Ladies and gentlemen, the program is about to begin. Reminder that you can submit questions at any time via the Ask Questions tab on the webcast page. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the program over to your host, Michael Ryskin. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for joining us, everyone, for our next session. My name is Mike Ryskin, from the Bank of America Life Science Tools, Diagnostics and Animal Health team. And for our next session, we're pleased to host Phibro Animal Health. Joining us, we've got Glenn David, CFO, and Daniel Bendheim, Director and EVP Corporate Strategy. Glenn, Danny, thanks for being back with us.
Thanks for having us, Mike.
Great to be here. Same format as all our sessions. It'll be a sort of a fireside chat format for 40 minutes. If you've got questions, feel free to ping them either via Bloomberg chat or email, or via the question portal on the webcast, to myself or to the rest of the team, and we'll incorporate them. I guess just to kick things off, you know, our easy intro question was you guys recently reported fiscal Q2. You know, you had some moving pieces in the quarter, but then you also reiterated the guidance. Any opening comments, anything that you think you wanna sort of have as the takeaway message from the quarter?
I think the first thing to highlight from the quarter, Mike, is probably the performance of the animal health sector. So when you look at the animal health sector in particular, it grew 6% for the quarter and 5% for the first half. So really strong performance there. We're also pleased to be able to reiterate guidance. You know, when guidance was restated in the Q1 , there was a lot of uncertainty in the market, particularly with our operations in Israel, and we're incredibly thankful to our colleagues there. The operations really are performing with really limited disruptions. So you know, very glad to be able to restate, you know, confirm the guidance for the full year. You know, we really see good momentum as we move into the second half of the year.
You know, as the guidance indicate, it does indicate an uptake in revenue in the second half of the year, and that'll come from continued strong performance in our animal health business, but also improved performance in the mineral nutrition and performance products, which did lag in the H1 of the year. So really excited about the H2 of the year. We see good momentum, and we see good demand for our products.
All right. And then, maybe one for you, Glenn, while you're going. Just, question we've got a couple times. You know, you recently joined Phibro. You're still, you know, early in your tenure, but anything you want to touch on in terms of initial earnings? Anything that sort of, you would put down as your early goals as, as incoming CFO?
Thanks, Mike, and as you mentioned, I am really early, right? I think I'm three weeks in right now. So maybe it helps to just talk a little bit about what attracted me to Phibro in the first place. So first, you know, Phibro does play a leadership role, particularly in livestock and the MFA space, and obviously, I have a strong passion for the industry. So really glad to be able to join a leader, particularly in the livestock segment. Also, as I was going through the process, really impressed with the leadership team that I got to meet. Really strong team with great experience in animal health. And also, you know, just some of the few observations, you know, I do see opportunity for continued growth in this business, right?
Starting at the revenue line, you know, as we talked about in the past, the livestock market, you know, does have opportunities for growth moving forward, growing in that low- to mid-single-digit range. With our portfolio, we see our ability to do that. Also, as we continue to expand within vaccines, we see opportunities for significant growth, and in the medium term, the opportunities that we see in companion animal as well for revenue growth. Then from an income perspective, you know, I do see opportunity to improve margins as the mix of the portfolio shifts a little bit more towards vaccines, but also as we continue to be disciplined in taking price and also with opportunities in savings in both COGS and OpEx. Really excited yet about the opportunities to drive income growth moving forward and working with the management team to do so.
Got it. That's really helpful. Touched on a lot there, Glenn, that I wanna follow up on. But first, maybe just kick it off on the livestock market. I mean, as you said, low- to mid-single-digit growth, that's typically how we think about the broader livestock market, over a multi-year period. Pretty, you know, pretty, defensive, market, in that you don't have a lot of downside, for most of it. Obviously, it's gonna vary year by year and, and species by species.
But yet your, 2024 guide is a little bit below that or on the lower end of that. You're calling for about 2% or, or, or 2% to 2.5% sales growth. So what are the factors there? What are you seeing in the livestock markets in your business this year, you know, versus that long-term dynamic?
Yeah, so I'll start. I'll let Danny, you know, add any, any color. But I think you really need to look at the performance of the different businesses when you look at the performance for Phibro in the H1 and also the guidance for the full year. So when you look at the performance for the first half, the animal health segment within Phibro did grow 5%, so sort of in line with those expectations for the livestock market. Really what's driving the 1% growth for the first half of the year were some particular issues within the performance products and the mineral nutrition products portfolio. Those businesses did decline in the H1 of the year, driven by some inventory adjustments, both from our side as well as on the customer side.
So when you look at the guidance, which implies a 2% growth at the midpoint, we are expecting an improvement in growth in the second half, and that comes from continued strong performance in the animal health business. So again, you know, as we talked about, growing in line with the market, but also better performance from both our performance products and our mineral nutrition group.
Then thinking about end market itself in 2024. Excuse me. It has been a little bit volatile in the last couple of years. Some segments done a little bit better, some a little worse. Danny, maybe you. How do you feel about, you know, the moving pieces there? What's got you most excited, as you go through this year and, you know, start thinking ahead to fiscal year 2025?
Yeah, you know, internally, we kind of have a checkerboard of all the different regions that we operate in, all the different species, and, you know, red is trouble, yellow is doing okay, green is doing well. And, you know, it's mostly yellow and green. There are some reds out there. You know, I think we've highlighted in the recent past, kind of the U.S. dairy being a challenge for us, and that's a business that we have a significant exposure to with our nutritional specialty products. Still under a lot of price pressure there. You know, the less efficient producers are probably losing money right now.
China's been a little bit of an issue, but, you know, I think the, the U.S. as a whole, pretty strong across the species, with the exception of dairy. You have, you know, Mexico has, has been doing nicely, Brazil, mostly yellow or green. So, you know, overall, we feel pretty good about the industry, about the livestock side of the industry. As you mentioned, weather plays a huge part capacity and El Niño, how does that affect it? You know, in Brazil, that could theoretically be a, a bigger issue, depending on how wet the, you know, their seasons are.
Always it's hard to give, like, say, "Hey, how we think about guidance for next year?" Obviously, we're still, got another four months of this fiscal year, and we don't give that next guidance, but I think as a whole, we feel pretty strong, pretty good about the industry.
Okay, that's a good overview. I'd love to take a look at that checkerboard one day. Just to see, if you wanna just sneak that in at some point, that'd be very useful. But maybe just on the dairy, U.S. dairy, nutritional specialties in particular, yeah, we'd love to get your thoughts on that. I mean, you mentioned the price pressure, but it feels like that's, that's a market that, you know, was really, really strong for a multi-year period. And, you know, we really thought it would continue, and it seems like it's hit a little bit of a harder time. Anything else you can offer in terms of what's behind that, and is that a market that you think can return to that, you know, high single digit, 10% plus growth?
Are you saying the dairy market or our nutritional specialty sales?
Your nutritional specialties business, understating the underpinning of that is-
Listen, there's obviously, there's the market itself and then our market share within that market, and we're continuing to grow share overall. W e don't need to see necessarily a huge growth in the overall market. We still have a lot of room. We have new products that we continuously look to introduce. Our nutritional specialties reporting segment is both dairy and poultry, and our companion animal currently is also reported in there, so it's not kind of a direct proxy to the U.S. dairy industry.
Historically, we've guided towards kind of low double-digit growth in nutritional specialties and, you know, despite the fact that this year has not started out that way, I think our long-term guidance on that segment remains the same. It's a big focus for us, and we're still excited about it.
Okay. And then maybe you just touched on Mexico, and you touched on Brazil, but I have to ask you the Argentina question. O bviously, we're all paying attention to what happened with, with the Argentine peso and the devaluation there. I mean, could you provide a little more color on, the sort of magnitude of your exposure, any possibilities to offset? H ow we think about that coming through the model.
I think when you look at our, our overall exposure, right, it is somewhat limited. Our business in Argentina is less than a few percent of our total revenue, but we're not really seeing any real changes to customer behavior, right? So just for some context, the P&L hit was really related to restating the balance sheet assets in terms of mostly inventory and accounts receivable, and we'll continue to look to minimize those balances moving forward. But our price list in Argentina is actually tied to the U.S. dollar, so the business has been really good in terms of making sure that we're taking aggressive price increases to reflect the devaluation of the peso. So we really haven't seen any long-term negative impact from a business perspective.
Okay, that's helpful. And now that you've taken that adjustment on the balance sheet assets, is that, I'm not gonna say it's fully de-risked going forward because obviously, you could see further devaluation. But do you feel like that's sort of a one-time hit?
Yes, in terms of reflecting the current currency conversion. But to your point, if there was future devaluations, that could have additional impact.
Okay. All right, that's helpful. All right, well, so maybe I want to switch a little bit to, to some of the individual products and the individual, business lines. You know, your vaccine business, within, the animal health subsegment, it's been doing incredibly well in the last couple of quarters. You know, would love to hear your thoughts on what's really driving that, where you're seeing the biggest strength, you know, how have you been able to to post such good results there?
Yes, I guess I'll take that. You know, like nutritional specialties, we call out vaccines for low double-digit growth historically and we're beating it this year. I think, you know, our business is small enough still that you sometimes have these strong years and then some smaller years, and it averages out just similarly with nutritional specialty. L ast year, fiscal 2023, I think we did about $100 million in vaccines.
Exactly 100, 100.0, so.
We're about $56 million the first two quarters here, including $30 million last quarter. So obviously, we're ramping really nicely. What you're seeing is a combination of both our commercial poultry vaccines. These are vaccines that we sell in many markets around the world. We've had, you know, it takes years of work to get there, but we've had registrations that have begun to come through in different markets. Most notably, we've called out some South American registrations that have been approved, and as we start selling those products, we obviously get an initial boost in those years.
This year is like the end of the tail end of last year, really the calendar year beginning like last February through this year, we saw some nice registrations get approved, and we're seeing the effects of that. Obviously, we'll start overlapping as we get to towards the H2 of the year, but we are still building share. So you have that, and we've also called out, we've built an autogenous vaccine facility in Brazil, and that's impactful as well. Not at the same level as the conventional vaccines that you've seen but still impactful and going forward, that will increasingly be impactful. So we have a long list of registrations for our vaccines around the world.
It's obviously stuff that is behind the scenes, but we have a strong vaccine portfolio on poultry. We actually had our first approval in Israel for an aqua vaccine, so we have an aqua portfolio, which we look to be rolling out over the next few years. You need the host country to get approval, and then you can start looking for exports. That will take two or three years in general. W e have a lot that we're excited about in vaccines, and we'll continue to highlight it, and we'll continue to grow, as Glenn mentioned in his starting comments.
Okay, that's helpful, and I actually touched on a couple of things there I want to follow up again. You know, when you're talking about, registrations and approvals and things like that, the last one for aqua, you mentioned Israel. Should we assume that, most of the approvals you're talking about are in the U.S. first and other geographies later or, or somewhere else, and?
Yeah. S o our vaccine, our commercial poultry vaccines are manufactured ex-U.S. We have a facility in Israel. We have a facility now in Ireland, which is still ramping up, but and it's taking longer than we expected, but is nearing the end of that ramp. So that's an exciting period of time as well for us. Having said that, it's actually the U.S. so it'll be the host countries. It'll be Ireland, and it'll be Israel are the initial approvals, and then you'll move on to other countries. We actually, the U.S. has some strange laws that prevent, for the most part, vaccines being manufactured outside the country being brought in.
So the U.S. is one market we actually don't have a lot of access to on the commercial vaccine side. We do have, though, our autogenous vaccines in the U.S., and it's not really an approval process there, but that's also been a very strong and great business for us. That's based in Omaha, and we, I think we called out that we have expanded there as well. We purchased the neighboring property, and we are expanding our production there as well. So, on the autogenous side, we have. So our commercial vaccines, which is the largest part of our business is, you know, Israel and Sligo, Ireland. Autogenous, we have in the United States. We have the recently opened one in Brazil. We have a small autogenous, actually, in Israel as well.
There are a lot of synergies between our different autogenous vaccine facilities. The technology that we have is a strong technology, and we do see that as a competitive advantage. So our ramp-up in Brazil will be faster than I think you would historically see in a autogenous vaccine facility get share. So it is something that we're excited.
Yeah, and specifically for the aqua vaccines, Mike, as you know, the U.S. isn't a big market for the aqua vaccines, so we wouldn't be starting there. Yeah, for cold-water species, it's more Europe and Latin America. For warm-water species, you know, more Latin America, more APAC as well.
Okay. On the traditional commercial vaccine, is there any interest in expanding facilities in the U.S. in the future, or is that not in the near-term plan? Or just to get into that market domestically.
I'd say we have a lot on our plate right now with our opening up of our Ireland facility and I think the strategy have been stressing of late is autogenous vaccine facilities. And I do think that there's opportunities to grow as we talked about, grow our U.S. presence there and in other areas as well.
Okay. T hen how should we think about the margin profile of some of these businesses? I don't know to what level you wanna go into this, but you know, whether it's vaccine overall or autogenous versus commercial vaccine as they ramp. You know, animal health, this animal health segment overall is certainly above your corporate average. That's where the majority of the profits come in, but I would imagine vaccine would be on the higher end of that as well, right?
Yeah. So I think vaccines are higher. I mean taking a step back, I'm not sure if everyone understands what autogenous vaccines are. They're custom or bespoke vaccines you go to a farm and you'll find the bacteria disease there or the viral disease there, and you'll make a vaccine specifically for that. As you can imagine, that's more costly than kind of a commercial vaccine, where you're making one vaccine that covers a specific disease. Obviously, a disease that does not move that much, it does not mutate that much, a commercial vaccine is the more effective angle. But for diseases that do have a lot of mutations, you'll look to autogenous.
Commercial vaccines have a lower cost of goods as a result, better margin profile. Autogenous vaccines are more expensive for the customer, higher cost as well. T he net margin might be similar, but obviously, from a margin percentage, it you have a better percentage on the commercial vaccines.
Okay, but both would be accretive to your total company margins?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely right. As you said, Mike, I mean, as you look at it, commercial vaccine is probably the highest percentage, the autogenous next, then the MFA, and then obviously, we have the mineral nutrition and performance products as well.
Okay. Makes sense. That's pretty much exactly how I ranked it. Okay. I mean, Dan, maybe on a point you just touched on there at the end would be an easy transition as you talk about, you talked about price. It's been a very rapidly evolving environment in the last couple of years in terms of price, both in terms of COGS to you and your input costs, but also price you're able to take with your customer. A s we're here in 2024 and halfway through your fiscal year, would you say the pricing dynamic is normalizing a little bit? Are we coming back to more traditional pricing levels, or is it still really volatile?
I think it's funny 'cause Phibro during pre-COVID, we were historically not a company that looked at pricing as a lever that we would really chase after, 'cause there are so many volume opportunities for us. D uring COVID, you had no choice but to take price, and frankly, I think there's still within our cost structure, there's still some places where we haven't fully realized the cost. So I would say that as we look internally at our company, we haven't fully shaken out kind of where those opportunities still exist. I don't think we've had our final say on the matter.
So I would expect some volatility, I'd say still going forward. I don't know, Glenn, if you wanna.
Yeah, I'm still learning the business, but as I would always say the price is always an area that I think is important to really be aggressive on and an area that obviously I'll want to focus on and understand, particularly for the Phibro portfolio.
Have you noticed any of your customers? A gain, we often talk about your customers as being relatively price-agnostic to, to a certain degree, just because at the end of the day it's for them, it's about margin, it's about , end customer demand, things like that. It's about the value add of the, of the products you're offering. Would you, would you say that's still the case? Are they, are they becoming more aware of price that you're taking, or is it still something that they're not really bothered by as long as the, as long as their margin is there in the back end and as long as the demand is there?
I don't think anyone's ever happy when you take price. So I'm sure I can't speak for all of our customers there's appropriate pushback. I think when we take price, we're taking price because we can show that's why we're doing it. So we recognize this is an economic decision for on the livestock side. I will say when you move to the vaccine market, it really is more disease in response to specific diseases or immediate pressures, as opposed to, say, nutritional specialties, which is more prevent of getting ahead of immune boosters, things of that nature.
On the vaccine side that really, your product really typically is differentiated from other producers, and that's why that's usually a little bit stronger of a margin profile.
Okay. All right. I'm gonna start to work in a couple product-specific questions that we always get. One is been a lot of news about Mecadox over the last couple of years, but also over the last six months. Any updates you can give us on the ongoing dialogue with the FDA there?
Yeah, I use ongoing dialogue loosely. The FDA has , almost for a decade now, or maybe even longer been raising questions about Mecadox. When it comes down to it, right now they are challenging. They're not challenging the safety of Mecadox, but in any respect. What they are challenging is whether or not we're complying with the rules as far as having a marker within the product. We believe we are. They have taken an approach to say we haven't. If they are able to prove to pull a marker, which is required, then we would have, obviously, would ultimately have to pull the product. We think this is a back-ended way the way the FDA is doing this.
We've challenged them both internally and externally we think we're very confident in the health and safety and in the strength of our arguments. But it is the FDA, so we have to be cognizant of that. I'll say this is kind of the third time they've made a run at it. We're still standing, we continue to support the product and the industry continues to see the need for the product and stand strongly with us.
Okay. And when you say marker, sorry, what do you mean? Can you expand on that a little bit? I'm not sure what you mean there.
I mean, that's so this is really getting into the weeds. There is a potential carcinogen in Mecadox. When you have those types of products, there's something called Delaney Clause. You have to have a different marker within. You have to have another product that degrades at the same or faster pace than or slower pace, I should say, than the potential carcinogen. S ince this product was approved decades ago, the FDA and the U.S. and us agreed what the marker should be. Frankly, the USDA has a different marker that they use. The FDA has now come around saying that they don't believe that the marker that they've chosen is the appropriate one.
Rather than sit down with us and say, "Hey, let's find a different marker," like the USDA, like the Canadian authorities have, they've said, "Okay, we're gonna try to pull this marker, and therefore, you're not gonna have a marker." And that's just not the way that the FDA has traditionally acted in other similar situations. I think we've written that to them. So we'll see. There's an administrative hearing, there's other avenues to take if you don't, if you're not successful in the administrative hearing.
We feel pretty strongly that even the current marker is correct, but if it's not, there's other markers out there and that this product remains safe and necessary for the industry.
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. The marker allows you to track sort of the degradation or the breakdown of the product, and therefore, by tracking the marker, you can say, "Okay, if the marker has dropped to this level, that means Mecadox has dropped to this level, and therefore-
Not Mecadox, but the area of concern within Mecadox.
Yes. Makes perfect sense, actually. Thank you so much. And yeah, it sounds like you're not really worried about it being pulled off the market or anything like that.
Well, I don't want to overstate it 'cause it is. When the government says they wanna do something, and historically most products that the government has said they want to remove are not on the market ten years later. I'm not forecasting whether or not we'll be successful. I will just tell you, I'm just trying to say our belief is, it's a safe and efficacious product that we're meeting the regulations. That if we're not meeting the regulations, there's a process to go through to find other ways to have the, that they should go through, to find other ways for the marker.
But I can't tell you what the ultimately the government's gonna try to do here.
Okay, fair enough. No, I mean, we've certainly run into that a number of times as well. It's impossible to predict or even just get the timing right of it. All right. And then the other product I wanna touch on is Rejensa, your companion animal product. It's been on the market for a couple of years now. You know, had a very strong start when it launched. You know, you were kind of projecting a gradual ramp, but I think you've been pleased with how it's done. Any updates you can give us on performance in recent quarters and anything notable we should be looking forward to on that side?
No, listen, I don't think we gave guidance this year exactly on Rejensa. It had been that when it initially ramped kind of doubling year- over- year we're the law of big numbers or I wouldn't want to say huge numbers, but it's a bigger number. It's hard to do that. We're still growing very nicely, and we're still very pleased with it. And it's kind of our cornerstone or our initial step into the companion animal market.
I anticipate that with our pipeline, eventually we'll have RX products in the mid to longer term, and then our strategy is to kind of move to more sophisticated products. But Rejensa is a great product. It continues to be a great product and has carved out a role in the vet clinic. And even though it could be sold over the counter we sell it exclusively through the vet channel. And we're in 3,000 clinics and growing every day. So we see still huge opportunity there and it's doing well.
Is there? I mean, you mentioned Rx, over-the-counter versus through the clinic. Is that something you would consider changing down the road, maybe as you've got more recognition and sort of brand awareness?
I'd say, listen, ultimately, every option is ultimately open. I think there's a lot of benefit to going through the vet. It is the trusted voice of the pet parent and we're certainly working hard to make sure that our vet partners are not competing against an over-the-counter great product, for instance or for sure, Phibro itself is not looking to compete with our vet partners. I'll never say never down the road as industry dynamics change, as competition changes. But right now, there's a lot of runway ahead with the vet channel.
Okay. And then, again, just thought upon something you talked about was the rest of the pipeline and companion going beyond Rejensa. You talked about a little go, going into Rx at some point down the road, some more sophisticated assets. You also previously talked about your canine oral care pipeline. Just any tidbits you can give us on how to think about companion animal development over the next let's say one, two, three years?
Yeah, I'd say for sure, in the short term, it's still just spend, right? It's definitely taking a little bit longer than we anticipated, but we are making progress and I think we've shown that when we stop making progress, we'll turn off a project and look at other areas. So, overall, it's a real spend for us as a company. But we still continuously kind of update what the risks are, what the projections are, and risk-adjusted returns or anticipated returns, and it's still a very strong positive and looking for ways to grow it.
I think the costs of bringing a product to market have during the FDA approval phase gotten a little bit more expensive across the board. So, there are challenges on finding dogs to test. There's challenges, on seasonality, things of that nature. I think we're all the entire industry is facing that. That's not a Phibro problem alone, but we still are very, very, very excited about our pipeline and do believe that in the mid to long term, it'll be a significant part of Phibro.
How do you think about you know, you touched about the cost component of it and the difficulty of it. How do you think about fully internal development versus something like a partnership, JV, collaboration model, versus you know, flat out in-licensing later-stage products or buying assets? You know, you've got a couple different options there. How do you, how do you balance those priorities?
Yeah, and we're doing a number of those things. So some of our lead product, our DermaCare, which is a licensed API, but we're in charge of developing it. Now, we do have partners, CROs and CDMOs, that we're working with, because we don't have the in-house capabilities to completely do it ourselves, but we're in charge of it. We're spending the money and we make the full decisions. Other places, we have partners who are responsible for making the decisions as far as getting to product, getting the product to market, but we have milestone payments if they do get it to market and things of that nature.
Obviously, as you go higher up or closer to commercialization, the cost changes, and at this stage we don't have the synergies that perhaps some of our competitors would have as far as the sales force and things of that nature. So it's harder for us to justify some of the larger prices that you would get. But I think eventually we'll be there. So, we see ourselves as being, you know, in the future, a major player on the pet side.
Okay. And just on the, on the topic of M&A, and capital deployment, there was a transaction in the, in the aquaculture space, just a few weeks ago, between, Elanco and, and Merck Animal Health. It was on the, on the larger side, but still, it just shows that there are still deals being done assets moving around. Are there any opportunities, that you look at there, just from a straight capital deployment perspective? And could you talk about your balance sheet and your willing to spend to bring some assets in-house?
You want to start, Danny, and then-
Well, I mean Glenn could talk about the balance sheet. I'd say, we're definitely - it's an active industry. So there's no shortage of M&A opportunities. I think we see a decent amount comes across our desk, and we take a look at where it's appropriate.
Yeah, and just to Danny's point, obviously, we'll be active. We'll look at things that become available. O ur current debt levels are relatively high, but we do see a path to work those down. But we do have capacity for the right deal to make the right move.
Okay. All right. Fair enough. We got about three, four minutes left. A reminder to clients, if you've got any questions, feel free to ping me or send them over in the chat. I've got a couple more myself, in the meanwhile, but one is, I think, Dan, you mentioned this earlier, or maybe it was Glenn in the initial remarks. Y ou talked about your presence in Israel, and obviously, everything that's been going on over the last couple of months there, and how your team has handled it.
You know, could you remind everyone of sort of the, the scale of your presence there, what assets you have, what facilities do you have and how you've been able to handle just the operating environment over the last couple of months with everything that's happening in the region?
I'll take that. We have a vaccine facility there. We have a small premix facility there, and we have an API manufacturer as well. W e have sales within Israel. Most of our sales are ex-Israel from those facilities. I t's been a challenge, there's no question about it. It's been a challenge. I'd say from a workload point of view. I t's a small country, Israel, so everyone is one step removed from either a tragedy or someone being called up for reserve duty. So we have a few employees who that might have occurred to. You have employees whose spouses maybe were called up and have to work from home.
Bbut people have really stepped up. We're probably a very diverse workforce in Israel, and obviously, in the current environment, that could have been an issue as well. W e're proud to say that it hasn't been on the opposite, people who are able to have stepped up. We have not missed a beat. At the end, costs maybe are a little bit higher. T ransportation has fewer flights going in and out of Israel.
I mean, United, I think, is actually, El Al continued from the United States, but El Al, United had stopped starting again next week, so that you should allow for. There is some kind of transportation sometimes we have that's indicative of, of stuff that we have to buy from the States or whatever, that maybe has costs go up because there's fewer options. But that should be less than going on. So I do think without predicting the future, the worst is hopefully behind us. I think I say that not just as a business but I think all of us hope that this is winding down.
I'm very proud of how our team did and handled, and at the end of the day we kept our customers fully stocked, and really stepped up.
Okay. All right. Agree with you there. And obviously, wish the best on, on that end. Thanks, Danny. Got one, quick follow-up question, for you, Glenn, and then maybe I'll, I'll throw in a concluding one. So the follow-up question is, to the point of the balance sheet, what's your goal in terms of leverage, and do you have sort of like an end of fiscal year or long-term target you kind of wanna be around on debt to EBITDA leverage?
Yeah. So to my knowledge, we haven't stated a specific goal, Mike, so that's something I'm reviewing right now and would like to get a better understanding of. T he intention is to continue to work down the overall debt levels, but I don't know that we've stated a specific target of net less than something we will look to do.
Okay. All right. Fair. And then, maybe for you, Danny, or, or Glenn, feel free to jump in, obviously. As you look out to the rest of the fiscal year, what are the key things you're focused on as upside risk, downside risk? Y ou've got, especially on the EPS line, you still have a little bit of a broad range. So anything you can say in terms of, you know, this is what we're focused on that could go really well for us, or this is what we're worried about, where things could come in a little bit lighter? Like, you know, what are the key factors we should be focusing on, to gauge the year?
Gwen, you wanna take that?
Yeah, so I'll start. I mean some of the, some of the things that I mentioned in the beginning, right? Continued strong performance from our animal health business, right? Continued growth in our vaccines. W e see those as, as upsides and continues positives in our business. But equally important is some of the turnarounds that we're expecting, particularly in mineral nutrition and the performance products. I think you might have highlighted at one point, Mike, the impact of EBITDA and EBITDA not growing as fast as revenue.
That's really been driven by those two, two businesses, and there were some particular issues in the first half of the year that drove that, that we are expecting improvements on in the second half of the year that will really improve our EBITDA performance in the second half and lessen the impact for the full year.
Okay. Anything to add, Danny, or is that a good, good overview?
I couldn't have said it better.
Okay. All right. Fantastic. With that, I think we're out of time. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Great to chat again, as always. And everyone's on the line, thank you for participating. Thanks for listening in. If you got any follow-up questions, you know where to find us. Thank you.
Thanks so much, Mike.