Hello and welcome to the Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for the Small Cap Growth Conference. Our next presentation is from Auxly Cannabis Group. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides, and you can view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Hugo Alves. He's the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Auxly Cannabis Group, which trades in the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol CBWTF and on the TSX under the symbol XLY. Welcome, Hugo.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And hello, everyone. Before we get started, I'd like to say thank you for your time today and your interest in Auxly. My name is Hugo Alves, and I'm the founder and Chief Executive of Auxly Cannabis Group. And maybe before we begin, I'll say a few words about myself. I've been in regulated cannabis since the inception of the industry when regulations were introduced in 2013. Before Auxly, I was a senior partner at Bennett Jones, which is a national law firm here in Canada, where me and my team really structured a lot of the cannabis transactions as companies started to become capitalized in the 2010s.
Now, we left Bennett Jones to found Auxly in 2017, but throughout my journey, I've also been very fortunate to play a role in the shaping and evolution of cannabis policy in Canada, most recently in my capacity as the chairman of the Cannabis Industry Forum, which acted as an industry advisory panel to our federal government. So I'm delighted to be here today to tell you a little bit more about Auxly and why we're very excited for the future. Now, before we begin, I'd like to ask you to take a few minutes to step on a pause on our standard disclaimers for forward-looking information and non-IFRS measures. And with that dispensed with, we can jump right in. So Auxly, as John mentioned, we are a publicly traded cannabis company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Our shares trade on the TSX and the OTCQB exchanges.
We're a passionate team, passionate and committed, about 400, just over 400 team members strong. We specialize in the cultivation and manufacturing of cannabis products that we sell domestically here in Canada under a portfolio of own brands. Now, we're currently the third largest producer by market share, about 6% share of market, but our flagship brand, Back Forty, is the number one cannabis brand in Canada by dollar sold. It sells more than any other brand and is loved by consumers from coast to coast. You can find our products in about 97% of all retail locations in Canada because we focus on the formats that matter most: dried flower, pre-rolls, and vapes. Those are the three formats that we are great at, and those three formats collectively account for nearly 90% of all cannabis sales in Canada.
We're also one of the few licensed producers that has a significant strategic partner in Imperial Brands, one of the world's largest tobacco companies. Imperial owns approximately 20% of our stock and has been an incredibly supportive partner on everything from pre-roll technologies to finance. And over the long term, our partnership with Imperial is going to be a huge advantage as new jurisdictions legalize cannabis for recreational use. And then finally, I think most importantly, what I'm most proud to say is that Auxly is a cannabis company that is growing profitably. We've grown revenue at about a 60% CAGR since we started commercial sales in 2020.
Over the last 12 months, as at the end of Q3, we've generated about CAD 146 million in net operating revenue, over CAD 42 million in Adjusted EBITDA, and approximately CAD 35 million in free cash flow from operations before working capital adjustments. We're excited about the future of the company and its ability to continue delivering year-over-year growth. First and foremost, the market in which we operate, the Canadian cannabis market, continues to grow. It's a growing market. More and more Canadians are choosing cannabis for recreation, and more and more of those consumers are choosing to purchase their cannabis from safe legal sources. Not only is the market continuing to grow at 5%-7% a year, but the market's also maturing. It's stabilizing.
As companies have exited the market or converted to asset-light models or focused internationally, that's created better pricing dynamics here domestically in Canada. Producers like Auxly are getting a higher price for their products. And we expect those dynamics to continue given the strong demand environment that we're in and the high capital cost and time, if you can raise the capital, to bring quality cultivation capacity online. And then, of course, beyond Canada, there is a global cannabis market that continues to evolve and grow, which provides Auxly with a much larger global market to grow into. Now, our current focus is to win at home. We've always said there has to be a reason to believe that you can compete internationally, but our vision as a company is to be a global leader. And we think that Auxly is exceptionally well positioned to achieve that vision.
I think first and foremost, Auxly is winning at home. We have proven that we make incredible products and brands that consumers trust and love. We believe we've developed the right assets and capabilities, which I'll speak to in a minute, which not only enable us to continue winning at home, but also compete on a global scale eventually, including our strategic partnership with Imperial Brands, which I've mentioned. This is one of the world's truly global CPG companies. They operate in over 120 different countries, including all of the ones that have pathways to cannabis legalization. Their resources and capabilities in those jurisdictions are unrivaled by any cannabis company in the world. When the time is right, Imperial Brands will help us expand internationally effectively and with confidence.
Turning now to our assets for a moment, I think we believe that our purpose-built strategic assets are best in class, and that they give us a real edge in terms of cost and quality. Let's start with Auxly Leamington. This is our flagship 1.1 million sq ft cannabis cultivation facility located in Leamington, Ontario. And it is one of the largest, most advanced cannabis cultivation facilities on the planet. We're currently producing about 100,000 kilograms of dried flower per year. And I'll note the facility sits on over 100 acres of owned land. We currently occupy less than half of that footprint, so plenty of capacity to expand over the long term. Now, we built and designed Auxly Leamington in partnership with one of North America's largest greenhouse manufacturers. And what I can tell you is that every single aspect of this facility has been purpose-built for cannabis.
And that gives us a real edge in terms of scale and cost, but without sacrificing quality. We believe Auxly Leamington is one of the, if not the lowest cost producer of cannabis in Canada. But low cost means nothing if quality and consistency suffer. And that is really where this facility shines because Auxly Leamington consistently produces high potency, high-quality cannabis that consumers love. And the proof is in the results. Back Forty is the number one brand in dried flower. It is growing as a dried flower brand at a rate of 90% on a rolling 12-month basis. And our flagship products, our Back Forty Liquid Imagination and our Back Forty Fire Breath ounce bags, are respectively the number one and number two top-selling SKUs total market all categories. So Auxly Leamington delivers on flower cost and quality.
Auxly Leamington also houses our automated pre-roll operations, where our approach is much the same as it is in flower: deliver quality at scale. Now, through a strategic partnership with Imperial Brands and a five-year R&D collaboration with the world's largest manufacturer of high-throughput tobacco equipment, we have developed the most advanced high-speed cannabis pre-roll, filling, and packaging capabilities in the entire industry and unrivaled operational and technical know-how on how to get the best out of these machines. That's given us the ability to consistently deliver a high-quality product, but also achieve the scale and cost advantages in pre-rolls, which is one of the largest and most important consumer categories in cannabis. Now, I think our deep focus on the pre-roll format and the investment that we've made in these specialized capabilities have yielded tremendous results to date.
Our Back Forty Slims product that you see on the left-hand side of the page has become a national consumer favorite, over 10,000 points of national distribution, and really propelling Back Forty to be the number one brand in non-infused pre-rolls. And half, 50% of the top 10 non-infused SKUs, pre-roll SKUs nationally, are a Back Forty product. And now we're starting to innovate. We're starting to innovate with larger-sized pre-rolls, with infused formats to continue winning category share, which is exactly what we did this summer when we introduced the Back Forty Backpackers. That's the larger pre-roll that you see here in the middle of the page. And it was a huge success. We launched it over the summer. Both SKUs that we launched are in the top 10 non-infused pre-roll SKUs nationally.
We're very excited about our ability to continue to innovate and win category share in pre-rolls. And then moving over to vapes, you get to Auxly Charlottetown, our other facility, which is our home of vapor innovation and manufacturing located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. And we got to Charlottetown because of their very deep talent pool in science and biotechnology. The PEI government has done a tremendous job promoting the biotech sector over the last decade and a half and has been very successful in attracting some of the world's top biotech companies and talent to the province. And what that's enabled us to do is amass an incredible team in Charlottetown. They are leaders in vapor quality. Our vapes have among the lowest failure rates in the industry and are lauded by budtenders for their quality.
I think the Charlottetown team is unmatched in terms of cannabis vapor innovation. They have released more first-to-market vape innovations than any other team, including last year when they released the all-in-one vape to the Canadian cannabis market and fundamentally changed the category. Vape was a stagnant category, about 14%-15% total market share. It's up around 18% now. That is driven by the incredible popularity of the all-in-one vapes. Back Forty dominates. It is the number one brand in all-in-one vapes with about 22% share of segment. Again, very broadly distributed, over 10,000 points of national distribution. Our Back Forty brand has always been a top vape brand. That's where Auxly got its start in vapes. But yet, despite its longevity, it continues to grow as a vape brand, approximately 12% on a rolling 12-month basis.
Auxly Charlottetown continues to deliver with vape innovations. As a company, we are not going to stop. We are going to continue to nurture and lean into our culture of innovation because it is that combination of innovation, leadership, and operational excellence, which helps drive some of our CPG-style margins. Whether it's the next great cultivar, pre-roll, or vapor product, our culture of data-driven consumer insights and innovation, it helps ensure that we stay focused on what's important and that we can evolve and grow with our consumer by bringing great new products to market so that we can continue growing and winning market share. I think I'll just pause here for a moment and recap.
We think that the strong product focus we have at Auxly, we've bet on the right products, along with those assets, those specialized assets and capabilities that I just discussed, coupled with the fact that we operate in a very strong and growing market, both domestically and internationally, it underwrites a lot of our confidence that Auxly can continue to deliver some very strong, profitable results, and most recently, we reported our Q3 2025 results. That's up to the end of September 2025, and delighted to report that it was a record quarter for Auxly. We grew net revenues in the quarter to CAD 39.9 million. That was a 20% year-over-year improvement. Gross margins expanded to 56%. That's nine percentage points higher than Q3 2024, and we generated CAD 12.3 million of adjusted EBITDA. That's a 48% increase year-over-year and represents an EBITDA margin of 31%.
Bottom line was also very, very healthy. Net income of CAD 20.5 million. That's over a 500% improvement year-over-year, so it was a very strong quarter of year-over-year improvements. Those improvements were driven by improvements in our throughput and quality at our facilities that we funded with our own cash flows, increasing demand for our products, product innovation mix, and, of course, some of that increased pricing power in the Canadian rec market that I mentioned earlier, so we're delighted. We think it was another CPG-style performance for the company and that the company's in a great spot to continue growing while enjoying the benefits of strong operating leverage. The cost base at our facilities is largely fixed, so continued improvements in revenue should flow largely to the bottom line, and certainly, we made further improvements to our balance sheet in Q3. We recapitalized in July of this year.
That made our balance sheet get a lot stronger. You can see they're ending the quarter with about CAD 30 million of cash and a total debt-to-trailing EBITDA ratio of 1.3x , which is quite healthy. Net of cash, it's down at about 0.6 times net debt-to-trailing EBITDA. So we've done a lot of great work to improve the balance sheet this year. And also, we want to make sure we're generating strong cash flows. EBITDA to us is not as meaningful unless it's translating into cash flow. In our most recently reported quarter, in Q3, we generated about CAD 11 million of cash flow from operations before working capital changes. That was an 82% increase year-over-year. And importantly, over the last 12 months, we've generated about CAD 35 million of cash flow from operations on CAD 42 million of EBITDA. That's a very healthy 83% conversion rate.
And then subsequent to quarter, we also paid off the last tranche. It was a CAD 5 million tranche of high-interest debt, which will save the company approximately another CAD 900,000 in interest service and charges per year. So the company is generating very strong cash flows to fund its growth. And looking at our cash flow, we're often asked how we plan to deploy it. And I think first, we will make some reasonable increase to CapEx spending in 2026. Our 2025 CapEx spending will come in at between CAD 2 million- CAD 2.5 million, as we've communicated to investors previously.
However, as you can see from the chart on the right-hand side of the page, our CapEx over the last three years has been deliberately restrained so that we could focus on navigating industry headwinds, preserving our cash, and also strengthening our balance sheet to achieve the recapitalization that we obtained earlier in the year. However, now that we have a stronger, more flexible balance sheet, we do want to invest in some higher return opportunities to increase throughput and quality at Auxly Leamington to help support our continued organic growth domestically and abroad. We don't have a final CapEx number for 2026, but what I can tell you is our CapEx budget will not impair the ability of the company to generate free cash flow. We expect to have substantial free cash flow even after considering CapEx.
I think secondly, we will also look to continue bolstering our balance sheet. The company has just recently made significant improvements to its balance sheet, but we're happy to continue bolstering it. It brings multiple benefits to the company, both reducing interest, allowing us to fund continued growth, and also empowering the company to explore and be opportunistic with inorganic options that may arise. So that will be our focus in 2026, investing in our capabilities and bolstering our balance sheet. But we will also continue to evaluate all the capital allocation alternatives that we feel would be accretive to shareholders. Okay. I'm going to wrap it up by just concluding that we're very excited about the future of the company. We truly believe we're just getting started. We operate in a growing domestic and international market.
We believe that we focused on the right product formats, that we've been able to make products and brands that consumers truly, genuinely love, and that we've developed best-in-class assets that really give us true competitive advantages. And I think the proof is in the results. The company is growing profitably, and it's generating strong cash flows to fund its continued growth. And I'll also say, as a management team, we're a strong, united, and battle-hardened management team. The executive leadership team here has been together as a management team almost since day one of Auxly. We've navigated the very well-documented industry headwinds together. And while our passion and belief in Auxly and the great cannabis opportunities never wavered, we absolutely learned a lot of lessons along the way.
And I think what you can expect from us as a management team is that we're going to continue to prioritize profitability and cash flow generation and that we're going to allocate our capital very prudently to our best opportunities. So I will stop there. I want to thank everyone for their time. I know we do have a few minutes for questions. I'm delighted to answer any questions you may have. And I've invited our head of IR, Mark Sherman, to join me for the questions. So, Mark, over to you to see if there's any questions that you want to address here.
Absolutely. Thank you, everybody. We have about a dozen questions in the queue. We'll start with the general strategy questions and then dive into innovation. There's a lot of hardcore Auxly fans I can see here.
So firstly, Hugo, where do you see near-term opportunities to expand internationally?
Yeah, thanks. I think, look, internationally, the near-term opportunity we do allocate a portion of our yield to B2B opportunities would be to offshore some of that B2B yield. We'll do that on a sort of bulk basis. We have made an international shipment to the U.K. earlier in the year. We'll continue to explore making shipments. But this is really a learning phase for us, understanding the sort of technical requirements of international shipment and also vetting partners, how are our different partners to work with. So the short term is to be a vendor of dry bulk flower with partners that we vet in markets that we like. Longer term, of course, would likely involve Imperial and be a more significant expansion where we would look to have Auxly's branded products available in those jurisdictions.
Okay. What is your current market share?
I think, as I mentioned earlier, we're about 6% share of total market. Sometimes it's depending on week. It could be higher, but it's around 6%.
Would you consider an NCIB?
Look, as I mentioned, we are going to look and evaluate all options that we feel are accretive to shareholders, and we're well aware of our large share count. We're also very aware of our cost of equity, which is very high cost, so we will examine all options. It is always on the table for discussion at the board level, but we also have very high return opportunities at Auxly Leamington, so we want to make sure that there's a good balance and that we're allocating capital to the highest return options.
How are you thinking about M&A and using your free cash flow?
Yeah, that's a great question. Look, as I said during the presentation, having a strong balance sheet and having a strong cash balance empowers the company to be able to explore or be opportunistic in organic options. We certainly think that there are lots of great companies that are developing out there. We're not closed off to inorganic options, but of course, we also don't want to overextend ourselves. We think over the next two or three years there will be good acquisition opportunities, but we will be quite prudent in how we're looking at them, and the current focus is on organic growth.
Okay. Lots of people are aware of our newest innovation, Southpoint. Can you tell us how the name concept was derived, your route to market, and how it's being received so far?
Yeah, great. I had to wait for it to launch to use its background because we have the Southpoint logo up there. So look, Southpoint's very, very easy. I think we've continued to make quality enhancements in our Leamington facility. That's both in genetic selection and in sort of cultivation post-harvest processes. So Southpoint derives its name from the fact that it is grown in the southernmost point of Canada, Sun City, Leamington. And it really is about giving the product unique genetics. So not available in any other Auxly product. These are genetics that we've selected for their potency, their aroma, the full appeal. And it really is operating at a price point between Back Forty and Kolab.
And it's, look, to give the consumer that wants to treat themselves a little bit more an option of Auxly product where we're very proud of the quality of the flower and the enhancements that we've made. We specialize in the slim straight cut pre-roll. We didn't have a competitor in cone pre-roll. So Southpoint gives us a competitor in the very popular 5x half-gram cone pre-roll format. It's still too early to tell you how it's going to do. It's been in market for a week. What I can tell you is where we launched in Ontario, the three SKUs, 3.5 gram, the 14 gram bag, and the 5x 0.5 pre-rolls, all of them are in the top 10 SKUs for their category. So that's a tremendous first-week result, but still too early to tell how it'll do over the long term.
So something for investors to check in with and for us to report on at a later date.
We have one investor here who's familiar with their activity in Quebec saying, "Was Auxly awarded a vape SKU? Did Auxly launch vape in Quebec? And if so, how was the interest?
We did win a vape SKU through our Quebec partners, so we do have a Kolab vape in store. Now, it is just online, so it's not as broadly distributed as some of the other vape SKUs. Look, our approach to the Quebec vapor market is one of some caution. We are excited, of course, to see Quebec bring vape online. They have some different requirements than the rest of the country, so we're happy to participate in a more limited fashion, see how the market evolves before we really press down on working capital dollars to make special vapes for the market, but so far, it seems like the market has responded to vape, so we'll see. It's still too early. We'll see over the next three, four months how it evolves.
Continuing on with vape, many people on the line here, and I think they know Auxly is quite dominant in the all-in-one category. Can you share the secret to success there and kind of what's the catalyst for increasing potency or purity of input materials?
Yeah, look, I think it's innovation excellence, right, and focus. Because we only focus on three formats and we're only really target on our consumers, not all consumers. That sort of focus allows us to take bigger bets on fewer innovations, right, with greater certainty, and that's been our approach. We don't go into product listing calls with 30, 40 innovations. We go with just a handful. And some of these are kind of like iterations, like a new flavor for a Back Forty all-in-one vape. And then we'll generally have one to two big bets in the year. This year, big bet was Backpackers and Southpoint. So far, they're doing well. Because of that focus and because of the approach we take, we worked on the all-in-one vape for 18 months before we launched it into market.
But then when we launched it into market and it took off, everyone else has rushed in. They haven't taken 18 months of careful R&D development, custom hardware, custom design, multiple rounds, dozens of rounds of sensory. So I think it's just the time and care that we take into innovation. And then we're never satisfied. Whether we launch a product and it's doing great, we will continue to look for ways to improve it. And as I said, we're not going to stop innovating. We were the first to market with the all-in-one vape. Obviously, it's a very hot category, very strong competition. And we'll continue to innovate. We'll continue to bring new-to-market innovations that really resonate with consumers. We have a significant vape innovation lined up for Q1 that I'm excited to bring to market. So yeah, the focus, time, and care that we take with the innovation.
We're never satisfied. There's a continuous improvement mentality at Auxly. We're always looking to make our products better.
So we've been in for a wee after wrap-up. Some of you in the questions here, we know who you are and will fill you in on the remainder of your questions. And anybody else, info@auxly.com, we're totally accessible for you. Hugo?
Yeah. Thank you everyone for your time. As Mark said, if you've got questions that we didn't get to, reach out to us at ir@auxly.com or info@auxly.com. Thank you very much for your time today. Pleasure to be here.