Well, good morning everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Bunge's Investor Day. We're pleased to have you with us. I'm Mark Haden, Head of Investor Relations for Bunge. Before I introduce our first presenter, I'd like to cover a few brief but important items. Today's presentation includes forward-looking statements that reflect Bunge's current views regarding future events, financial performance, and industry conditions. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to review the detailed discussion of these risk factors in our reports filed with the SEC. Second, a brief safety and orientation reminder.
In the event of an emergency, please follow the posted exit signage here and then in the rear of the room, and the instructions of on-site staff. Let me now walk you through today's agenda. Greg Heckman, our Chief Executive Officer, will begin with a company overview and strategy update. Julio Garros, our COO, will then discuss our operations and value chains. Next, Pierre Mauger, Bunge's Chief Transformation Officer, will provide an update on our corporate transformation initiatives. We will then take a 15-minute break. Following the break, John Neppl, our CFO, will deliver a financial update, including an overview of our mid-cycle baseline and capital allocation priorities.
Greg will then return to close out the prepared remarks. After the presentations, our executive leadership team will join us on stage for a Q&A session. There'll be plenty of time. Immediately following the Q&A, we invite you to stay for a light lunch featuring food prepared with Bunge products, along with a company experience where you can take a self-guided tour and learn more about our company and capabilities. With that, we're ready to begin.
For generations, Bunge has nourished the world. Now we're redefining what's possible. From our earliest origins, our journey has always been one of evolution. Anticipating global needs, embracing innovation, and creating value through our resilient supply chains. For more than two centuries, we've transformed, refined, and grown. Now, as we've strategically strengthened our company, we are driven by a singular purpose: to connect farmers to consumers to deliver essential food, feed, and fuel to the world. Bunge has accelerated its transformation, enhancing our ability to serve our customers at both ends of the value chain and create even more value for all our stakeholders.
The integration of Viterra with Bunge unites two world-class organizations, creating an unmatched network of origination, processing, and distribution. Together, we unlock new efficiencies, expand our global reach, and deepen our commitment to farmers and consumers around the world. This propels us toward unprecedented opportunities. Today, as one Bunge, our company is agile, resilient, and a partner of choice in a rapidly changing world. We are leveraging cutting-edge technology, championing more sustainable practices, and empowering our teams to deliver superior value from the field to end customers. This is Bunge. Poised to capture the opportunities of the 21st century. We're building the next-generation global agribusiness, one positioned for scale, relevance, and long-term value creation.
Join us as we turn origins to opportunities. Please welcome Chief Executive Officer Greg Heckman.
Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This is an exciting point in Bunge's history, and we're excited to share it with you. We've come a long way since 2019, and we've reshaped Bunge into a more agile, disciplined, and resilient company. Our strategy is clear. Strengthen the core, expand our reach, and deliver differentiated solutions to our customers, farmers and consumers of feed, food, and fuel. Everything we do is grounded in disciplined capital allocation, strong risk management, and a relentless focus on execution. I want to start today by reiterating why we're so excited, and why you should be as well, about where Bunge's headed.
There are many reasons to invest in Bunge, but we've distilled them down into six core points on why we believe Bunge is so compelling. This is and will always be an essential industry, and we possess attractive near and long-term demand fundamentals. Bunge has an irreplaceable footprint with our leading global pure-play network and infrastructure. We operate a unique value chain model, which positions us to capture margin throughout the cycle. We are providing increasingly differentiated solutions for our customers. Those are farmers and those customers in the industry serving the consumers of feed, food, and fuel. The Viterra combination and our project pipeline are at key stages as we enter our earnings accretion window.
We generate significant cash flow through the cycle, remaining committed to returning capital to our shareholders. Importantly, we're executing a proven playbook. We've done this before. We're utilizing the experience and capabilities that we've developed and we own. Our global team operates in over 50 countries, and we possess the talent, the footprint, and capabilities to support, improve, and help advance the entire industry. We're diversified across geographies, and that includes all the key producing regions and all the key crops. Our extensive origination, processing, storage, and distribution and logistics infrastructure enables us to reliably and efficiently connect supply and demand worldwide. Let me give you a little context or perspective.
Bunge supplies enough oilseeds and grains to provide every single person on the planet with one pound per week. Let me say that again. We could supply every person on the planet with one pound per week. That's a population that is projected to grow over 500 million people in the next decade. We're an essential business, both for today's capabilities and those that will be needed for the world's future growth. With that in mind, it's important to put the future in context of where we've been over the longer term and the work that we've done to transform our business over the last seven years.
Taking a big step back in our over 200-year history shows Bunge's resilience and adaptability. Bunge began as a European-based trading house, and next we built a strong presence in South America. By the late 1990s, we'd become a global multi-segment agribusiness with a focus on oilseeds and grains. 2001 was a key milestone. 25 years ago, this private company that had been private for 180 years, IPO'd. In 2019, that's when we really sharpened our focus and we began the transformation of the Bunge you see today. Similar to Bunge, Viterra also has a long, rich history in this industry, with roots going all the way back to 1920 in Canada.
Over the next 100 years, built themselves into a leading global grain merchant. This combination of Viterra and Bunge makes us into the premier global agribusiness company. Let's zoom in a bit on the work that we've done over the last seven years. Since 2019, we've reviewed and continually challenged and improved our org structure and our portfolio as we continue to transform Bunge. This work has allowed us to evolve into a premier modern agribusiness solutions company, and that's built for the realities and the complexities as well as the opportunities of the 21st century. We've moved from a siloed structure to an integrated global network, and that allows us to operate as one company.
We've built and deployed world-class and best-in-class risk management function with incredible capabilities, and we've driven that culture deep. We've identified and placed top talent in the roles of highest best use. We've exited low returning and non-strategic assets, and we've reinvested those proceeds where we have the right to win. We've executed a mix of transformative M&A along with organic investments, and they're all focused on strengthening our core capabilities. Our transformation has resulted in stronger cash generation through the cycle, ratings upgrades from all three agencies, and over $5 billion returned to shareholders.
We're driven by a culture of continuous improvement, and that's reflected in the changes that we made to date and those that you're going to hear about that are planned in our vision of the future. In 2019, we replaced our fragmented regional model with our global value chain model, and that enhanced our ability to act as one Bunge. It allowed us to get focused externally in serving our customers at both ends of the value chain, and that's farmers and the consumers of food, feed, and fuel. Internally, that allowed us to act as one Bunge, and that allowed us to ensure alignment with all of our stakeholders.
That structure is underpinned by our disciplined and independent risk management function, which maximizes the earnings power of our assets and our entire network. Julio and Pierre are going to share more on some of the key advantages of our value chain model a little bit later. Our risk management is embedded in everything we do, and it's a critical part of our DNA. It ensures a collaborative, no-surprises culture of transparency and accountability. It's an independent function. The Chief Risk Officer reports directly to me and is a peer to the top commercial people. The risk team's operating centrally and coordinated market and credit risk functions as those two things work hand in hand.
This framework is reinforced through clear values and behaviors of accountability, transparency, communication, and partnership. That enables proactive and timely decision-making, which reduces surprises and allows for optimal outcomes for earnings power of our business and always through the lens of the environment that we're operating in. That disciplined approach protects the earnings power of our assets, but it also positions us to capture opportunities, and that's when and as the market environment provides them. Safety. Absolutely non-negotiable top priority for Bunge. It is everyone at Bunge's job. It's our responsibility to ensure that we get every employee home safe at the end of the day the same way they came to work.
We all know that a safe company is a more efficient and a more productive company. We've driven reductions in our lost time injuries with life-altering potential since 2019. Our continuous operational improvement has reduced our unscheduled downtime, improved our machine availability across our processing network. We've also cut energy consumption per ton processed, and that means both cost savings and sustainability gains. This all results in a safer environment for our team, stronger margins, and more reliable customer service. We've taken decisive actions to streamline our portfolio. The team often hears me say, "Our job is not to be a collector of assets. It's to be a disciplined allocator of capital."
Since 2019, that's allowed us to unlock over $4 billion through portfolio optimization. That's through divestitures of non-core, underperforming, or non-strategic assets. This disciplined portfolio management, it sharpened our strategic focus. It strengthened our returns and generated significant cash proceeds to support our reinvestment, our balance sheet strength, and our shareholder value creation. These changes, most importantly, directly benefited shareholders because we generated significant cash flow, which we deployed in a disciplined manner, funding both our organic growth and our targeted bolt-on M&A. We also returned a significant amount of that capital to shareholders, all while strengthening the balance sheet through debt repayment, and we also funded the Viterra acquisition.
This combination of transformation and disciplined capital returns positions us to deliver sustainable value through the cycle. Our combination with Viterra, which we just closed in July of 2025, accelerates every priority of the Bunge strategy. It strengthened our position across all customers, both farmers and those industries serving the consumers of feed, food, and fuel. It diversifies us in three critical ways, geographically, across origin, processing, and distribution, and crops. This mitigates risk because it adds more balance to our oilseed processing footprint, and that's both in soy processing and softseeds. It's positioned us to better serve customers, both farmers and consumers, with integrated solutions.
A broader network means more optionality and more capabilities, and that allows us to provide better risk management, and not just for Bunge, but for all of our customers. It allows us to deliver durable synergies in the areas of logistics, processing, and merchandising. Most importantly, it makes us even better positioned to serve our customers globally. Which all leads us to where we are today. Our purpose, unchanged. Connect farmers to consumers to deliver essential food, feed, and fuel to the world. This is absolutely a mission-critical business and a mission-critical industry. It's vitally important as demand for goods and services grows, not just in volume, but continues to grow in complexity.
Our vision has expanded. We seek to be the premier agribusiness solutions company built for the 21st century. We have the talent and we have the global infrastructure network to deliver our vision. That's all supported by Bunge's core values. We're one team, we lead the way, and we always do what's right. This industry is, and always will be, a people business. I love that about it. I think this is an industry where the people can make a bigger delta in the performance of a company than any other industry. I think our success reflects our talented, An incredibly passionate workforce of 34,000 people.
We've got deep and experienced leadership team with just this small group here on this slide with over 180 years in the industry. Most importantly, this team has the proven ability to execute. Culture. Culture matters. It attracts and develops the best talent in the industry. What's that mean? That means people who wanna win, people who wanna work collaboratively, and people who wanna deliver results again and again. I am absolutely confident that we got the right team in place to navigate the complexities and recognize the opportunities which will drive our success. I also believe that we've got the best board in this industry or maybe any industry, and that matters.
You want the right backgrounds in the boardroom, whether it's governance, operations, or strategy, and we have that. We've got a deep and diverse commercial and technically experienced board that's worked across a number of industries, a number of geographies. We have multiple nationalities, and they live different places around the world. It's a real team between our board and leadership team. We operate in an industry that is deeply connected to the environment, making sustainability critical to our mission. It's not something we just do, it's part of who we are at Bunge. It's embedded in our strategy, it's embedded in our operations, and it's part of every investment decision that we make.
Why? Because it drives value. It drives value for all stakeholders. Our three core pillars, action on climate, responsible supply chains, and accountability, which means commitments to science-based decarbonization targets, non-deforestation and human rights, as well as regenerative agriculture, renewable fuels, and responsible farming. We've got important linkage of our compensation to our sustainability metrics. We measure the impact across our value chains, reporting our progress with transparency and accountability. Our sustainability performance dashboard tracks our progress against our long-term commitments. In 2024, Bunge was the first to achieve 100% soy traceability and monitoring of our direct and indirect soy purchases in the priority regions of Brazil's Cerrado biome.
We're really proud of that, and that was a 10-year effort. That's commitment. In our preliminary 2025 performance, we're showing almost a 21% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions versus our 2020 baseline, and we're on track to meet our 2030 targets. We'll publish our 2026 global sustainability report in June. When you think about the Bunge Viterra combined platform, that's gonna extend our sustainability leadership across an even broader global footprint, helping us drive growth and long-term value creation. Which brings me back to what makes Bunge such a compelling near and long-term investment. Let's talk about some proof points behind these fundamental strengths, and then Julio, Pierre, and John will go into even more detail.
We're connecting supply and demand, and that's essential at Bunge, and it puts us at the center of those global economics. Our business is structurally supported by long-term macro trends, and particularly global population growth and the rapid expansion of the global middle class. Both of these are driving rising agricultural trade volumes across our key commodities. The growth is concentrated primarily in regions that are unable to produce enough food, and that's due to constraints in water or agrarian land. These secular growth drivers, they're sustained long duration demand growth for grain and oil seed exports and imports.
We are uniquely positioned to deliver due to our scale and our diversification, to our global asset infrastructure and network, and our integrated value chain operating model. That provides us the ability to capture more than our share of these long-term growth trends. In addition to export, veg oil demand is expected to grow steadily, and that's gonna be driven by food consumption from the expanding global population and the growing incomes, and the expanded biofuel use from multiple supported policies around the world. Also, palm oil production growth is expected to slow, and that's due to constrained acreage expansion, as well as declining yields from aging trees.
Palm is also experiencing growing domestic biofuel programs, which means growth in domestic demand, which flattens the export growth. That results in soy and softseed oils being projected to contribute in the range of 50% of global veg oil production growth over the next decade. That is a significant shift, where in the past, palm has historically been the primary driver. Bunge unmatched physical assets, origination capabilities, along with our value chain operating model, puts us in an advantaged position to serve this growing market. Our operating model is designed to outperform and outcompete. We've consistently delivered strong results, and that's been through a wide range of market conditions the last few years.
We've navigated trade disputes, pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, biofuel and trade policy changes, all while continuing to protect and grow our earnings. Why is that? That's because Bunge is built for complexity and change. The combination of our integrated platform, our disciplined risk management, our focus on operational excellence have allowed us to perform through the cycle. Looking ahead, if the next five years is equally as complex or even more complex, the addition of Viterra, it enhances our diversification, our capabilities, and our scale, meaning that we're even better positioned to serve our customers' evolving needs. This map gives you a sense of our reach.
We operate in over 50 countries, and that's connecting origins to destinations, that's connecting supply to demand. We're the global leader in soy, rapeseed, canola, and sunseed processing. We're the leading global grain merchant. Our footprint of assets with our capabilities and our proven ability to execute is a core competitive advantage for Bunge. Our footprint is connected by our streamlined value chain model, and that allows us to integrate our origination, processing, refining, logistics, and merchandising as a coordinated system, along with our global functions and our business operations. That helps us optimize our flows and capture margins. That enhances earnings, allowing us to outperform through the cycle.
Our four segments and the value chains within them span and support all of our customers, and that's supported by our global functions and our business systems into one connected network. That allows us to deliver differentiated solutions across markets and continue to improve earnings through the cycle. You're gonna hear us talk more about farmers, food, feed, and fuel customers today because these key customer industries drive our focus that guide both the solutions that we bring to market and the investments that we make for the future. Farmers are at the core of everything we do, and our direct origination is an important connection to help them improve yields, manage risk, and access the best markets.
We do that through Bunge's capabilities, through a number of regional partnerships, and a number of ag tech initiatives. In the food industry, you'll hear about we're expanding our footprint and capabilities in vegetable proteins, oils, and fats, and that's to meet customer expectations so that they can meet the evolving needs of their consumers. We do that in areas like technical services, innovation, or helping them decarbonize their value chains with ways like regenerative agriculture. In the feed industry, Bunge is the largest global supplier of macro ingredients. We're partnering with our feed customer to help them enhance nutrition, efficiency, and the reliability of their supply chains.
That's all while providing crucial price and logistical risk management. In fuel, we're a leader in low carbon intensity feedstocks. We're leveraging our global origination network and our partnerships, and a couple great examples of that are our joint venture with Chevron and our joint venture with Repsol, and we have relationships with many of our other fuel customers. That allows us to help them meet their renewable energy demand as they work to put lower carbon intensity inputs into their value chains. Overall, Bunge's working across value chains and customer industry segments to deliver tailored solutions, and we do that by engaging with our customers early and working strategically with them to help them deliver the desired outcomes.
Julio is gonna talk more about how we're working with our customers to make them more successful. We're entering a meaningful phase of our value creation from both the Viterra synergies and our organic CapEx investments. I'm pleased to announce that our cost synergies are running ahead of plan, and we've increased our expectations. We've also identified significant network and commercial synergies. You may remember that our teams couldn't work on that until the close of the transaction, so that work is much more current, but we're really excited about what we're finding. Our large multi-year CapEx projects are nearing completion, which mean the EPS contributions will increase as they come online.
This all results in us updating our EPS mid-cycle baseline to reflect these gains. I'd like to remind you, in 2022, we updated our mid-cycle EPS baseline from $7 to $8.50. If you remember our baseline, it's not a forecast, it's a model with a set of specific assumptions. It reflects normalized margin environment where supply and demand are in balance. Based on the environment and the speed of execution, that can vary. We are increasing our baseline to over $15 by 2030. That's going to be driven by executing on our maturing project pipeline and the Viterra combination. It'll be about our disciplined capital deployment, and that will include significant share repurchases and an improving structural market environment.
As you can see from the chart, historically, our actual earnings versus the mid-cycle baseline vary in different parts of the cycle. That's going to depend on the environment that we see going forward and the speed of our execution. Regardless of timing, we expect to see higher highs and higher lows throughout the cycle. John's going to review in more detail on the drivers and assumptions around the baseline later. What's next? Julio is going to give you more on the footprint, our capabilities, our value chains, and our areas of focus. Pierre is going to talk about our corporate transformation, what we've done to build a company positioned to outperform and out-compete.
John’s going to give you more detail on the financial performance, the baseline model, and our capital allocation. I'll then make a few closing remarks before having the team join me up here for Q&A. Again, we're so pleased you joined us today. Enjoy.
The value chain model that was really a game changer in the way we decided we wanted to operate the company seven years ago. When we reformed Bunge as a global company, we really wanted to liberate the organization and promote faster decision-making, a more efficient value capture, and provide the commercial leaders with all of the levers to go after the commercial value.
Please welcome Chief Operating Officer, Julio Garros.
Thank you, everybody. I am Julio Garros. I am the Argentine of the leadership team. I spent all of my career in South America. I've been 23 years in Bunge already, and I've been many years working in Brazil with our local team there, building our footprint and the capability that we are gonna be talking during this presentation. Today, we're gonna be talking about our two main competitive advantages, our footprint and our unique operating model. Our footprint is an integrated combination of assets, grain elevators, terminal ports, crushing plants, and refineries, and they give us the global reach and the flexibility that we need to capture the benefit of the optionality.
This footprint has been completed very much after the combination with Viterra. Our unique operating model, or as we call it, our value chain model, is a combination of value chains per main commodities that integrate origination, processing, refining, shipping, transportation, and distribution into one single business. With this model, we have an end-to-end view that connects farmers to our customers. We are the only agribusiness company that has this specific business. We are not this specific model. We are not an aggregation of business unit or regional product lines. We have value chains. When we are talking about our operating model, we need to understand that this is being supported by our presence in origination and distribution.
Any global agribusiness company needs to have a relevance in origination. After the combination with Viterra, we complete our presence in originations in every major production region in the world. We have the strongest origination presence on the planet. I would like to highlight the situation in South America. Today, we are moving in South America more than 70 million tons of grains and oilseed. Our total volume in the world is more than 180 million tons of origination. This is important because there is no other agribusiness company that has this presence with our farmers. Our value chain are aggregated by external segments. We have four segments.
One is Soy Processing and Refining, Softseed Processing and Refining, Tropical Oils and Specialty Ingredients. We renamed this segment recently because it represents better what we have been doing and what we are investing in. The fourth is Grain Merchandising and Wheat Milling. In Soy Processing and Refining, Bunge is the largest crusher in the world. We are the largest and most efficient crusher. We crush more than 60 million tons of soybeans. We have a network that is very well distributed between origins and destination. It's very well-balanced and give us the optionality to serve our growers and our customers.
Today, Bunge handles more than 20% of the soy processing in the world excluding China, and if you include China, we handle 15% of the total capacity in the planet. Our processing plant are vertically integrated between origination, processing, refining, and distributions. We have the best optionality to serve our customers. Post-combination with Viterra, one of the nice reasons we did the combination with Viterra is because we brought home Renova plant. Renova plant is the largest crushing plant in the world. It's located in Argentina, and it has the capacity to process half Panamax per day. Every day, half Panamax is getting in and out in terms of crushing capacity in this complex.
The layout and the technology of this plant is unbelievable. There is no other crushing plant that can compete with this. The industrial cost of this plant is 50% lower than any other crushing plant on the planet. It's unbelievable. At some point, if you are in Argentina, you should visit this. This is just amazing, I would say. Now this plant is connected to our processing network of Bunge. It's located in a port terminal in Rosario with a capacity of 14 million tons, 14, and is located in the waterway in the Paraná River. We have the capability not only to crush Argentine beans, but also beans coming from Paraguay and from Brazil.
If you see that crops of soybeans are growing in that region, then you may understand that Renova is very well positioned to have those benefits. Not only that, I mean, also we like to have a very well-balanced network. We have a very nice network of crushing plant we call it destinations. You do that only in specific countries or regions that you have the consumption of both products. Vietnam is one of those places. In Vietnam, the consumption of soybean meal and soybean oil is growing every year. The consumption of soybean meal is growing more than 5% per year. The consumption of soybean oil, more than 3% per year.
When you have those conditions, makes sense to invest in capacity in destination, and we did that. We expanded our plant to 8,000 tons per day capacity. This is the largest crushing plant in Southeast Asia. Bunge today has the largest crushing plant in the region that the consumption of soybean meal and soybean oil is growing the most. It's also located in a port terminal that we also expanded to 10 million tons, and this footprint is very well prepared to serve the growing demand. By having this plant in Vietnam, we have more optionality to crush beans coming out of the U.S. or coming out of Brazil.
When we are talking about optionality, I would like to illustrate an example of how our model works, right? Anytime you have disruptions or a weather problem or a trade war, our model and our footprint allows us to capture the benefit of the optionality, to capture the benefit of the arbitrage. This is a typical example that connects U.S. with China. As you know, 20%-25% in any given year, in any normal year, whatever normal means, 20%-25% of the crop of the U.S. goes to China for crush. Recently, we have some kind of trade war, and China decided to stop buying beans from the U.S.
By then, Bunge, we have to find an outlet for the crop of our American growers. We decided to connect our origination book with our demand coming from our crushing in Europe. By connecting this new flow, we were able to continue flowing the origination coming out of the U.S. while connecting our demand in Europe. Later in time, there was a trade agreement, and China committed to buy material amount of beans or crop from the U.S. When that happens, as you can imagine, the prices of the beans in the U.S. become more expensive. Bunge decided to divert back the origination book out of Europe and connect it back to China.
Finally, we supply our demand from Europe from cheaper beans coming from Brazil. This is a simple example of how when you have a disruptions or when you have a dislocations, our network and our model is able to switch the flows and extract extra margin from those operations while connecting our growers with our customers. This is what we do. This is what we are the best at doing it. You can imagine that what is happening right now in the world is also another opportunity for Bunge to continue doing more of this type of activities. The second segment, Softseed Processing and Refining. Bunge is as well the largest and most efficient processor of softseed in the world.
This segment has been completed post combination with Viterra because we brought a very nice origination network of softseed, canola, and rapeseed from Viterra in Australia, in Canada and in Europe. We connect the origination network from Viterra with our processing network in Canada and in Europe. We handle today, 20% of the canola and rapeseed that is produced in the planet. 20% of the canola is handled by Bunge today. Also I would like to highlight that within this segment we have our sunflower network or sunflower franchise. It's a combination of two networks, one in Argentina and another in Europe. This network as well has been enhanced by the combination with Viterra.
By having these two type of networks combined, we are able to have a full supply of sunflower oil the entire year. As you know, the harvest of sunflower in Argentina happens in December, January, and the harvest of sunflower in Europe happens in June, Romania, July, August, the rest of the Eastern Europe. Bunge is the only player with these two networks able to have sunflower oil supply the entire year. If any food customers wants to have a reliable source of sunflower oil, they have to come with Bunge. This is what we are, this is what we are building. This is how we are gonna be making profit going forward.
All of our processing plants are co-located with refinery. We have a refinery capacity of vegetable oils of more than 10 million tons, and this has been completed with a couple of acquisitions and investment in tropical oils refining and fractionation. Combined, we have a capacity of 30 million tons of refining, and this is an extension of our value chain. This is an extension of our agribusiness that we have, and we are closer to our food customers. This is part of the third segment, the new name segment. We call it Tropical Oils and Specialty Ingredients. The tropical oils business, as I said, is an extension of the value chain.
With this business, we are closer to the food customers, and we are also investing. We are investing this refinery in Amsterdam. This refinery of tropical oils and fractionation will be the most efficient and sustainable refinery in the planet. It's replacing two old refineries that we used to have in the region. It's gonna be ready in Q1 of 2027. It's located in the port of Amsterdam, and jointly with this, we are investing in a tank farm of 100,000 tons of storage capacity to serve the refinery, but also to enhance our capability of trading vegetable oils in and out of Europe. Within this segment, we are making also a couple of nice investment in soy protein concentrate.
As we know, the demand for protein fortification in foods is growing every day. Everything today that we consume has protein. The yogurt, the bars, everything. It's not only about protein bars no more. Everything needs protein, and this is what we are producing. We saw this trend two, three years ago, and we took a couple of good decisions. One is to invest our protein plant in Morristown, Indiana, co-located to our crushing plant. This is gonna be the largest soy protein concentrate plant in the world for food applications. We are commissioning this plant right now as we speak. We feel very good about it. We'll have the possibility to produce flour, functional and texture soy protein concentrates.
The specs and the quality that this plant is already producing are very good and customers are starting to feel very excited about that. On top of that, we just announced the closing of our acquisition of the IFF protein business unit. This business also brought to Bunge two SPC plants that are located in the U.S. We brought a large amount of customers and also a massive portfolio of applications and formulations. When you combine these two investments, the Bunge size of this is we are becoming the largest producer of soy protein concentrate for food applications in the world. We feel very good about this segment.
The demand is there, and we are building the right capabilities. Our fourth segment, this is the backbone of the acquisition or the combination with Viterra, Grain Merchandising and Milling. When we put together post combination both networks we have, we combine the capacity of more than 100 million tons of handling of grains in the world. We operate in any major production region in the planet. We distribute the grains in all of the consumer regions in the world. With this combination with Viterra, we also bought a cotton business, a very nice cotton business with operations in Canada, US, Brazil, and Australia.
We also brought a very high value business of pulses with operations in Canada, Australia, and distribution in China and India. These two businesses are new for Bunge, but they complete our portfolio. Now anytime we're gonna be doing businesses with a grower, or we're gonna be doing business with a customer, we have a more complete portfolio of products to offer. The grain trading business is a business that requires supply chain efficiency. Our network is supported by terminal ports that are strategically located in origins and in destination countries. We have the capacity to move in our own terminal more than 120 million tons.
So we are able to do all of the trading using our own terminals without relying on third-party terminals, which is very good for this business. Post Viterra merger we double the size of our ocean freight business. Today, we are handling more than 400 vessels at any given time in the world. More than 400 vessels. Bunge today has the capacity to handle 15%, 15%, of the total agribusiness that is handled by sea. We operate in any major agribusiness hub discharging and loading in the world. We are the largest player. This is another example of how we do the arbitrage and the optionality in the grain business as well.
This is an example of barley. The typical flow is Canada origination to China demand. China is a very restricted country in terms of barley demand because you cannot supply from any origin, so they have some restriction in what might be the right origins to be supplied with barley. The typical flow is Canada forward to China, and we did that as many other players. Later in time, the Canada crop was hit by weather, so the weather affect the size and the quality of the barley in Canada. Bunge was the only player able to switch Canada origin to Ukraine.
We end supplying our Chinese customers with barley coming out of Ukraine, and we keep the Canada barley at higher prices locally. Again, this is a typical flow, and we had disruptions, and we were able to switch the flow and extract additional margin. Within this segment, we have our wheat milling business. This is a specific value chain that connect our origination and trading activities in Argentina with our milling, our wheat mills in Brazil. This business has been increased by the combination with Viterra. We increased the size of this business by 50% post-merger. We feel very good about this business.
We are finding that we have a lot of synergies by combining the commercial team and combining our mills and our ports into one network. We're gonna have a lot of opportunities to rationalize our commercial activities, to optimize our storage capacity, and to optimize our milling capacity. We have a lot of synergies opportunities in this value chain. We feel very good about it. The total market share that we have is 30%. Today, Bunge produces 30% of the flour that is consumed in Brazil. I'm talking about value creations, and Greg already anticipated this.
After being working with the team post-combination more than eight months, and after defining the new commercial team and visiting all of the assets that we received from the deal, we feel very comfortable that the amount of synergies or value creation opportunities that we have in front of us in the industrial and in the commercial segment are much greater than what we originally anticipated. We feel very good about it. We have a lot of good examples by connecting origination from Viterra, legacy Viterra with our processing plant. The leverage that we have in Europe to have better conditions in supply chains are massive.
Before the deal, Bunge was a buyer from third parties, FOB of soybean meal and soybean oil out of Argentina. We used to have more distribution capacity than origination and crushing capacity in Argentina. Viterra was a seller to third party of FOB soybean meal and soybean oil. Post-combination, we are connecting those flows. We are internalizing those flows, and that will represent a lot of opportunities in terms of value creation. Now we are gonna see a video, and we are gonna explain how all of this footprint of assets and our operating model help us to connect our farmers with our customers.
At Bunge, we operate as one global integrated platform that works seamlessly across markets and geographies. We're connecting what's grown in one part of the world to where it's needed the most efficiently, reliably, and responsibly. Presence is our foundation. With operations across every major origin and destination, Bunge is built for balance and for resilience. When markets shift, we move with them, adjusting flows, managing volatility, and keeping supply in motion. Today, our global footprint is expansive. It's agile and strategic. At the heart of our platform are farmers, not just as suppliers and customers, but as partners in progress.
By expanding direct origination, investing in local infrastructure, and leveraging digital solutions, we are strengthening connections and unlocking new opportunities together. At Bunge, farmers, food, feed, and fuel aren't separate focus areas. They are connected outcomes of one unified system. A single crop can serve multiple markets, creating flexibility and optionality at every step. That's our advantage.
CP Foods and Bunge have worked together for more than a decade. We rely on strong global partners who help strengthen our supply chain and ensure stable operations. This long-term partnership is built on trust, consistency, and shared values.
This integrated approach, which allows for one crop to serve multiple markets, also enables us to strategically adapt to evolving global needs. This includes accelerating demand for low carbon fuel solutions. Our scale, paired with meaningful sustainability capabilities, strengthens the end-to-end partnerships that can power the future.
Bunge knows agriculture, and Chevron knows fuel, and we're uniquely positioned to connect those worlds at scale.
There are a lot of complementary capabilities in both companies and a lot of cultural fit that enable us to have a successful journey together.
From fields to tables, feedlots, and fuel tanks, Bunge is essential in transforming agricultural origins into global solutions. It's what makes us the partner of choice to capture opportunities and deliver food, feed, and fuel to the world.
Now we can have an idea of how our operating model connects farmer with our customers. But we don't want to be just a transactional company. We want to be considered by them, by their partner of choice. We are investing in solutions or initiatives that we're gonna be talking in this section. In farmer solutions, and as I said earlier, to have a presence in origination is key to any agribusiness company in the world. This is what we have built. Today, Bunge post combination with Viterra, we touch more than 100,000 farmers globally, so we are the largest origination company. One of the indicators that we like to invest is what we call direct origination.
Direct origination means to do business directly with the grower instead of using middlemen, distributors, or resellers. Direct origination is important because it's an indicator of profitability for three main reasons. One, the first touch margin or the origination margin is higher. The quality of the grains and the oilseed that you receive is much better for your processing activities, and you have access firsthand to intel about farmer selling and crop conditions. So for us, direct origination is important. On average, today, we are on 55%, and we are planning to reach 65% in the coming years. If we're gonna be talking about origination, we need to talk about Brazil.
As we know, the crops has been growing year after year, and they continue growing. Today, in Mato Grosso, which is a state in the Cerrado, they produce more soybeans than the entire Argentina. This is what we're talking about when we say Brazil. The declaration of Oscar Zermi, the farmer that was in the video, gives a clear example of what we talked about farmer solutions, right? We have been doing business with Oscar for more than 40 years. He has been selling to us 100% of the production for the last 40 years. 100% of the production. He's the top five largest grower in Brazil.
We are talking about Brazil, for sure, it's the top five largest grower in the world. If you list the top 10 growers in Brazil or the top 20 growers in Brazil, they're gonna tell you that they pick Bunge as their partner of choice for origination. That is what we do. What we would like to communicate to you is that Bunge has the best footprint in Brazil. We operate in all of the eight corridors. We have the largest and better footprint of grain elevators, and we have today a capacity to originate more than 40 million tons.
The country is growing, and we continue expanded sustainably, and there is no better player than Bunge positioned to capture the benefit of this. This is what we do. Again, direct origination and are more volume, but also farmer solutions, right? We invest in initiatives to increase the stickiness with our grower to help them succeed, and also they help us to do to succeed as well. We have invested in Brazil. As you can see, we have the pocket of blue dots. We are investing in Brazilian ag programs, digital platforms, we distribute inputs, we do ag financing.
We do many activities in Brazil to be closer to the growers, to help the growers to commercialize their crops in the global markets. We are doing many of these initiatives in the other regions, and we are gonna continue investing. The more we do this, the more direct origination we're gonna have. The more direct origination, the more profitability that we're gonna have at Bunge. Food solutions. Our network of mills and plant protein and refineries work together in order to give better services and high-value products to our food customers. We operate in the B2B market mostly. We have some B2C good examples in Brazil and in Europe, but mostly we are a B2B player.
We serve the largest food customers globally and regionally. The way I see this business is the following. It's an extension of our value chain. It's an extension to go further downstream, and it's like taking a commodity with volatile prices, passing through our network, and convert it into a more high value, more price stable product to feed, to serve our food customers. We serve them in bakery, confectionery, nutrition, and dairy. We have a very nice franchise here. We feel very good about it, and we are able to bring net additional net margin to Bunge . Feed Solutions. We heard the declaration of the CEO of CP Foods talking about building long-term partnerships.
Feed Solutions, the demand of macro ingredient is growing again year after year. Regions like Asia and LatAm is where the consumption of this is growing the most. Bunge today, post combination with Viterra, we become the largest supplier of macro ingredients. We supply soybean meal, meat proteins, feed grains, feed ingredients to all of our feed customers globally. This is a business that needs to have efficient supply chain, so we are investing in that. As we know, there is an increase in the supply of soybean meal in the U.S. as a result of the biofuel demand.
The processing capacity in the U.S. has been growing in the last two to three years, so there is an increase of the supply of soybean meal. We decided to expand the capacity in our two terminal ports, one in Pacific and the other in the Gulf, in order to have more capabilities to handle this additional supply of soybean meal and to serve our clients at destinations, mainly in Asia and in LatAm. This is a clear example of how we adapt our footprint when we have an opportunity to do more businesses. We serve the largest feed customers in the world. We give them solutions. We are help them to decarbonize their supply chain.
We are serving them with low CI or low carbon intensity soy, low CI meal, deforestation-free soys, and we are also giving them traceability and certification. All of this right now is being connected with technology. Pierre will explain later, but basically, we are putting all of this traceability and certification in a token, and we are serving these customers not only with the macro ingredient, but we also are giving them the token with all of this information digitalized. This is what we are doing. This is what might be the next wave of how you put technology in order to give the information of traceability to our feed customers.
Fuel solutions. The demand from biofuels of oils, vegetable oils and waste oils is growing every year, as we know. The mandates are there. The demand is there. Bunge is the best company positioned to supply low carbon intensity feedstock to the fuel market. We made a couple of partnerships with Chevron and Repsol. We made two joint ventures, one in the U.S. with Chevron, the other in Spain with Repsol. We put together crushing plant refineries in order to create the capabilities to produce more low CI feedstock to supply the biofuel demand. We feel very good about these two joint ventures, and we are gonna continue growing in terms of how we create more low CI feedstock offers to the biofuel demand.
One of the low CI feedstock that we are working with these oil companies is novel seeds. Novel seeds are seeds that have two characteristics. One, high oil content. Secondly, has the possibility to be planted as a second crop or as an intercrop. These are the two conditions of novel seeds. We are developing these seeds with companies like Corteva, Bayer, and Grupo Donmario. These seeds, they are gonna produce additional amount of oil to supply the biofuel demand without affecting the food supply. This is perfect because they are not using extra land, they, because they are second crop, and they are producing more oil per hectare.
This makes totally sense for the biofuel demand. We are investing on this. We are investing in U.S. We are working with Corteva and with Chevron to develop winter canola. That program is working very, very well, and that program is gonna be supplying our crushing plant in the Gulf that is gonna be switchable between soybeans and canola. That plant, we are duplicating it. We are duplicating it right now and will be the single largest line of canola crush in the world. It's gonna be ready in the second semester, and will be dedicated to crush this winter canola coming from our novel seed program.
Also, we are working with Bayer in the U.S., and we are working with Grupo Donmario to have camelina, safflower, and castor oil in South America. We feel very good about this program. We believe that this is the future. Maybe a specific value chain in the future, we don't know, but the possibilities are really very exciting. With that, I guess I was able to explain how the operating model and the footprint works in a way to connect farmer with our customers. We feel very good about what we are building.
We feel very good about our capabilities, and we feel very good about what the market is showing or what the market is gonna be bringing to us, soon. We feel very good about this. We are very well positioned, and now Pierre will explain how we are gonna do all this better with technology. Thank you very much.
We have exposure to markets in the various commodities that we handle and process, so a very accurate, detailed understanding of those risks is really the starting point. We build systems that give us granularity, great level of transparency in understanding these risks. We apply various types of analytics on top of that then allow us to communicate those risks to our management team and our senior commercial teams and inform us about the landscape and what sort of risks that we are taking and managing.
Please welcome Chief Transformation Officer, Pierre Mauger.
Good morning, everyone, and great to be with you today. For over a decade, I've been working on and around our portfolio and strategy, and I have to say what we're sharing with you today is on a whole new level. It is without precedent in our industry, whether it's the asset network, the strategic clarity, or the capabilities. Greg and Julio talked about how the value chain works commercially, how we're creating value for our customers. I will talk about what we're doing internally to make it all work. This section is about how we're positioning Bunge to systematically outperform the market.
When we say systematically, we mean based on how we're organized, based on our talent, our processes, our technology, and our data. Being the largest and most global pure play of its kind gives us a unique opportunity to build industry-specific capabilities that move the needle. In our business, we buy and sell at market prices, and that means if we can consistently operate better than the rest of the industry, that increases our earnings in any market environment. We're working to enhance our gross profit by optimizing our 200 million tons of flows through better logistics, higher processing yields and lower costs, and through better management of risk.
We're also working to reduce our transaction overhead costs through Viterra combination synergies, through global consolidation of our operational activities, and through process optimization. The foundation of all this is our operating model. Here's an example of what we can achieve because of how we're set up. In July, when we closed Viterra, we were running in parallel two of the world's largest seaborne agricultural trade operations, each handling in excess of 60 million tons a year from origins to destinations all over the world. In each case, that's enough to feed several countries. We had two sets of legal entities, two processes, two systems, two teams.
In less than six months, we've been able to move all the Viterra legacy flows onto the Bunge platform. We now have a single process, one system run by one team. This is a huge unlock. It gives us one face to the market, better controls, and it's enabling us to realize cost synergies. This has only been possible thanks to the scalability and the process discipline of our operating model. The value chain approach works because it is underpinned by our global functions and our global business operations. Our functions now run fully globally, and they're increasingly focused on the strategic roles of partnering with the business to drive value and focusing on excellence in critical capabilities.
Most of the operational activities are handled by our Global Business Operations Group. We set this up almost 10 years ago. We have two core locations, one in India, one in Brazil, and the model is now mature. We're continually increasing the scope and the sophistication of activities that are covered. Over $50 million of our initial cost synergies with the Viterra combination come simply from moving activities into our global business operations group. Now moving to industrial operations, Greg talked about our relentless focus on safety and on efficiency. We're now embarking on a new chapter in our industrial productivity journey. We are going to run our facilities based on standards.
We've made a huge effort to codify all the best practices across our leading footprint into what we call the Bunge Production System, and this includes a demanding minimum Level 1, and we expect all of our facilities in time to operate at least at Level 1, and our most strategic assets to operate at Level 2 or 3. We already have 18 facilities at Level 1, and we're consistently seeing new site-level safety and productivity records. Technology and data play an increasingly critical role in our drive to outperform. Our technology strategy is focused on two major business outcomes.
First, value chain optimization, which is about using advanced analytics and AI to improve our most important commercial and operational decisions benefiting our gross profit. Second, we want to maintain an efficient transaction backbone so that we can deliver industry-leading costs. These two goals are deeply interconnected and reinforce each other through the Bunge Data Platform, which is how we aggregate our proprietary data in a curated, easily scalable form. Every day, teams across Bunge make hundreds of decisions that impact the bottom line. We've looked across the entire value chain to determine which activities can most benefit from advanced AI and analytics.
This is about optimizing the daily commercial and operational decisions that our teams make. Now, I must say, human supervision and control always remain in place. This is about augmenting what our talented people can do. Here's some examples of what we've built. I will cover Brazil's supply chain and the risk system in later slides. First, this is the second one moving across. We've developed proprietary software to plan our seaborne flows.n This is about defining the execution that best delivers the desired outcomes of our customers and maximizes the utilization of our assets on both sides of the supply chain.
For example, we can often achieve vessel turn times several days faster than market benchmarks. When you have 400 ships on the charter at any given time and 50 ports around the world, every improvement makes a huge difference. In industrial, we've developed a machine learning algorithm to optimize production settings. This utilizes data from over 1,000 sensors in a single crush plant, and we're seeing meaningful improvement in yield and throughput. For example, in our pilot facility, we've reduced oil losses in the meal by 14%. This has been implemented in three facilities, and we're now deploying it across the footprint.
In businesses with some differentiation, such as wheat milling and B2B oils, we've developed a price optimization tool. This is about delivering faster quotes to our customers, and it also improves our pricing recommendations to the sales teams. In wheat milling, for example, we've seen a consistent sales uplift of 1%-2%. Now I'll go into a couple of cases in a little bit more detail. In Brazil, we run a massive inland logistics operation. We run flows along eight main export corridors from interior to ports, and we operate nine domestic soybean processing facilities. We spend over BRL 10 billion per year on interior logistics in Brazil.
We developed the sales and operations planning optimizer to improve that supply chain. It is a model that incorporates over a million data points, including all the known constraints in our network. It has shrunk planning time from weeks to days, and it enables our team to take better decisions for our customers and for the bottom line. In risk management, we've built a proprietary system called Delta. This is our single global source of truth for all commodity, currency, and credit exposures. It gives us accurate position data every day that can be searched instantly all the way down to the contract level. The transparency and analytics that this provides are fundamental.
They're a key part of what enables us to take the appropriate amount of risk for our earnings power and for the environment we're in. This has been highly instrumental in the commercial integration of Viterra, for instance, and the key to this success is a dedicated team that is continuously improving the system and the processes around it. These advanced analytics use cases are not one-off wonders. They're part of a systematic approach to build digital capabilities. At its heart, we have the Bunge Data Platform. This is how we aggregate the mounds of proprietary data that Bunge generates every day. We're moving from a collection of traditional databases to a single cloud-based data platform.
Having the data in a curated, easily usable form like this, we can rapidly and efficiently scale new use cases, even where that involves massive amounts of information and computational power. In association with this, we built a talented data science team, and we're implementing world-class data governance. We don't create technology, but these capabilities make Bunge a high-impact adopter of new technology, especially AI, across our vast physical network. Bunge is a transaction machine. We run over 10,000 customer transactions per day. These can be small and simple, like selling a bag of flour to a baker in Brazil, or they can be large and complex, like shipping a vessel loaded with over 50 million tons of commodities across oceans and country borders.
Our goal is to execute each transaction reliably and at ever lower costs. Prior to Viterra, we had successfully implemented SAP across our global operations. This took time and money, but it's been a huge enabler for what followed. When we planned integration, we chose not to take a technology-centric approach. We used a deeply cross-functional lens. We looked at processes as well as systems. In each country, we defined the quickest, lowest cost path to get both businesses on a single platform. Now, we already have a lot of businesses on the same platform, most of our key markets, and this consolidation will be largely complete by the end of 2026, so it's going very well.
Looking to the future beyond integration, we see opportunity for a step change in productivity. We will be deploying teams that combine process expertise and technology know-how in order to optimize processes using both automation and design improvements. Alongside that, we're gonna be taking a cost-efficient, low-risk approach to managing the life cycle of our traditional technology platforms. Increasingly, our focus is gonna be on the next generation of technology, analytics and AI, where we see a much higher marginal return on investment that we can scale across our physical network. Having an efficient transaction backbone is all about improving our ability to convert gross profit into earnings and cash flow.
Here you see the ratio between our SG&A costs and our baseline gross profit. It's a strong trajectory over many years, and the Viterra integration helps us travel a step further down this path. Beyond integration, we see major opportunity in process excellence and automation. We have several years of sequential productivity improvements ahead of us. Now, moving to conclusion. When we announced Viterra, we indicated operational cost synergies of $250 million a year. Today, we have a clear path to deliver and exceed this level, which is why we've included a higher amount in the earnings baseline that John will share a little bit later.
So far, we've been progressing very well through combinational synergies, which is tackling the duplication across the two legacy organizations. In 2026 and 2027, the focus has moved to operations consolidation and cost reduction. This is about moving more activity into our global business operations group and reducing costs. Beyond the current horizon, we see significant upside from process optimization and automation. The progress we've already achieved gives us confidence we'll deliver. Our frontline leaders in the trenches are the very same people who drove the turnaround of Bunge. We have a talented and seasoned team with a passion for execution and producing results.
All these efforts are positioning Bunge to deliver higher earnings in any environment by systematically outperforming the market. Thank you for your time and attention today.
It's break time. Let's take 15 minutes if we could have everyone back in their seats at, say, 20 till, just 'cause we have people on the webcast, and we can kinda start promptly. Please enjoy some of the refreshments outside, and we'll see you back in about 15 minutes. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The show will begin in five minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and remember to silence all wireless devices.
As I think about culture here at Bunge, I feel that it is super important, and it's really our most valuable asset. It is a long-standing, historical culture that we've had here at Bunge, and I say it's our superpower. It is unique, it is global, and it is very important, and we didn't want to lose that with the Viterra integration.
Please welcome Chief Financial Officer, John Neppl.
Good morning, everyone. I'm glad to be here. My name is John Neppl. I'm the CFO at Bunge. I joined the company seven years ago. At the time, I was fortunate enough to receive a call from Greg. It's been about seven years ago today, in fact, or very close to today. Greg had taken over as acting CEO at Bunge, and he and I had worked together for almost 20 years at that time. So we've been together, I think, 25 years of my 30-year career. But he called me and said, "Hey, we've got something interesting here going," and said, "I think there's a real opportunity to join Bunge, and we could transform this company."
He took you through some of that earlier. It's been an amazing run for seven years for me, personally, and I think for the company. We've been extremely pleased with the progress with the team. It's been exciting, it's been fun, and I think we have more fun ahead of us. Greg walked you through that transformation, what we've done in the last seven years. It's been amazing. Julio talked about our unique operating model, our value chains, our segments, and our assets. That really is, you know, the core of the company.
Pierre talked about technology and how we're gonna leverage that going forward, how we're gonna make ourselves more efficient, how we're gonna integrate Viterra. That's all been extremely exciting as well. What I'm going to do now is boil that down to what you all really wanna know about is the numbers, right? With that, I wanna start with foundationally, how do we think about ourselves going forward from a financial perspective? Number one is we are gonna be generating strong cash flow going forward. We're very comfortable with that, especially through the cycle. There's gonna be ups and downs, you know, it's not gonna be a straight line.
You know, we're above mid-cycle, below mid-cycle, but we like the trends, but we are gonna be generating a lot of cash. Secondly, like we have focused on for the last seven years, we want a very strong balance sheet. We think it's important to remain competitive, gives us the flexibility we need to operate in any environment, so that's gonna be a foundation. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. We really are entering a period of strong earnings for the company. Greg talked about that. We've got our large, what we call our mega projects, all coming to completion in the back half of 2026, first half of 2027.
As well, we've got a lot of opportunity ahead of us in terms of Viterra integration. Those are going to yield earnings improvement. On top of that, we're gonna have a disciplined capital allocation strategy, which is gonna include a more targeted approach to shareholder returns. I wanna talk a second about our capital allocation strategy. On the left-hand side of this chart, you'll see we start with discretionary cash flow, which is really adjusted funds from operations, less our sustainable CapEx, which is our maintenance, environmental health, and safety. That's the money we spend to keep our machine running efficiently and effectively.
That discretionary cash flow, first thing we wanna do is continue, as I mentioned earlier, maintain a strong balance sheet. We've got a targeted credit rating between 2 x and 2.5 x. It's gonna depend on what part of the environment we're in, if we see an opportunity, but largely, we wanna stay within that, a very solid investment grade rating target. Once we establish that, which we feel, you know, like, in the long run, that should be very easy to attain, we're gonna focus on returning to shareholders. First is dividends, and we're gonna continue to maintain a strong and competitive dividend policy.
What's changing a little bit is when we think about total return to shareholders, we wanna allocate 50% of our discretionary cash flow to return to shareholders between dividends and share repurchases. I'll quantify that in a few minutes, but we wanna get more targeted and more systematic about shareholder returns through share buybacks. Now that will again, similar to the environment, will move up and down year to year depending on cash flow, but over the cycle, that's what we wanna target. Finally, we will continue to invest in growth. What we're gonna change a little bit is our strategy of we've done the big greenfield projects, we've done the Viterra transaction.
We wanna focus on really absorbing those and optimizing those large projects. Going forward, we still recognize we wanna invest some amount of money in growth. I'm gonna walk you through this from left to right. There's a lot of numbers on this page, but ultimately, what I wanna do is explain how do we get from where we are today to that $15 baseline that you probably saw in the press release this morning. If I start with our earnings today, this is the midpoint of our current forecast of $7.50-$8 that we announced last quarter on our earnings call. I'm starting with that, its midpoint. We've been in an environment where we are below mid-cycle.
I think everyone would agree 2025 was a bit of a tough environment. I think as we started 2026, you know, things are starting to move the right direction, but we're still what we believe is below baseline. If we look at history, I'll talk in a minute or two about the assumptions, but we think there's about $2 a share to get us back to mid-cycle. If we get to a mid-cycle environment, we think that's gonna mean, based on the platform we're running today, that's worth about $2 a share to us, a little over $2. On top of that, we've got our in-flight projects.
What I mean in-flight, those are the large projects we talked about, as well as a few smaller ones that we've got that are underway that should be to completion over the next couple years. That's gonna be worth about $1.30 when we get those completed and up and really running. It takes time to commission and optimize those. Over the course between now and 2030, we get all those in-flight projects done, that's worth another $1.30 to us. Then there are the Viterra-related items, and I'll talk about those first, the middle one, from a cost perspective. You heard Pierre talk about that.
On the cost side, we think we announced $190 million included in our forecast for this year, and we've got another $0.50 a share worth of costs that we believe we're gonna capture over the next couple years, most of that in the next couple years. On top of that, another $1 a share related to those commercial synergies that both Julio and Pierre talked a bit about. The important thing about those, that $0.50 and that $1, we're not gonna necessarily stop there. I mean, those are what we believe today is very attainable. We feel very good about that, we are gonna constantly be challenging our cost structure, our opportunities on the commercial side.
Finally, the other Viterra item here is we've got $250 million of stock yet to repurchase related to the Viterra transaction that we expect to complete this year. We also are gonna have a small amount of debt repayment related to that. That gets us to a $13, what we call a run rate baseline. What that means essentially is if we take everything we have in process today, all the projects we're working on, the Viterra integration, the things that we've done up to this point, the decisions we've made, if we get all that executed, at a mid-cycle baseline, we'll be operating at $13 a share.
What that doesn't account for is that future capital allocation into share buybacks and growth and productivity CapEx. If we layer that on during that time that we're completing all these other items, we're also gonna be looking at that capital allocation, buying back stock, investing in the additional growth. We should be at $15 a share by the end of 2030. Now, from an assumption standpoint, there's a lot of assumptions that go into a mid-cycle baseline, but I'm gonna start with a few of the basics here. From a Soy Processing and Refining perspective, that's a big driver because that's our biggest value chain and our biggest segment.
We are assuming at a mid-cycle to have margins in the $45-$47 range, and I'll show another slide on that in a second, but that's a big driver. We think where we are going with biofuel policy going forward, the environment we see ahead of us when we triangulate that with the history and we look at what you know, what the margins are gonna need to be in the industry to incent capacity, we think that's a pretty reasonable forecast. On the refining side of soy, we're looking at an average refining margin a little bit above our five-year average, really driven by what we believe is gonna be an improved environment in Brazil and Europe.
On the softseed side, our assumption is the $75-$77 range, which is kind of right in line with the five-year average. We're not expecting any improvement over what we've seen in the last five years on average. The refining side, refining premiums, we're assuming a little bit lower than average on the refining side. That kinda covers the two bigger segments. From a Tropical Oils and Specialty Ingredients perspective, we're assuming relatively flat forecast to what we have today as mid-cycle, but it will be improved over time based on those in-flight projects.
A lot of the Morristown plant that we talked about and then the Amsterdam plant, both of those are in that segment, will over time help improve the performance of that segment. On the Grain Merchandising and Milling side, we're assuming $800 million, kind of a yearly mid-cycle base of earnings. On top of that, a lot of the synergies that we talked about, that Julio talked about are gonna be captured in that segment over time. Those were captured in that synergy bucket on the prior chart. From a corporate and other standpoint, we're gonna assume roughly in line with where we are today from what we assume in mid-cycle.
Tax rate of 24%-26%. You see interest there, $550 million-$575 million. Costs, we're assuming a lot of the cost inflation that we're gonna see as you typically would see over a time cycle. We're assuming a lot of that's gonna be offset with our technology investments. Pierre talked a lot about investing in technology and that working to keep our costs down, and we believe we'll be able to offset that inflation through productivity. On the right-hand side, I kinda touched on the capital allocation, but we're gonna assume about $300 million-$400 million a year in growth and productivity CapEx.
Again, that's gonna be more focused on efficiency and bolt-on kind of things and not greenfield. It may be 300 some years, it may be less, it may be more, it depends on the opportunity. We're not gonna be very strict that we've gotta spend $300 million-$400 million every year no matter what. It's gotta be the right projects at the right time. Then I talked a lot about the capital return to shareholders already with the share buybacks. During that time, as we progress forward and we allocate that, we are still gonna have extra capital available in the form of surplus debt capacity.
As we look at that capital allocation that I walked you through, we're still lowering our leverage over that timeframe. As we target the 2x-2.5 x, that implies that we're gonna have some surplus debt capacity as well by the time we get to 2030. Here's just a quick look at the margin structure that I talked about on the prior page. The left-hand side is the soy processing margins, and you can see right in line with our five -year average and above what we had in our prior mid-cycle assumption. Then on the right, the right-hand chart is our global softseeds look. You can see the $76 just above our five-year average and well above our current baseline.
Those are really based on what we're seeing globally and what we believe the next five years is gonna yield in terms of margin structure. At that $13 run rate mid-cycle baseline, we should be generating about $3.5 billion a year in adjusted funds from operations. After we allocate that $800 million I talked about around sustaining CapEx, that's gonna leave us $2.7 billion available for allocation to all those various buckets that I talked about on the prior slides. First thing is dividend after maintenance CapEx. We have been committed to a competitive dividend over the last several years. Since 2020, we've increased our dividend on average about 7% a year.
While we expect in 2026 to have a more modest increase in our dividend, we do expect and model going forward through 2030 roughly a mid-single-digit increase every year. That obviously could change depending on the outlook and where we are in the cycle, but that's our assumption at this point. On the share buyback side. Historically, we've been, I would say other than the Viterra-related share repurchases, we have been largely opportunistic. We bought a little here, bought a little there. We got very committed when we made the commitment relative to Viterra, and we've completed $1.75 billion of that $2 billion commitment.
Going forward, we do expect to be more targeted in our process. Based on the modeling that we've done in the mid-cycle baseline, we should be at about a $700 million a year amount available for share repurchase based on that 50% of discretionary cash flow model that I talked about. We've also spent, you know, $3 billion since 2022 on growth CapEx. A lot of that is related to the four large multi-year projects that we talked about, and then some other things. We've added some port capacity. We've added an oils plant in India. We've done some other projects as well. We expanded in the PNW for soybean meal export.
Julio talked about that project. We've had a lot of projects in tow. What we expect in 2026 is to see a fairly significant decrease, about $300 million decline in 2026 in growth CapEx, really as we finish those large multi-year projects. Then you can see in 2026, we have an uptick in maintenance, really reflecting the addition of Viterra for a full year. In 2025, it was really just the back half of the year. In 2026, we're gonna have a full year. Then as we go forward, we're seeing maintenance CapEx in the $700 million range.
Then again, on the growth side, you can see significantly smaller relative to the past, that $300-$400 million range in growth CapEx. What we're gonna do from a growth and productivity CapEx is really try to focus our investment not so much in anything new, but enhancing what Julio talked about around our customers on both ends of the supply chain. We wanna invest in regenerative ag investments, things that can help us work with the farmer. A lot of the partnerships we're doing with the seed companies, those sorts of things. We're gonna invest some money there.
Downstream on the food, feed, and fuel side, anything we do really of that $300 million-$400 million a year, we expect it to, you know, support all of these initiatives that Julio described. We will continue to have targeted returns. We wanna see our projects at, you know, 1.7x our WACC is our, kind of our base assumption that a project has to clear that level to be approved. Obviously we risk adjust those for depending on the region of the world we're in and which value chain it's in, we'll risk adjust those accordingly. We've also strengthened our balance sheet considerably over the last five, six years.
If you look at this chart in 2021 through 2023 and really if you go all the way back to 2019, we had significant retained cash flow on an annual basis, and that was really by design. When we came into the company, we didn't feel like we had to find somewhere to invest cash. So we took that time to really strengthen our balance sheet, and I'll talk about our credit rating in a second. But we really focused on retaining cash and strengthening our balance sheet and waiting for the right opportunities rather than looking for something that maybe wouldn't fit.
When we got into the 2024, 2025 timeframe, we started investing a lot of that capital relative. You know, I talked about those large CapEx projects, so we invested there. Of course, that really ultimately set us up for the Viterra transaction. We had the debt capacity, we had the balance sheet strength to step into that transformational project, and that really made a big difference, obviously. As we look forward and we think about, okay, what does that mean going forward? If we look at that mid-cycle run rate of $13 a share, that should yield again the $3.5 billion of adjusted funds from operations.
When we look at our allocation between maintenance capital, growth capital, dividends, and share buybacks, we believe that's gonna leave us on average about $1 billion of extra capital not allocated to anything. That's why we feel very good about the $15, because we're gonna be generating even more capital than what we're allocating in the model. I talked about our focus on the balance sheet, and we've had credit rating upgrades twice from all three agencies since 2019. Most recently, we had one actually at the close of the transaction, which a lot of times is pretty unusual.
It reflects, you know, the fact that we had a really strong balance sheet going into the Viterra transaction. Then when you look at the scale it brought, the business risk profile, the diversification, it really played well into our balance sheet strength. We feel very good about where we are from a credit rating standpoint. Very key for us to remain competitive. I'll talk in a minute as an example why that's really important. We feel very good about where we are today. You know, we are gonna target in this range going forward. Likely that A- equivalent across all three rating agencies probably is ultimately where we wanna be.
Then we'll decide if we need to go anywhere different from that. We feel like at that level, we're gonna be highly competitive, and we are today in terms of our cost of money is highly competitive in the industry. When we closed on the Viterra transaction, we assumed a considerable amount of debt. Roughly $2 billion of that was acquisition financing. Then we assumed roughly $7 billion of debt with the Viterra transaction. Most of that debt that we assumed was supported by readily marketable inventory. As you can see, for us, before close, we had substantially more RMI or readily marketable inventory than we even had debt.
Which signaled the fact that we could liquidate all of our inventory, pay off all our debt, and we'd still have money left over. Very conservative balance sheet. With the Viterra transaction, because a big part of the debt that we assumed was underpinned with readily marketable inventory, we still run a fairly conservative balance sheet from that perspective. Today, in theory, we could liquidate all of our RMI and have virtually no debt left on the balance sheet. Now, we're not gonna do that, but that's in theory, what you could do. Why does RMI matter? You know, for us, it is the lifeblood of the business.
When you think about it, what do we have to do as a company? We have to manage timing between farmers when farmers wanna sell and when customers wanna buy. We also have to manage getting stuff from where it's grown to where it's being consumed. All of that takes inventory. You have to run that through the machine. For us to run the merchandising business, the processing business that Julio talked about, it takes RMI to do that. It is the fuel running through the engine. When we think about RMI, these are not decisions that you're making, like, when you wanna build a plant, and we talked about the Morristown plant, for example.
We made that decision a couple years ago, or three years ago to do it. That's a 10, 20, 30-year decision when you build a plant. RMI decisions are months, weeks, sometimes even days that we make the decision to invest in that RMI, but it is critical for us. The reason why when I talked about our credit rating being critical is because we have access to capital at credit spreads that are highly competitive in our industry. The industry generally trades at average cost of money. To the extent we have an advantage over the average industry player, we have the ability to take advantage of transactions that others may not be able to do, given our ability to access capital.
That's been for us, we think. As we've seen our credit rating upgrades over the last few years, we've seen those credit spreads for us tighten significantly to where we are top tier in the industry. Adjusted return on invested capital. This is a metric that we've used since I joined the company back in 2019. It gives a better, in our view, indication of how you use RMI. So rather than a traditional return on invested capital, which treats RMI just like a plant asset, any fixed asset, we look at it differently. The rating agencies do as well.
They give us credit for RMI against our debt levels, but we also do a similar adjustment when we look at adjusted return on invested capital. As we go forward, we are targeting at the $13 run rate baseline, a number around 12.5% return annually, which we think is a pretty solid competitive given the much larger scale of the company going forward. Importantly, you can see in that timeframe from 2021 through 2023, when we were well above mid-cycle environment, you could see our returns were obviously pretty impressive and pretty attractive. That just shows you the power of the machine, and we're not assuming an above mid-cycle environment going forward.
Certainly if we end up in an environment like that, you're gonna see those returns substantially above the 12.5%. Cash return on equity or cash flow yield's another metric that we use and we talk about. Coincidentally, that view going forward is about 12.5% cash return on equity as we look at the model going forward under the $13 run rate mid-cycle baseline. However, again, you can see based on history, if we get in the right environment, we think that will improve considerably. Finally, I just wanna close on a few things here. One is our top three priorities are fairly simple at this point.
First is we're gonna commercialize those large multi-year projects that we talked about in the other in-flight projects. Again, worth about $1.30 of EPS for us. Secondly, we're gonna focus, continue to have a maniacal focus on Viterra integration and the cost synergy capture on both the cost synergy capture and the commercial synergy opportunity that we see out there that Julio mentioned. Finally, we're gonna continue to be focused, you know, on disciplined capital allocation through the cycle. Those three things together, which we largely control those three. Those are worth about $5 a share, a little over $5 a share for us.
That's why we're excited is a meaningful amount of that earnings increase that we're showing over the next four or 5 five years is under our control. On top of that, if we get into a mid-cycle environment, I mentioned earlier, that we think is worth a couple of dollars a share. If we start heading in that direction, which we think the market's starting to move that way, then we feel very good. That's why we feel very good about the $15+ by the end of 2030. Let me just close by saying this, and I think you heard it earlier, is that we really believe we're positioned for higher highs when we're in above mid-cycle and higher lows in a below mid-cycle environment.
We feel very good about that. We've got hands down the best team in the industry, and certainly the best team that I've ever worked with in my 30-year career. Makes me really excited and optimistic and can't wait to see where we go from here. With that, thanks for your time. I'm gonna turn it back over to Greg for some final comments.
Good job. Thanks, John. Thanks, Pierre. Thanks, Julio. Appreciate you sharing all that with everybody today. All right, I just wanna give you a few closing thoughts. Back to where we started. Why invest in Bunge? We're stronger, we're more agile, and we're better positioned than at any point in our 200-year history. We've transformed our portfolio, and we've strengthened our operating model. With the addition of Viterra, we've created a Bunge with an unmatched footprint and a set of capabilities with the most talented and proven team in the industry to execute with. All this is supported by our disciplined approach to growth and capital allocation.
All of this results in a Bunge, a business with durable earnings power in any environment. We're resilient. We can adapt quickly to whatever scenario, whether that's continued de-globalization that we're experiencing now or a return to the globalization that we enjoyed for over two decades. I wanna give some context on what I mean when I say we're resilient and we can adapt. Some of the complex situations that we've been dealing with that affect the velocity and the volatility of prices and markets are always focused, one, on keeping our people safe.
If you look at the Ukraine situation, it was an important part of our global network, important origination, important supply for the world, and it was tucked into our global network. As the war broke out, we had to adjust supply chains, moving to safer ports, doing less by water, doing more by rail and truck, and we've continued to manage as things have changed over the years. When that situation stabilizes, we'll change again on how Ukraine operates within our global network. Take the energy transition policies. Some of them have been on again, off again, every country, and in some countries every state has some of their own policy, and they're developing at different paces.
Our global team is sharing our knowledge and the knowledge that we gain with our partners to adapt to those different paces and where it makes sense for us. In the Middle East, we've been serving the demand in the Middle East for decades. The Gulf region's important. As that complexity increases, we've served that Middle East in times of peace, and we've served it in the past in times of conflict. Again, we're adjusting to make sure that we get supply to demand. Regardless of whatever develops over the next few years, our diversified portfolio gives us the flexibility to allocate capital and assets where they're most needed and where they will ultimately result in returns that make the most sense for our shareholders.
You heard about our earnings baseline from John. It's just the starting point. We've built a business with incredible capabilities, a business that provides real differentiated solutions for our customers at both ends of the value chain, our farmers and our consumers of feed, food, and fuel. We are advancing across everything we do. Pierre talked about technology. It's a great example, and we're gonna continue to innovate and evolve. As the biggest pure play, we're the partner of choice, not only with our customers and our business partners, but with our technology providers.
We're empowering our teams with data and AI tools, and while it's very early in that journey, we're already getting more out of our proprietary data, allowing us to make even better decisions to drive the efficiency of our hard assets, and that's both our logistical assets and our processing assets. That all allows us to better serve our customers, better manage our risk, and capture more market opportunities. This is just the beginning, and we're really excited about that fact. Bunge is built to outperform, and I am absolutely confident in our ability to create value for our customers, for our communities, and for our shareholders. Thank you for joining.
We appreciate your time, your interest, and most of all, your continued support as we build the premier agribusiness solutions company for the twenty-first century. Thanks for joining us today, and now I'm gonna turn it back over to Mark. Thank you.
Thank you, Greg, Julio, Pierre, and John for sharing your insights with us this morning. Before we get to Q&A, we're just gonna take a few minutes to set the stage. If you guys wanna stand and stretch your legs, that's fine, but I ask that you kinda stay near your seats. We have about 40 minutes dedicated to this period. You'll get the full executive team. If I could ask those, when you ask a question, raise your hand, please. We'll bring over a mic to answer your question. If you could just state your name and your company for the benefit of those on the webcast. We'll get started shortly. Thank you.
Still waiting on us to go up here, Kevin.
Yeah. Good to be seated. I think we're set.
That's right.
Let's go, guys.
Okay. Oh. Ugh.
You know, maybe before we get started real quick, if we could just those who weren't presenting today, if you can give a brief introduction and then we'll
Sure
Kick it off.
Good morning. Kellie Sears, Chief Human Resources Officer. I've been with the company for a little over three years.
Hi. Joe Podwika, the Chief Legal Officer. I've been with Bunge for seven years and in the ag space for almost 30 years. I'm very happy to be here, even though if this goes really well, there will be no questions for me.
I'm Robert Wagner, Chief Risk Officer, and I joined the company seven years ago.
All right. Ready to go. We'll go front row. Tom?
Thanks. Hey. Tom Palmer, JPMorgan. Thanks so much for the presentation today. Maybe I'll just kick off asking on the $13 EPS outlook. I wanted to maybe clarify the timeline if we were to kinda move into a normalized environment when that $13 might be possible, because there are some projects, as you note, that are in flight that I believe kind of ramp both this year and over the course of 2027. I know it may not be an exact timeline, but should we think about maybe by the end of 2027, that's the type of run rate if we were in a mid-cycle environment to anticipate, and then that remaining $2 is kinda what ensues over the next couple years? Just any color on that. Thank you.
Yeah.
Take it.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom. Yeah, how I look at it, if we make the assumption we're in mid-cycle, I think we will have largely captured a good part of that value before 2030. I think to get our large capital projects, those four large projects, really we think the run rate on those is gonna be optimized in probably late 2028, early 2029. We could see it a year early, maybe a year and a half at that run rate, but I wouldn't say any earlier than that probably.
Second row. Ben?
Thank you very much. Row by row. Benjamin Theurer, Barclays. Thanks for the presentation. I wanted to follow up. We've talked a lot about all the opportunities with Viterra, and there's been different building blocks in terms of incremental synergies. It feels like if we take a look at the EPS impact at, I guess it's pre-tax, roundabout a $500 million synergy mark, whereas the $340 million that was announced back when you made the acquisition announcement. Wanted to understand within your framework of visibility, it feels like that's what you're seeing now, but what is the upside potential? Where are upside risks, and where is potentially that incremental synergy that you've talked about it? Could you quantify that over the $340 million? What is what?
Let me start, and then Julio or John, if you wanna join in. I think if you look at a couple of the global examples of the optionality and arbitrage that Julio gave you on a global basis, and if you think about how complete now our network is between connecting Viterra's origination, it was kind of a vertical merger, right, with our processing and then both companies' distribution capabilities. That arbitrage and optionality that you saw on a global scale, that happens on a continent scale, if you look between Canada and U.S. or Argentina and Brazil, and it happens on a country and a regional scale if you think about pockets of origination feeding different processing plants, swinging between different ports.
It's the completeness and diversification of the origination, and that's why it's so key to be in all key crops, all key origins, and all key destinations. At a high level, that is the mining of the opportunity out of the machine and why we're so excited to put this combination together.
In my mind, the more disruption that we face, the more opportunity to capture the optionality and things that is happening on and on and on. That is one point. Another that we need to estimate better is how to use Renova crushing plant into our processing network, right? I mean, we are bringing that monster plant, right? That is gonna be. We're gonna become more efficient, right? How this is gonna play serving our customers. That benefit is not yet clear how big might be. We feel very good about that, but this, that is not there. Again, also internalization of flows, right? When you are putting together the two networks, right?
Then you don't need to rely on third parties, right? You control your flow. That means a lot of extra margins in your volume. That is a lot of—somethng that also we need to understand better, Pierre was explaining about the using of technology, right? We are moving 200 million tons per year. Every year, 200 million tons. Any improvement in the performance of your plants or in the performance of your yields of 1% will represent a lot of money on a yearly basis.
I think maybe just one other thing I'd add on, Ben, is that the commercial synergies that we identified, that dollar, were specific initiatives that the team said, "We can do these things." What's really difficult are the intangibles or the ones that are really hard to measure. All of a sudden we're one voice in a market, or we combined our freight book and Pierre talked about that, but what is that gonna do in terms of our ability to perform better than everybody else in the freight market? Some of those things are really impossible to quantify, but they're out there.
They're intangible in a way, but they will be tangible, we think, in terms of creating value to the bottom line. It's just very hard to point to specifically that dollar got to here. I think the way we took the approach is, let's talk about the things we gotta identify as initiatives, but we know there's more out there.
There's probably. Let me make just two other points. When you think about the long-term growth in demand, we'll probably serve that primarily by making more yield on the same hectare, you know, the same acre. That means when there is a weather problem, you end up with that dislocation that we're able to help solve. The other, as you continue to grow volumes, there begin to be choke points at distribution points, at storage points, and so that'll be, you know, problems for us to solve, but also with the insight we have, it'll be very clear where the best returns on investments as we debottleneck, or do, you know, targeted M&A to improve our capabilities. Both of those are great long-term plays.
Manav and then Heather.
Hi. Manav Gupta, UBS. I apologize, I'm the one asking about the RVO question, but somebody's going to ask it anyway. Have you heard anything? The question I'm trying to understand is, how important is that final number in trying to get to that mid-cycle margin? What role will that finalized RVO number play in you getting there? Thank you.
John, you wanna take that one?
Yeah, I can start with that. Like everybody else here, we're anxiously awaiting a final decision on RVO. We haven't heard anything counter to what we've been expecting. It's just timing is kinda driving us all crazy. When we look at our mid-cycle, RVO is gonna be an important part of that because we were assuming, particularly on the soy side, to see a good improvement in margins. That's gonna be driven, though, by two things. One is U.S. RVO policy, which we think is critical for both soy and softseed, frankly, because softseed's gonna be supported well. We're also seeing improvement in biofuel policy in Brazil, and that also has given us some confidence in our forward look.
Then, of course, you've got ongoing European development around biofuel policy as well. This one singularly is probably the biggest one we're watching right now, but nonetheless, Brazil and where they're headed is important as well for us, because we have such a big footprint down there. We need it. We need it to get to the $13, but you know. I think we're confident it's gonna be certainly better than it has been. Timing, we'll see.
Heather Jones, Heather Jones Research. On soy, you raised it nearly $10 a ton from your 2022 level and nearly $20 a ton on the soft. How much of that is related to your RVO assumptions and all, as opposed to just structural improvements y'all have made and more favorable policy that's already in place in other areas of the world?
Yeah, I would say it's probably. I mean, when I look at one of the things we did is we looked at our five-year average, obviously, and okay, where are we versus a five-year average? What do we see going forward? It's a little bit of art involved, but when you look going forward and you say, "What's it gonna cost to incent?" You know, if demand increases, what kind of return is the market gonna have to get to be able to build or justify a new build or expansion of capacity? We looked at what margin level it would take to provide an adequate return to the next investor.
We did look at what we believe the impact to RVO is. A little bit of a science, but I think we felt like we landed on a margin structure that is, you know, reasonable and attainable based on what we expect the impact to be. Structurally, I think softseed globally is better than it was, and that's a big driver is a lot of that improvement on the softseed side versus, say, 2022. A lot of that's Argentina, a lot of it's Europe, softseed side, sunseed side's been very good for us. You know, it's a lot of different factors to get there, but what we're doing is telling you what we believe that number is.
If it ends up better or worse than or above or below that, we'll explain that. But we think those are, you know, based on all the factors, pretty reasonable assumptions.
There has been a normalization in Argentina from a macro point of view in the last two years. They are reducing the export duties. You have more stability in how we are taking the decisions in that countries. We have more than 30% of the crush capacity in that country. Everything indicates that the average gross margin per ton of Bunge will be higher because of the stability that is coming from Argentina. Argentina took the decisions on sunflower three years ago to reduce the export tax, and the crop went from three million tons to seven million tons in two years, meaning the potential is there. The growers are there. If that happens to corn or to soy, we should have a nice benefit in crush margins overall.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Hi, Matthew Blair from TPH. Thanks for hosting this event. There's been some major geopolitical events over the past few weeks here in Iran, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about any impacts to your business. Is this raising costs? Is it opening up trading opportunities? I think you mentioned that you have 400 ships on the water. Is that being disrupted at all? Just anything on the Iran impacts to Bunge. Thank you.
Yeah. I'll start, Julio, and then I'll let you take it. Yeah, unfortunately, as you've seen, we've gotten a lot of practice the last seven years with things that were outside of our control. Robert, I might have you talk a little bit as well. We always talk about we control the things we can, and then we do a lot of stress testing and scenario analysis around the things that we can't control and what would be the possible scenarios, and if certain things happen, what would we do? I think being proactive and thinking about how we then connect supply with demand under certain scenarios helps us be ready.
Then as we were talking about the physical footprint of our infrastructure, our network, to be ready for that. That's allowed us to then make those decisions on which ports, if you have to slow down shipments, if you have to move to different modes of transportation. Why don't you talk a little bit.
The way I see this situation, right, you have to separate the short term from the medium term, right? Right now, everybody are trying to understand the duration of the conflict, right? I mean, there has been lack of energy in some places, so we have to adjust all of our logistics to continue serving our customers, right? I mean, people needs to eat, and we have to deliver those basic foods to them no matter what. We are doing that. The logistics is being flexible enough, so we continue keeping the flow running.
Now, in the medium term, what we are seeing right now, and let's see how this evolves, is that at these prices, growers tend to sell more. We are basically fulfilling all of our grain elevators in North America and in South America as we speak right now, which means that we are having more opportunities to increase what we call the first touch margins and to do the quality improvement and so on. Medium term, we should be better and feel very good about what we're gonna be executing.
Robert, you might talk a little bit about.
Yes. I would just add that in the short term, we start every day with a very detailed understanding of our exposures. We have our teams across credit, commercial, compliance, logistics, trade finance working together to find solutions, whether that's finding safe ports to discharge our cargoes, whether it's finding acceptable payment channels, a very active dialogue with all of our customers in the region on a daily basis. Really the team is well positioned to find the right solutions.
Good. Okay. Andrew?
Andrew Strelzik from BMO. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the meal market. I think there's been concern over time about what happens with soybean meal prices as crush ramps, and prices have been pretty resilient here recently. How did you approach that? You know, how'd you think about that within the context of the five-year framework? What's within your control? What are you doing to drive demand for meal internally? Thanks.
Okay. Let me start. I'll let you talk about the framework, you can talk commercially. I don't know if you remember we talked in the past, we were, you know, net deficit. We marketed way more meal than we produced. One of the things about bringing Renova and the teams together, the capabilities of our crushing processes, we had that demand. You saw we made, you know, some of the investments here in North America and the gateways, both in the PNW as well as the Central Gulf, to be able to serve that. From an overall, feed manufacturers love to use soybean meal, right?
I think the takeaway that we've been seeing, the demand continues to surprise everybody, and that is showing that growth, whether it's the growth in protein, animal protein, people eating more chicken, more pork, more beef, more turkey, or the overall growth as well as the growth in animal protein is driving that meal demand.
I would like to complete with. There are two important factor that we need to understand. Firstly, the demand of soybean meal has been a positive surprise. We have the additional supply as we know, right? We know clearly the number of the additional processing capacity that we are investing on. The demand is surprising us. When you go to countries in Southeast Asia or even China, we are having higher demand than expected. I guess that is because at cheaper prices, the ratio of the formulation is changing in favor of soybean meal, so that is happening. Latin American countries, they are consuming more as well. We feel very good about that.
What we need to do, and that is the second factor, is we have to remain competitive. We have to be the most competitive distributor of ingredient in the world. That's why we are doing the investment in the U.S. terminals. We are making another investment of terminals in Brazil and in destination countries as well. If we continue doing that way, it's gonna be a very good thing to have this excess of soybean meal coming to the market because we are gonna have the distribution capabilities.
Yeah, I would just say maybe, Andrew, from a modeling standpoint, as we looked at the margin structure that we assumed going forward, we're contemplating, you know, there will be some floor on soybean meal. We don't know what exact dollar level that is where it prices into more and more applications, but with the offset on the oil side being strong, we feel comfortable that we've got the right, you know, forecast in there for margins.
Christina.
Thank you. Julio, I wanted to explore the Argentine comment more, the fact that you're seeing more stability going forward, because historically when Argentina's been weak, we've seen Europe and Brazil and the U.S. better. If Argentina's more stable going forward, what does that mean for the other countries? Does it mean that this better margin environment accrues more to Bunge because of your Argentine crush capacity than maybe some of your peers without that capacity?
The way I think that in the past, that is right, that when Argentina was suffering, let's put it that way, or they weren't crushing at full potential, the crush margins in destination was much better. There was an additional change in the market that you have to consider, which is Brazil. Brazil, in the last two years, add 30 million tons of beans production, meaning that you will have the benefit for an Argentine running full capacity, let's put it that way, to supply the Indian market, Indonesia, whatever, with meal and oil. You're gonna have cheaper beans coming out of Brazil to be crushed at destination in Europe.
If you put those factors combined, I would say that this would seem to have a better Argentina from a macro point of view.
Your other point's correct as well, that we were underrepresented in Argentina in the past. With this combination, it gives us the global balance, including Argentina. As Argentina improves, we will benefit there much more than we did in the past. We really like the global balance in our crushing footprint now.
Sal.
Thank you. Salvator Tiano from Bank of America. I wanted to ask a couple of things. Number one, on AI, you mentioned that AI is helping, but there's always a human component and human control. Is there a point a few years out that you're working towards actually not needing that human component, whether it's on pricing or trade flows or how you run your plants? A little bit on the short term, everybody's still trying to figure out the synergy target.
It seems based on your guidance that you have $150 million in synergies left from the original $340 million target. That's $0.60 in EPS, and you're guiding to $1.50. Is it fair to say that the synergy target has been raised by $0.90 or around mid $200 million?
Pierre, why don't you and then Robert talk a little bit about how we're using AI to enhance decision-making, but the human's still making the decision. John, I'll let you take the synergy.
I think we all know AI is changing extremely fast, right? We see these models capable of doing things now that they couldn't do three months ago. I'm probably not gonna engage here in a prediction of ultimately where the technology can go. We're following it very closely. You know, we're trying to adapt. Our own experience with AI goes back actually a few years, and it's more around machine learning. It's the live sort of high impact use cases we have so far are more about building our own algorithms. It's not the consumer, you know, GenAI type of solution. This is much more data-driven, to optimize production, to optimize logistics, some of the examples that I've showed.
We're looking closely at GenAI and what that can do to drive automation. We see potential. Midterm, we see probably more potential around accelerating analytics, making various forms of analytics much quicker. You know, surprisingly, with AI, you could write a novel, but you can't pay an invoice. We're looking closely out there, and there's no company that's just magically automated a transaction process, and that's where that human element remains key. Across all of it, though, what is super important is the data. So as this technology improves, the ticket to the big game is having your data in a form that is reliable, curated, controlled.
Because you've all read, you have this notion that the AI can hallucinate, it can either get the wrong information, or it can even make stuff up. It's super important that we have our data in a very tight box, and as we deploy those tools, it's using the right information to answer our questions. It's using the right information to guide what are very important decisions that we make with that information.
Before Robert, sorry, just to complete, we have a couple of examples that we are implementing the algorithm in our crushing plants today. We have a crushing plant that is our lighthouse. This we tried all of this technology that Pierre is talking about, and the algorithm is finding ways to do the extraction of the plant much better than what we used to do, and that are improving the yields of the plant by 0.5%, just the algorithm. What I'm trying to say that this is not about.
That was our best plant and our best operator.
It was already a very good plant, by the way. What I'm saying is, this is not about reducing headcount in the plant. This is about improving the way you are processing your beans. Just imagine, as Pierre said, we have to collect the data. The data have to be clean. We have to build the algorithm, blah, blah. Imagine if we extrapolate that benefit to a monster plant like Renova, what may happen? Sorry, Robert.
It's okay. Really I would just add for risk management purposes, we still very much rely on human decision-makers. We are using systems like the Delta system, which Pierre described, which has tremendous amount of detailed information on exposures. We are beginning to use AI and how we then distill the outcome of the analytics and make quicker inquiries to the data. What maybe used to take us couple of hours or even days to put together with some of the latest tools, we are seeing a lot of productivity to get very quick answers, quick analytics back from the underlying systems and the results that we generate. That's where we see a lot of opportunity from the risk perspective.
I wanna make sure I touch on the synergy question. We had originally set out $250 million. We mentioned we have $190 million in our forecast for this year. We're estimating total now, really that $250 million, we're more like $350 million, with that $0.50 of additional that we see that we're gonna capture here going forward. Then on the commercial side, that $1, you know, it's $250 million-$300 million, and again, those are specific, targeted, you know, opportunities that the teams identified, but we believe there's more out there that is gonna be really tough to pinpoint exactly. We'll certainly communicate those as they become obvious.
That includes the $0.90?
Yeah, that includes the $0.90, yep, in the commercial side. Yep.
Ken?
If you don't fully know the RVO at this point, how much conservatism have you built into your expectations, and how much cushion do you have in terms of cost savings opportunities? 'Cause it could be a pretty wide variance of the RVO. I'm assuming, given your history, you guys tend to be on the conservative side. I'm just trying to figure out, you know, if it doesn't go exactly your way, how much conservatism you have in there. Thanks.
John, I'll start by saying guilty as charged, okay? All right. One of the things that we like to do is make sure we deliver what we promised. One of the things that you heard us say today that we're excited about this combination is we've got more levers to pull to drive cost synergies, to drive commercial synergies, to solve problems for our customers by helping them get to market and solve some of the complexities, which we think will continue going forward. There are, you know, a lot of ways to win and deal with things that turn out different than the assumptions. Now, that being said-
Yeah, Ken, I would. It's kinda hard to characterize exactly, but I think the one thing we did is we didn't. Our model and our go-forward view of mid-cycle and how we look between now and 2030 wasn't done by a bunch of accountants in a dark little room. We got with the commercial teams globally and talked with each one of them. "What are you seeing in your regions? How do we feel going forward about you know, biofuel policy, other drivers in the business, the competitors? Where do we see global demand and you know, supply and demand, factors?" It was. We felt like really a bottoms-up sort of approach to this.
It wasn't, you know, a top-down at all. Our teams are inherently, to Greg's point, they're inherently, you know, conservative. I mean, their mind is, "I'll tell you what I think I can do." We feel good with that, you know, it considers what we have seen historically when times are good and when times are not so good. We factored in what's happening globally around production and demand, biofuel policy in lots of other places, and the impact of things like palm oil policy in Indonesia, those sorts of things. We feel good about where they are. I can't predict where they're exactly gonna come in versus what we modeled, but we feel like it's a reasonable approach.
I wanna put a finer point on that, John, 'cause you made a really important point about how we operate Bunge. Business is a team sport, all right? The one thing that we've done since we started the transformation in 2019, if you think about, right, we sold a lot of assets, we bought assets, we did deals, we changed the operating model, and during that, how were we able to accomplish all this?
Now, I'm a pretty optimistic guy and they'll tell you, I have kind of, you know, high expectations of our team, but what we were able to do, the capabilities we were able to build and the execution over the last few years, that's what gives us the confidence going forward. As John said, it's because we get the team together. We run this organization very flat, enormous amounts of transparency. We figure out what makes sense, and then we lock arms on it. Then comes the accountability part, and that's where everybody is playing their role in this team sport of business and taking the pride in our customer.
You know, our customers are at the center of it. Our employees are so passionate about what we're doing and the purpose of this company. I mean, Kellie, you've got to talk about the engagement scores that we got, unbelievable and during this time of turmoil. I think it is the way that we run the company and the accountability that we have driven so deep and wide that allows us to deliver the way we do. Talk a little about it. I think it's worth mentioning.
Sure. We started the cultural integration really after we signed the deal, so that was, you know, almost two years before we closed, and it was really important to understand the similarities and differences. We recently, after we closed, just did a combined survey or engagement survey where we had 65% of our employees participating with an 85% score. This is a significant achievement for any company, actually, and we're really proud, given all the change we're going through those results. It really, you know, positions us well to enable our strategy and deliver on the future.
Thanks, Kellie.
We're at back row.
Thanks. Pooran Sharma with Stephens. Just wanted to ask about the mid-cycle assumptions for the grain business. When I thought about this business before, you know, you have merchandising opportunity, but with Viterra, now you have space income opportunity. When I think about mid-cycle and $800 million, is this more of a space income opportunity, or do you have more merchandising profits in there? Would just love to get a little bit more granularity on how to think about the moving pieces within grain at that $800 million.
I'd say the answer is yes, and I'll let these guys talk about it. That's the beauty of what we've added, right? In the past, if the markets were tight and there was no storage revenue, we had the ability to benefit from that. But there were a number of areas like North America, Canada, Australia, and even Europe, where we didn't have the same benefit as a storage footprint that we got with Viterra. So now we've got that offset. When the storage income is there, we're able to clip those coupons, if you will, until the market calls on that supply and then, you know, it's back to the merchandising we had before.
Yeah. I will give you an example. As Bunge legacy, we used to operate in Australia in wheat, in western part of Australia, and Viterra was very strong in the southern part of Australia. Now, together, we have a perfect network to participate in the growth in Australia from a grain point of view. That is a positive that we have to consider going forward, and the same with Canada, right? I mean, the footprint that we are bringing with a combination of Viterra is unbelievable. It's something that we didn't have before, so we feel very good about that.
In the U.S. market, we are having the full network of grain elevators in the Mid-Plains that will enhance not only our grain merchandising business, but also the carry of our bean for processing. There are a lot of extra synergies or positive from these combinations that you should consider in the modeling, in my opinion.
One of the things we did. This is the part of the business that is the most difficult to forecast because every year in merchandising, money's made a different way, different market structure, different S&Ds. You know, you could have a dislocation, a disruption, so it's very hard. What we did is we looked at history over a five-year period, and we said, "Okay, what has happened in that five-year period?" There's always things, puts and takes.
You know, we had this location, we had this dynamic, we had this weather event, and we tried to look across that and say, "If we were to sort of account for every one of those different sort of market environments," some years carries are really good, and so grain storage is a very good thing, and some years carries aren't as good. We tried to look across kind of a five-year history and put in what we thought was reasonable based on our historical results in our merchandising segment, along with Viterra's historical results.
We spent a lot of time looking at their history and dissecting it, understanding what went well, what didn't, and that's where we came up with the number. That's one that we're gonna continue to try to digest and understand going forward and figure out, is there a better way going forward to forecast it? That is where we see the most upside from a synergy standpoint will be in that segment because obviously that's where a lot of the value we think bringing the global merchandising together.
We feel like we've got a good, you know, rule of thumb in there at $800, and then we'll layer on synergies as those get realized and keep refining it over time, and maybe AI will help us get better at forecasting that. I don't know. That one's a bit more challenging probably than the other segments.
Andrew.
Thanks. You talked about all the work you've done to kind of reshape the portfolio, and I'm just curious on the margin, kind of where do you see opportunities to continue to evolve the portfolio? You talked about bolt-on M&A. I think there's $1 billion kind of not earmarked within the cash flow. How do you want us to think about that, and how did you incorporate that into the baseline? Thanks.
Let me start again.
Yeah
You guys can dive in. Look, one of the things that we're really excited about, right? Is there are so many opportunities with bringing Viterra and Bunge together that are right in front of us, right? We have the ability to reach the full potential of our grain merchandising business, right? And whether it's a cost improvement or the optionality improves that we execute on with the volumes that are going through there, just there's an enormous amount of leverage, you know, in that. You know, Julio talked about, you know, we couldn't, I think, have built a Morristown plant and made the acquisition of IFF at a better time.
There either one would improve what the amount of opportunity we're able to get at with what we're seeing going on in protein demand. The fact that the timing of bringing them both together at the same time, fantastic. It'll take time, but, you know, we're very excited about helping that part of our business reach its full potential. A lot of the go-to-market is with some of those, you know, great brands that you know around the world that we're also selling specialty fats and oils to as well, as we bring those specialty proteins in. Then we, you know, as we talked about the processing footprint, again.
You know, we've got the best or better practice somewhere on the globe happening in one of our facilities, whether it's grain handling, wheat milling, soy crushing, softseed crushing, and our industrial teams are benchmarking those KPIs and learning from one another. We'll continue to drive against that productivity across our asset infrastructure and network globally. That's ours to manage to try to get to the full potential, and the culture.
If you ask me, the priorities right now are executing what we are doing right now, that is priority number one. We have to execute the model, capture the synergies, and so that is priority number. Priority number two, digital. I mean, those projects that Pierre was talking about, they are showing us that there is a lot of extra margin that can be captured. Again, as I said, we are moving 200 million tons end-to-end, so any improvement there will make the difference. Now, if you go to where we should consider expansion, right? That is your question.
Again, we can debate, but what we are doing in fuel with Chevron and Repsol is very nice and I would like to do a little bit more, whether doing those joint ventures bigger with more capabilities. Novel seeds, I guess that is a program that can surprise us or do another partnership with another oil company in another regions. We are looking at that already, so that might be one point. Another point for foods or Tropical Oils is India. I guess our network of Tropical Oils refining and fractionation in India have to be expanded, so the consumption is there and is growing, so we have a nice opportunity there going forward.
I do wanna touch, Andrew, on your question on the model. As we ramp up to that $1 billion of surplus cash a year, it kinda starts in 2027 and gets bigger as we get to 2030, get all the synergies captured, get the in-flight projects up and running, everything's cash flowing. What we've assumed is we're just gonna pay down debt with that excess capital, that's what's built into the model. Obviously, we're not gonna get into a mode where we get our leverage down to some ridiculously low number.
You know, eventually we'll either return that to shareholders in the way of more share buybacks, increase our dividend, or, you know, if an opportunity comes along, we'll deploy some of that capital. Right now we're just assuming debt pay down for that excess.
Luke.
Hi, Luke Washer, Hudson Bay Capital Management. Can you, Greg, maybe talk about the key differences between the first transformation of Bunge and the integration with Viterra? Related to that, you guys talked about your proprietary software and pricing systems. What kind of systems were in place at Viterra that you're kind of upgrading and being combined with Bunge? Just last one quickly just to clarify on the synergies. The intangible opportunities that you're talking about, just to be clear, that is not a part of the targets that you're that are quantifiable on the slides.
Quickly answer that one. Correct. Yes.
Okay, great.
And then we can go to the other-
Yeah. Let me start and then I'll call on Robert and Pierre to add on. I think what's different this time is we've already done it. We've got the experience, we've got the team in place that has that experience, and we've got more opportunities with this combined network than we did last time. We probably also have, I think, and I'll let Pierre talk to it, but you know, some opportunities as technology's changing to bring some different tools and capabilities to that. I think that just gives us the momentum and the confidence to really lean in.
As I said before, that capacity that we built, we own that and I think, you know, as an organization, we've even surprised ourselves what we were able to do the last few years, but now that's confidence that we're building off of.
Yeah, I think, I mean, on the comparisons to the first turnaround or to the turnaround, you know, we started by shrinking. We're not shrinking here. You have to understand that the mindset and what's going on with our talent is a very different kind of energy. We went with a lot of focus the first time around. Here, basically, we've had the pick of the best people from Bunge and from Viterra in any single job, and we've been very disciplined about putting every person in the best role they can fill, and the excitement of the team to go and execute that is really tremendous.
It's a different feeling, let's say, and our status in the industry and so on before was a bit different. When it comes to the technology, generally speaking, and that's true in the comparison with the turnaround, Bunge itself was in a much more mature place. We didn't have SAP everywhere when Greg and John arrived. That was a very long, frankly, very painful process. We're all happy it's behind us, that we only had to do that once. That creates a foundation that's made it much easier and quicker to act on certain of these things.
Having that global business operations group in place has been very instrumental because we've got the structure, we've got the processes mapped and defined, so we can plug things in very easily. I would say generally Viterra was overall less mature in terms of technology. There's a couple of pockets we found very interesting. They do much more global origination, direct origination, that's something Julio talked about a lot, and their approach to the systems supporting that was probably a step ahead of Bunge. We're building on that, and we're gonna accelerate it.
The other area is in terms of economic research, which is how we track supply and demand. It involves crunching a lot of numbers. They were ahead in terms of having that more automated, more on the cloud, and Robert's team is right in the middle of this, we're building on that and just accelerating it.
I would just add from the risk management perspective, we are mainly utilizing the legacy Bunge infrastructure and systems that we talked about. In fact, on day one, the teams have created a solution that as soon as the transaction closed, we turned on the systems, and we had full global visibility at a transaction level data to both Bunge and Viterra. All of the analytics, the risk framework, decision-making from day one, it effectively worked on one system.
Got time for one more. Tom?
Hey, we've covered a lot of the operating parts of the business. I did wanna just maybe clarify on the refined side. We watched over the last few years kinda this boom as the RD industry really took off in the U.S., and then over the last couple of years, we've seen both the addition of pretreatment units and weaker demand in terms of feedstocks. How do you see that playing out here over the next couple of years as presumably the demand for feedstocks ramps significantly? We do have pretreatment, but maybe it doesn't cover everything. To what extent are you starting to see that shift now just recently? 'Cause it does seem like markets have evolved quite a bit even since you last reported. Thanks.
Yeah. I'll start and then, Julio. You know, overall, I think we talked at the time that as pretreatment got built, some of that margin would come out of the refined side, and the re-refining overages would go down, but that would move into the crude because demand for crude would go up, and so it would be more in the crush margin. We've definitely seen some of that. I think, you know, your call-out is exactly right. We're seeing demand start to pick back up as those economics are improving. Part of that's anticipation, where the RVO's gonna be, but some of it's been the recent move in the energy markets as well.
No, it's exactly that. We see processing and refining as one combo, and we were expecting that, right? The refining per se, right, standalone will make less profit, and a lot of that margin will be concentrated in the processing plant. That is already happening. We are seeing that. Our refining will be more dedicated to food, which makes sense. That is how we originally invested in that network. On demand side, before these two weeks, right? I mean, the demand was already starting, right? We were already seeing a higher demand for low CI feedstock in the U.S. already.
Thank you.
That's it.
All right. Well, I'd just kinda like to put a bow on this and wrap up by saying thank you. Thank you for coming today. Thanks for your time. As being a people business and as I said, business is a team sport, I wanna thank the Bunge team, the ones that got us to this point. As I always said, our town hall, what I really wanna thank them for is what we're gonna do in the future, because that's what we're really looking forward to. I also wanna thank the team that made today possible and supported us. It's been a fantastic effort.
We haven't done one of these for a long time, and we were happy to host you today. The last thing that I would say is that, you know, I love this business, love the people in it. The excitement of our team, the combined team, and you can't tell when you travel around the world to plants and visit offices or plants or customers with our teams. You can't tell who is Viterra legacy or who is Bunge legacy because everyone is so excited about what we've built here and what we're building and what we're gonna do with it, that they wanna be part of this.
This is a special company, and we're really excited about the future. You know, I—when I called John and Robert and internally as we all talked about the going forward and some of the dreams we had in 2019, it was like, "Look, this is an incredible company. We've got incredible passion for what we do and the purpose and helping connect farmers to consumers of feed, food, and fuel, doing it in a sustainable way, and let's transform this company, and let's use it to help transform the industry." I'm really proud of what we've done, but we're just getting started.
The rest of the journey is gonna be fantastic over the next few years. I really hope you invest with us, because if you don't, you're really gonna miss the ride. Thanks for your time today. Great being with you.