Okay. We're excited to kick off the afternoon with a discussion with Bunge. Since assuming their current roles in 2019, CEO Greg Heckman and CFO John Neppl have transformed Bunge's earnings potential through materially improved operational execution and expanded footprinting capabilities and accretive capital allocation. Bunge's poised to demonstrate the power of its expanded network over the coming years, with Viterra integration progressing, an improving operating environment, and in-flight capital projects nearing completion. We're pleased to have CEO Greg Heckman and CFO John Neppl with us today to discuss Bunge's strategy and outlook. Thank you both for being here.
Thanks for having us.
Absolutely. Maybe where I wanted to start, is looking back. You're right now approaching the one-year anniversary since Bunge's closing of the Viterra acquisition. Can you remind us of the deal rationale? Have there been any big surprises? Since bringing those two companies together, and maybe how far away we are from seeing the true capabilities of the combined company?
I'd say no big surprises, so we're really thrilled about how things are going. Yeah, if you back up to the strategic rationale, I think everything we've been doing since we arrived at Bunge was really, you know, focusing on ensuring that we had the capabilities to be the partner of choice for our customers, and that's the farmers and the consumers of food, feed, and fuel. Everything that we were trying to do strategically to improve the capabilities of our global infrastructure to serve our customers lined up really well with Viterra's capabilities. When you think about we put those companies together, they were much more upstream on the origination, and it really folded in well with our processing.
You know, they also brought us some oilseed processing on soy and sunseed on the soft seed that fit very well. Just couldn't be more pleased about how the assets fit together, how the teams have culturally really taken off, hitting the ground running. The progress that we've made against, you know, early on cost synergies, but more importantly, on the commercial synergies. Feel really good. It's just kind of accelerated everything we want to do strategically, not only from the assets, but most importantly, the people, because they make all the difference in this industry.
Now that you have this expanded network, can you talk about the capabilities that gives you? Obviously, much bigger in Argentina and crush and some of the other things that you talked about. How does that enable you to flex and tap into pockets of opportunity kinda year-round?
If you think about it, we now touch more farmers directly than anyone else on the globe. We are in all the key producing markets with more capillarity and granularity than anyone else. Most importantly, we can now connect those farmers to the consumers of feed, food, and fuel because we're also in all of the key consuming markets with more capillarity and granularity than we've ever had. When you look at our crushing footprint, we're now the largest global oilseed crusher. On soy, we added a key asset, you talked about in Argentina. We added Viterra's Renova asset, which is the largest global crushing facility and the lowest cost crushing facility on the globe.
It was being run alone before, and it's now plugged into our global network, and it gave us that geographical balance that we were kind of lacking in Argentina before. On the sunseed side, we've got some great capabilities with their Argentine sunseed crush, which now offsets our European sunseed crush, and so we're there for those customers right through the year-round cycle. Very, very excited about that capabilities that it brought us.
You had spent several quarters talking about, you know, lack of visibility, the demand environment was a little spotty, more hand to mouth. We've gotten the RVO. How has the demand environment evolved over the last several weeks and months?
Yeah.
Well, the obvious thing is demand for veg oil has gone up dramatically. I think a lot of our customers on the downstream side, the energy industry, they were waiting, right, for certainty. I mean, everybody was waiting for certainty. Even to some degree, the food industry was holding off. What we've seen now is engagement on that side, in particular related to RVO. Not only the energy customers engaging with us, but the food industry as well now. They kinda see where things are headed. Now, a lot of oil stocks were built up as we anticipated the RVO. I think everybody kinda knew it was coming, but no one had conviction to really go, you know, price forward and really make commitments.
The industry continued to crush and continued to store the oil. What we're seeing is demand, you know, likely here in the near term, will outpace the production for a period of time until we pull these stocks down. Ultimately, we'll find the right balance of supply and demand. It definitely has provided that certainty everyone was waiting on.
The RVO and the biofuels policy in the U.S. gets so much focus. Obviously, it's not just a U.S. story in terms of growing biofuels demand. Can you discuss what you're seeing in some of the other parts of the world? What opportunities these energy policies kinda bring to you guys, in particular Brazil, Indonesia? How should we think about that?
Sure. We're definitely seeing, I think, a different posture globally as people think about fuel security as well. The demand is kinda up and to the right. Even in Europe, we just saw what happened on RED III, changing some of how UCO treated. That's gonna drive more demand for rapeseed oil, so that'll be good for soft seed crush there in Europe. If you look at what's happening in Brazil, currently B15, they're talking about going to B16. They're doing some testing with the fuel fleet to see if how quickly they could do that, move to that. Of course, that is all they've set their goal on, the fuel of the future to get to B20. They're on that path.
You look at Malaysia, which hasn't been talked about as much as Indonesia, but they're trying, their goal is they're working to get to a B10 on palm oil blending. Indonesia is on their path. They've been the most aggressive about domestic demand, and they're on their path to B50. You know, there are a number of projects. Of course, you know, we're partners in biofuels with not only Repsol, but Chevron, and then we continue to talk to a number of people. There are projects being looked at all around the globe, and I think people just believe that that policy around biofuels is gonna continue to be constructive.
That's great, very supportive for the oil leg and to be able to run our global footprint. We like the trend up and to the right.
Okay. Maybe in that context, I mean, we've seen where crush margins, and particularly in the U.S., have gotten much better. Can you maybe compare and contrast current crush fundamentals globally versus what we saw in 2022, 2023, when things were obviously last very strong?
Yeah. We're definitely seeing, if you look across Bunge's global footprint, average crush margins across soy, you know, better than last year, even though they're heavily inverted. That, of course, the big driver to that has been the U.S. and, you know, here in North America, around RVO policy. Soft seeds as well. Globally across our footprint, average crush margin's better than a year ago. Again, heavily inverted, but driven as well by North America and some of that soft seed crush in Argentina, with good seed supply there. You know, environment's good. There still is a lot of uncertainty in the back half of the year. We've got to see, you know, crops develop, you know, here in the Northern Hemisphere.
We've got to continue to see, kinda how the Middle East conflict plays out. That's definitely keeping, you know, some of people from committing. You know, the farmer as well forward, but especially, some of the food and feed consumers, out farther on the curve, and I think some of that uncertainty, is shown there. You know, that has the opportunity to kinda improve, you know, month at a time or quarter at a time as we go forward, depending on the fundamentals.
I might just add, Andrew, that, you know, versus 2022, 2023, we're close on the crush margins themselves. Where we see a little bit of difference is on the refining premium side. Isn't quite as robust today, and we didn't expect it to be. You know, a lot of pre-treatment has been built. The energy companies, you know, have taken some of that, the goal to take some of that margin in-house. We also expected the margin, some of that margin potentially move back into the crush, and I think we're seeing some of that. We're really happy with the crush margins, obviously, where they are today. The refining premiums have actually been fairly resilient. We're not at that 2022, 2023 level. The demand for refined oil has still been good.
The energy or the food companies, demand has been good. You know, it's setting up pretty well.
You mentioned inverted curves in the back half of the year, some of the other uncertainties that you talked about. Which of those are maybe most material to the outlook, positively or negatively, depending on how they go? You know, I guess, how do you navigate what seems to be a daily changing, evolving environment?
Yeah. I might answer first kind of how we navigate. I mean, I think one of the things that we've been most pleased about are the way that the teams are working together, because the diversification we now have across geographies, across crops, across our capabilities to serve all customers, it is also allowing us the visibility into the physical price curves, the liquidity to be able to hedge ourselves and, you know, manage against the things we can control, and then stress test and protect ourselves against possible outcomes on the things that we can't control. That's really about, you know, mining the optionality out of this global network as we serve our customers.
I think that when we talk about commercial synergies and in some of the upside going forward, a lot of that's in the execution. Those are things that we control. The things we don't control, of course, how the, how the crops develop, you know, here in North America and then in South America. How long the conflict in the Middle East carries on, what that can mean to energy prices, which kinda, you know, not only find their way through fertilizer, but into our manufacturing cost, into all the transportation costs. Also, you know, from a nutrients and input cost, if that starts to change, shifts in acreage, and what that does to the balance sheets to pay attention to that.
Ultimately, you know, we're in a year that's got a higher percent of El Niño, and if you get a weather event and what that means to be based on, you know, whether the farmers have cut back nutrients and started to mine the soil somewhat with whatever shift in acreage and then whatever effect you could get from weather. You know, there's a lot that could happen to shift things either way. Pretty dynamic, I'm glad to be sitting here with a very global footprint and a great team.
On the, I guess I wanted to get your perspective on the South America farmer. There's a lot of, you know, dialogue about what's going on with fertilizer prices and the applications in the U.S. and acreage and those types of things. Our understanding is that there's a lot that was pre-bought, maybe there's a little bit of insulation there. Maybe the South American farmer doesn't have as much of that because of the timing. What do you think maybe the potential implications are, the health of the farmer in South America? Any perspective on your thinking around that?
Yeah. We see North America kind of as you said, in the U.S., most of the nutrients and inputs were in place, and we think ultimately it'll shake out that there was, you know, maybe a low single-digit percentage change to oil seeds, but not a big shift. The key'll be spring of 2027. If this drags on, we want to really watch what's going to happen in the U.S. and North America spring of 2027. In South America, the Brazilian farmer's in pretty good shape. They've had a good run. It's been a good few years. They've continued to expand, if you look, continued to have record production in soybeans. They are, you know, they were buying fertilizer early, they're not as covered as the U.S. was.
As prices have moved up, now it'll be important to see, you know, what's that behavior gonna be, what's the crop mix gonna be, and if they cut back, that will be something to watch on yields. That'll be key if this, if this continues on how that shakes out in the fall. We're watching that. It's a big flag.
Okay. With some of the geopolitical unrest, maybe some of the drought risk, are you seeing more opportunities to serve customers? Is that creating some opportunities there that maybe weren't before?
Yeah. You know, I would say every sense that we put this platform together, we're just way more complete with our end customers, and especially on the feed side, where we now have the feed grains and the protein meals, and to be that complete supplier. The conversations we're able to have, not only with our farmer customers, with our consuming customers on feed, food, and fuel, of the problems that we can solve, whether it's logistical, helping them hedge out on the price curve, they're very different conversations and very strategic.
You know, I think that is one of the huge benefits, and I think that's some of the resilience that you've seen, you know, what we were able to do here in first quarter and how we're thinking about, the balance of the year.
When I think about your earnings baseline, there's some areas that have been good guys. One of the areas that's been maybe a bad guy has been on the merchandising side. When I think about demand, China's been, you know, pretty volatile from a demand perspective. Do you feel like China demand is structurally different than it was before? Can that ever come back to kind of the levels that we've seen historically? Maybe there's just geographic shifts. How do you think about China within the demand side?
Look, it's still, you know, absolutely one of the most important markets, you know, across all of the grains and oilseeds. We, you know, also operate in China in crushing, which is, you know, our team does a great job connecting that value chain from the farmer all the way through. I think we run at higher capacity utilizations than some because of the way we're organized. The demand's, you know, slowed some. Some of the profitability in the animal segment, especially in pork, has come off some. Of course, long-term, we know they continue to work to be more self-sufficient in developing their own ag production and their own yields as they prioritize food security. They're always going to have, you know, multiple origins.
That's why they want the relationship with the U.S. and with South America, for food security, to have the flexibility to need those markets at different times of the season. Continue to be, I think, the most important customer.
Okay. If the conflict in the Middle East were to end, question is how does that change your fundamentals? I think ultimately what people are struggling to understand is how much is fundamental and how much is, you know, a product of some of these geopolitical from a firmly fundamental perspective. How do you think about that? What would maybe be the implications?
Yeah. I think how we think about it, these, you know, when these shocks happen, they generally, there's a short term. If you look back to the Ukraine conflict, there's a short-term, you know, shock which can be positive or negative. That's really the short term. It's structurally things get more complex and, you know, the financial markets react first, physically you've gotta move the goods and you've gotta get them where they're going. You know, for example, you know, in the Middle East, we have not had an interruption of the supply chains, but we've had a disruption of the supply chain. It's created complexity, it's created additional costs, different ports, moving things over land, but we're able to take care of the customers.
You know, we're debating should it end, you know, what's kind of a short-term impact, a mid-term impact, and a longer-term impact. Short term, you'll see, you know, people have been pulling their stocks down. You'll see people, you know, replenish those stocks and rebuild pipelines, which have definitely gotten shorter. You'd argue you may see additional security stocks build, and that may not only be in the Middle East. Globally, I think people are less comfortable with what's the art of the possible. Their stress testing is a different answer today than it was two years ago or five years ago.
You may see additional security stocks built globally, and that may start to change some of the S&Ds that what looks like heavier stocks to you, some of those stocks aren't available to the rest of the market. You've really gotta think about what is the, what is the real balance. That ultimately means more volatility, more dislocation if we have a weather problem or some other government policy change or some other trade disruption. That's what we're really built to help solve. As you're solving those physical things, that's generally when you get paid for managing that risk and untangling that problem.
Okay, that's helpful. I feel like I always ask you about soybean meal.
You do.
resilient demand. I know I do. I know I do. I'm going to ask you again. You know, there was just so much concern in the market about, like, "Hey, we've got all this crush capacity coming online. What are we going to do with the soybean meal?" Here we are. I think soybean meal has been a really nice piece of the story, surprisingly positive piece of the story. Have you been surprised? Did the market just get it wrong? Maybe what's been driving that resilience?
I, you know, I think if somebody goes back and looks, we always said the meal will find a home. The market will work, people love to feed soybean meal. It is the most effective nutrient. You know, the price of lysine matters, the price of feed grains matters. You know, feed grains have been very well supplied, and they've been feeding very high rates of soy and corn. We also talked about the fact that, you know, Bunge, we were net short. We were marketing way more soybean meal than we produce before Viterra. We still continue to.
We were making investments in our handling facilities on the river, in the PNW, and in the Gulf to have additional capabilities to be able to export soybean meal to feed those customers. Part of that was we said that we believe the rest of the world was operating at lower inclusion rates than we were seeing the more developed and more sophisticated markets do. We thought there was not only going to continue to be volume growth, which continues to tick away, whether it's, you know, just purely the number of people on the globe, but also wealth of the middle class, and they're eating more animal protein, which means more meal demand. I think that's continued to tick away, and then the higher inclusion rates as well.
We've kinda tipped the, whether it's GLP-1s or the food pyramid's now been kinda tipped over in the U.S. I mean, like, there's a seems to be a bit of a shift to protein from carbs. You've got very high beef prices, so people are eating more pork and more poultry, which of course eat a lot more meal. You've got just, it's no one factor, but it's a number of factors. It continues to, you know, continues to deliver.
If given the strength of what we see on the curve, would you expect a similar type of supply response at some point? Do we see more crush capacity come online, or are conditions different now than before where maybe that's not the case?
Well, you know, most of the crush in the U.S. has been built out. I think maybe there's another 5% to come online or something. Our plant's gonna come online later this year in Destrehan. I think some of the investors and those that built saw that the financials are one way if you've got a network to plug into. If you're standalone, it's a little bit, can be more challenging at times. I think that matters. Also, the cost to build. Replacement cost now for about a 5,000 ton plant is about $1 billion. That's a different, that's a different calculation for the investors.
You're not hedging these plants when you spend that kind of money for three months, you know, or three years. You can't hedge them for three years. I mean, these plants live for, you know, over three decades. The first thing that happens is debottlenecking. There could be some of the soy capacity be switched over to soft capacity. As oil, you know, drives the leg, you could see some of that shift. Eventually, you know, if the economics are there long enough and the risk is right, there could be some capacity added, but we don't think that'll be the first thing done.
Okay.
What we've seen, Andrew, in particular with our experience is labor's really hard to get, particularly, the talented belt skill labor to electricians, all the stuff we need to get done at the plants. The construction trade, really tough to get. Resources are scarce because there's so much other building going on, data centers and all that kind of thing. As Greg mentioned, the cost. I mean, we are feeling much better today that we're on the tail end of our four large projects than at the beginning of them because it's been a challenge and that we only see it getting a little bit tougher here in the near term.
Okay. We talked about some of the risks on the crop side that kind of, you know, may or may not be there. You talked about how the platform is positioned to deal with periods of crop disruption in certain regions. I guess, you know, there's a lot of discussion about drought and things like that happening right now. I guess when we see those headlines, when we see estimates changing, how should we think about the potential implications for your business?
I think that if, even if you look at Q1, where merchandising was very challenging because, you know, the balance sheets continue, corn and wheat continue to be well supplied globally. You know, a number of our, the assets in our system are flexible, whether it's origination or storage or the ports. We can then point those to support, you know, it was the oilseeds, soft seed and soy crush margin there in the first quarter, to support where the margins are. We're able to look to where is the need for our customers and where are the best margins, that's where we put our global system to work.
If you end up with seeing South America grow less corn and grow more soy because of the fertilizer prices, you know, their ethanol production's continued to grow down there, so they got more domestic demand. You've got less corn exports out of South America. We'll move those assets over to soy, you know, more soy supply will be good for our crushing and our soy exports, that opens up the opportunity for more corn exports out of the U.S. We'll shift the global system to serve the customers and where the margins are to run it. That's the other thing. You know, you talked about Argentina.
In the past, you know, when Argentina would run harder, it could be bad for the global crushing, and we were underrepresented in Argentina. Now we're not only the biggest crusher in Argentina, we're the lowest cost crusher in Argentina, and it balances our global system, so we now can benefit as Argentina continues to recover and decide where we run the crush harder, whether that's in Argentina or whether that's in Europe. The optionality that exists in our global system not only helps us ensure that we serve our customers, that we ensure that we serve our stockholders.
Okay. I wanted to ask about the mid-cycle baseline you guys recently updated at the Investor Day. At the time, you know, you got a question and acknowledged that there was some remaining uncertainties. We didn't have an RVO. You were guiding into that, you know, had to navigate that. Now that we have finalized RVO details, is there anything you would have done differently with respect to the baseline than what you articulated at the Investor Day?
Yeah. Not really. I think the purpose of our mid-cycle baseline was not to predict where crush margins were going in the next year or two. It was about looking at our historical results and saying, "What do we think kind of in a mid, you know, mid-cycle environment? There's gonna be better, there's gonna be worse. Where do we think on average have we been in over the long run?" We looked back at 2022 and 2023, great years. We looked at 2025, not so good. We looked at, you know, 2019 and 2020, not so good. So we ended up. We looked globally as well. We looked at the U.S., Canada, we looked at South America, we looked at Europe. We ultimately came with some numbers.
We said, "Okay, we'll define it as this," that we think's been kind of a historical mid-cycle. We may do better than that, and that's fine, and we'll explain that we're performing above mid, above baseline or above mid-cycle, which in the case today, some of our margins are well above mid-cycle, and we'll just explain that. In the long run, are we operating at a different level in the future? We'll see. There may be a time where it makes sense for us to update that.
Ultimately, it was really about just putting a benchmark out there that we could, you know, we could lean to and point to and say, "Are we performing above or below that?" You look at it today and say $46 soy crush margin and a $76 soft seed margin look conservative. We do look at it globally, though, where we've, you know, we're not as good in Brazil and Argentina right now, and Europe's probably in line. Overall, we are performing a little bit above baseline on the crush side. Part of that's the reason why we took our forecast up $1.50 on the year after we closed Q1.
You know, looking at it over the long run, we're underperforming in merchandising and, you know, our grain merchandising and milling segment, which baseline, you know, we're below baseline there. There's a lot of moving pieces, but all in all, we feel good about certainly where the crush margins are today versus what we modeled, but we'll point to that. We can explain, yeah, we're above baseline there. The, again, the point of the whole mid-cycle baseline was kinda set a benchmark, you know, not a prediction, not a forecast. It's a benchmark that we use to help explain where we are from a performance standpoint.
You know, I'm gonna add one thing. The thing we wanted people to really understand out of that conversation was we've got to give, you know, the guidance, you know, with the mid-cycle. Regardless, we believe that the global network that we have put together and the team running it, that, you know, it has more resiliency in the earnings, the flexibility, the capabilities, the optionality that exists, the reach that we have and the scope and scale. It definitely means when the environment's above mid-cycle, you're gonna see higher highs, right? That's for sure. You know, if you look right now in the mix, you know, the merchandising is behind, the oil seed's picking it up. That diversification helps.
The other really key thing is that when things are tougher, you're gonna see higher lows, and that's part of the resiliency and the diversification that we built.
Okay, that makes sense. The when you have the bridge on the, on the baseline, one of the pieces was the in-flight capital projects you mentioned kind of nearing the end now. Obviously, the return assumptions within that as you assigned, you know, a certain amount of earnings upside from that. Should we assume or are the return, is the return profile better in this environment currently than maybe what is assumed in that bridge, just given kinda the strength of the margin environment, what you're seeing in currently?
I think of it this way. We build these projects and we think about a long-term return profile, not any given, you know, current market environment. We do feel pretty good about, you know, where they sit today versus what our long-term assumptions were. Clearly with Destrehan, which is our, in our joint venture with Chevron, we're gonna bring that online probably at the end of Q3. Very good environment today for that. Above what we would have assumed certainly when we modeled it. We'll have a head start on the returns there, and we'll get a quicker payback on that expansion, and certainly we're gonna like those returns in the near term, obviously.
The other projects we have are a little bit less dependent on current crush margins. Our Morristown facility is a SPC plant, really more specialty into the food value add going into the food, the food side of things. You know, plant protein-based, very specific applications for customers. It's gonna be less price sensitive, less about the current crush margin. Same thing with our Destrehan export terminal. That's really gonna be driven by elevation margins and then the, you know, exports of corn and soybean meal and things like that, how much throughput and demand there's gonna be for elevations. Our big plant in Wormerveer in the Netherlands, this is a refining plant, it's about specialty oils. It's a little bit less dependent on, you know, just crush itself.
It's more about the demand on the food side for the specialty oils that we provide, you know, we're gonna be a low-cost producer there. I think we feel very good again about the long-term return profile there, less dependent on the absolute crush margin.
Can you remind us the timing? I know you mentioned one's the end of Q3.
Yep.
Can you remind us the timing of those projects coming on and kind of how we should think about the ramp phasing?
Yeah. Destrehan, as I said, kinda end of Q3. Very similar timeframe with our export terminal, right, you know, right across, basically right across the levee from the crush plant. Those will be late Q3. Really, you know, you got a little bit of ramp-up time with the new plant, 'cause effectively what we've done is built a new plant next to the old plant. You figure it's probably gonna take three to six months to really get rolling. We're gonna probably start with processing soybeans even though ultimately that's about soft seed. It's gonna be about canola and winter canola mostly through that plant. We'll be up and running, and I think operating pretty well inside a year. The Morristown plant, we started running that plant early this year.
We had ribbon-cutting last week. That's a little bit more of a timeline given, you know, food qualification with food customers. The products that Some of the products we're designing there are unique. It takes a little bit more time to get through the system and commission and get the thing up and running. We really expect probably not to see a really strong run rate until, you know, back half of 2027. It's when we really think we'll start performing well. Of course with [Zaan] in Netherlands starting in Q1 of 2027, it'll probably take, you know, anywhere from six to 12 months, probably closer to 12 months to really get rolling. I think the big impact you'll see in 2028 and beyond.
Okay
of all these together, all of them on the various stages of ramp-up, you know, during that time.
Okay. love to hear you talk about some of the synergies with Viterra. You, you obviously gave us an update, kinda laid out some timing at the Investor Day across the network and commercial synergies. You know, what have, what is still left? What have you done? What is still left to do? When you think about upside, I remember there was a big bar with a little plus on it. Where's the upside opportunity should that come about?
I can start on the cost side, Greg.
Sure
You went through the commercial. On the cost side, we originally targeted about $250 million. We've got $190 million of savings built into our forecast for 2026. As part of our increase that we put in Investor Day, another $0.50 a share, that's roughly taken us up another $100 million of cost synergies. We moved that $250 million- $350 million, and we're pushing hard to bring that a year sooner. We're gonna have a vast majority of it done, you know, by the end of 2028. We had originally given ourselves four years. We're backing that up as much as we can, and a big chunk of it I think will see significant progress in 2027, and then we'll get the vast majority of the remainder in 2028.
We feel. We're not gonna stop there. I mean, now we're looking at how we leverage our global service centers. We got a couple of key global processing centers where we do a lot of our transactional activity, and we're building more capability there, and we're investing in technology as well to get more efficient. I think, We look at 350 as really a stopping point, it becomes about continuous improvement for the overall company, and we're really focused on that. I would just say we feel extremely good about the progress we've made in a pretty complicated deal. The teams have done amazing work. We're pretty proud of it.
You know, when you think about the plus and That really comes in the commercial synergies, right?
Yes.
There's some of the things that you're able to do quickly. You know, we talked about, you know, we've got 400 vessels a day moving somewhere around the globe. You know, that's already run by one team on one system, one face to the market. That, you know, that had a lot of leverage. That's already been executed. Things we're able to do and negotiating across our global network, whether it's locally on trucks and rail and barge or on vessels. You know, some of those things, you know, become, you know, structural and some of them are just, you know, opportunities that are passed along through the value chain between the farmer and the, and the end consumer.
Then really it's, you know, the upside becomes on the commercial synergies on the opportunity, and that's really flexing the system, thinking about, okay, not only which assets are we going to run, where do we, you know, where do we invest that we have, continue to improve our cost footprint. Which assets do we not need? Do we have any holes where we need to bolt on acquisitions? Where do we debottleneck? And where do we, you know, get the combined system really fine-tuned and fit for purpose? That you just, you know, those are not, you know, those become structural. We get to keep them. You see them fall out kind of every quarter. Then depending on the environment, they can be, you know, smaller or larger.
Got it. Okay. On capital allocation, leverage ratio is below your target. I know debt paydown's still near-term priority. How much debt are you looking to pay down? Kinda what's the timeline to which we should think about that playing out?
Yeah. I think when we started the year, we were elevated a bit on our, on our leverage from what our long-term target is. As we've gone through the year and our earnings outlook has improved, we actually think now we'll be relatively in line by the end of the year just from a stronger earnings perspective. Our, our focus on debt paydown may not necessarily need to be there. I think it's gonna depend on how we look at 2027 and 2028, but I think right now we feel like we'll be in a pretty good position by the end of the year.
If maybe debt paydown's not, doesn't need to be as much of a focus, you know, what are the alternative uses? In particular on buybacks, I know in the baseline you've talked about $700 million. When is that kind of applicable? 'Cause you haven't committed to that for this year.
Right
When does that start, and just broadly, the 50% of discretionary cash flow.
Yep, yep. Our plan for this year, right now we've got $250 million yet to do related to the Viterra transaction. We plan to and expect to get that done this year, and we should get that done this year. We have still a significant amount of CapEx in our pipeline with the wrap-up of those four large projects and some other debottlenecking projects. That's gonna largely consume all of our free cash flow for the year. As we head into 2027, we're gonna start looking at the new capital allocation formula that we laid out, where we're gonna look at 50% of our discretionary cash flow to go back to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks. That'll begin in 2027.
As we determine how much is available, it's gonna be driven largely by how much cash we're generating. I think, you know, the assumption is $700 million a year of available capital for share buybacks is based on our $13 run rate baseline that we're forecasting out in the future. If we get there sooner, we'll have more available. What we expect beginning in 2027 to start following that formula, whether we get to $700 million a year, you know, if it takes us a couple of years to get there or whatever, that's it's still out there. It's again, at $13 a share, that should be about $700 million a year of share buybacks.
If we make less than that as we ramp up toward that $13, it'll be a little bit lower, but we that's absolutely gonna be a key part of our go-forward plan.
Yeah. I appreciate it's still early days with Viterra. You did mention, you know, if we need to look at the portfolio, there's bolt-on M&A opportunities, what have you. Is that an area where we could see more capital put to work? Maybe what would be the opportunities? What would be interesting as you evaluate the portfolio today?
We're always, you know, running that analysis on where is the best return on that next dollar of capital. John keeps us honest with his buyback formula on our returns. You know, we wanna protect our capabilities and continue to look at how crops are shifting, where customers are growing and, you know, looking at those external factors to make sure that where we have those strong networks, that we protect those, whether that's through bolt-on, debottlenecking, brownfields or even greenfields. We'd always rather buy something than build something. It just goes quicker. You heard us talking about that.
And then also any of the gaps that we've got, we wanna fill those in to be, you know, the partner of choice, to have the capabilities that we need to fulfill in what we expect to continue to be a pretty challenging world, whether it goes back towards globalization, where it actually gets, you know, easier because every origin is open to every destination, or we continue to have de-globalization, where it's more complex and we're gonna see more dislocation, we're gonna see more volatility. Having those capabilities. That's where we're constantly thinking about where the capital is, where we improve our networks.
Okay.
That's whether it's across soy crushing, softseed crushing, you know, our merchant business with the strong feed grains, corn, you know, our global wheat franchise, or our strong milling, wheat milling franchise in Brazil. And of course, you know, tropical oils and John talked about our plant protein business. We're operating where we feel we have the right to win, where we have the cost structure and the capabilities, and we are very focused in that space.
You know, and while we have a long-term capital allocation strategy, obviously any given year it may not work exactly perfectly because when there's opportunity, sometimes you gotta jump on it, you know. There may be cases along the way where some of that opportunity to consolidate the industry, buy an asset that we've wanted, that may come about and we may need to jump on that at that point. Over the long run, we're still gonna maintain that long-term discipline. We'll explain in the short run, we did this because of this reason, and we'll make it clear as to why we moved on something at any given time, 'cause as you always say, you gotta shoot them while they're flying.
Right. We only have about a minute left. Any final messages you wanna leave the audience with?
I, you know, I'd just say, it's been, you know, it's been great this last year bringing the teams at Viterra and Bunge together and, you know, we got a 208-year-old company here, but it feels like a newborn. We're having a lot of fun. There's a lot of energy in the company. We've never had more capabilities, you know, more talent to be able to execute against what is, you know, probably the most complicated global scenario that we've ever seen. I'm gonna quit saying it can't get more complicated because it keeps getting more complicated. But I feel really good about where we're at and how the team's performing and, you know, thanks for having us.
Yeah, we appreciate you being here. Thank you.
Thanks.