Morning. Next up, we have Phibro Animal Health. Excited to have you guys join us again this year. Good to see you. Welcome by the company's CO O, Larry Miller, and Dan Bendheim, Director and EVP of Corporate Strategy. I want to turn it over to the team for some slides. They have a lot to talk about. If you remember, they did a major MFA deal that was announced around this time last year. I believe we can get into that and leave some time at the end for Q&A. Over to you guys.
Thanks very much. Thank you for joining us this morning. Good morning to everyone. We thought we would give a little more background on Phibro. We know that there are a lot of people that may not be as familiar with us. For the first part of our presentation, we are going to share a little bit more history about our company. Before we proceed, I want to just, we will discuss financial performance data and expectations regarding the development of our business. Therefore, I want to draw your attention to our Safe Harbor statement. The text you see in this slide essentially states that the information to be presented today is intended for internal purposes. Any forward-looking statements are preliminary and subject to risks and uncertainties. We just ask that you make note of legal disclaimers on the slide, including the disclaimer on the use of non-GAAP financial measures.
I think the challenge that we see and the opportunity that we see, certainly in the food animal sector, is that the world population is growing and continued expected to grow. Matter of fact, in the next couple of decades, expected to reach 10 billion people on this planet. That will require us as an industry and our customers to produce 70% more animal-based protein than what we have today. We all know that the size of the number of acres available and the size of the Earth is just not going to grow, right? We have to do more with less. That is where Phibro's opportunity comes in, really, because our animal health and nutrition products help maintain the well-being of livestock by preventing, treating, and controlling disease, which enables animals to achieve more optimal performance.
Focusing on overall animal health and welfare, as well as more affordable food with less use of natural resources to produce that food. Our vision, our purpose, and our values are very important to us. Vision, really, what we focus on every day is to improve lives through innovation and proven solutions and comparable expertise and exceptional care. Care for our customers, care for our animals primarily, and for our people. We want to empower our customers to protect and nourish both animals, people, and our planet, again, producing more with less inputs. Our values are keeping animals healthy, investing in our and in supporting our people, and again, providing unwavering customer support and service. A little bit about our company. Basically, we've been in business since 1946. We manufacture about 70% or so of the products that we produce today.
We are listed publicly traded on the NASDAQ as PAHC. We have about 2,300 employees, 18 manufacturing plants around the world that produce those, some 22,000 product registrations, and customers that buy our products in approximately 100 countries around the world. Our business has been growing, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Prior to the acquisition, which we'll talk about a little bit more, in our fiscal year ending FY 2024, which ended June 2024, we achieved the $1 billion mark. Before the acquisition, organically, we had achieved the $1 billion mark before we added the new products that we have just acquired. I'm not going to go through every one of these. A little bit of a snapshot of our history, as I mentioned, since 1946.
A couple of things that I would point out that are kind of hallmarks along this roadmap for us would be in the year 2000, the company, then known as Phibro, actually acquired the medicated feed additive business from Pfizer. That brought us many of our legacy products today and really positioned us in the animal health segment and particularly around animal health products for livestock. We, as I mentioned, were listed in 2014. The other one that was important to us is in 2009, we got into the vaccine business. At that point, we were nutritionals, and we recently had the medicated feed additives. This was important for us.
We were able to acquire the Teva decided to get out of their animal health business, which was largely vaccines, poultry vaccines, and we made that the acquisition really helped us to bring us another growth driver for our business in a segment which enabled us to bring a lot of solutions, especially preventative solutions to livestock. We also launched Rejensa, one of our first companion animal products a few years ago in 2019. As John mentioned, we just closed in the integration process for the Zoetis medicated feed additive business. It's a very nice addition to our current legacy business.
Okay. Donny Bendheim, I'll take over for here. Typically, Glenn David, who our CFO, would be presenting this. I say everything I say, take with a little bit of a grain of salt, a little ish.
When it comes to the numbers, Glenn is visiting some of our plants in Europe right now. Larry touched upon our acquisition of the MFA business from Zoetis. I think Zoetis is next. I'll let them explain exactly the rationale they had in letting go of the business. I will say it was a rare transaction that when it was announced, both their stock and our stock went up. It made a lot of strategic sense for both parties. For us, if you go through our history and you looked at the acquisitions that we had, the businesses that we had acquired over that timeline that Larry just shared, with the exception of the 2,000 acquisition of the Pfizer medicated feed additive business, almost all of our acquisitions were nutritional specialties and vaccines.
Truthfully, if you would come to us and said two years ago, "Hey, what's your next acquisition going to be?" It would probably have been in those areas. This was a really compelling opportunity. It was an opportunity where Zoetis was selling the plants and the products, but not the people, which meant that there were very few people on our side who could bid on this. I think as a result, we got a very fair price. The other part that I think is important to realize is that at least from how I view or how we view Zoetis's point of view, they were staying in the animal health business, right, on the livestock side. It was very important for them that the customers would be well served.
I think both, again, I'll speak for Phibro, our vision always is to put the customer first. I think that matched what Zoetis was looking for. It has been really a great integration process, a seamless integration process. The North Star is the customer, and we're working closely with them. As a result, I think from the industry point of view, this has been a very successful acquisition. Specifically from Phibro's point of view, it has gone very well as well. We had this opportunity. We had the opportunity to expand and diversify our revenue base. As Larry mentioned, our legacy business was about $1 billion in sales. This would take us on a pro forma basis to about $1.4 billion. It was also extremely accretive and allowed us to raise our EBITDA margins, our gross margins.
When we announced this business, and this slide is actually from when we announced this business, we were targeting a margin of low 20%. So far, actually, thankfully, we've been in the mid to high 20% on the acquired business. It's obviously a little difficult once you acquire a business to give it a standalone EBITDA, as there are shared services and things of that nature. But thus far, it's been really very strongly accretive and our overall margins have increased. Next slide. It has also made our business, introduced us to new geographies and new markets. You could see that the Phibro legacy business was largely in poultry, a little bit of beef, and we had dairy and swine and other. The Zoetis business that we acquired was also strongly in poultry, but it introduced us to beef in a meaningful way.
As a whole now, we are much better balanced. We're about 37% poultry, 14% dairy, 19% beef, 13% swine. From a geographic point of view, when we bought this MFA business from Pfizer in 2000, they had just exited Europe. We have for years been trying to get back into Europe, but we never really had that flagpole to get back in. Our ability to sell our nutritional and our vaccine products were hindered by the fact that we did not have the base in Europe. This brought us the base. Now Europe has become a much more important part of our business. It was 8% of the Zoetis business. As we look towards the future, I think one of the areas that you'll see us grow across all of our business lines now will be Europe, which is the second largest market.
Again, now taking a look at our legacy business. Our fiscal year is a June 30th fiscal year. We are actually near the end of fiscal year 2025. I am showing you here fiscal year 2024 numbers, about $1 billion in sales, $111 million in EBITDA. What we consider our core business is our animal health business. That was $700 million of sales with the acquisition. Now, obviously, it pro forma above a billion. MFA and others, so that is the medicated feed additives and others. That is the population that grows with population growth. That is a steady business for us. I think if you look historically, we have probably outperformed the market with that. Now, with the acquisition, we are the number two player behind Elanco in MFAs.
The other areas that we concentrate, and as I mentioned before, probably where you'll see acquisitions historically and going forward, nutritional specialties and vaccines. Nutritional specialties, these are products, I'd say, the equivalent of human products you'd see in GNC or Vitamin Shop. These are high-value products, high-performance products that don't necessarily have the same regulatory pathway as medicated feed additives do, but they are still regulated. Vaccines are, as we all know, biological products. That's our core business. We have a largely U.S.-based mineral nutrition business. This is the daily minerals that animals need to take. It's a high-volume business, lower margins, but a great cash business. Finally, we have our legacy business, our performance products business, about $70 million of sales, $8 million of EBITDA last year. Corporate, about $60 million is obviously the negative. We're here to help.
For this year, through three quarters, just to give you a sense on our legacy business, we're up about 8% through Q3 on our legacy business, and our EBITDA is up 26%. We have a strong legacy business, strong growth opportunities. Within that, EBITDA being up 26% corporate-wide, our animal health business is up about 8% on the EBITDA side.
A little bit more color around our product, our combined product grouping now after the acquisition. Donny talked about and just shared with you 70% or so of the business has been in what we call the animal health space. When we say animal health, we have three main categories. First is the medicated feed additives, the nutrition specialty, our branded nutritional products, and then the vaccines. Within the medicated feed additives, there's really three key segments that comprise that.
The first is antimicrobials. These are, in most cases, antibiotics or other compounds that deter bacterial growth. These are used in therapeutic basis for animals to prevent and treat diseases. We have a nice complement with a combined group here in different classes of molecules, as well as different modes of actions among the antimicrobials. The second important space is anti-coccidial. This is a very important segment in anybody that's producing poultry. We have, again, a nice complement with the acquired products adding to the legacy products here. We have different modes of action, and we have good choices now, more choices to offer our poultry customers. In many cases, or in most cases, poultry, because animals are continually exposed to coccidia, they need to rotate.
They're always looking for options, strategic options that help them with their rotations, which is usually on a seasonal basis. We also have now a good mix of ionophores as well as rumen function products and other products such as MGA that's used to control, suppress estrus in feedlot cattle. The middle space here on the slide is nutrition specialty. These are nutritional products that are non-medicated. These are products that are branded, and they are mixed into feed and fed in the animals' diets. We have products for our ruminants. Primarily, dairy is the strength here with the nutrition specialty products. Monogastrics, a number of different products that are used to maintain health and really help with gut health in particular. And then some other branded nutritional products.
As I mentioned earlier, the Rejensa companion animal, we put that in as a nutritional specialty grouped product. Third, the vaccines. We have conventional vaccines. These are almost all poultry vaccines, products that are sold around the world with the exception of the U.S. The regulations for the U.S. are a bit different than many other countries around the world. We have a very nice offering of products to prevent disease for poultry. We have what we call our autogenous. These are tailor-made custom vaccines, primarily in the United States as well as Brazil. We take an isolate, could be viral or it could be bacterial, from a farm and produce a custom vaccine to fit their needs. We also produce adjuvants.
These are specialty adjuvants that we use in our own vaccines, but also we do supply to other leading livestock manufacturers.
Okay. This is the guidance that we have given for our fiscal year. This is through June 30. We're obviously three quarters in. Net sales $1.26 billion-$1.29 billion and EBITDA of $177 million-$183 million. This obviously includes now the acquired business. Again, I repeat that our legacy business is up about 8% on sales year to year and 26% on EBITDA year- to- year. Our sales of the Zoetis products in the five months that we've had it is $113 million. When we bought the business, we said on a full year basis, about $350 million. The math obviously does not round to that in this first year.
There is, when you acquire a business, there's lockout periods as far as just making sure that customers, you'll stock the customers before the business is sold. We have about two weeks beforehand, two weeks afterwards, where there wasn't much sales. I think if you were to look at our business probably in Q4, that would give you a better sense of the run rate that we expect. We're also running this business a little bit differently than Zoetis has been running it. There has been some skew rationalization. We are running it very much bottom-line oriented. I think, as mentioned, the margins that we had talked about when we acquired the business, we're actually doing significantly better than that. I think that's part of the focus of what we're looking to do here.
Getting down a little bit more on the updated guidance, go through this. I would say the other thing is that when we announced the deal, we had looked to bring our, it was financed through debt. We had looked to bring our EBITDA leverage down to three times by 2027. We've actually hit that two years early. We are now below on a pro forma basis, below three times leverage. We are looking to continue with that going forward. Finally, we have not given guidance for our next fiscal year, but we have kind of given some top-line stuff. We do see continuing growth in the legacy business across all the business lines, the vaccines, nutritional specialties, and medicated feed additives. We'll have the full year revenue and profits from the new acquisition, the Zoetis MFA business.
We'll have eight months in this year versus 12 months next year. I think it's a fuller 12 months than the eight months that we had. Finally, we haven't talked about this, but one of the things that has helped drive our EBITDA growth this year and will further drive it next year is we have been going through internally through a transformation process that we call Phibro Forward. It's an income growth initiative. It's very much focused on levers on both the cost side as well as the sales side. It's gone very well for us. It continues to impact us in this fiscal year, but I think the bigger growth is in the years to come. We believe that that will be another strong driver as we hit 2026. There are headwinds in 2026.
Tariffs, I think we have framed it as currently listed as between $5 million and $10 million of EBITDA impact. We also have a very favorable bank line that comes off in next year, a swap that comes off in next year, so in the next fiscal year. Those are some incremental headwinds, but overall, we feel pretty strongly that we're really well positioned to grow nicely next year.
That was great. Thanks, guys. I'll kick it off. If you have questions, let me know, throw up your hand, and we'll get it in front of management. Let's just continue with the MFA deal. Seems like it's very successful for you guys. You mentioned the revenue growth, but obviously the EBITDA growth has been tremendous. Maybe a little bit more where you are post-closure, eight months on the integration.
Do you see further opportunities to streamline, take costs out as you go into the next fiscal year?
Yeah. First of all, the integration, the standpoint, marketing authorizations, and some of the TSAs, et cetera, are going really nicely to our plan. As you saw, the biggest part of the top market by far is the U.S. The process for transferring the marketing authorizations here was very quick. It's a quick process. That was roughly 60% of the sales that the TSA came through right away for. The others, we are working on our transition. Many we've received already, and others are certainly on line with what we expected as far as the transfer of the marketing authorizations and as well as the transfer of our systems. I think as far as the integration itself, our people have been excited about this since day one, since we announced, as you said, a little more than a year ago.
We see the opportunity to combine very well-known, trusted, relied products with our legacy products, which also have been around in a very trusted process, products. It was really a nice complementary fit to those. I've had the opportunity to be out with a lot of our key customers in the last many months, and I see a lot of excitement from them as well. They're excited to see our commitment and our excitement for these products and the fact that we're going to have a high priority for these products. It is a large segment for us, and it's one that we're looking and exploring opportunities with our customers. In some cases, there will be some opportunities where, particularly in the United States, the largest segment where you have to get combination approvals to use existing products together.
We see some opportunities there that our customers have helped us identify where we can actually do some combination approvals in-house with the acquired as well as the legacy products.
How about to take that a step further? Sort of that question was on the EBITDA side, and you answered it. It seems like there's more stuff to do there. How about if I use the word halo effect? I mean, this was a big deal for Phibro, the billion to the one four, roughly pro forma. You showed your commitment to animal health. I'm guessing it probably brought in maybe some new customers along the way, opportunities to get in front of those customers and show them the Phibro Animal Health portfolio. Have you started to realize that? Has it helped sort of aid overall sales of the company and opened up new avenues or touchpoints with additional customers?
I'll start on this, and Donny, you can jump in. I think that Donny presented the slide where there was a really nice opportunity for us to strengthen geographically, first of all, some markets where we weren't as strong as we would have liked to be, some markets in Asia as well as Western Europe. Donny talked about that. That certainly is giving us a new foundation in those markets from which to build. By species, we would like to have been stronger in swine and in beef cattle. This acquisition brought us strength in both, particularly in the U.S. fed cattle market. We are beginning to see, again, in those cases, we did not acquire any people with this acquisition, commercial people. We have hired a feedlot team and are really proud of the team that we've hired.
They are out there working with customers. Obviously, they have been in the industry, most of them, for some time, and they have got an established relationship. We are seeing some really nice momentum, I think, from our customers and excitement.
Nothing to that.
Okay. How about just a little bit of the lay of the land? Most of the time in animal health, we get the companies coming up here. Jeff was giving me a hard time that I spent 26 minutes on companion animal and only allocated four minutes for farm animal. Here we sort of have the inverse. You guys have a very, very big footprint on the farm animal side. A little bit of the lay of the land, how things are in the U.S. Now you have the reach, and as you highlighted, even a bigger footprint in Europe post the deal. What are you seeing end market-wise from a demand perspective? Any trends or particular species that you want to call out when you look at the market?
Yeah. By species, I would say that, again, we had a pretty nice footprint and established relationships with poultry customers. It's been our largest segment on a global basis with our medicated, our nutritional products, as well as our vaccines globally. I think what we're seeing there is, and I talked about the anti-coccidials, some nice tools that give more options on rotations, et cetera, give more options that we can bring to our customers and helping them design their strategic anti-coccidial programs. Swine, we've had some presence in swine. Again, this gives us some very nice presence for treating and controlling diseases in swine. As I mentioned just a few minutes ago, the beef segment, particularly in the United States, is a very exciting segment for us to be in that segment now.
Again, our field people have had their relationships, but Phibro is, they do not know Phibro as well. This is an opportunity for us to get out there with them. We are doing that with some of the leading feedlot companies as well as the veterinary nutritionists and consulting nutritionists and veterinarians.
Okay.
Please.
I noticed you guys don't have an R&D line. Is there innovation in-house or everything is purchased?
I'll take that. Yeah. We do spend. We just do not break it out. I'd say if you look at our core business, the billion-dollar animal health business, it's about 3%, 3%-4% spend. It's embedded in our SG&A.
Swine flu, swine fever comes and goes. Over the last 10 years, it's been negative, and you don't hear about it. Bird flu, same thing. Are these insurmountable problems, or are these things that you guys have maybe in your pipeline that maybe in the next five years?
Yeah. I think in the case of African swine fever, it's been one of the holy grails. It's been around for a long time. I think for the most part, there's been some control from what we saw when it really broke many years ago, particularly in Asia, but then it drifted into some of the other continents. As far as the flu, we do not today have an offering in that space. As you are probably aware, for the most part, the United States. is not vaccinating for high-path avian influenza. There is a lot of debate about that. There is one product that has been conditionally approved. We are looking at this certainly as an opportunity in our pipeline.
Yeah. I would say there are, we do have it in our pipeline in different countries. Bird flu, I mean, bird flu, there are lots of different flus that could be bird flu, right? There are different variations of it. We do have bird flu within our pipeline, not in our United States offerings.
Okay. If the U.S. changes their position, that'd be a big market or it's complicated?
It's complicated, yeah. Certainly, the animals are here, and there's a big opportunity for it. It's just, will the industry vaccinate? That's the question out there now. I think the industry has done a very good job. I'll just talk about the broiler industry, of being very quick to identify when there's an issue, to isolate those farms, to depopulate, to disinfect, to let those farms set the amount of time that they need to be in quarantine before they repopulate. The producers are able to then set more eggs and place more in other farms.
Maybe just to follow up on that, when we talk about big opportunities within farm animal, again, just referencing Elanco again, they talked about the future opportunity in livestock sustainability and maybe a little bit of a lower trajectory from Bovaer that they were hoping for. How do you view that market? They've thrown out big numbers of $1 billion to $2 billion. And what does that mean for Phibro longer term?
Yeah. I think it is a great market. It's exciting to have that as a new market within the industry. It's a tough one to really put your finger on the current value. It's a matter of there's both carrot and sticks out there. You have countries that are forcing it. You have Denmark with the carbon tax. You've got the state of California with some credits. You obviously have the CPG companies out there that have made pledges. Now, I mean, we saw PepsiCo this week, I think, backed away from some of their pledges and in some areas strengthened them in others. Because it's meeting a need that is, it's not necessarily from a production point of view, from making the animal grow healthier or better for our customers, it's hard to exactly pinpoint the value.
It is clear that, and obviously we have the politics of it in today's day and age, especially domestically. It is clear that there is a value there. I do not know if we see it in the extreme near term, but we definitely think over time, as collectively, as people inhabiting this earth, we are all going to play a part in that. Specifically within Phibro, I think we are extremely well positioned, right? A lot of the discussions obviously have been about dairy. Dairy has the double whammy of both just carbon tonnage in general or CO2, but methane specifically, which if you treat methane, it is a faster way to help us hit our environmental goals as an industry. We believe that we probably have the largest sales force serving dairies in the United States.
Especially if the solutions out there are feeder-oriented, we're extremely well positioned, both U.S. and overseas. It is not just dairy. Every animal that is produced has a contribution out there. The Tysons of the world have made pledges, not just the Danones. We do think that it is a market that is going to, over time, take time, but will get its footing. We know that there are a lot of companies out there who are looking at it as far as technology solutions. We think, again, we're well positioned when other technologies emerge. There obviously have been some very successful technologies from a technical point of view that have emerged. We are excited to see where it goes. We think there is room for multiple parties.
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