Bunge Global SA Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Thanks for having us today. Great to be here again, great to be on stage again with you. It really has helped us in every way. I think there has been no better capabilities added for our risk management, for our customers, both the farmers and the consumers of feed, food, and fuel, than the diversification that we got with the merger, with the combination of Viterra and Bunge. Because we are now in every key producing region. We touch more farmers directly than anyone else. This gave us not only the diversification across geography, but we now have diversification across grains and oilseeds that we need to serve our customers. So whether it is the challenge that you mentioned on whether it is trade war, the actual wars, weather issues, we just have more origins, more destinations, a better, more complete team in order to be able to solve those problems.

You want to start? Yeah, I can start.

So look, as we got through Q2, and we looked at the balance of the year, number one is we felt very good about where we performed up through the first half. I think we felt like we had some good momentum in the business. We looked ahead at the balance of the year, and we saw good S&D drivers. Ultimately, our RVO clarity hadn't been totally resolved yet, but we felt like the industry was ramping up. There was good demand for soybean oil, there was good demand for meal.

We saw improving results in various places in the world, and I think the resilience of our team and how they looked at the balance of the year, even though maybe a little bit less clarity and visibility into Q4, we felt like Q3 was largely locked at that point and saw a path to get to the number we gave, the $9.25 to $9.75 range. Yeah, I think a lot of it had to do with what we felt like the range of likely outcomes for the balance of the year. We felt pretty good about where we were.

I think it's also worth noting, we just passed a year in July since closing the transaction. While it took a couple of years to get through regulatory, which was very helpful for the integration planning, and I think it's helped the integration go so smooth. Remember, the commercial teams couldn't start to work on commercial synergies, start thinking about optimizing the footprint, making sure that we had the right people in the right roles until we closed the transaction. We've been doing that work for the last year. Also as we've gotten some of the reps together with the team in a challenging environment, also you remember Viterra was private, and so forecasting not as important as for a public company.

As we brought the teams together and the systems and processes and began to do that work, that's also been helpful in giving us visibility and confidence in going forward.

Yeah, I can start, Greg.

Sure. The first thing is the 45 to 47 is sort of a framework that we built thinking about history.

We looked back five years, what were the dynamics? We saw highs and lows in a five-year period. So we looked at averages and said, okay, in all the regions we operate globally, what were the dynamics during that five-year period, and what do we feel like probably was as best we could figure out a normalized level of margin. Then looking forward, what did we expect structurally? Was there an inherent change in a given geography that might drive a structural change going forward? As well, we looked at our RVO policy and everything else, and we came up with what we felt like in each region was ultimately a likely ongoing average margin.

Also too, where would it need to be to provide the right return on assets to incent expansion if it was needed at some point? So we look at all these factors, a little bit of art, a little bit of science. We plugged that into the model, and obviously a big piece of that, or a portion that can impact that is certainly the policy around RVO, biofuel policy in general, globally. I think today we look at it in the U.S., and what's come out recently is certainly performing above what we consider that average baseline. We're above that in the U.S. and Canada, for example, but there's parts of the world where we're below it.

Today, on weighted average, we feel pretty good about where we're there, in total, just the pieces are a little bit different than maybe how we modeled it. But again, those are going to change, continue to change. But I think we feel like that's a pretty good guideline for how we think about it going forward.