Cibus, Inc. (NASDAQ:CBUS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Cibus, Inc. (NASDAQ:CBUS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 21, 2024

Cibus, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.01259, expectations were $-1.12. CBUS isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Cibus Fourth Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen only mode. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note today’s event is being recorded. At this time, I’d like to turn the conference call to Wade King, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Wade King: Thank you and good afternoon. This is Wade King the Chief Financial Officer of Cibus. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for Cibus’ fourth quarter 2023 financial results and corporate update conference call and webcast. Presenting with me today is Rory Riggs, our Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman; and Peter Beetham, Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin the call, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast, including those regarding future financial results and future operational goals and industry prospects are forward-looking and may be subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the call.

Please refer to Cibus’ SEC filings for a list of associated risks. This conference call is being webcast. The webcast link along with our press release and corporate presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of cibus.com to assist in your analysis of the business. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Riggs. Go ahead, Rory.

Rory Riggs: Thanks, Wade, and welcome to everyone on the call. Today, I will provide a high-level overview of our progress in 2023 and how the event for the last year differentiated us in this emerging industry. And Peter will walk you through our recent commercial progress with our products and some milestones we expect to achieve this year. Lastly, Wade will finish with a brief discussion of the financials. Our goal is to help you best understand our business, so you can measure and track our progress and achievements on both the corporate and the commercial basis. Above all 2023 was the year we transformed from an R&D focused company to a commercial stage gene editing company, a company focused on the production and commercialization of a family of gene edited trait products.

Our transformation began with the first transfers of our partners edited elite germplasm early 2023 in both canola and rice. These transfers mark the beginning of the timetable for the commercialization of our pipeline of developed traits. In parallel, we opened the industry’s first standardized semi-automatic high throughput gene editing facility that we call the trade machine. This facility is a huge breakthrough in the improvement of the precision, speed and scale of gene editing trait products for us and frankly for the industry. What has made this breakthrough in trait development even more significant is the progress we have seen in global regulations to regulate the trait from gene editing similar to traits from conventional breeding.

This shows there is increasing global support for this new gene editing industry to address the major sustainability challenges in our global food supply. Before Peter provides specifics on our products and their progress, I’d like to briefly discuss how our commercial progress has occurred in parallel with the evolution of the company and our vision of a commercial stage gene editing company in plants, which we define as an integrated commercial business model that connects research and the development of new traits to a standardized semi-automated trait production facility and lastly, through the commercial trait transfers into seed company customers for commercialization and sale of our traits. To say it more simply, a commercial company focused on gene edited trait products that operates a gene editing trait supply system.

A system that is industrial scale to process and deliver multiple traits for multiple customers across multiple crops. Above all, our first transfers and opening the trade machine represent the face of our transformation to this vision of a commercial stage company. In our vision, technology based trait companies operate as an extension of the seed companies breeding operation. In this model, see this augments the seed company’s breeding operation with important new complex traits and in so doing accelerates the seed and trait development of our customers. Importantly, because our traits are indistinguishable from traits derived from conventional breeding or nature, more and more countries and regions have moved to adopt new regulations to encourage gene editing.

The goal of these new regulations is to encourage gene editing by treating the traits from NGTs similar to traits from conventional breeding. The United States and South America were the leaders in adapting these new regulations. An important moment in the ongoing development of this new industry happened in February 2024, when even the EU voted to regulate traits from NGT Technology, similar traits from conventional breeding, bringing the EU in Miami Nevada, United States, South America and many others. These adoptions country-by-country have shown the importance of our technology in achieving a sustainable global food supply. These new regulations with gene editing represent a real point of inflection. The new regulations are globally enabling this new era of standardized high throughput trait development.

In the seed industry, traits are a critical basis of competition. The need for faster scalable methods for reading cannot be understated. Establishing global regulatory standards are another important part of this puzzle. Because of the scale and speed enabled by our stabilized high throughput trait development technology, this moment is commonly referred to as agriculture’s analog to digital moments. In other words, this era is going to materially speed up new trait development and enable new trait build to obtain timelines in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional breeding or GMO methodologies. This is why we believe that our vision for commercial stage gene editing company is the future of breeding and the future of commercial crop development.

As discussed, the centerpiece of our commercial strategy is the advancement of our commercial pipeline integrated with our standalone high throughput trait facility and the initial transfers of our traits to leading seed companies for commercialization. This is why 2023 was a major point of inflection for our business and for the industry. Now, Peter will provide more specifics to our pipeline and our path to commercialization. Importantly, to provide some background on our trade products and our execution. Peter?

Peter Beetham: Thank you, Rory, and good afternoon to everyone. As Rory highlighted, our commercialization efforts are well underway and are focused on launching our 3 developed productivity traits with customers. Pod Shatter Reduction, or as we call it, PSR in canola, and our herbicide tolerance traits in rice that we call HT1 and HT3. Before I launch into the product discussion, I would like to explain how we define developed traits, and why there are significant advantages to working with these traits in customers’ elite genetics. Essentially, this helps to frame our vision for our developed trait products. We define developed traits as having completed multiple years of successful field-testing that the traits have met our Cibus product specifications and the traits have completed a product stewardship assessment, which includes quality assurance, regulatory, and intellectual property documentation.

These developed traits are in customer elite genetics, providing Cibus customers with a significant time advantage to move traits to market and the potential to accelerate their pre commercial pre plant breeding activities. Essentially, we are an extension of their own plant breeding programs. This acceleration is also impactful to any of our follow on products that mature from our advanced trait development. This integration of genetics and traits highlights why we see this analog to digital moment, Rory mentioned previously. Let me continue by further describing our first developed productivity trait PSR in canola. PSR strengthens the pod shatter around canola or winter oilseed rape seeds, protecting the crop yield in many typical to extreme weather conditions at harvest.

In canola, farmers are moving to what they call direct harvest, where they can harvest canola without the need to mow it down first. This saves on fuel costs and allows greater flexibility to manage the timing of harvest on their farms. Multiple years of our field trials, including the most recent 2023 results, have shown that our trait across many genetic backgrounds has similar efficacy to the leading competitive product that is currently on the market. We have already achieved significant commercial traction with our PSR trait, demonstrated by our engagements with 10 seed company customers to have Cibus’ PSR trait edited into their elite germplasm. We believe this current customer base, which includes names such as Bayer, Nuseed and Nutrien, represents over 20 million acres or approximately $150 million of potential annual royalties from canola and winter oilseed rape.

We achieved a major milestone in 2023 by completing transfers to multiple customers, signaling that PSR is getting closer to generating revenue for our company. We enter 2024 with significant momentum. And by the end of the year, we expect 7 to 8 out of our 10 current customers in canola will have their elite germplasm containing Cibus’ trait either transferred or ready to be transferred back to them. As a reminder, the transfer of a lead germplasm containing the Cibus trait enables the start of the commercialization process. Moving on to our other 2 developed productivity traits, HT1 and HT3 in rice. This is another multinational expansion opportunity for Cibus. These HT traits targeting weed management in rice are fully developed and validated like our work in PSR.

And our current customer base represents 3 million acres or approximately $70 million in potential annual royalties. To help frame this opportunity in rice, take for example the success of GMO based traits have had in major crops such as canola, soybean and corn. Over 95% of these crops currently utilize GMO based HT traits for weed management. This is amazing penetration that speaks to the value those traits provide to producers. However, the rice industry has yet to achieve similar success, having only had conventionally produced HT systems that struggle to have the success of GMO based HT traits. This void presents a significant opportunity for Cibus’ trait solutions, which have been shown to be very effective as demonstrated in our 2023 field trial results that indicated both HT1 and HT3 met or exceeded performance expectations when evaluated with proposed commercial herbicide application rate.

These field trials are an important step improving the effectiveness of our technology and helping to drive commercial progress. To that point, we have secured agreements with 3 major rice seed company customers, including Nutrien and Interoc. To have Cibus’ HT1 and HT3 traits incorporated into their elite germplasm. Excitingly, we have also successfully completed the first transfers of customers’ elite germplasm containing our HT1 and HT3 traits. This marks the beginning of commercialization for our rice traits. Our commercial team is working hard to expand our customer base for canola and rice with all 3 of our existing developed productivity traits and we expect to secure additional customer agreements in 2024. Let’s move to progress of advanced traits.

In addition to the incredible achievements within our developed traits, we continue to make progress with our 2 advanced traits. Sclerotinia Resistance, also known as white mold resistance, and our herbicide tolerance HT2 trait. Both are multi crop traits, meaning that they have potential efficacy across multiple crop types, including canola, winter oilseed rape, and soybean. This is an important distinction as we have the commercial opportunity to earn royalties across multiple crop types based on the same trait. Let’s start with the first advanced trait, Sclerotinia Resistance. Sclerotinia is the most economically significant disease in canola and one of the major diseases impacting soybean. In canola alone, we estimate that approximately 30 million acres could be impacted by Sclerotinia.

Sclerotinia is a fungal pathogen that causes a significant disease known as stem rot in crops. It affects 14% to 30% of canola and winter oilseed rape fields annually. And in 2016, the Canola Council of Canada reported that potentially up to 90% of the Canadian canola crop was affected. Sclerotinia can reduce canola yields by 7% to 15% with yield losses per infected plant being as great as 50%. The Canola Council of Canada calls Sclerotinia stem rot the most economically significant canola disease in Canada. It is also a significant disease in soybean, with the prevalence of the fungal pathogen detected in soybean production regions of between 33.3% in 2015 and 78.3% in 2020. To be durable, this resistance trait, like other disease traits, need to address multiple parts of the disease condition, meaning it needs multiple modes of action.

In 2023, we achieved a milestone in stacking 2 different modes of action against Sclerotinia in canola, and we were able to successfully prove effectiveness in greenhouse tests. This year, we expect greenhouse results for a third mode of action for Sclerotinia Resistance in Canola. We are also currently developing a plan to integrate Sclerotinia Resistance into soybean once that editing platform is fully developed. When successful, this would be the first major disease trait that would be applicable to multiple crops. Across canola and soybean alone, we believe this represents over $800 million of future annual royalty payments. Let’s move to our next advanced trait, HT2. Many weeds have become resistant to herbicides as a result of their extensive use over the last 20 years.

Thus, for crops like canola and soybean, there is huge demand for broad spectrum herbicides and associated herbicide traits that target broad leaf weeds. This is where our HT2 trait can make a real difference in improving productivity in farming. We completed successful edits of HT2 in canola in 2023, demonstrating continued progress in its development. Because of demand in canola and soybean, we believe HT2 has the potential to be the first gene edited trait to achieve 100 million acres of yearly use. For perspective, the industry estimates that GMO based herbicide tolerant traits are utilized currently on over 300 million planted acres. So, there is a clear precedent demonstrating adoption of value enhancing traits, which represents an immense opportunity for us.

We are excited to see the important greenhouse results for this trait this summer. Combined, our 3 developed and 2 advanced productivity traits represent a potential target market of over 250 million accessible acres, which translates to well over $1 billion in potential annual royalties. I would emphasize that we are just scratching the surface of what we have the potential to achieve with this business. Let’s move on to other platforms and sustainable ingredients. Now, I’ll touch on the development progress of our other crop platforms and our sustainable ingredients business, utilizing a set of quality traits that we are working on. We announced in January that we made a major industry breakthrough in completing what we believe to be the world’s first successful regeneration of wheat plants from single cells of elite wheat germplasm.

This amazing accomplishment demonstrates our company’s continued success in developing scalable high throughput breeding platforms that can operate as extensions of seed Company breeding programs. We believe this new platform opens the potential for developing various productivity and sustainable traits that work to address the most significant challenges faced by wheat farmers globally. I’m extremely proud of our entire R&D and technical teams for making this breakthrough. Our success was completed well ahead of schedule and we expect to demonstrate initial edits toward developing productivity traits for wheat this year. Turning to our soybean single cell regeneration platform. This is clearly one of the toughest cell biology challenges many institutions have faced.

However, we continue to make progress on this challenge by refining many steps in this process to be successful for our standardized high throughput trait machine. We expect the platform to be operational and have initial editing completed in 2024. Continued development of our soybean platform is a key strategic initiative and is the foundation of our emerging sustainable ingredients business, which is focused on the development of plant based alternative oils for downstream customer applications. We anticipate completing discovery efforts for alternative oils this year, an initial step toward developing solutions utilizing our quality traits that increase our customers’ ability to meet their sustainability targets. What’s particularly exciting for us is that we already have existing engagements with many of the world’s largest seed companies across other crops and projects.

As we continue to build trust and demonstrate value with these customers, we are also sowing the seeds for our future soybean platform as well, which we think really demonstrates the thoughtful approach that we’ve brought to our business model. The commercialization of our 3 developed traits and the progression of our 2 advanced traits remain the central focus of our corporate strategy. As such, we intend to track the progression of each trait as it is deployed into our customers’ alleged germplasm. The progress of which will be central to our quarterly updates going forward, as each trait by crop combination starts generating royalty revenue. I’ll now pass the call to Wade to briefly review our financials. Wade?

Wade King: Thank you, Peter. Looking at our financials for the fourth quarter, cash and cash equivalents were $32.7 million as of December 31, 2023. From a cash flow perspective for the 3 month period ended December, we used $17.1 million of cash for operations, which implies a monthly burn rate of approximately $5.7 million. Meanwhile, we’ve been working hard on optimizing our resources and have implemented cost saving measures that have reduced our operating cash flow burn rate down to $5 million per month. We believe this represents the appropriate level of cash burn needed to fund planned operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements going forward. This should extend our current cash runway into the early third quarter of 2024.

In terms of financing activities, we raised $20.3 million of gross proceeds via a registered direct offering in the fourth quarter and have also been successful in raising additional proceeds via regular equity sales in the first quarter. Moving to our income statement, which I’d like to remind everyone isn’t directly comparable to that of the prior year given the merger with Calyxt that closed in May of 2023. Please keep this in mind as I make reference to the prior year results. R&D expense was $14.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to $2.3 million in the year ago period. The increase was primarily related to increased lab supply and facility expenses, an increase in employee headcount and an increase in stock-based compensation expense for restricted stock awards.

SG&A expense was $6.8 million for the fourth quarter 2023 compared to $1 million in the year ago period. The increase was primarily related to an increase in headcount, increased consulting and legal fees, and an increase in stock-based compensation expense for restricted stock grants. Royalty liability interest expense was $8.1 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to no expense last year. This was related to the liability assumed in the May 31, 2023 merger with Cibus Global LLC. Non-operating income was $0.1 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to non-operating income of $0.5 million in the year ago period. The decrease was due to $0.8 million received in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a legal settlement. This was partially offset by a $0.3 million change in the fair value of the liability classified Class A common stock warrants.

Net loss was $277.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to net loss of $2.8 million in the year ago period. The increase in net loss was primarily the result of a $249.4 million non-cash goodwill and intangible assets impairment charge that we recorded in the fourth quarter that was associated with our May 2023 merger with Calyxt. For additional details about our financials for the fourth quarter of 2023, please refer to our press release and filings with the SEC. That concludes our financial discussion. Rory, now back to you for your closing remarks.

Rory Riggs: Thanks, Wade, and many thanks to everyone for listening in. I hope we accurately portrayed our excitement about our progress. The incredible commercial momentum we have achieved so far is a really strong endorsement of our industry leading gene editing technology, which uniquely positions us to partner with the breeding operations of some of the largest seed companies in the world. Furthermore, as Peter mentioned, our expected milestone for 2024 will further show our commercial progress with our customers for our developed products and the key milestones for advanced traits and new platforms. Together, they show our business vision of building a large high margin agricultural trait royalty business based on a family of our high value trait products and our proprietary technology platform that will enable us to develop and deliver on an ongoing basis multiple complex traits for multiple seed companies across multiple crops.

As I hope this is evident, Cibus is leading the charge into the new gene editing era. We truly believe that we are at the forefront of agricultural’s analog digital moment. We are excited about our continued commercial success in the months and quarters to come. We look forward to updating you. Operator that concludes our prepared remarks.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Bobby Burleson with Canaccord Genuity.

Bobby Burleson: So, yes, just curious, when we think about the cash runway, and the milestones that you guys have kind of set out for 2024, which ones do you think are kind of first half milestones? What can you kind of execute on prior to needing that infusion of cash to happen?

Rory Riggs: The big milestone that we expect to do and it’s just taking so long is trying to get soybean complete. It’s been, we keep making progress. This is one of the toughest projects in biology and I think we’re really close together and if we can accomplish this, it not only opens up 250 million acres, but it really opens up the sustainable ingredients business, and the ability to take soybeans and Procter & Gamble has worked with us, we have others working with us to be able to start that whole industry. So those are the ones from most the big milestone that we focus on. The others is, we are shipping as much as we can or working to get our traits out into the marketplace and to me those are the derisking moments for us is to be able to get into people’s hands they’re germplasm with our traits [indiscernible].

Bobby Burleson: And then I guess just trying to understand, the importance, to your partners of the programs that you’re working on, especially as you have successes and kind of prove out the viability of the platform. Are there any kind of maybe qualitative things you can highlight in terms of how that’s helping your business development efforts, the access to your prospective partners, existing partners or things are you seeing building momentum there based on tracking your successes and the overall kind of derisking of the viability of the platform?

Rory Riggs: We have two big things. One is because of our platform, we’re able to make these products. And so we actually have three developed products and they’ve been through their field trials. So before anybody send us their seeds, they’ve already gone to the fields, they’ve seen the products work and that’s the trait development business, right? The big part of our business where you see this amazing progress is the industrialization of the trait business. So once we have the trait, you don’t hand it to them. We have this trait machine, which allows them to bring in germplasm to us, edit it, and give it back to them. And what we see is real momentum for the big seed companies to work with us so that each ongoing season, they can look at us as a cost effective way of updating their traits and getting them into the field.

We weren’t quite expecting this type of momentum this quickly. And you saw by having Nutrien or Bayer come out and say that they were working with us. And what that meant was, they were working with us more than just the traits we gave them. They were working with us as a seed partner and they’re getting their crops ready. That’s how we look at it. And the and the fact that the industry itself is accepting this model that we can take their lead elite germplasm and put traits and then give it back to them on a timely and cost effective basis. I think when we first met you, Bobby, I don’t think we could have told you it would have happened as fast, It’s clear that the industry is, as you start the second and third launches, are really buying into this model of us being able to cost effectively make these ends and give back their products.

Does that make sense?

Bobby Burleson: And maybe I can just squeeze one more in on the royalty opportunity. You talked about some pretty big hundreds of millions of prospective royalties and just kind of direction surface there. But maybe can you revisit the kind of split that you’re assuming in terms of farmer, germplasm owner and the value enhancer being your role. In terms of how you arrive at that market? What’s the kind of rough math that you guys are thinking in terms of how that value creation is split amongst stakeholders?

Rory Riggs: I’m going to try this. This is one of the harder questions for us to answer in general about this business, because the trade businesses have been around for a long time. So between the seed companies, there’s $2 billion, $4 billion traits everybody’s developed things and they entered license between each other and pay royalties. So the knowledge base that royalties are quantifiable, so when you especially for productivity trades, when you notice that if you put a trait in, you can quantify the cost benefit and you share it with the seed company, with the farmer and with us, that for each of our traits. There really hasn’t been much of a dispute as to what type of royalty you would have and how to launch them. And so we’re fairly encouraged by how well they’ve adopted it.

We won’t know until we launch them. But the fact is for each of the traits that are that we have, we are getting them into their hands and they have a real model for which, they’re pricing these things. And then we’re encouraged that says that it’s not going to be tried farmer by farmer. We are encouraged that each of their crops, these are traits that they need, like a BT trait, you needed that in every acre, right, that we’re encouraged that these traits are going to be into it as full of especially our first three traits of a customer’s germplasm which are sold. Things like Sclerotinia, we don’t think there’ll be more than a third of the acres or 50% of the acres, but we’re pretty conservative how to look at them. Peter, do you want to add anything to that?

Do you want to think about your peers talking every day to the seed companies and pricing and launching? Peter?