Universal Corp (UVV) 2026 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jordan, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Universal Corporation third quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. (Operator Instructions). Thank you.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Wushuang Ma, Vice President and Treasurer. You may begin.

Good evening, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Preston Wigner, our Chairman, President and CEO; and Johan Kroner, our Chief Financial Officer.

During the course of this call, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on our current knowledge and some assumptions about the future. These are representative as of today only. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from anticipated results, prospects, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, but we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

For information on some of the risks and uncertainties related to these forward-looking statements, please refer to the reports we filed with ICC and under cautionary statements regarding forward-looking statements in our current earnings press release. Finally, some of the information we have for you today may be based on unaudited allocations and may be subject to reclassification. Our comments may also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. For details regarding these measures, including a reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our current earnings press release and other public materials.

This call is being webcast live and will be available for a replay on our website through May 9, 2026, and by telephone through February 23, 2026. This call is copyrighted and may not be used without our permission. Other than the reference replay, we have not authorized and disclaim responsibility for any recording, replay or distribution of any transcription of this call.

I would like to now turn the call over to Preston.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Fiscal year 2025 was an extraordinary year for Universal. We're following that year with solid performance at the end of our third quarter of fiscal year 2026. I'm proud of our company's dedication and commitment to delivering results for all our stakeholders.

During the third quarter of our fiscal year, our team executed well and advanced the strategic priorities that support long-term value creation. I'll start with our tobacco operations segment, which generated solid quarterly results in comparison to a robust third quarter last fiscal year. Customer demand remained firm for most tobacco styles following several years of undersupply. We continue to leverage our diverse global footprint, long-standing customer relationships and deep local expertise to optimize results as the market transitions into an oversupply environment.

Turning to the Ingredients Operations segment. We continue to advance our strategy in order to build durable commercial and operational fundamentals that support sustained growth. Sales revenue for our value-added products has started to make up a significant portion of our overall ingredients revenue. However, our segment results reflect higher fixed costs from the significant investments we made which have compressed margins.

Additionally, market headwinds, such as the broader softness in the consumer packaged goods sector weighed on our business directly and indirectly and tariff impacts were more pronounced during this quarter. These headwinds reinforce the importance of our disciplined and deliberate approach to investing in the resources and capabilities needed to provide resiliency and grow our ingredients business for the long term.

While our global commercial and operational teams focused on delivering strong results, we also took several meaningful steps to strengthen our company and position ourselves for the future. We refinanced, upsized and improved our corporate credit facility, which significantly expanded our liquidity and improved financial flexibility. And earlier today, we were excited to announce the appointment of our new CFO, Steven S. Diel, effective April 1. Steve brings strong financial, business and strategic expertise to his new role, and I look forward to working closely with them to advance our company's strategies and deliver value to our stakeholders.

I will now turn the call over to Johan to review our financial and operational performance in more detail, after which I'll share a few additional thoughts.

Thank you, Preston. Good evening, everyone. For the 9 months ended December 31, 2025, consolidated revenue was $2.21 billion compared to $2.25 billion in the prior year period. Operating income was $183.4 million versus $190 million for the same period last year. Net income was $75.9 million versus $85.7 million for the same period last year.

In our tobacco operations segment, revenue was $1.94 billion compared to $2 billion in the prior year period. Segment operating income was $185 million versus $194.4 million for the same period last year. In our ingredients operations segment, revenue was $265.2 million compared to $249 million in the prior year period. Segment operating income was $1.4 million compared to $7.9 million for the same period last year.

For the third quarter of fiscal year 2026, consolidated revenue was $861.3 million compared to $937.2 million in the same quarter of last year. Operating income was $82 million versus $104.1 million for the third quarter of last fiscal year. Net income was $33.2 million versus $59.6 million for the third quarter of last fiscal year. In our tobacco operations segment, revenue was $779.9 million compared to $853.9 million in the same quarter of last year. Segment operating income was $84 million versus $102.6 million for the third quarter of last fiscal year.

In our Ingredients operating segment, revenue was $81.3 million compared to $83.3 million in the third quarter last year. Segment operating loss was $0.1 million compared to segment operating income of $3.7 million in the third quarter of last fiscal year.

Turning to liquidity and capital structure. During the quarter, with strong support from our existing and new banking partners. We refinanced our senior unsecured credit facility and upsized the facility by $250 million. The new facility significantly expands our available liquidity and lowers our borrowing costs, enhances our financial flexibility and positions us well to advance our long-term strategic priorities. As of December 31, 2025, our net debt was $995 million compared to $945 million at the same point last year. Our liquidity availability, which includes cash and availability under our committed and uncommitted credit lines totaled $917 million.

I will now turn the conversation back to Preston.

Thank you, Johan. We are pleased with our solid results through the first three quarters of the fiscal year. As anticipated, the leaf tobacco market is moving into an oversupply environment. Managing evolving market dynamics is an area where Universal has demonstrated consistent strength for more than 100 years. We're proud of our resilience and our ability to deliver strong performance under all market conditions.

Our long history of tobacco leadership motivates us to build and grow Universal Ingredients to support our long-term success. Back in 2018, we made the decision and developed a strategy to diversify into food and beverage ingredients. As part of that strategy, we made three acquisitions in 2020 and 2021 to gain a broad product portfolio, established customer relationships and experienced management teams. These moves created Universal Ingredients and established the foundation for a scalable differentiated platform capable of delivering and offering new innovative solutions-based products to our customers.

To support that strategy, we invested in building commercial sales, R&D and product development capabilities and in adding industry-leading production capabilities. These investments culminated in the completion of our Lancaster, Pennsylvania facility expansion just over a year ago. Since completing the expansion, our focus has been on leveraging these new resources and capabilities to grow Universal Ingredients and convert customer interest into sales.

We're excited about the progress we've made since those early days in 2018. While we continue to navigate inflationary pressures and the impact of tariff headwinds, we're focused on increasing sales to absorb fixed costs from our growth investments in Universal Ingredients. We're encouraged by the continued steady interest in our enhanced capabilities and the growing breadth of our solutions-based product portfolio. We are committed to continuing the progress we've made to date and scaling the platform to support stronger earnings, improved resilience and enhanced margins.

Before we conclude today's discussion, I want to highlight our continued progress in advancing our sustainability priorities. We recently released our annual sustainability report, which highlights significant progress across our environmental and social commitments. Notably, we increased renewable electricity consumption nearly sixfold year-over-year with approximately 17.7% of our global electricity sourced from renewable energy. These actions support our approved science-based emissions targets and our commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain by 2050.

We also further demonstrated our support for farming communities globally, advancing our good agricultural practices and agricultural labor practices programs to maintain momentum across our social responsibility and farmer sustainability initiatives. Our disciplined execution and clear strategic focus provide a strong foundation as we move into the final quarter of the fiscal year. We are confident in our ability to execute on our strategy and continue creating long-term value for our stakeholders.

Thank you again for joining us today. We will now open the call for questions.

(Operator Instructions)

Daniel Harriman, Sidoti.

I'll start this afternoon with ingredients. And with the mention of the tariffs and obviously, the overall market weakness within consumer packaged goods, I was hoping you could help us understand how those issues are affecting both the traditional business within Ingredients and then also the newer solutions-based offerings?

And then in tobacco, you called out fiscal 2025. And while sales were down in the quarter, that's not necessarily a fair compare to think that are in the supply backdrop last year and margins have been holding up pretty well. So given that last year was a high watermark for the segment, how do you view the underlying performance of the tobacco segment this quarter considering solid sales and like I said, maintain margins.

Daniel, I'll start with Ingredients. So last year, third quarter, was a good quarter for Ingredients, we had revenues and volume both up over the prior year's quarter. And this year, we've been impacted by market headwinds and product mix and the higher fixed costs. And I'll talk about all three. So on those market headwinds, which are affecting the industry and a lot of the sectors where our customers are. There's weakness in that consumer packaged goods sector and other food and beverage sectors and those inflationary pressures.

We're putting pressures on the consumer goods prices and therefore, from those customers. pressures on us on our pricing and compressing our margins as well as tightening demand as their sales might decrease, then their orders from us will decrease. If it impacts them, it will impact us. And we've seen that maybe in particular, with sales this quarter of -- or sort of traditional core products. On the tariff side, we've talked about this a little bit in the past. We've had direct tariff impact with that indirect tariff impacts. Those impacts were just a little more pronounced this quarter than in the first half.

On the direct tariff impact, we've got tariff costs that are impacting the cost of the products that we import into the US and incorporate into the products that we sell. And so we've got tariff costs in those raw materials that we're having difficulty this past quarter, capturing all of that in our sales to our customers. And then on the indirect impact, our customers have tariff impacts, which are impacting the sale of their products. Those tariffs might be impacting components of their products or packaging of their products, which has decrease their sales. And again, if their sales decreasing, then potentially their orders to us are decreasing.

On the product mix side, we had just a different mix of products with a little higher margins in the third quarter last year than we did this year. Some of those could be attributed, for example, to customer ordering based on forecasts of how they think their products were going to perform last year. So they might have ordered higher-margin products from us last year, ramping up for their sales into the market. And if those sales didn't turn out the way they had forecasted, then potentially this quarter, they would have had fewer of those sales or different products that they'd be ordering from us with slightly different margins. So just a little bit of a margin mix.

And then lastly, on the higher fixed costs, we've been talking about that for a while. We're still focused on scaling the business to absorb the costs and the investments we made to grow the ingredients business, including the expansion of our capabilities of the Lancaster extracts facility. We continue to try to absorb those costs, which are impacting our margins and impacting our earnings. So we're positioned to offer innovative solutions-based products to our customers, and our sales are up 7% year-to-date versus last year, despite this challenging market, and our goal is to maintain that momentum.

Sales of our new products have contributed to our increased sales, and we're focused on continuing to increase those sales and increased new and existing customer interest in Universal ingredients. We continue to add to our active product development pipeline that leverages our broad product portfolio across the full Universal Ingredients Foundation. And we think those capabilities and the products that we offer can help our customers deliver new or improved or unique products to navigate the existing headwinds that are impacting them.

So our focus on the ingredient side, every single day is to convert that customer interest and the product portfolio into increased sales and volume across the factory floor. So I'm really encouraged by the dedication of the team is putting in the hard work on a daily basis. And I'm really pleased with the progress that we've made and how far we've come since our early days of 2018.

So on the tobacco side, as you mentioned, this has been a solid quarter and year-to-date for our tobacco business. Last year was an extraordinary year for us. In last year's third quarter, was really robust. We had very strong demand in the undersupply market last year. We moved a lot of tobacco in the third quarter, including accelerated shipments in the third quarter. and pricing, both for our farmer pricing, green pricing as well as our sales prices were high, resulting in high dollar margins. And we also shipped more of certain kind of higher-margin dark tobaccos last third quarter, which supported a high operating margin last third quarter.

This year, year-to-date, our tobacco segment revenues and operating income were only down slightly from last year's extraordinary results. Quarter-to-quarter, tobacco segment revenues and operating income are good, except in comparison to such a big third quarter last year. Last year's year-to-date and third quarter numbers were the highest that we've seen in a number of years. And just looking at the last 4 years for us, which were all solid years, our current year-to-date tobacco numbers are the second highest during that period. And our third quarter tobacco segment revenues are second highest and our tobacco segment operating income is within $4 million of being second highest for that period.

So last year cast a big shadow, but we're still performing well this year and this quarter. This year's large crops, especially in Brazil and Africa, and still firm customer demand have given us opportunities to keep up with last year's sales. And we've also increased our third-party processing based on the size of those crops. But pricing is down slightly from last year.

And we've had additional write-downs in certain dark air cured tobaccos that have impacted results and the comparative mix of products, which I just mentioned a second ago that we sold this quarter, third quarter versus last year's third quarter also had an impact with some higher-margin styles shipped at higher volumes left third quarter versus this third quarter. And then there's also some shipment timing impacts to the quarter-to-quarter comparison.

So we've leveraged our tobacco expertise, our diversified footprint and our strong customer relationships to navigate what's been a really complex year, and we're moving into undersupply move from undersupply to oversupply. And with all of that, I'm really proud of the job we've done around the world to deliver the results we've delivered in to support all of our stakeholders.

Ann Gurkin, Davenport.

Good evening, everybody. I'd love to pick up with the conversation around the tobacco segment. Do you think you'd be able to exit fiscal '26 with margins relatively in line with what you delivered in fiscal '25? I thought Q3 was better than I would have expected, and it's very impressive. So I was just curious if you can give me any kind of direction as to the full year tobacco segment margin?

Yes, I'd say we're still working hard on the quarter. We've got some tobacco to ship. Some of that tobacco is higher-margin tobacco that may have otherwise shipped in the third quarter. It's really going to come down to mix into timing of shipments. Can get all that tobacco out in the fourth quarter.

Okay. And any comments on the customers' inventory level or duration positions with your key customers? Any comments? Any insight you can share there?

Yes. We're in near constant communication with the customers. And I think with customers, it's a little bit of a mix. Some of those customers last year and into this year, they've been buying what they need and may be restoring some of their durations and looking at their duration policies. Some still have lower durations and they'll decide in the upcoming years, whether they'll return to those historically high duration levels or try to maintain a tighter duration and assume some of that risk as we go into oversupply.

Okay. And then do you have a worldwide uncommitted lease inventory number?

Yes. So estimated unsold flue-cured and Burley stock was about 102 million kilos at December 31, 2025, which is about the same as it was on September 30 2025.

Great. And then switching over to the Ingredients segment. I'd be curious what your biggest surprise was from the Q3 results versus Q2 on a sequential basis?

I think the market headwinds and the impacts and the length of those impacts we've seen in the third quarter on our customers. I think that's had a bigger impact than maybe I would have thought a year ago. We're hearing and we're seeing lots of customers trying to keep up sales, trying to keep up volumes and their own margins and results through the third quarter. But that will be cyclical, and we will -- we're going to continue to perform, continue to get in front of our customers and get our products sold. But I'd say that's -- to me, that's probably the biggest surprise.

Okay. And if you break out the revenue component, can you break it out in volume, price and new customer wins?

We don't have that breakdown for public disclosure. It's -- and it's also a little bit of mix -- the mix this quarter versus same quarter last year.

Do you anticipate in the next several quarters, pricing catching up with the higher tariff cost or input cost?

I think we are optimistic with continuing sales that maybe the higher cost inventory we have that's carrying those additional tariffs that we can get that through the system in the coming quarters and then get that behind us, that will certainly help.

Okay. And then can you quantify the amount of inventory write-down in the Ingredients segment?

We had some, Ann, but that’s standard. The methodology that we used, we just looked at some of the inventory at the end of the quarter and determined whether or not it was the realizable value was below the cost. So we took a little bit, but it was primarily in the dark air-cured space where we had to take some write-downs.

So it's more write-down in the tobacco space than it was an ingredient space?

Oh, yes. Yes.

Okay. Okay. And then I'm just curious with the CFO announcement, congratulations, but I think you put out a press release in January of a CFO, and then now you have another announcement today. I'm just kind of curious if you can walk me through what's going on.

Yes. We filed an 8-K announcing that we withdrew our offer from Mr. Mittal to become our CFO and in our 8-K really speaks for itself. Instead, we were thrilled to have our press release this morning. And Steve cannot wait to join these calls and talk to you.

That’s great. Preston, I also want to tell you how much I enjoyed your presentation at ICR. I'm so glad you all participated in that conference. Terrific presentation. I have a couple of questions if I can still ask questions in relation to that presentation. In the presentation, you talked about participating in the next-generation supply chain for tobacco companies. Can you just flesh that statement out a little bit for me?

Yes. As part of our strategy, we want to make sure that we have opportunities to participate in some way in that supply chain. Some of that we do today. So if they’ve got tobacco-based products like Heat-Not-Burn, for those customers, we want to make sure that that tobacco is coming from us. And then as they develop and expand other products, we want to have opportunities to be part of that supply chain for that as well, whether it’s Liquid Nicotine or going forward with our Universal Ingredients abilities with flavors. So all of that, we’d like to have that as part of our strategy, part of our growth going forward.

Okay. Great. And then you talked about investing in commercial sales and the platform and opportunities to cross-sell across the two segments. So I was wondering if I could get an update on your ability to launch that investment? And are you recognizing realizing wins or cross-selling successes? Any kind of update there?

I think that cross-selling referred to products within the Universal Ingredients platform, I think. And that's a big part of what we're doing in terms of building that active pipeline, getting that commercial sales teams in front of existing customers, selling new products in front of new customers, selling new products, getting those in the pipeline back through. And we don't have them broken out separately, but that's a big part of the increased sales and also on the flavor side as well.

Okay. Great. And then just one more question. What tax rate should I use for the year?

It's a good question, Ann. As you could see in the filings, it ticked up a little bit. We had some -- a hard look at our taxes. There were some taxes implemented in certain countries by law, so that had an impact on this. So like I said before, it’s normally between 28% and 32%. We have been below that in the last couple of years, but we’re ticking up slightly because of some of these changes. And of course, it depends on the mix. Where do we make it and the currency it’s earned in. So all those things come into play in the next quarter.

There are no further questions for the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the call over to Preston Wigner closing remarks.

Thanks, Jordan. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. We look forward to connecting again on our next earnings call.

That concludes today's meeting. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.