Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EcoSynthetics twenty nineteen Annual and Special Meeting. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. If you are a shareholder of EcoSynthetics and you have a question related to one of the resolutions during the meeting, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad.
Only matters related to the resolutions will be heard during the formal meeting. The company will provide an open question and answer session for shareholders at the end of the corporate update. Shareholders will be reminded of the instructions at that time. Today's meeting is being recorded on Wednesday, 05/20/2020 at 1PM Eastern Time. I would now like to hand the call over to Mr.
Paul Lucas, Chair of EcoSynthetics. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of the Shareholders of EcoSyntetics Incorporated. The meeting will come to order. My name is Paul Lucas, and I am Chair of the Board of EcoSyntetics. And pursuant to EcoSynthetics' bylaws, I'll chair this meeting.
Robert Hare, the Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Secretary of the company, will act as the Secretary of this meeting. After the meeting, Jeff McDonald, the Chief Executive Officer of the company will make a presentation, after which there will be a period for questions. For the purposes of this meeting, I have appointed AFT Trust Company through its representative Lata Malchin Singh to act as scrutineer. Ms. Malchin Singh is attending the meeting via telephone conference call.
We will now proceed with the business of the meeting. I've been advised that the notice calling this meeting and related management proxy material were mailed to shareholders of record in accordance with applicable law. AST Trust Company has filed with me proof of service of such mailing and I direct that a copy of such proof of service be annexed to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule. I will dispense with calling for a reading of the notice of the meeting. The scrutineer has also advised me that prior to the meeting, proxies were received from the holders of a sufficient number of common shares to constitute a quorum.
And accordingly, I declare that a quorum is present and that the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct that the formal report of the scrutineer be annexed to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule. We are asking the meeting participants present here today to complete the provided attendance sheet indicating the name and address of the shareholder and proxy holder, if applicable. Once completed, we will ask each person to leave the attendance sheet on the table at the end of the meeting in a designated area. The attendance sheet will be collected and provided to the scrutineer and to the other representatives of our transfer agent as required.
I'd like to take a moment to comment on the voting procedures to be used at today's meeting. Voting will proceed by way of a show of hands, except that voting for the directors of the company will proceed by way of ballot. If you are a registered shareholder or proxy holder, you will be required to complete the ballot that has been placed in front of you. With respect to each matter to be considered at today's meeting, I will ask for a motion. Only registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders can make a motion or address the meeting with respect to a pending motion.
As the first item of business of this meeting, I now present to the meeting the company's consolidated financial statements as that and for the financial year ended December 3139. Copies of the financial statements were mailed to shareholders in accordance with applicable law. The next item of business is the appointment of auditors for the ensuing year and the authorization for the Board to fix their remuneration. I would ask for a motion for an ordinary resolution that PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, chartered accountants be appointed as auditors of the company to hold office for the ensuing year or until their successor is appointed at such remuneration as may be fixed by the Board of Directors. Will someone move the resolution?
I so moved. The motion is now on the floor. All shareholders and proxy holders in favor of the resolution, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary, if any, I declare that resolution carried. The next item of business is the election of directors.
The meeting is now open for the nomination of the five directors to be elected by the company's shareholders to hold office until the close of the first annual meeting of shareholders following such election or until their successors are elected or appointed. No notice of director nominations is Jeff McDonald Jeff McDonald, Susan Allen, Martin Hovis and Jeffrey Nodland as Directors for the ensuing year or until their successors are elected or appointed. I will now call for a motion to elect the Directors. Will someone move the motion? I so move.
The motion is now on the floor. As a result of the company's majority voting policy, it is necessary to vote by ballot for the election of each director. I therefore direct that a poll be taken. Each shareholder or proxy nominee should record his or her vote in respect of the election of each director nominee by marking the appropriate box beside each director's name and by signing and printing his or her name on the ballot. Once you have completed your ballot, I will ask you to place your ballots on the designated table so that they can be scanned and transmitted to the scrutineer.
Prior to the meeting, I was advised by the scrutineers that the proxies deposited for the meeting were overwhelmingly voted for the election of each of the directors nominated. Therefore, I declare Paul Lucas, Jeff McDonald, Susan Allen, Martin Elvis and Jeffrey Nodland to be elected as your Board of Directors to serve in that capacity until the company's next annual general meeting or until their successors are elected or appointed. Rather than hold up the business of this meeting for the final tabulation of votes cast, I directed the results of the poll for the election of the directors be included with the minutes of this meeting and filed on SEDAR. The next item of business is the approval of the unallocated options under the company's 2011 Stock Option Plan as more particularly described in the management information circular. In order to be effective, this resolution must be approved by the affirmative vote, but not less than a majority of the votes cast at this meeting.
I will now call for a motion to approve the resolution. Sorry about that. In order to be effective, this resolution must be approved by the affirmative vote of not less than a majority of the votes cast at this meeting. I will now call for a motion to approve the resolution set out under the heading, Approval of Unallocated Stock Options on pages 13 to 15 of the management information circular. Will someone move the resolution?
I still move. The motion is now on the floor. All shareholders and proxy holders in favor of the resolution, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary if any, I declare the resolution carried. As there is no further business, I ask that someone move a resolution that this meeting now terminate.
I so move. All shareholders and proxy holders in favor of the resolution, please so signify by raising your hand. Contrary if any, I declare that this meeting is now terminated. I'd now like to pass the meeting over to our CEO, Jeff McDonald.
Thanks very much, Paul. And thanks to everyone who has joined us in person and remotely today, and for the most part remotely due to these different times. And I guess as we are working in different times, I'd just like to start by confirming that our number one priority today is the health and safety of our team members. And that as of today, all of them and their families remain in good health. And that's also very critical to our number two priority, which is the continued success of our customers through our support.
We have a small team working here in Burlington, Ontario in our labs and on our pilot line supporting customer initiatives and advancing some of our R and D work, while those who are in more clerical or administrative roles are able to perform their tasks from home for the time being. 2019 saw an unprecedented level of ESG investing and therefore an unprecedented level of businesses trying to engineer themselves to conform to certain ESG criteria. I guess I'd like to start by reminding everyone that we really believe we were ESG before ESG was a term. Make no mistake, we're here to build a great business. But we've defined our business purpose based on developing and marketing sustainable, healthy solutions to our customers.
We do that on the basis of our biopolymer platform. It is a platform technology that is naturally derived and sustainable and therefore creates a good starting point for that ESG agenda. But there are lots of very interesting things in the world of green products that are out there that have failed to achieve scale and failed to achieve economics to be successful in building a business. Our product lines based on this biopolymer at its core has proven itself to be economically viable and has been fully scaled through our two production facilities. So it's both sustainable and it's economical in its production and its applications in the markets that we serve.
Otherwise, we just don't do it as a business. So we're able to bring our customers safe and healthy solutions and that's put us on the radar that many businesses and business people have taken as their radar as they look forward into the future of what their businesses need to look like. As we came out of 2019 and into 2020, we really felt there was an unprecedented level of sustainability and climate change commitment on the agendas of many of the top business thinkers around the world, even some that you would maybe least expect it from. So we see here some great examples of companies like Amazon and Ikea putting the carbon footprint reduction and sustainability at the top of the agenda. Our platform is uniquely positioned to help support that agenda.
We bring an opportunity for our customers to achieve safer and healthier solutions that allow them to reduce their carbon footprint. A great example is our paper business, where within the graphic paper market, our biopolymer solution replaces an incumbent petroleum based product and achieves a 67% reduction in carbon footprint, while also delivering our customers savings. From that same innovation, that core biopolymer, we're able to derive multiple solutions that we can tailor to meet the needs of multiple sectors. And within those sectors, that can spawn a number of products for each application that we choose to go after. So with that, as a science based company, it would be pretty easy for us to get excited and distracted by lots of very interesting science projects.
There are a plethora of ideas out there for us to be targeting and applying our solutions to. We've been in the last five years on a very focused and disciplined mission to build our paper business into something that was self supporting on its own and then expand into markets where we had great technology matched with a strong value proposition and the sustainability agenda to back our customers' sustainability agendas. So paper, wood composites and personal care are our focus. So the addressable markets for these spaces are attractive and are one of the key reasons why we chose these spaces. We need to be able to bring economics, but we also like catalyst opportunities where there is change afoot for greener and healthier solutions.
And so with the establishment of our paper business and driving sustainability and savings in that market, we look to where else we could deliver such a technical and economic solution to customers. And we found that we had a technology that applied itself very well to the replacement of formaldehyde in the wood panel industry, which was we thought a catalyst event where customers and consumers were looking to move away from formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen. We also have more recently taken advantage of the opportunity to replace petroleum based ingredients in the personal care space with an all natural ingredient that replaces an ingredient called polyvinylpyrrolidone within the personal care market. And as you can see here, each of those markets represents a very significant opportunity for us. You can have the greatest value proposition, but if no one's listening, then you can't get anywhere.
We have taken our value proposition and it has been in many ways and in many cases adopted by our customers into their own value propositions. And I think we're as lucky as any emerging company with the quality of partnerships that we've been able to establish. So within the paper and paper based packaging market, companies like Store Enzo are working with our products. We have one of the leaders in the wood based panel industry globally in Swisscrono using our product daily in the production of their wood panels. And we're working with one of the world's largest chemical companies in delivering all natural solutions for their personal care ingredients line.
We've been very disciplined on our roadmap. When we got started together as a new team about five years ago, we made it our first mission to ensure that our underlying paper business could stand on its own two feet as a viable cash generating business. And we quickly got to that result and then looked for our growth opportunities to build our revenue base. We established our focus on the wood composites market and established our partnership with Swiss Crono to get that off the ground. That combined with our paper business in the last year has allowed us to register consistent positive operating cash flow and we now turn our sights toward driving success within those established partnerships in wood panels and in personal care products to begin develop to begin generating profitable growth for the business.
So in summary, what our mission is today is all about driving change and commercial adoption in wood panels and in personal care markets. We think we have a number of blue chip partners that are engaged in working with us in doing exactly that. They're benefiting from having retailer and supply chain pull. Customers are asking for greener and healthier solutions. And I think on the other side of this crisis, we're going to see that demand being even stronger as people consider what's in front of them and how it's affecting their health.
We're going to
stick to the discipline of having this multiple shots on goal approach to achieving our commercial success on the basis of these three markets we're serving. With that, I'd be happy to open it up to questions and we'll open the line. Thank you.
And I'm showing no questions at this time.
Okay. Well, again, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today, and we look forward to our regular quarterly updates with you soon. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call.
You
may now disconnect. Thank you.