Today it's a very special one. In all those years, I have never been as excited as I am right now with the strength, capability, and results being delivered by our current team. I am very proud to say, at the current configuration, Verde AgriTech is second to none in the Brazilian agriculture sector. Most certainly, we are already harvesting this year the results from the preparation we did last year throughout, as you all know, an absolutely terrible market.
As usual, if you have any questions throughout the presentation, please send them in the Q&A. We will try to answer as many of them as possible. If you're watching this video on YouTube, please share, please like, and if there's any question you want answered, do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Before we begin the results presentation and the Q&A session, I will be introducing our new team, the leaders of our new team. After this brief presentation, I will then allow them to go back to what matters the most, which is carrying on the communication, the relationship with our customers. They will be with us here for the first couple of minutes of the presentation, and then they have other priorities.
I would like to start by introducing Marcus Ribeiro. Marcus is our Chief Revenue Officer. Marcus has been doing an absolutely amazing job by gathering the great leaders we have in this call here. Marcus has a very successful career in specialty fertilizer sales, having worked for some of the leading companies in Brazil.
We also have in this call Guilherme Medeiros, who is our recently appointed, and with spoilers, there will be a press release as well with more of his background. He has been recently appointed as our Chief Marketing Officer. Guilherme is an agronomist. Guilherme has worked for very leading companies as well, developing markets for specialty products. He will be responsible not just for marketing, but he is also going to be leading our technical team.
One mistake I did in the past was to have separate leaderships for our technical team and for our marketing team. With Guilherme, now we can combine those two sectors, and that makes me very excited about the transfer of knowledge from research, from all the benefits we've seen, all the way to the marketing and communication with our customers.
I was just in a call just right now with our private team, and the level of feedbacks and results which are coming from the relationship with the customers already is phenomenal. I'm pretty certain that with Guilherme now, we're going to be able to amplify that to the rest of the company. I will now present our four Sales Directors.
Each one is responsible for a different region of Brazil, and each one of those four directors leads a team that goes from 9 to 12 other field sales managers, all of them agronomists, all of them with extensive expertise in selling specialty products. This team you guys are seeing right now was assembled in the later part of last year when a lot of the market had already purchased fertilizers. This is really the first season.
This is really the first year that they will have an opportunity to start developing the market. Starting with Muriel, she is responsible for the Cerrado region, has been doing an amazing job. She won last year our award for the person who has done the most in the company, and we named this trophy Alysson Paolinelli after our former director and huge leader. Muriel, she is the one leading the Cerrado region. All of them, I will not go into details with the companies, but all of them are agronomists with several years' experience with some of the leading specialty companies.
I am really highlighting the word specialty here on purpose because there has been a lot of frustration over the years about, "So how come our product delivers so much more? How come our product costs so much more in the U.S. and so many more people buy our product in the U.S. looking at those added benefits? How come more of the Brazilian agronomists or the Brazilian farmers, they can't perceive this value?
A lot of it was our fault in terms of having a team which was equipped in helping the customers in the ground to understand and fully benefit from those advantages. We also have Aislan, who leads the team responsible for the north of Minas Gerais State, an area in the vicinity of our mine. Aislan, likewise, very experienced, very successful sales professional, very technical. We have Fabrício Santos, another phenomenal sales executive responsible for the south of Minas Gerais State, where the mine is, as well as Espírito Santo, another important state for coffee growing.
Our fourth director here is Maurício Júnior, who is responsible for the state of São Paulo and Paraná State. Again, several years of experience selling specialty products, great relationships with a number of important distributors. It is a joy to be a witness of the meetings where they are leading their teams, and it is hard to put in words how excited we all are.
We have in the call as well, Maiara Santos. Maiara Santos, a phenomenal leader. Maiara started with us as an SDR, so as an intern trying to develop the market, cold-calling customers to talk about our product. She went forward to start leading that sales development team. Then she assembled both the inside sales team and the SDR team, and now she manages about 10 people looking at all the inside sales we have.
We already have several customers who are adults inside, as well as playing a very crucial role supporting the other directors when it comes to scheduling calls and creating demand. She also leads our sales force, our CRM team, which uses some very advanced techniques for customer relationship, generation of demand, and other benefits. We also have Dayana. Dayana also started as an intern at Verde a few years ago. She was in our customer success team. She was in our SDR team. She was in our direct sales team. Now she is leading a very important new team we put together, which is our customer success team. Dayana, she has in her team at the present six, another one being hired.
What they do is to properly follow in the field the usage of our product, the benefits the farmers are having, the challenge they might be facing, looks at results, so the opportunities for innovation. A very strategic team as well we have in place. We also have in this call, as the other leader from our sales team, Eheke Villele, who has been responsible for our international sales team for a number of years now and has been able to open other markets internationally, both in South America and Asia, several new clients in North America. He has developed all the key relationships throughout last year, which are translating into more sales for this year when we look at exports. Finally, we have Luiza, who makes it all happen, our Investor Relations Manager.
She also started as an intern, has been progressing, has been doing an amazing job, has been responsible not just for the filings, but answering your emails every time, and has been doing an amazing job. Felipe Paolucci, who you all have known for a while, our great Chief Financial Officer.
Thank you very much, Guilherme, Muriel, Marcus, Aislan, Eheke, Fabrício , Dayana, Maurício. Luiza will stay with us and Maiara. Thank you. It was an opportunity for us. I'm very thankful for you to take your time away from your busy schedule talking to our customers so we could introduce you all to our co-owners. I will then allow you to go back to what matters the most, which is keeping our customers happy. Thank you very much for attending the call. We shall now begin the boring part of the conversation. Thank you very much.
Starting with the presentation, if you could please share your screen with the deck we prepared for today, which, as you may expect, will have a lot of terrible, ugly news from this hopefully soon to be forgotten last couple of years in the agriculture space in Brazil. It has been extraordinarily tough, and we will begin the presentation looking at how depressing it has been. Next slide, please. We have another slide with all the disclaimers, which is very familiar for everyone and should be on the very first slide as well. When we upload the video, Luiza, this should be at the very beginning of the investors' video, the disclaimer. Showing the results, make it differ. We have forward-looking statements. It can all go wrong.
You can all lose all your money, but we're doing the best here and among the challenge to make sure it doesn't happen. The next slide. Oh, who hasn't bought a bag of Super G reensand? I hope you go on Amazon right now if you're in the U.S. We have a 5% off coupon, and we will be sending you one of our amazing products.
You can enjoy the thousands of customers who have bought our product in North America and are very happy with them. Next slide. Let's start looking at how awful the market was for 2024. Please go ahead, Felipe. There it is. Price for agricultural commodity prices coming down. What you can see in this chart on the top for soybeans, when you start looking at 2025, you can see the prices are strengthening a little bit.
One thing which this presentation does not have, and the next one will have, is something called the relações de troca or the exchange ratio, which essentially means how many soybean bags you need in order to buy the inputs you need. This is what really matters to farms, and this is starting to look quite promising.
The farms are seeing some sort of stabilization, and there is an excitement for this year. Unfortunately, some regions of Brazil are dealing with bad weather. For example, Mato Grosso do Sul, I was just in a call earlier today with one of the customers, and he was just reporting how terrible it has been with the weather. Several of other regions are experiencing much better yields. You can see corn prices performing really well. Corn prices are performing really well.
Brazil is using corn for ethanol production as well, in addition to sugarcane. There is a lot of new plants being built. There is a big bullish excitement about corn production in Brazil. It is amazing how growing, how producing ethanol out of corn is good as a market, as something that expands our market because you do not only need corn. You also need biomass in order to fuel your industry. The biomass which is used is eucalyptus. It is also a lot of new eucalyptus being grown in Brazil as an energy source for those plants. This is quite bullish.
In terms of soybeans, again, from a geopolitical perspective, looking at 2025, when we had the previous Trump administration, and when we had the tariffs and the tariffs war with China and the sanctions, the country that most benefited from all of that was Brazil, the Brazilian farmers, because China had to pivot and start buying more.
The price went up. Hopefully, we will see Brazil as the world's largest soybeans exporter, and there is excitement about that as well. Next slide, please. You can see potash price collapsing, but you can also see how at the beginning of this year, there is some recovery there. Some literary recovery from CAD 2.90 up to CAD 3.40.
Even though when you look at a chart like that, even though the number does not seem to be very big, for a farmer, it has a very strong psychological impact when they start seeing fertilizer price going up. Drives consumption and, quite frankly, helps us all. I do not think I am often asked if I think potash price, fertilizer price are going to go through the roof again anytime soon.
I personally find it unlikely, but I have already come across several different geopolitical theories to why this might happen. I do not know. They all might be right. Hopefully, they are. Why there would be a strong increase.
As far as how we run the company, as far as how we're planning, and as far as how we are looking at our future, we're really looking at the base case scenario without big increases and making sure we can be very profitable no matter what. Next slide. Oh, this is painful, isn't it? This is so, so painful. I'm wanting to see how the exchange rates in Brazil have been going up brutally, all the way from 2017. When we started there, 2017 was when we built our first plant, when I had to sign off as a guarantor to borrow money on personally guaranteeing the loans.
Otherwise, the banks would not lend us the money to build the first operation. The market, you remember, was also terrible back in 2017. We went there, signed it. I put everything there. Of course, it worked out. Had some amazing years. It went down. It went down the interest rates, but you can see how terrible, how terrible. Hopefully, it will start cooling down soon, and we're going to go back to some sort of normality.
There is a lot of pressure in Brazil for interest rates to come down. The government seems to be understanding. They seem to be trying to put some measures in place. Fingers crossed they can resolve that. Some people say, if we had DOGE in Brazil, if we had Elon Musk or someone trying to cut costs down in Brazil, this interest rate would come down crashing. Because if there is one thing just between us, do not tell anyone, but it is appalling, appalling the wastage you see in Brazil.
If the U.S. is bad, I think Brazil, I think if we were to do something similar in the country, it would be transformational. Absolutely transformational. How much scope there is in the country and all sorts of level of administration to cut down wastage. Who knows? Maybe one day. Exchange rate keeps changing.
The weaker the Brazilian currency is, the better it will always be for us. The better it will always be for farmers. Next slide. Oh, that's a painful slide. That's an atrocious, an absolutely sad slide. The number of bankruptcies in Brazil in the agriculture sector has been at record levels. What we're seeing here is even worse. This is an older source of insolvency. We know of a number of very even larger companies. It isn't even shown here in this chart.
If you look at, for example, the bottom one, AgroGalaxy, they owe us money, unfortunately. That is an insolvency filing they did. The total amount of money, though, is CAD 4 billion, so about CAD 1 billion. This is a very successful company. It is backed by one of the most successful private equity groups in agriculture. I know the founder, phenomenal guy.
That is what it is. What the big problem was when this company filed for insolvency protection was that a lot of the banks got completely spooked and started canceling credit to a lot of other input suppliers, to a lot of farmers. There was a little bit of a Lehman Brothers moment last year for the agricultural sector and it put us all, quite frankly, in a very difficult spot.
Because if before you wanted to sell as much as you possibly could, now it's not just about selling. It's selling and being certain you're going to get back. It's tough. We had a lot of tough conversations with Felipe, our CFO, and our salespeople who wanted to make some sales. There were some great opportunities, great possibilities, significant volumes, but there was an equally large risk of insolvency.
There was an equally large risk that we might do the sale, but might not be receiving any money. If you keep looking, you have another company, this Grupo Patense, is close to where we are. Phenomenal company. Same thing. You have a number of other agricultural groups and others as an example. All really bad.
Again, it has been two years now, and this is all an impact from all the way back in 2022. We've written that in several press releases. We've written that in several MD&As. We've written that all over the place. What happened was, in 2022, agriculture input prices went up a lot. Agricultural commodity prices equally went up a lot.
What a lot of farmers did was to buy those very expensive agricultural input prices, finance them. When it got to the point in time when they had to pay for those expensive agricultural input prices, which was when they were to sell their agricultural production, the price for corn, soybeans, everything else had crashed. They were faced with big bills to pay and had much less money from the sale of their production. That ruined a number of groups, unfortunately. Next slide.
Next slide is the number with the. Felipe is going to be showing. Before Felipe starts showing all the bad news, just go to the slide where there's good news there, Felipe. I want to be talking about the good news. Next one. Just go skip. You can go back. Go one back. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. The key information here is if you look at what we've accomplished, if you look at what this new team I introduced in the beginning of the call, if you look at what they've accomplished in the first 79 days of the year, it's 60% already of everything we did last year.
That's amazing. Absolutely amazing. One shareholder already responded to a post I did on X. What he did was to calculate on a per-day basis and extrapolate that for the full year. You start getting to some exciting numbers. That is why we are cautiously optimistic, cautiously optimistic about 2025 and beyond. Having said that, Felipe, the floor is yours. Please show all those terrible, terrible numbers, which hopefully we are going to start making them look great again very soon.
Okay. Thank you, Cristiano. Thanks, everyone, for joining the conference. We are now presenting Q4 and full year 2024 results. First, a bit on cash and profitability. The cash held by the group decreased by CAD 3.5 million from CAD 6.9 million in full year 2023 to CAD 3.4 million in full year 2024. Addition, the group has short-term receivables. The total cash and other receivables, we are close to CAD 10.3 million at the end of 2024. In terms of profitability, sales in 2024 were 319,000 tons, a 25% reduction compared to 2023.
In terms of revenue, 2024 was CAD 21.6 million, a 43% reduction compared to 2023. A vision before no cash events was CAD -2.5 million compared to CAD 2 million+ in 2023. In terms of net loss, we had CAD 12.6 million- compared to CAD 6 million- in 2023. In terms of sales in general, administrative expenses, we had a relevant reduction, which I will get more details in the coming charts. We had CAD 10.1 million total compared to CAD 11.7 million in 2023.
First, in terms of P&L, you can see here the results on the left side of the table, the Q4 2024 compared to the prior quarter of 2023. On the right side of the table, 2024 full year compared to full year 2023. The key points that we might comment here is, as expected, we had a much lower level on total costs, explained by the lower volume. We had also, as well as I explained before, and I will explain later on, the reduction on sales and marketing expenses among the general administrative expenses as well.
However, at the end of the day, due to the high level of investment we've made, we have a significant amount on depreciation and also on interest rates to be booked in each month or each year. At the end of the day, we had full year losses on CAD 12.5 million compared to CAD 5.9 million in 2023. Of course, we expect this number to improve after we see the company start to grow again. In terms of operation summary, on this chart, you can see the numbers per ton.
The first table, we see that it is. Then the second one, we have the adjustment here excluding freight, which is very relevant for our business. Sometimes the product is cheaper than the freight. For a full analysis on margin or in the cost, for example, etcetera, it's better to analyze without freight on it. Although we had a lower volume in the year, we were able to decrease the production cost per ton for basically two reasons. First reason, we use a bit more our plant two, which has a more effective cost since it's right next to the mine compared to the plant one. Also, in addition, we had the Brazilian real devaluating as well.
On top of it, I think what we should emphasize and explain a bit is how the effort that the team has made since the end of 2022, but mostly in the beginning of 2024, reducing costs. We revised all the contractors' and suppliers' contracts and costs one by one, line by line, from the biggest one, the largest one, to the smallest ones. We were able to reduce a lot of costs, of fixed costs, for example, rental and other type of costs that we had, expenses that we had before. This is good to remind. Also, a very important point is that when we use more of the plant two, we have a much lower number of employees needed to operate the lines. We do have also a reduction in people, which explains basically the cost point here, reduction per ton.
In terms of sales in general and administrative expenses, what we can see here in terms, for example, of sales and marketing, it was a reduction of close to CAD 700,000 in the year. We had, in terms of fee-based to sales agents, an increase, but this was mainly driven by the 2023 reversion that we've made to adjust the lines. As Christian said before, we increased our sales team, and we do expect to have a higher cost during 2025 in terms of fee-based to sales agents. This is, of course, it will depend on the volume and depends on the value of FOB price being made in the marketplace. In terms of general administrative expenses, we also saw a relevant reduction.
Here we can keep commenting on the terms I said, a few contracts that we had that were not connected to cost, but on expenses, like containers, like metallic structures, and among other rentals that we had in the past. We did have a relevant reduction on staff, on back-office people from all over the areas. We really made a cost reduction, expense reduction plan. It was not easy to do, but it was needed to be made.
The expectation for 2025 is also to remain the same level or even lower level of expenses. Of course, once we increase volume, most of these expenses in general are fixed costs. This could be diluted by higher volume. In the end of the day, delivered to us a higher EBITDA and profitability. This is what we are thinking for the coming periods.
Another point that's important to raise is what was commented by Cristiano. We had some clients that were on insolvency as well, and we had to book some relevant amount here. We had an increase on allowance for expected credit loss, which we used to just call bad debt, but now it's allowance for expected credit losses increased on 32% for CAD 2.3 million compared to CAD 1.7 million in 2023.
This we are working on since the beginning of the crisis to be more restricted in terms of credit, etcetera, to avoid this number to increase even more. This effort, I think, was very helpful to avoid this to be more than this. Of course, to make our results worse and cash flow as well even worse. In terms of debt overview, that's very good news for the moment.
We were able to renegotiate as we had already two or three press releases on this matter. As most of the ones that have been following us know, we have already negotiated with our key creditors, and we were able to exchange the profile of our debt from the short term to the long term. Basically, at the end of the day, for 2025, we do have an expectation to pay on debt, including interest and principal of all our loans, no more than $300,000.
If we did nothing, do nothing scenario prior to April last year when we started this renegotiation, we would have to pay during 2025 over $27.1 million, which would be a very, very hard work for us. I think now with this plan ongoing with nine years payment terms after we have the grace period finalized, which will be in April 2026. The other point, which is very, very important in this scenario, we do have to pay the first three years 10% per year. In the last six years or four years, in the end of the period, we pay the other 60%.
This is very helpful for cash flow projections and will allow us to keep investing in commercial area, in sales field team, and other research that might be needed to improve our volumes. Of course, the key idea is how can we grow to achieve our full capacity, which is 3 million tons per year, and then reduce, of course, the fixed costs and also the variable costs since we are being a larger company. Of course, contracts are better, everything gets better, and at the end of the day, profitability and our ability to pay the creditors as well.
In the end of 2024, the group had a total loan balance of $39.7 million compared to $46.1 million in 2023. It was a reduction of 16%. This was driven by two key points. We paid in the first trimester or quarter 2024 a relevant amount to the banks. Of course, also the Brazilian real devaluated a bit, which also helps to reduce the amount of debt in Canadian dollars. This is what I had for today in terms of numbers. I will report it back to Cristiano, who will be leading now the Q&A sections. Thank you.
Thank you, Felipe. I hope soon you start reporting phenomenal profits again. We're all looking forward. We're all looking forward to that. We have received a bunch of questions here, which I'm very thankful for. As I always say, and I always will, those questions make us all think about the business as well. When I get those questions, it's not just trying to answer them. It allows me to reflect on them. We often see some good suggestions here as well. I am quite excited about this conversation we are about to have all together here.
First one, can you talk about the pipeline in the order book and compare it to other years? It seems like the order book is ahead of schedule. Please provide more details. I think we have shared a lot already in terms of having done 60% of what we did last year between product delivered and between signed orders with customers. It is still early days. People have done their own calculations of what it might turn out to be.
That team you all saw at the beginning of that call, they are not working for Verde AgriTech because of the salary they get paid. I tell you that. Those guys are awesome. It's like daily contact by headhunters trying to get them out of Verde AgriTech. The reason they're here with us is because they truly believe in the potential for exponential growth from where we are.
That's why we're all here, quite frankly. We can look at the previous couple of years and think that this is all a terrible disaster scenario when we should all run for the hills. Or we can look at that and say, "Hey, there was a pause. It's still a phenomenal product. It's still getting great feedback. It's still the best country you can have for agriculture. Market seems to be shaping up.
Let us come back to being back on track. Each one can take their own view. I feel very similar to how I felt back in 2017, in the early days, when no one cared about what we do. No one cared about our potential. No one cared about anything. Then we started proving everything, everyone wrong. We started growing and getting better and people seeing the benefits of the technology.
Then having some phenomenal years, as you all know, which we would like to think that were just interrupted by the disaster that was agriculture in Brazil for a little while. It is all cyclical. Fingers crossed, we have hit bottom already. H1 2025 still sees the negative impact of 2024, but the second half is looking promising. I have said a lot, but I did not answer the question. He is asking about the pipeline order book. We have.
While I was answering the question, I was thinking, "Should I give a spoiler here?" Yes, I can click here and I can see from our Salesforce dashboard how much product we have on each one of the phases of our pipeline. It's looking good. It's looking good for the rest of the year. Next question. Hello. Are there any news regarding enhanced rock weathering?
I had a paragraph in the press release about ERW, but at the last second, I decided to remove it. We're working on a dedicated press release on ERW. We've been doing a lot with scientists in that front. It's looking good. Hopefully, we will have some very material information in connection to it. Right now, there is nothing more I can say other than saying that we've worked really hard over the last few months.
The reason we had to work really hard was because the market for ERW changed a lot. The science required, the level of field validation required by the certifiers changed radically from when we first announced ERW. We have been doing the homework to be able to comply with all of that. We are very lucky with a scientist who has been advising us and leading this effort.
Could not have been luckier with the lady who is working on it for us. It is something we remain very bullish on. What about Oby Rare Earths? Will it be introduced on ASX as previously announced? Oby Rare Earths, for those of you who were shareholders in Verde AgriTech on the January 2025, that was the record date. Anyone who bought shares after the January 2027 will not be getting shares in Oby.
Those shares should have been issued already, but there were some administrative issues and being a private Australian company. There's something called CDS in Canada, which doesn't allow us to see who our shareholders are in the company. There was a lot of admin stuff navigating how to do that. It seems like it's going to be fixed soon, so we should soon be doing it.
What we're also going to be doing is doing a webinar conference call with the shareholders of Oby. We should announce that at some point, try to communicate so everyone can be brought up to date with the company and what's going on. Yes, it remains as a very exciting, and there's a lot going on there as well. Next question.
The next question, you're stating the fourth quarter fully highlights that in 2025, after only 79 days, Verde already has orders and delivered products representing 60% of all products delivered in 2024. This is a rather extraordinary acceleration in orders. Did this happen all of a sudden, or was there a noticeable acceleration that had already begun at the end of 2024?
It's a good question. I wouldn't say it happened all of a sudden. It's something that has been consistently improving throughout the beginning of this year and pretty much in line with all the planning and preparation we did throughout last year. It's like good things only tend to happen all at once, and we saw that happening again before with Verde AgriTech. I tell you, it comes from a lot of preparation work, hard work ahead of that.
Has the improvement in the economic environment for Brazil been so exaggerated that it requires this, or are there other factors at play? I think the key factor is really why I would like to think we're coming to a bottom in this terrible, disastrous last couple of years or three years that has been for agriculture in face of what I said during the main presentation. Agriculture is cyclical, absolutely cyclical. It's hard to think about things getting much worse.
Y ou can see the record level with solvency and everything that has happened. Hopefully it's looking better. Some other question, which isn't here, but someone I was talking to, a shareholder the other day, and he was saying how currently the United States represents 70% of all stock market value in the world.
The United States is 70%, the rest of the world is 30%. He is seeing some institutional investors, retail investors, looking away from the United States. There is certainly a trend that can benefit us. There is also, perhaps this is worth saying, I posted it on X, trying to be a little bit more active on X. If you are not following me, try to find me there and follow it.
There was a very obscure article which was in one of the Russian newspapers about their president, I think, saying that he had requested a study on potash with a view of creating quotas. It is just something along those lines, which was some sort of official obscure Russian paper. It was the first time I saw Russia publicly talking about using potash as a geopolitical weapon.
For those of you who have been following Verde for a while, you've seen me for the last 15 years saying that no one is more powerful in the world than Vladimir Putin because he can independently decide whether or not the world will be able to eat. It's a fact. If Russia stops supplying potash or starts deciding who gets potash, there will be starvation.
Not straight away, but the following harvest will be completely atrocious because you cannot grow food economically. Brazil is the breadbasket of the world. I'll do a post showing the growth of Brazilian agriculture versus the growth of agriculture, for example, in the U.S. You can see how Brazil is indeed the reason the rest of the world can eat. This isn't possible without potash. There is a massive geopolitical play here. I really wonder if this is a card the Russians will ever want to play. It is something that is quite interesting. Whenever it starts—oh, we will get to that.
Let's just move on. The other question here is, is this uptick in orders potentially lumpy and therefore not indicative of a trend that will last throughout 2025? I do not think so because I can see the pipeline for new orders, and the pipeline is looking strong, and it is growing consistently strong as well. I do not think it is just an uptick. Next question. Judging by the realized price per ton, the sales plan to disconnect from conventional potash pricing and command premium has not worked.
That's a statement which it's something we can't start judging yet because, in all honesty, this team I introduced at the beginning of the call, they're the ones who know how to sell specialty products. Their work is literally beginning in this season. This is going to be the very first year when our team is going to be validating and following in the ground the added benefits and demonstrating value from replacing conventional potash with our product. It's starting now.
Even the shift that you go from digital sales market to the current hybrid approach has resulted in a drop. Again, we can't be judged by last year because this fueled sales team really, really, really, really was 70% assembled in the last quarter of last year. Even at the beginning of this year, we're still hiring for key positions and finalizing setting up the team. It is too soon to be judged one way or another. Some extremely unlikely potash supply shock event. What can you offer your very concerned investors that the operation can really be turned around?
I cannot offer any guarantee that it can be turned around, unfortunately. I think both myself and the sales team, we are doing our best, and we are excited about the feedback and thankful to the feedback we're receiving from our investors—sorry, from our customers. There are some investors, maybe, but mainly from our customers and from our farmers. We believe this will be able to carry on translating into growth in sales after we see a normalization of agricultural markets. Next question. Is the LCA audit complete?
Is there anything positive you can share with regard to Verde obtaining commitments from corporate producers committed to reducing the carbon footprint of their supply chains? That's a good question. Yes. Maybe we should press release that. That would be a good press release. It's not materials, but I think we'll add to the story. Let's put together a press release on a not material press release, okay?
Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to talk about it. Let's put together an informative press release both to our investors and the rest of the corporate agricultural market where we talk about Bureau Veritas auditing our life cycle analysis and showing the very small carbon footprint our product has. I know there is a paper that has been written on conventional potash showing some very big numbers. Perhaps later on, we can do something along those lines.
Let's work on that press release, which isn't material for you. There's another question here which is saying, "I see you were slated to be the CEO of Oby." I don't know if I will be the CEO of Oby. Oby is in the process of raising money to develop. For now, I would say most of our shareholders, all shareholders in Oby, I'm helping making sure the company can be put together for success. At this point in time, I have not committed to any sort of full-time role at Oby.
Most certainly, I would not be committing to a full-time role with any other company rather than Verde AgriTech, which remains as my main focus. Yes, my main focus here is this turnaround, which I'd like to think is in progress of happening right now. That's a concern. It's a valid concern about me changing, being distracted with another venture. I take that very seriously. Even though I have been doing this for over 20 years now, it's something we most certainly learn something new every day. I hope we carry on learning something new every day along this journey of several ups and downs, which I hope we will start exiting from this fourth or fifth downturn very soon.
Next question. Q4 saw corn and coffee prices strengthen signifLcantly, while the Brazilian real weakened a great deal, causing MOP to be considerably more expensive. These developments should have strengthened the sales opportunity, and yet this was the weakest quarter the company had in many years. Why? Coffee. The reason prices for coffee went up was because farmers were completely devastated with weather issues in the last harvest.
Lots of them struggled with cash flow problems as a consequence of not having enough to sell, even if at a greater price. What we were able to do, which we're very excited about this next year, is to test a lot of the new technologies with a lot of our customers. Those are specialty products which command much greater margins. Lots of those products, you make more money out of the technology than you do on potash itself.
The sustaining higher prices of coffee, or even if they were to weaken, is something that makes us excited about that. When we talk about corn prices and the increase in recovery, those were sales that pretty much all of them took place earlier in the year as part of farmers buying for both soybeans and corn being grown.
Pretty much all of that potash or fertilizer had already been negotiated much earlier on. It was negotiated in that scenario, which we went through in detail in the conversation, where there was a massive risk of insolvency, where there are several distributors going broke, where a lot of sales were made, and there is not as much visibility whether or not money will be coming into their bank accounts.
Next question. With the Selic rate now, which is the Brazilian interest rate, at 14.25%, while Canada's rate is at 2.75%, the borrowing differential has continued to widen further and further. Is this the primary cause of negative sales growth? It is one of the reasons cumulative with the other one expressed, which is the very high risk of insolvency. If so, is there anything that can counter this challenge?
I think the dream scenario would be to be able to raise debt in Canada. We've looked into it several times before, but because of the exposure, because of the operations in Brazil, we end up being penalized with something similar for a small company like ours. As we grow, hopefully, we can be issuing bonds in international markets, and that would be a huge game changer for the company.
The problem is that issuing those bonds to a broader market requires a minimum of $100 million plus on a bond issuance, which is far greater than what could work for a small company like us at the moment. Growing, and the reason it needs to be so much money is because usually the people who buy those bonds, they hope to have some sort of secondary market.
Unless there is a significant amount, there isn't coverage, there isn't research, there isn't even rating, it doesn't work economically. What you end up with is smaller dedicated funds, smaller dedicated hedge funds, smaller dedicated outfits who look to lend you money, but it ends up with an all-in cost identical to what you would get in Brazil because they know who they are competing against. If anyone in this call has a lead to something that might work, even if it's something that might you should try, please reach out, and we will certainly see if there's something there to be done.
Next question. After following the challenges and struggles of this company for many years, the carbon offsetting set opportunity and the ability to offer a subsidized price to farmers appeared to be the only way to finally attract buying demand and grow the sales volume. Jay is asking this question. The team I introduced in this call at the beginning, they do not want us to discount our product. If anything, they want us to put the price up given the benefits they are seeing from this product. If anything, that is what they use to sell it. If anything, that is what they hope to be demonstrating farmers. The idea that we would only be feasible, economic, and growth and profitable by discounting it with carbon.
I understand how some people might see it this way, but I tell you, people who are dedicating their lives and putting their careers and their families in line as a bet on Verde AgriTech, the people who were in the beginning of this call, people who have an average of 15, 20 years of selling products, specialty products to farmers, they have a radically different opinion in terms of how our products, our technologies should be perceived.
The second part of your question is that we've received no tangible updates on ERW in almost a year. Is the carbon monetization plan DOA? What's that? Death? I don't know what that means, but DOA? I presume it's dead or some sort of anyway. Anyway, no. As I said, it's something very exciting. It's something we're working with, probably the best scientists we could possibly be working on.
There's a lot of work, a lot of discussion. There's a lot of work literally going on right now, working with data. We just don't want, given how much of the science and the requirements for ERW have been changing and advancing in the last few months, we don't want to be saying anything before it's concrete, just in case the market moves ahead of us again.
We're working hard on it. If anything, from a technical perspective, I'm now more excited and concrete than ever in terms of where we are. It doesn't mean it can't change tomorrow when more data becomes available, but as it stands now, it's looking extraordinarily promising. Next question. How optimistic, pessimistic are you about expected credit losses in 2025? Future losses and recovery loss from 2025. I'm realistic. It's a write-off.
I don't think we're going to get anything back from that number. I'm sorry. If we do, it's going to be like 10%-15% of that, if at most. I think, unfortunately, given everything we're seeing in terms of insolvency, I think there's very little hope. I think it's thankful. We should all be thankful to Felipe Paolucci because I think if him and his credit team weren't as rigorous as they were throughout 2023 and 2024, those numbers would look even uglier than they do now. I know several people in the space. I know several other people who have companies in agriculture import. I know companies who haven't announced it yet but are completely filed soon for insolvency.
We've stopped selling to some distributors, and one of those distributors is a massive company, a massive public company, which the market is really betting at the moment is going to be another one going to file for insolvency protection very soon. It's been ugly, and I don't see much hope, unfortunately, with that money.
Next question. How are the sales for 2025 located from the plant? That team I presented in the beginning of the call, the four directors, they're all operating very close to the plant. We have two directors in Minas Gerais State. We have Muriel looking at the Cerrado, but that's Goiás State. That's south of Bahia. That's pretty much very close to the mine as well. Maurício, same thing, looking at São Paulo.
All the team underneath them, which each one of them have another 10-12 people they manage, they're all working in this area. It is reasonable that we will be seeing for 2025 an increase, both in specialty and an increase in demand for product close to the plants, which command greater prices. What is also worth mentioning, and it is in the filing we made, there has been a growth in the sale of specialty products last year, not as big as we would expect or as we see the potential of that growth going in, but there has been nonetheless a growth. Do you see any trend there? Also, the type of customers, farmers changed. I think the answer is there. Yeah, we see a trend because there's more people there.
Likewise, Maiara's team, which is the inside sales team that look after clients which are a bit further away, they're also doing a good job. They're also bringing orders in. Yeah, it's quite broad, the crops which are grown by our customers. One other question here is about looking at the sales, the sales price for potash, which would be required to make our project profitable.
The way to look at it is not looking at the price of potash because this isn't the point, looking at the price of potash from the current levels. The key point here, quite frankly, is increasing volume. It's increasing volume. As we increase volume, we can dilute a lot of the costs, a lot of the variable costs, and that's what drives profitability. It is less worry about the price of potash and more focus on increasing volumes and diluting overall costs. That is what we are working hard to achieve.
This concludes all questions we have received. I would like to thank you all for participating in this results conference today. I look forward to the next one. If any of you have any questions in the meantime, any suggestions, any criticism, please do not hesitate to reach out to us via our email, and we look forward to your feedback. Thank you very much. Look forward to seeing you again soon. Bye-bye.