Westrock Coffee Company, LLC (NASDAQ:WEST) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ben Bienvenu: Okay, great, thanks. I’ll get back in the queue.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Smith from Stifel.

Scott Ford: Hi, Matt.

Matt Smith: Hi, Scott and Chris.

Chris Pledger: Hey.

Matt Smith: Scott, I wanted to follow up on your comments around the initial lines for Conway now essentially being fully under contract. Can you talk about how the mix of the business for those lines and the profitability of those contracts compared to your initial expectations as you begin began to contemplate the Conway project? And then if I could, as you look more into the future at the extract capabilities that will come on line in the coming years, have your expectations changed for the mix of that business, the profitability of that business or do they remained fairly consistent with your initial expectations?

Scott Ford: Yeah, super question. When we actually spent time on with the Board this morning, the mix has come in actually, I would say, better than we expected. We thought that it might be super highly concentrated, it looks like the way that we’ve landed and most of this is now, I would say, probably we have room for one more contractual piece on our — on one of the first two lines and then we are down to just the small line available with space. And the spread there is — we’re probably dealing with six of the 10 largest CPG coffee ready to drink brands in the country on that set of contracts. So that’s the mix expectation that came in a little broader than we thought, the MOQs [Phonetic] on it are still very large, because the players that are coming in are all large in the space on a relative basis.

So we’ve been very pleased with that. As we look at the expected margins relative to the pricing, we assumed when we went out, we were basically right on top of that plus or minus 10% at an EBITDA level, not at a pricing — at a revenue level, so we’re very pleased with that. That’s a lot tighter than we actually had any reason to expect we could guess from the market. And then finally, as you look forward, this is I think the core driver of the business and, Matt, your question is kind of where we’ve been living, which is it’s reminiscent to me of wireless data, we never got our wireless data for — I used to run a wireless business called Alltel, doesn’t matter now, but we never got our wireless data growth forecast high enough. We just never could guess how much people were going to shift to wireless data away from terrestrial based wireline networks.

And we were — no matter how much we invested and how aggressive we were, we were always behind the curve. I have seen this curve before and we are still behind it. We have literally $100 million of additional EBITDA in a pipeline that we are busily trying to find places to make the product to bring it through. We have caught the bus and we are trying to actually get it to slow down a little so that we can catch up with, actually wrestle it down, if you will.

Matt Smith: That’s great. Thank you for that commentary. And if I could follow up with a question around what you’re seeing across the industry, given the really robust demand that you’re speaking of? Are you seeing other capacity plans that may impact just how strong the demand is for the Conway space?