Astarta Holding PLC (ASTPF) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

higher revenues sales volumes in the agricultural segment, which allowed us to compensate slight decrease in the revenues in the other segments. On the profitability side, as cost of sales were going up and there was a price correction in the market, gross margin halved to 20%. and EBITDA margin came down to 15%. The bottom line was also affected not only by the operating results but by the forex movement of 4 million euro which gave us a loss at the bottom line. Going to the cash flows, our focus remained on maximizing operating cash flows, which were held by working capital release as we accelerated sales of grains and oilseeds. We kept our investments at maintenance CAPEX levels safe for residual investment into the SPC but lower profitability led to increased leverage currently standing at three times net debt EBITDA going into agricultural segment results one can see higher volumes of corn, wheat and sunflower seeds, but lower average prices compared to the previous period for all crops across the board. If we are looking at our harvesting results, we see higher yields for winter crops, the harvesting for which we already finished, at 5.4 tons per hectare in wheat and 3.1 in rapeseeds. We continue harvesting for late crops and the results will be known later during the year. If we are looking at the market situation, we see already a much widening differential between global and domestic Ukrainian prices because of the difficulty of getting grain out of Ukraine. 90% of soft commodities used to be transported via Odessa deep ports and these now do not operate at full potential. We see the alternative capacity at maximum two and a half million tons per month, which was a recent estimate by the Ministry of Agriculture. But the real Ukrainian needs for its annual ha...