Canopy Growth Corporation (NASDAQ:CGC) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Judy Hong: Yes, John. Thanks for the question. So on the — on our balance sheet, I think the starting point is that we do still have a strong cash position. We ended the quarter — the year with $783 million. As I said earlier, all of the facility, the dispositions that we have either closed or currently working on will bring in additional up to $150 million in proceeds by September of 2023. And we expect a significant reduction in operating expenses in fiscal ‘24 as we execute on our cost savings program. So we think those actions are actually sufficient to allow us to have a flexibility in our balance sheet and continue to maintain the funding requirements for all of the businesses. But we think that there are additional options that are available to us, including looking at all of our noncore assets and businesses.

I think we’re really trying to position ourselves as a cannabis focused company. And I think historically, we’ve had a number of businesses that were not core that we’ve divested and we’re continuing to explore options to simplify our businesses and generate some cash as we look for opportunities to divest some of these noncore assets and businesses. I also recognize — we also recognize that we want to make sure that we reduce our debt over time in an accretive manner. We think that that will also help our cash flow, just given the interest cost reduction that would be expected. And to be clear, some of the proceeds from the facility divestitures won’t go towards paying off our term loan. So, that would also help us with lower — reducing our debt and also reducing our interest expenses over time.

Operator: Your next question comes from Michael Lavery at Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Michael Lavery: I just was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on, if you hit your plan as you have it now with EBITDA positive or breakeven by the end of the year, what does that look like on a cash flow basis? And what are some of your assumptions? You mentioned the divestitures that you’re trying to make or the facility sales. Some of that’s in hand, but can you give us a sense of how you’re valuing those and what the certainty is of that coming through? And how important is it in terms of just your liquidity management and just paint a little bit of a picture for how you’re thinking about how the year unfolds that way.

Judy Hong: Sure. I’ll take that question. So, obviously, the — to your point, achieving our plan and reducing our cost to improve our adjusted EBITDA is kind of the starting point. In addition, we are obviously working to reduce our debt and save on interest expenses and even some of the actions that we’ve outlined already and have implemented already. In reducing our costs, we should see on a year-over-year basis, $20-plus million of lower interest expenses, even taking into consideration the rising rate environment that we’re seeing across the board. We also expect to see working capital improvement in a significant manner, just given how we’re managing our inventory and the reduced footprint, frankly, that we have across Canada and obviously, BioSteel working on an initiative to make sure that they’re rightsized from an inventory standpoint there as well.