This conference is being recorded. [Foreign language].
All participants, thank you for standing by. The conference is ready to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Conifex Timber Inc. Q1 2025 results conference call. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Ken Shields. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call covering our Q1 2025 results. I'm in our Vancouver office today, but our Chief Operating Officer, Andrew McLellan, and our Chief Financial Officer, Trevor Pruden, are participating on this call from our regional office in Prince George. Let's quickly deal with a housekeeping item. We will be making forward-looking statements and references to non-IFRS measures, and therefore call your attention to the warning statement set out on pages one and two of the management discussion and analysis that we released this morning. Turning to our Q1 results, all of us at Conifex are most pleased that our Q1 2025 net income allowed us to join West Fraser as the second member of the club of public SPS producers, operating facilities in Western Canada, that managed to achieve positive net income after tax in Q1. We barely made it.
We reported net income of $600,000, or just under $0.02 per fully diluted Conifex share. We generated EBITDA in Q1 of $4.9 million, which, incidentally, is equivalent to roughly 30% of our present equity market capitalization. Two years ago, we alerted our shareholders that the Chief Forester's May 2023 harvest determination, coupled with some other Forest Ministry initiatives we were pursuing, would enable our Mackenzie site to migrate to a lower and more enviable ranking on the North American lumber industry cost curve. Our Q1 results illustrate the EBITDA we are capable of achieving when we access an affordable supply of quality saw logs to support a two-shift sawmill operation. Our Q1 results, as you'd be aware, are fully consistent with the guidance we provided you on our March call when we explained how transitioning to a two-shift sawmill operation would substantially boost EBITDA.
We would like to take about five minutes or so of your time now to provide our perspective on where we rank on the North American softwood lumber industry cost curve and the thoughts we have about our ability to continue to generate positive EBITDA after duty deposit rates increase in the second half of 2025. The simple fact is that our Q1 2025 EBITDA per 1,000 board feet of lumber produced and sold from our integrated Mackenzie sawmill and power complex has not been matched by any other public forest products company in North America. We achieved EBITDA of CAD 4.9 million on shipments of 38 million board feet, and this translates into EBITDA of CAD 129 per 1,000 board feet of lumber produced and sold in the quarter. This is equivalent to approximately $90 per 1,000 board feet.
In the opening quarter of 2025, traditional low-cost SPF producers, Weyerhaeuser, PotlatchDeltic, Canfor, and West Fraser, earned between $35 and $53 per 1,000 board feet of the lumber they produced and sold. I think Canfor's North American lumber business earned something like CAD 48 per 1,000 board feet, and Interfor appears to have earned around $56. Our Q1 results reflect reasonably strong EBITDA margins for two main reasons. The first is that in Q1, we benefit from relatively low log costs because our winter harvest is sourced from relatively close-in, low-cost truck delivery bands. Our delivered log costs are higher in the summer and fall because our harvesting activity takes place in the northern half of the Mackenzie timber supply area, and in the north, the harvesting and delivery costs are greater than they are in the south.
The second reason we typically do well in the opening quarter of the year is that the prices we receive for the electricity we sell to the BC Hydro Grid under our energy purchase agreement are higher in the opening and closing months of each calendar year, but lower in the middle months. Typically, our Q2 EBITDA contribution from power generation is held back by the annual maintenance downtime that we take at our plant. Against that backdrop, we have looked at a variety of scenarios to project our results over the remainder of 2025. Our mid-take projection assumes higher duty deposit rates, but it assumes that there are no additional tariffs. Our pricing assumptions for the year align with the price assumptions made by the leading forest products analyst in Canada.
Our mid-take projection indicates that our full-year EBITDA per 1,000 board feet of lumber produced and sold in 2025 is expected to be in line with or a bit higher than what forest products analysts presently expect Canfor, Interfor, and West Fraser to achieve in 2025 from their North American operation. On our recent calls with you, we discussed the May 4, 2023, release by BC Chief Forester of a new harvest-level determination for the Mackenzie timber supply area. Included in the release was the removal of the previous requirement to secure 55% of our saw log supply from dead pine salvage stands, most of which had already lost their commercial value of saw logs. The current annual allowable cut for the Mackenzie PSA is 2.32 million cu m. We operate the only sawmill. Our annual fiber requirements are roughly 800,000 cu m.
You can see that the new AAC is roughly 2.9 times our present requirements. This confirms our view that we do not face supply constraints in Mackenzie, similar to those that are presently challenging many sawmill operations in B. C. and in certain other regions. We are fortunate to operate in a fiber supply region that has a degree of saw log self-sufficiency that is unparalleled in the interior region of B. C, and perhaps in any other major saw log supply region in Canada. As a company, we've gone through a transition period over the past two years, and our current harvest is now primarily sourced from green, commercially viable saw log stands.
This shift in log quality is the main reason our EBITDA loss fell in half in 2024 from what we incurred in 2023, and the main reason we're capable of achieving, in our opinion, low double-digit EBITDA in 2025 with further improvement in 2026. Summing up on this point, after funding some minor projects that will improve the reliability and consistency of our two-shift operation, we are confident that the EBITDA per 1,000 board feet of lumber we produce and sell will be in line with or slightly higher than the EBITDA reported by the other major public lumber companies whose diversified operations are viewed as being fully cost competitive and economically sustainable by knowledgeable industry observers.
Turning to duty deposits, you'll note that we expense $2.8 million of duties in the quarter, representing the full amount of countervailing and anti-dumping duties incurred on shipments of softwood lumber from Mackenzie to the U.S. at a combined duty deposit rate of 14.4%. As of March 31, we had cumulative duties of $40.3 million U.S. held in trust by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. On a pre-tax basis, these deposits are equivalent to approximately CAD 56 million or $1.38 per Conifex share. Except for roughly $11 million recorded as recoverable and respective overpayments, Conifex has recorded the duty deposits as an expense.
With cumulative duty for the $1.38 per share and recent trading prices of $0.30-$0.40 per share and the plenty of tax shelter that we have, Conifex shareholders should benefit by more than the shareholders of any other publicly traded lumber company if an eventual trade settlement includes the provision for partial repayments of duties held on deposit. As everyone on the line that covers our industry knows, some preliminary duty rates have been announced regarding duty deposit rates that are projected to increase from 14.4% presently. In our case, if the preliminary rates hold, we expect to pay something like 26.81% in September and perhaps 34.45% in November and beyond. Turning to our book value, our book value per share exceeds $2 per share, and as you know, it exceeds our share trading price by five or more times.
In closing, and before taking your questions, on behalf of our board of directors, I wish to express gratitude and deep appreciation, first to our employees for their continued hard work helping strengthen the economic sustainability of our company in an environmentally responsible and safe manner. Secondly, to our lenders who continue to demonstrate their confidence and trust in the economic sustainability of our integrated site at Mackenzie, as well as the asset values underpinning our fiber procurement, lumber manufacturing, and power production platform. This employee and lender support is crucially important given present cost currents in the British Columbia lumber industry and the broader North American economy. Our differentiated and high-quality fiber supply, coupled with the contribution from CAD 100 million we've invested in power generation, provide us the foundation we require to sustain a profitable lumber business at our site in Mackenzie, B. C .
All of us at Conifex, thank you for your interest in our company, and Andrew, Trevor, and I look forward to responding to any questions and answers some shareholders may have. We will turn our discussion back to the operators.
Thank you. You may press star one if you have a question. First question is from Kirk Ludtke, from Imperial Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello, Ken. Appreciate the call.
Hi, Kirk.
I just wanted to, with respect to the guidance, I heard fiscal 2025 Adjusted EBITDA in the low double digits. Did I hear that correctly?
Yep, very low double digits. If you look at what the general forecasts are for the major companies, the forecasts are generally coming in around $40 or $50 per 1,000 board feet of FPS that's produced and sold. If we do 170 or 180 million and we get $60 or $70 per 1,000 board feet over the 12-month period, we would be in the low double digits for EBITDA for the calendar year.
Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. That assumes no additional tariffs, but it does assume.
It assumes the ramp-up of duties to 34.45% in the second half of 2025.
Okay. Can you characterize the pricing assumption there? Is it roughly in line with today's pricing, or are you assuming some ramp?
No, we are assuming a ramp. We monitor what the major analysts on the street have been forecasting. The latest number I have is that one bank dealer is at benchmark prices of $528 in 2025 and $548 in 2026. Others are generally $475-$550. One analyst is at $485 and $490. Our pricing assumptions, as we get towards the end of the year, represent an improvement from today's price. They probably are not materially different from the Q1 average price that we had on the benchmark of $488. The November futures are 18% higher than the current cash market prices. We expect that some of the costs of the incremental tariffs will be borne by lumber consumers, not producers. We expect to have some price relief that partially offsets the higher duties that we will be incurring.
Got it. I appreciate it. Thank you. On the last call, you mentioned positive EBITDA in the second quarter. Are you still thinking it'll be positive?
Yes, but it will be quite a bit lower. The main reason for that is that our power plant is down for maintenance for at least four weeks. The power plant goes from our source of EBITDA to consume EBITDA for repairs. That knocks our EBITDA back in the quarter. Secondly, our team did a great job transitioning from a single-shift to a two-shift operation early in the new year. The weather did not cooperate with us enough, and we did not get enough logs in the yard to sustain a full two-shift operation. We are running our mill four days a week now on two shifts rather than five days. We are hoping we can maintain that rate going through the balance of the year, but we might have to take a few extra days of downtime.
We're not going to have capacity utilization rates that are what we expect to be able to achieve on a two-shift basis on a go-forward basis. That's because we had a relatively late start to shifting our harvest activity and boosting them up to support a two-shift operation. We don't plan to use the rest 10 for the EBITDA in the Q2, but it's going to be more significantly reduced from Q1.
Got it. Okay. I appreciate it. My last topic would be liquidity. How would you feel about it? Do you need to borrow additional monies to fund the ramp in working capital or not?
Yes. That is the subject. We have a very close relationship with our main lenders, one for the power plant and one for our sawmill business. They are separately financed businesses. We really appreciate the efforts that the lenders have taken to understand the competitiveness of our facility. The fact of the matter is that in the phenomenal side of things, we have a 14% interest rate. We accepted a higher interest rate because we did not want to be burdened by a fixed charge coverage ratio. In the current year, there are going to be some one-time charges once the duty rates are finalized. There will be some accounting adjustments taken against EBITDA probably in Q3 of this year. The terms of our loan agreement are such that that will not create any challenges for us.
The second point I'd make is that 14% is expensive. We don't like keeping a whole bunch of cash around and paying 14% interest on it. We don't have much surplus liquidity at all. We'll be spending some time with our lenders in the next four weeks or so reviewing our second-half plans in more detail and looking at factors such as several small capital projects that we have that have very rapid paybacks on them. Secondly, we want to spend some money developing stands for our winter harvest season and next summer harvest. We're going to be putting some capital to work developing stands for future harvest.
Okay. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, you may press star one if you have a question. There are no further questions registered at this time. I would like to turn the meeting back over to Mr. Shields.
Thank you for that very comprehensive question. Thanks to everyone on the call for monitoring our progress and showing interest in our company. It's much appreciated by all of us. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.
Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.
This conference is no longer being recorded.