build a pipeline of products focused on developing novel bio-stimulant products to enrich fertilizer efficiency. ICL will join as the shareholders of Lavie Bio to Evogene and Corteva, a major agriculture company rested in New York with a market cap of $44 billion, and I'm very proud that these 2 agriculture giants have shown a strong interest in what Lavie Bio has to offer.

I believe Lavie Bio is now well set on a phase for significant achievements and success over the coming years. From the Evogene standpoint, this investment in the Lavie Bio is an additional key milestone that demonstrates the power of our business model, whereby we are leveraging the value of our tech engine through dedicated subsidiaries. It shows that our hard work in building, investing in, (inaudible) sensing our subsidiaries, all of which are leveraging our underlying concessional predictive biological tech engine is the right strategy and bears fruit. The $10 million investment in Lavie Bio will also allow its activity to power ahead while lowering the need for Evogene financial resources. This will enable Evogene to advance other new promising activities while ensuring that Lavie Bio is moving ahead at full speed.

I want to hand over to Russ Putland, EVP at Lavie Bio, who will go into some more details on the recent activities and progress. Russ, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ofer. I'm very happy to have been asked to participate in the Evogene analyst call today. It's the first time I've participated in such a call and given that, I'd like to introduce myself. As Ofer mentioned, my name is Russ Putland, and I am Lavie Bio's Executive Vice President of Commercial and General Manager of Lavie Bio's U.S. subsidiary. I joined Lavie Bio in May of 2021, and have previous experience in commercial leadership and strategy with FMC, DuPont and Cargo spanning over 30 years. I'm excited to be able to share Lavie Bio's progress and direction with you today.

I'll start at a high level, and then we can work beyond this under the detail. The world's population continues to grow, and consumer sophistication is increasing. We are faced with the challenge of producing food not only sustainably, but also profitably for farmers. We at Lavie Bio have accepted this challenge and are well positioned to lead agriculture in this biological segment. Lavie Bio uses microbiome selected naturally occurring microbes that create positive effects in plants.

We have been using these microbes to establish living factories in chosen crops, surpassing the efficacy, consistency and the stability of not only other using biological competing products but measuring up to current synthetic commercial products. We are fortunate to be blessed with the strong proven partners in Corteva Agriscience, a global leader in crop protection and seeds, and now ICL and our new collaboration agreement, focusing on novel biostimulant products that will enrich and improve fertilizer efficiency.

We drove access to leverage Corteva and ICL's successful organizations and coupled them with Evogene, our brand company's core competency of computational biology, this is where unique and breakthrough products are born. In early 2022, we sold out of our planned production of Thrivus inoculant, the brand name of our new product. For use in wheat crops in the U.S., and it was part of our first soft launch, it was a relatively small amount, and our intended purpose was to demonstrate our launch capability in the areas that include production, marketing and sales, all in preparation for a significant accelerated growth in 2023. I want to add that we recently made a decision to change our bio-inoculant's name from result to Thrivus as we believe the new name for this strongly represents our brand and its expected performance.

Thrivus inoculant for use in spraying wheat was launched in the market at exactly the right time. When we consider increasing global supply shortages resulting from unfavorable environmental conditions in these key growing geographies. Also we need to highlight the Russia-Ukraine war, as these are 2 of the largest wheat exporters. This further supports the immediate need for increasing wheat yields globally. We have chosen to distribute our products to (inaudible) market, direct and is the case with in 2022 with a (inaudible) and indirect in the future. It is important that farmers have the necessary access to purchase Thrivus and realize the benefit of increased redevelopment biomass and ultimately, 3 to 4 bushels of yield per acre, representing an average of 4% to 6% in increased wheat yield.

As our strategy marches towards 2023, we are finalizing the expanded production for next year's prime season. Our increased production will fuel expansion in North Dakota, Montana and Minnesota that stalemate the United States. We are on track with our plans to launch in Western Canada for the 2024 going season and in parallel, we are continuing on with our plans to expand Thrivus into new geographies, namely Europe and Israel from 450 with partners from round the globe. Additionally, we will be working to advance and broaden the crop use label with additional crops such as durum, oats, barley, soybeans and canola, and we'll update with you in the newest report there. Moving to our biopesticides pipeline, our bio-fungicide fruit rot program is progressing as we'd expect, and we continue to see exciting results in our field trials conducted in vineyards.

Prior to the end of 2022, we expect to submit the regulatory dossier with the federal U.S. EPA for our leading candidate, LAV311. The standard time line registration tends to take about 18 months, and we will continue to update as we progress. Our intent is to soft launch in 2024 growing season pending regulatory approval. It is important for me to emphasize that this significant progress I described cannot be achieved without the full selectivity between the R&D Group of Lavie Bio and Evogene, and more specifically, the MicroBoost tech engine that boosts our pipeline. I want to thank Ofer and all the Evogene staff for their ongoing support of our activities at Lavie Bio. Thank you for spending this time with Lavie Bio. We look forward to speaking with you again as we hit our goals and achieve our milestones.

With that, I'll turn things back to Ofer. Back to you, Ofer.

Thank you, Russ. In summary, Evogene today is a key reflection point, whereby we are making critical milestones and the inherent value of our subsidiaries is becoming increasingly obvious. Evogene's goal in the near term is to continue to bring high value-adding partners and investors at the subsidiary level, who understand and can value the potential from the product that our subsidiaries are developing. This, we believe, will demonstrate in a very public way the significant untapped value contained within our activities.

We continue our discussion with potential strategic and financial investors towards potential fundraising and partnering at the subsidiary level and to the extent permissible under security loads, we intend to provide updates. Our target is that each subsidiary will have its own financial resources to support its activities until its success -- while at Evogene, in addition to being a major shareholders, continue to play a major role in maintaining and building the competitive advantage through our tech engines. In parallel, and maybe even more importantly, we are targeting and exploring the potential to establish new activities that can benefit from our technology. This is (inaudible) new EVP of Business Development may mention and I aim to elaborate on it more during our next quarterly analyst call.

Over to Yaron in the financial review, Yaron.

Thank you, Ofer. I will now provide a financial summary. Evogene continues to maintain a solid financial position for its activity with approximately $35.3 million in consolidated cash, cash-related accounts, bank deposits and marketable securities as of June 30, 2022. Approximately $3.6 million of Evogene's consolidated cash is appropriated to its subsidiary, Lavie Bio.

We do not have any bank debt. These amounts do not include the $10 million investment of ICL in Lavie Bio, which was completed during the third quarter. During the second quarter of 2022, a consolidated cash usage was approximately $9.3 million or approximately $6.4 million, excluding the Lavie Bio. Out of the $9.3 million, $1.7 million is a noncash charge related to foreign exchange expenses due to U.S. dollar and Shekel exchange rate differences and a decrease in the market value of marketable securities on our balance sheet.

As we have previously discussed, our full year net burn rate, excluding exchange rate impact in 2022, is expected to be in the range of $26 million to $28 million, including Lavie Bio and $18 million to $20 million, excluding Lavie Bio, which manages its own cash position. I would like now to highlight some specific items on the P&L. Revenue for the second quarter was $312,000 in comparison to $135,000 in the same period the previous year. Revenues were primarily due to the initial sales of Lavie Bio's Thrivus product and sales of economic products in the Israeli market.

R&D expenses for the quarter, which are reported net of non-refundable grants received were $5.4 million in comparison to $5 million in the same period the previous year. The increase in R&D expenses was primarily due to the increase in Lavie Bio's R&D activities and Biomica's recent start to its Phase I trial. Business development expenses were approximately $1 million for the second quarter of 2022 in comparison to $700,000 in the same period of the previous year. The increase in the business development expenses was primarily due to recruitment of business development personnel.

General and administrative expenses remained stable, and for the second quarter of 2022 were $1.7 million in comparison to $1.8 million in the same period in the previous year. Operating loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $8 million in compared to $7.4 million in the same period in the previous year. Financing expenses for the second quarter of 2022 or $1.7 million in comparison to financing income of $600,000 in the same period in the previous year. The increase in financing expenses was mainly due to the U.S. dollar and Shekel exchange rate differences between periods and a decrease in marketable securities value, as I mentioned earlier. The net loss for the second quarter of 2022 was $9.8 million in comparison to a net loss of $6.9 million in the same period in the previous year.

As also mentioned earlier, ICL invested the $10 million in Lavie Bio via a SAFE mechanism. For those of you who are less familiar with a safe investment, I would like to elaborate. SAFE stands for a simple agreement for future equity, and today has become a common investment agreement tool due to its simplicity. It is an agreement between a company and an investor, whereby the investor transfers the funds into the company immediately, which will convert automatically to equity at the next fundraising at a discount from the share price to be determined in this future round.

The ICL investment into Lavie Bio was concluded in mid-August, and it enables Lavie Bio to continue further development, growth and increased value prior to completing its next financial round. As Ofer mentioned, we continue to pursue strategies to strengthen Evogene's group cash position, ensuring our subsidiaries are well capitalized and also have value-adding investors and partners to advance their goals. Finally, in the near term, while the capital markets remain volatile, we are looking to lower expenses by reducing activity with distant milestones.

With that, both Ofer and I would now like to open the call for any questions you may have. Operator.

(Operator Instructions) The first question is from Kristen Kluska of Cantor Fitzgerald.

The first one I had in regards to Lavie Bio, could you discuss some of the specific components and of the particular data that led to the collaboration with ICL? And I guess how are you thinking about the potential for other deals moving forward? And of the key players in the field, do you believe that there's a lot of overlapping synergies in the activity to cost both bio-stimulants and bio-pesticides.

Okay, so this is Ofer, and I will take this question. Thank you for participating in our analyst call. So in the long-term strategy of Lavie Bio, we are intending to be the world-leading in the world of mainly bio-pesticides. But of course, we can use our technology also in the area of bio-stimulant, and one of the things that we really see as a significant value is working together with a fertilizer company that have a broad experience in using fertilizer. We believe that in the future, there will be more and more products that will combine fertilizer and bio-stimulant, and we saw that it would be a great partner to work with Lavie Bio. ICL are located -- the headquarter is here in Israel.

They have research centers worldwide, and I think that this could create a very, very nice synergy. The field that we are going to focus with them is bio-stimulant and we are -- and it's not related to bio-pesticides and it's quite a different type of microbes and it's a very different type of regulatory processes. I don't see too much of overlap between bio-stimulant and bio-pesticides. So we will continue all of our activity in the area of bio-pesticides based on the results and the business plan of Lavie Bio. It's not part of the relationship with ICL. ICL it will be -- the program that we are going to run with them, it will be in addition to what we already have in our pipeline.

Okay, I had another question in regard to Biomica. So we're under a month away from the advisory committee meeting for a different microbiome-based product. So while it's another indication in a different mechanism, could you talk about the importance of these meetings and really understanding what the FDA is looking for and also what a first potential approval in the microbiome clap to mean for your company.

The connection wasn't very well. Can you repeat the answer, please?

Yes. So I was asking in regards to an advisory committee meeting that's scheduled for another microbiome-based product, how important this could be for the field with the first potential microbiome-based approval, but then also helping a company like Biomica sort of to understand what the FDA is looking for, again, because it is a newer drug class and we haven't seen any approvals yet.

I'm less familiar with this specific meeting you are talking about. What I can do -- I'm sorry that Elran is not participating in this call -- he is abroad, but I will ask him to contact with you and address this question, if it's okay.

Yes, absolutely. And then just last from me, how are you thinking about balancing the cash on hand in light of the subsidiaries moving forward? But then also looking to expand your technology applications into other fields as well.

Okay. So I think that -- I think my quick -- the main message is that we are expecting that our subsidiary will have the offer resources. I think that we are in a good shape now with Lavie Bio, and we might expand this investment in the company in the future. We are talking with additional investors.

I think that we are also talking with another subsidiary with another set of investors that will invest in the company as well. So what I'm trying to say is that our target is that each subsidiary will have its own financial resources, and the need for Evogene's budget will be -- as we see the cash from Evogene through the year will be lower -- and this will allow us to use the money that we already have to invest in additional new opportunities. This is one of the purpose of -- that we recruit Eyal Ronen, our EVP Business Development because there are so many other different areas that can benefit from our technology.

I think that at least in some cases, what we might look also is to a collaboration agreement in the area that our facility are not participate. This type of collaborations can inject also cash to the company. So that's (inaudible), milestone and royalty, the same type of structure that we did in the past. So this will be another way to fund future activity in Evogene. So bottom line, when I'm looking on our (inaudible) financial funding in the future -- the subsidiaries, we are planning to fund their activity through additional investments conducted by third party and also through collaboration agreement that some of them are now discussing.

And with respect to Evogene, we have our financial resources, and we are also looking for additional opportunities to use our technology to generate revenue. We are also always looking on the capital markets to see what is the position and what -- and looking for additional opportunity to raise money. But, at least in the short term, the main focus, the main focus is going to be to bring more cash to our utility in the subsidiary level through fundraising and collaboration.

The next question is from Brian Wright of ROTH.

Congrats on the quarter. And I apologize if I missed this, they're literally doing construction outside my window. So did you provide any kind of valuation parameters for the $10 million investment in Lavie?

So unfortunately, we are limited from disclosing the specific details of the SAFE contract as for various business and various competitive reasons, and the pertinent goal is to maintain those details confidential. However, what I can say is that we are very, very pleased with this deal, including the terms and believe it is good for all parties involved, Lavie Bio, ICL and especially Evogene and its shareholders. I think that in any event, when this investment will be converted into share, it will be very positive for Evogene shareholders and definitely based on the current market valuation of Evogene, the company itself. So we can't disclose, but I think that this is something that I'm quite proud about.

Great. And it sounds like there might be some minimum valuation parameters in that?

Yes, yes.

Awesome, great, thank you. Just on a detailed question on the quarter. Could you give us a little more granularity between kind of the Lavie and Canonic in the quarter? Any kind of color on that for modeling would be very helpful.

What I can say is that we are expecting to see some increase in revenue from Canonic activity in the second half of this year. We are planning to launch a new varieties at the Israeli market that's addressing the demand for high THC. We hope to launch those products during September, October. So currently, without getting into the details, currently, we don't see the jump that we were hoping in Canonic revenue from the existing products, but the expectation is that in the second half of the year, we will start to see a change in this mean. So more or less, it's -- I can't disclose too much, but you can look at previous reports and you can try to calculate the numbers.

The next question is from Brett Reiss of Janney Montgomery Scott.

This might be for Mr. Putland. Since you -- with the spring read are getting greater yields, do you use the same amount of water, so in effect, water usage was going down per unit.

Yes. So in terms of -- Yes, got it. In terms of water use, there is a slight gain. We're in the process of mapping out that environmental footprint and that come in the carbon realm as we speak. I don't know that we're far enough along to comment specifically on the amount of water efficiency or nutrient efficiency that we've gained. Clearly, we do gain with a nutrient uptake and efficiency. We've seen that clear. It is notable. And once we've got that mapped out a little more clearly, I think we'll share that with the public. But we're not in a position today to do that.

Right, right. If you have favorable lose on that, I mean it's a real important topic. So that would excite people. I don't have to tell you that.

Yes, I'm actually working on that as we speak. I'm looking at sustainability measurements around land use efficiency, energy use and GHG emissions. So we should have something in a relatively short period of time, and we will surely share that not only for our benefit but just to kind of backdrop, all the good things that are happening with the bio-inoculant.

Great. Great. Now the Phase I trial where the results will come out in early 2023, if you see favorable results prior to that. Are you -- is it in your control to release that to the market? Or it's your joint venture partner who controls the news flow on that trial?

So we receive the results from the hospital that is executing in the clinical trials when they receive it themselves. So yes, we along the clinical trial, we are receiving the information, and we might decide if we have enough data during the terms of the clinical trial, we will share this information with the public. So we don't -- not necessarily we need to wait until the end of the clinical trial.

All right. That sounds good. Last one for me. Can you talk about the $312,000 in revenues. So some of it is from Lavie Bio embedded in that? Are there seasonality things that you can educate us on? And then Canonic is less of a seasonal type of product sale cadence. If you could just give us some color on that?

I think you described it correctly. With respect to selling Lavie Bio product, it's a seasonal type of product. And I think that as Russ described it, this year, it was mainly to make sure that we have all the parts in place, and we were very proud that the minute that we finished the production, we sold almost everything. Maybe we produce more, but this wasn't our main attention -- to generate a significant revenue. It was mainly to make sure that we are doing everything correctly, and it looks that we succeed in this target. Next year, the production is going to be in a few order of magnitude higher. And I hope that we'll see the same results as this year.

With respect to Canonic products. So here, it's -- the revenue is generated through all the year, because we grow in the crop in greenhouses. So it's less affected by the weather. Yes, it can have effect on the quality of the product. Usually, it's better to grow it during spring and summertime. But still, you can grow with this crop, the cannabis, during the winter. So it can generate revenue through the year. And as I described just now, we are expecting to launch a new set of products during -- some of them in September, some of them on October. And I will be more than happy to share with you on the performance of those new variety in the next analyst call. But it's -- we are quite positive about the performance of the new variety.

(Operator Instructions) There are no further questions at this time. Before I ask Mr. Ofer Haviv to go ahead with his closing statement, I would like to remind participants that a replay of this call is scheduled to begin 2 hours after the conference. In the U.S., please call 1888-326-9310. In Israel, please call (03) 9255-901. Internationally, please call 972-3-9255-901.

Mr. Haviv, would you like to make your concluding statement?

Yes. Thank you all for joining the call today. I look forward to updating you with our progress in our next call. In the meantime, I will be presenting at the HC Wainwright conference in September and attending the LD Micro conference in October, and I look forward to seeing some of you there. Thank you, and good day.

Thank you. This concludes Evogene's Second Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. Thank you for your participation. You may go ahead and disconnect.