Darling Ingredients Inc. (NYSE:DAR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brad Phillips: Yes. Tom, this is Brad. Yes. So you heard earlier, kind of right there at the end of the year with the cold weather, with the kind of startup on number 3, with working capital and whatnot, that contributed to the contribution, no pun intended, on what we did here of $75 million per partner in the — up to the filing here. And so the outlook is as Randy and Sandy have mentioned, number 3 is working its way up to capacity kind of as we speak over the coming days in this month. And as that occurs, we will see DGD become debt-free and would anticipate distributions starting sometime by midyear, I would frame it that way, if not earlier.

Operator: And the next question will be from Manav Gupta from UBS.

Manav Gupta: I actually wanted to follow up on something you said, and I completely agree. There are some small players out there who are claiming they can produce SAF, they were never actually produced RD. And what’s interesting is they’ve gone ahead and signed like 500 million, 700 million gallons of contracts out there. And as you pointed out, these are not real gallons. There is no SAF behind them, but you will have the real gallons. So my question here is, let’s say, if Delta, American and all these airlines come to you and say, “Please sign a 400 million, 500 million, 600 million gallon contract for 8 or 9, 10 period — year,” would you be open to such contracts because you have the real SAF gallons versus these guys?

John Bullock: Yes. This is John. I think you’re hitting on something that we see in the SAF market, which is there’s a lot of promises for SAF gallons out there that, quite frankly, we don’t really understand how people are going to commercialize and bring to the marketplace. So we believe we’re going to be one of the real players in the marketplace. And one of the few real players in the marketplace that are going to have physical gallons available for folks. I think with all of the promises that have been made out there, that’s going to put us into an ideal position. How we commercialize, how we do in terms of signing contracts and some folks and so forth, that will evolve over the next year or so for us. I wouldn’t want to prejudge and essentially say, listen, we’re willing to be taken out by one individual counterparty.

We’re just going to have to see what the market develops. But there’s no doubt, and we can already see it starting to churn in the marketplace. People are going to start going from phantom gallons to real gallons. And when they do, there’s basically only 2 doors that people can knock on to get those real gallons, and we’re one of them. So we’re looking forward to those conversations. We’re engaged in those conversations with our counterparties out there. Want to try to put this — turn this into a situation where it’s a real advantage for the folks that actually do end up signing the SAF gallons with them because we think they’re going to be in a really advantaged position in the marketplace versus their competitors. We think that will evolve over the next 10 to 12 months.

Manav Gupta: I think phantom gallons is a perfect word for that. My follow-up quick question here is just going back to the guidance. The guidance of $1.8 billion to $1.85 billion does not include Gelnex. So if you do close that, there is still a strong possibility that by the time with the higher — slightly higher fat prices and stuff and Gelnex in there, you could still be looking at probably $1.875 billion to $1.9 billion. That cannot be ruled out, I’m just saying at this point of time

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