 Okay, good morning everyone. My name is Ryan Oklewitz. I'm Global Marketing Manager with PMMI. And on behalf of PMMI and our Global Marketing Committee, I want to thank you for joining our webinar today. Today's webinar is one in a series of webinars, seminars, and events that PMMI has planned this year to help PMMI members grow their export sales. To find out what other events we have coming up, including events and services at ExpoPAC Mexico and other trade shows that will be present throughout around the globe this year, I encourage you to take a moment and visit PMMI.org backslashglobal for more information. Today's webinar figures to be an exciting one, explores the Brazilian market for packaging and processing machinery and equipment. For many members, the idea of doing business in Brazil is a challenging thought. It's a distant prospect and it's mainly due to the custo-Brazil or the infamous Brazil cost, which could be a result of high import prices, high interest rates, poor infrastructure, low productivity, rigid labor laws. There's a gamut of things that add to the price of your machines, which have been known to be increased by 40-60% when doing business in Brazil. But that has not discouraged growth in US exports of packaging machinery to Brazil. Exports of US machinery to Brazil have doubled in the past six years from 22 million to 58 million just last year. And the fact that Brazil is one of the largest economies located in our hemisphere, needs to be on everybody's radar. To give us an update on the business climate in Brazil and understand the competitive environment for PMMI members, with us today is AJ and Anand Hemnani, brothers and founders of Indobras Consulting, a market research and strategy firm with offices in Sao Paulo. Both Anand and AJ have extensive experience analyzing the packaging machinery and capital goods sectors in Brazil and have conducted many market research reports for PMMI members over the past 15 years. They are here to share their findings today of a newly released report, which is available for download as well on PMMI.org. Some quick housekeeping items before I turn this over to AJ and Anand. I want to bring to your attention that you have entered the webinar in muted mode. And if you'd like to ask a question at any time during the presentation, to please enter it in the chat box in the lower left portion of the screen, all questions will be read at the end of the presentation. Also, this webinar is being recorded, so we will share both the presentation and audio with you after we conclude here today. So without further ado, I will be happy to turn the presentation over to Mr. Hemnani. AJ, all yours. Hey, Ryan. This is Anand. Good morning, everyone. Well, thanks for the introduction, Ryan. Thanks also for putting rightfully all the daunting issues that one has to tackle when thinking about Brazil. So I'd like to just, by way of introduction, just re-emphasize that I've been assisting companies in the capital goods space in Brazil for about 18 years now. And it's been a bumpy ride, but it's been a good one. And there's a great quote that I'd like to pre-empt my presentations from Louis Greitner from IBM who said that, you know, once you decide to go in, it's a full-body immersion. And I think that sort of epitomizes Brazil. It's not for the weak of heart, but again, it's an exciting market. It's arguably the world's second-best market in terms of a demographic dividend. And what I want to try to do today is walk you all through some of the macro issues. And then, AJ, my partner, will get into some of the leads of the report and how we've seen differentiation tactics by European vendors and Brazilian vendors compared to what a lot of the US companies and some of the smaller European companies have shied away from, typically. And that hopefully just helps us in articulating a strategy. And more strategy, just more tactical, real-life, pragmatic things that can be done to offset some of these Brazil costs, as Ryan put it. But I also wanted to try to get you to understand Brazil costs because it's not as daunting as 40% or 60% because, as Einstein says, in relativity, Brazilian manufacturers actually pay the lion's share of that 60% delta that you're looking at anyway. So when you look at a differential basis or a relative basis, it's not near as daunting as all that. Anyway, I wanted to move to the first slide, which is, I like this slide that we picked up from Bloomberg, an analyst that I follow pretty well, put it together. And the punchline is obviously the end of the party. If you thought about Brazil over the last three years, everyone was rushing there. You couldn't get hotel rooms in Sao Paulo and airline tickets on American, United, and Delta were almost double the price of what they are right now. Brazil obviously went through an incredible boom, largely due to government spending and a consumer indebtedness increase. And there's what I consider to be retrenching. And the Brazilian economy is retrenching. We're in for at least – and again, I told you I've been doing this for 18 years, so I tend to be more cynical than most. But we're going into a stagnation period in GDP growth per se. And we're not going to come out of it. It's going to take us at least four to six quarters to come out of it. The government, the new finance minister, he's a very, very good guy. And he's articulated a plan that's passed in Congress and the Senate to increase the tax burden, increase interest rates, and implement a very aggressive private investment program in the concession space, in highways and ports, in airports and in energy plants, and water and wastewater plants. We have what is a growing government debt. You have a currency that's actually depreciated. I remember clients of ours importing equipment into Brazil two years ago and an exchange rate of 1.6. The exchange rate today is at 3.2. It truly is one of the most wildly oscillating and fluctuating exchanges in the world. I think it loses out only to Turkey in terms of the number of standard deviations that it oscillates to. Again, it poses a challenge, but it suffices to say that we as American exporters going into Brazil have to understand that there has been a devaluation to the dollar that's surpassed the devaluation to the euro. So it's a double whammy. It's not only that our products are more expensive, US products are more expensive, but it's also more expensive against some of your larger competitors being Italian, German vendors. The second thing is that obviously Brazil is a pretty commodity-dependent economy, so we are seeing a little bit of a bumpy road in the commodity pricing, but it's fleeting. You see prices follow all the large soy. Again, Brazil is either the second largest exporter of a lot of the basic commodities, everything from soy to cotton to corn to iron ore and orange juice and coffee, etc. So it is a pretty commodity-dependent economy. As commodity prices begin to edge up again towards as they have over the last month and a half, we will see some of these delays or the issues in the economy improving. Having said that, the main thing on equipment and packaging equipment is really consumer demand. Consumer demand is going to stay stagnated for at least a couple of quarters before it starts picking up again. The other thing I wanted to talk to you a little bit about is that a lot of what's happening with the inflation, with the exchange rate, and with interest rates, it's market economics, but it's also politics. Our president, Dilma, she enjoys what is the lowest popularity rating in the history of our polls. She's at under 9% now. It's very, very difficult for her to get anything done at this point. So the country is de facto being run by the finance minister. He's got a tremendous amount of power right now. He's a Chicago educated, World Bank Inter-American Development Bank trained tenured executive. He used to run one of the large private bank asset management companies. I've got a lot of confidence in him and we believe that this shock or this retrenching that he's implementing in terms of increasing interest rates and really shaking out consumer demand so that you get indebted to become a little bit lower is a necessary evil to get growth back into the system and confidence back into the system over the next couple quarters. So let me run you through slide number four now, which is something that I've always found very interesting, but if you look at what it costs a Brazilian manufacturer to borrow, it's significantly higher than the US obviously. But if you look at what it costs a Brazilian consumer to borrow, we're looking at 9.5% per month. So if I overdraw my credit card, I'm paying 9.5% per month and that's compounded month on month. So the Brazilian economy is pretty incredible in that if you look at it from your perspective with a good technology, with decent service and with local presence and with US cost of capital, you're just about 19% or 15% more competitive than your Brazilian counterpart. And that's something that's a little appreciated by most of the folks who are exporting down to Brazil and are complaining about how expensive it is to do business there. But the main thing, what I wanted to re-emphasize is that it's expensive for the local guys too. And the next slide is something that we put together which really does summarize that in that it's something that's, this is something that was sponsored by the Brazilian government through the National Confederation of Industries where they actually did a benchmarking by country in terms of productivity. And what happens is that besides the cost of capital being very high, the cost of labor is also very high. If you pay a factory worker $1,000 in states, you're paying $1,000 in Brazil plus 102% social security benefit. So he's actually wanting you cost a company double. And labor in Brazil is expensive. Social security amplifies that expense. So what you end up with is a situation where you're competing against folks that have a ball and chain permanently tied to them. So despite the exchange rate devaluation and despite the import duties and cascading VAT taxes that come upon the import duties, you have to understand that the Brazilian manufacturers are all competing against you but having to pay all of that and then some. So it's almost counterintuitive to think of Brazil as, oh, it's an expensive place to do business so I won't do it. It's more like, oh shoot, it isn't an expensive place to do business but it's so much more expensive to the local guys that I must be there because I'm going to be more competitive. And if I'm competing against someone that has a cost of capital of 20% a year and I can't make money there then I'm doing something wrong. Again, the other thought before we get into the weeds of the slide deck is that if you look at the size of the country and if you look at the demographic dividend the country has to offer, it is going to be without a doubt the fifth largest economy in the world within a few short years. It is the size of the continental US which poses problems and opportunities because problems are obviously distribution related and figuring out how to work with local value added manufacturing and local distributors to actually reach each corner of Brazil. You would not have, for example, an exclusive distributor in the US nor should you have someone like that in Brazil. It's too large, no one can actually touch all the different consumer clusters in Brazil within one roof. My message is that it's a very large country. It's obviously 210 million consumers with an increasing consumer base but it's also a large country in terms of geographic challenges and with that some legal challenges in how you appoint distributors and how you actually do business there. What we try to do during this research report with PMMI was to outline what we think are important benchmarks and interview very seasoned and tenured players, both European as well as Brazilian players to really extract what they're doing and hopefully be able to analyze that together with you to perhaps shed light or perhaps just allow you all to benchmark yourselves again some of the best practices, if you would, of local packaging manufacturing companies and European packaging manufacturing companies that are doing business successfully in Brazil. So with that I just wanted to pass the word on to Ajay who's going to just walk us through some of the benchmarks and the results of the report. Thank you Anand and thank you Ryan for the introduction. Well, what Ryan mentioned earlier is that we have been working with PMMI in previous studies and just the results from those studies and just general market observation we should all by now be aware of the overwhelming European dominance in the packaging scenario in Brazil. And this stems from various reasons mainly coming from their first mover advantage and that whole by-Europe influence from the multinationals focused on standardization and global scale and trust all historic elements that have led to their superiority in numbers of machines installed in Brazil. However, in recent years we have also witnessed a transformation in the industry with the reduced influence of the headquarters on machinery selection and greater decision making autonomy especially as it relates to capital good procurements by the local teams. And this is mainly led by the P&L requirements of the local clients having to post profits and giving extra power to their engineering teams to make procurement decisions and the customization requirements of the clients saying we don't want standardized machinery. We need machinery that speaks to the Brazilian consumer and most importantly of all financing requirements. So having looked at all this we decided to put together a study that somehow captures the various criteria that influence this choice of the client and from both the supplier and clients perspective and we interviewed several suppliers from different packaging companies and of different nationalities and asked them why do their clients prefer one manufacturer from one country over another. And from these results we managed to draw some great insights as to the current state of play in Brazil and also to determine the key pressure points that the US manufacturer should work on to increase their business in Brazil. We selected six criteria which basically encompasses the study. One is the geopolitical and macroeconomics. Other one is the cultural criteria. How willing is the machinery supplier ready to listen to the customer, see what they require and co-develop technology alongside and negotiate along the terms that are a win-win to both and that difficulty in establishing that relationship or not or the ease of it. Another point was the customization. How willing is the supplier to listen to the client and make changes to their standardized lines? What's the flexibility and adaptation that they would push for? Are the machines able to integrate in existing lines because many times the client does not have a huge budget and he wants to just add on and add on so you'd have to look at upgrades and joining machines that do different functions. Financing, how competitive are your prices? The dollar-based, do you have financing schemes? Are you willing to discuss terms and conditions such as installments or supplier-based financing? And how is the after-sales service as a total cost to the overall project? Another criteria was the local presence. Is the supplier present in Brazil? Is it recognized in Brazil? How is it present in Brazil? Does it have a direct subsidiary? Does it have agreement with distributors or representatives because installation and after-market support as we have seen in Brazil and probably as you have seen in many other parts of the world is of growing importance. And finally, actually scoring the machinery that is being supplied is how is the ease of installation? What is the training that the suppliers are giving to my local team? Is the machine user friendly or do I have to keep calling the technical support all the time? And what are the ranges? What are the capacity ranges and the application ranges? Because today I want to test the market so I want to start off small and then I want to slowly upgrade and grow. The supplier offered me these various ranges or not. And how reliable and durable are these items? So moving on to slide 8, what we see over here is that over a span of 14 years we can see that the European suppliers still dominate the industry with Italy and Germany leading the pack. But in 2014 what we do notice is that Germany and Italy maintained their market share. However, a lot of companies lost participation with the entry of other European and Asian players. Now with what Ryan mentioned earlier that the US has doubled its shipments to Brazil and still remains a very small percentage of total imports into Brazil. What's interesting to note over here is that despite this small representation if you look at the actual project and what the clients were talking about the US ranks very high up there in terms of their perspective of US manufacturers. We see that the procurement managers have put the US almost in equal terms as Europe. Now doing a deep dive into the different criteria we'll start off with economic and geopolitical and macroeconomic. We see that not surprisingly Brazil receives a low grade as Anand mentioned for many reasons the period of retrenching and negative outlook. However, we do believe that other markets such as Germany and Asia are ranking very high in this regards and that's mainly due to the work done by the governments and agencies to foster business in international markets and deal with certain restrictions such as environment safety issues that and clients demand for specific recycling recyclable packs or biodegradable packs. So this export-oriented culture stemming from European and now Asian companies is really coming to play in Brazil. Moving on to the next criteria, if we look at cultural criteria, here basically what we're looking for is the willingness of suppliers from different countries of origin to consider customer requests and whether they take a rigid or a more lenient stand towards it. For instance, some of the results of the interview showed Italian companies to be highly customer-oriented. Many that work with cross-functional engineering teams to globally build-to-suit packaging projects for clients in Brazil. And one thing that really came across is that the Brazilians also do the same. However, the Italians know how to plan whereas Brazilians still lag behind in the capacity to think long-term. For instance, Italian machineries, they leave rooms for future adjustments and upgrades that will arise down the line whereas Brazilian companies were more focused on executing on the present, irrespective of the client's growth plans one year from now. And what's also interesting is that Germany ranks very highly on this because they're known to be very well vested into the client's interests. They anticipate the machinery requirements many times even before the client does. And that really struck home because many of these Brazilian manufacturers, given the state of play, they don't know how fast the market will grow. So they need a partner in their supplier-based community to really help them adjust according and dance with the music. What's also interesting is that German and American companies, and this may come as a surprise to many, Brazilian companies are really now focused on building this element of trust and moving away from the do-what-it-takes mentality and quick-fix attitudes. If you look at the professional culture that is developed in Brazil, they are welcoming the culture of ethics and professional codes of conduct that are typically linked with German companies and with American companies. So this is a very good moment for American companies to come in because many of the professional companies are saying, please, please, we want to do things correctly. Moving on to another criteria which is the customization criteria. Now here what we're seeing is that clients are increasingly measuring their capital expenditure purchases on performance and results. Many clients have mentioned this, that the idea is to reduce the conversion costs of their raw materials into finished goods. Automation plays a big role over here, but everyone wants to produce more with less resources, particularly with what Anand mentioned about the exorbitant rates of labor over here, which is considered a very large and unstable component to the operating expense. European companies are known for their cooperation with local engineers and are helping with this flexibility to develop customized machines, whereas Brazilian companies have the added advantage of being able to backward integrate their metalworks of a machine and customize exactly to the client requirements based on the project designs. And this really hits a home run with many of their clients who want to co-develop and adapt their machines. And for us in the US, there's a very good market perception that US packaging manufacturers have as it relates to innovation and automation, ease of use, and what are the negative aspects that we need to work on is that many clients still believe that American companies are labeled as one-size-fit-all suppliers focused on standardized products. And while we may argue that this one-size-fits-all does work for many clients, clients tend to give a preference to companies with best prices and where customization is required. So this is something we do need to work on according to the study. Moving forward, financial parameters, well, I'm not going to drill too much into this because Anand mentioned, but one of the main issues over here is how do you sponsor this purchase? Client financing structures for capital good investments. Finami, I'm sure many of you must have heard the term, but it's a financing mechanism offered by the government for locally manufactured machines that have at least a minimum of 60% of the components that are produced locally. So what we're starting to see is many European companies and Asian companies and recently American companies trying to acquire local companies that are already operating the benefit from this program so they can offer cheaper financing for their clients. European manufacturers are working heavily with their banks and their governments to offer more credit and financing of goods and trade credit with export insurance and Italian machine suppliers are more concerned with the deal and are also offering short-term and long-term credit in order to secure the deal. What's interesting to note over here is that the German culture from what the interview has mentioned is that they are selling the machine for what it's worth and not for what we perceive the client is willing to pay for it. That's what the Germans were saying. So the starting price does not leave much room for negotiation. And rather than focusing on price discussions these German suppliers they prefer to focus on technical discussions which has really done wonders for their business in Brazil and they focus on the advantages over other solutions available such as machinery metrics the return on investment capacity utilization efficiency indices and wrapper and raw material savings safety, minimizing machinery downtime and really focusing on the general pack quality for zero market complaints. So where you cannot compete on price these are the elements that should be worked with jointly with the client. Moving on, local market presence this is increasingly becoming important for many of the companies who want to do the full-body immersion as Anand mentioned we are seeing that many of the American companies have renewed or have a more diligent effort to scout and appoint reputable distributors and representative agents to increase orders and focus on customer service and strengthening the ties with the supplier I mean the supplier client ties. It is possible to do that with local representation to bridge that expensive any cultural learning curves and definitely focus on increased business and finally moving on to the actual machinery what we have noticed over here is that the Italians have a strong reputation for capacity and application ranges considered by some clients as far ahead of any other competitor including the US. German machines are known for their technological competence durability and sturdiness. What many companies are doing now is because they have local presence they can sponsor fully functional showrooms that showcase the product lines and allow the conversation or the sales conversational to move away from commercial only towards commercial and technical and this is very very important particularly when you are conducting tests that take into account shelf life and energy savings and capacity flexibility and adaptations that the machine can do so all these points really are important and whereas the Brazilian companies they also do offer machine testing and many times they have multiple clients that they've already sold to so they direct the prospective client to go and visit these sites. So some of these are some of the criteria that you'll find in our study and I pass it on back to Anand. Thank you Jay, I know that that's a lot of information and a lot of criteria that we obviously looked at and there's a lot of case history in the report which I encourage you all to read through. I didn't want to get into what individual companies were doing during this presentation but be happy to field questions on any of these benchmark parameters and how we've seen successful differentiation strategies. I did want to leave you with a couple of thoughts. One being obviously that there's a lot of things to consider when you're looking at Brazil. One of the big things is obviously local presence. I think that if you take a look at all the European companies and obviously all the Brazilian companies their real differentiation from most of the parameters that we've outlined is the fact that they have local presence and the fact that they can actually put together some financing packages as part of their product offering. So I don't want to know if the product is worth $100 but I want to know if I can pay $10 a month for 10 months because as a consumer in Brazil that's more important to me and you can charge me $200 at that point because I'd happily pay you $10 for 20 months because that's still going to be a lot cheaper for me. Once that sort of crystallizes in our heads in terms of strategy there's many ways to move forward. One of the simple ways is just to establish a local company in Brazil. Lawyers will tell you it's impossible and it's very expensive and it's relatively simple. There are obviously running expenses to it so you need to have enough of a revenue base already built into your business to do that. But what you can do is you can benefit from transfer pricing. You can benefit from outsourcing some of the manufacturing in Brazil and getting the 60% value add and offering financial packages to your distributors or even to your end clients. And obviously having legal control on your brand, on your IP in a way that you can appoint as many distributors as you want without ever being a hostage to one. And I've seen that there's a lot of evidence that European companies, they don't backtrack into this. They go into this with their eyes wide open and they're actually doing that. The other thing that I've noticed over the last six months more so than lately is the fact that Brazilian, local Brazilian manufacturers are A. very good and B. very cheap right now, A. given the exchange rate and B. given the weakening economy. So I've seen that there's a lot of renewed interest and I've got a real-life example of about six companies over the last eight months in the packaging space that we've looked at where there's just been acquisitions happening by European companies in a couple of cases by even US private equity funds. Just buying up companies in Brazil to take advantage of all the benchmarks that we've discussed but in a way that's quite cheap just because it's, you know, the bits and multiples now in Brazil are very, very low compared to what they were three years ago when everyone absolutely had to be there. So these are two thoughts I wanted to leave you with. And then the last thought I wanted to leave you with is that Brazil is not only about the Brazilian market. Obviously about the South American market in general. You know, once you're in Brazil you have a free trade zone into Argentina, into Chile, into Colombia, into Uruguay and Paraguay. And what we've seen is that Brazilian companies, Brazilian consumer product companies are buying up companies all over Latin America and all over the world quite honestly. I mean, I guess the biggest and the best example is, you know, 3G which is a group of three Brazilian private equity guys that have gone out and obviously they've bought, you know, notoriously bought Anheuser-Busch, Burger King, and more recently Kraft and Heinz, you know, together with Juan Buffett. And these are now, you know, allegedly Brazilian controlled companies. So there's a lot of packaging decisions, a lot of strategic decisions that are happening in Brazil globally. It's a pretty interesting place and it's a small place and network. At the end of the day, you know, despite the 210 million people, you know, there's a few decision makers and there's a lot of consolidation at the consumer product levels. You've obviously, you've got two of the largest, you know, 14 manufacturing companies in the world based in Brazil now. They're both publicly traded. I'd encourage you to take a look at the case histories of these. It's JBS and BRF Foods, you know, largest poultry manufacturer in the world, largest pig and cow farming company in the world. So we're looking at global giants here that are obviously dictating the trend for both end user packaging as well as bulk packaging for supply chains. And it's something that I wanted to just leave you with as a thought. I'm not really going to go too much into the last slide. It's more of what we do to help some of our clients think through the speed and direction at which they have to create local presence. So I'll just stop there and be very, very happy to take questions or to help further illustrate any of the points that we've briefly touched on today. Great. Thank you, Anand. That was a very insightful presentation. A lot of meat there to chew on for everyone. This presentation and the recording of the webinar I will share with everybody on the call today. Be sure to download the report online as well. It goes into great detail profiling a number of companies, OEMs that are in Brazil, doing business in Brazil, that goes into what some of their best practices are and how they're getting competitive advantage in Brazil. You know, that leads me to my first question that I have for you. There's a big difference in Brazil between a company that exports to Brazil and a company that has a local presence in Brazil. It seems like there's a lot of benefits to have a local presence in Brazil talking to some of PMI members that are in Brazil. In fact, a number of companies that you profiled in the report. They're all in Brazil building machines in Brazil that are geared towards more or less the middle market in Brazil. Is that a trend that you've seen Anand? Or is that a trend that's going to change? You mentioned there's a lot more customization going on in Brazil. It's not just about price anymore and selling kind of a reliable machine. It's more or less now where they're looking at flexibility in ways that they can really reduce costs with automation. Is that a trend that you're seeing pick up in Brazil? Absolutely, yes. I've seen very little evidence of companies doing very much business and that they have a unique patent unless they're established in Brazil either through a trading entity or through a trading slash manufacturing assembly entity. Are you seeing – Brazil is known for a long time that employment was relatively cheap I would say. We're at full employment in Brazil right now, so you have a lot of labor on the line, particularly in doing the secondary part of the line. Is it still manual or are we moving towards automating the secondary part of the line? No, absolutely moving towards automating it, Ryan. Again, there's a great saying that I think it was – I think the president of Glencore that coined it, he said that the cure for high prices is high prices. Again, because we've been at a situation of full employment, a lot of the companies have been investing very, very heavily in end of line and then middle line automation. Again, all labor in Brazil is unionized and irrespective of what happens with the economy or with your business, if you're employing people there and the union says that you've got to increase their wages by 7.5% that year, guess what? You've got to increase their wages by 7.5%. So it's one of these very, very rigid – I joke with my clients, it's the worst of France with the worst of Portugal put together in terms of labor laws. So wherever you can actually shed some costs, and it's exactly now in a down market where that's ever more problems. Very interesting. Again, I just want to remind everybody if you want to ask a question, just enter it in the lower left chat box there and send it either to me or to Anand and we'll make sure it's read. One more quick question. Brazil has a lot of local manufacturers. I mean, you've profiled a couple in the report. One of them was Missal, but you also have Indumac and Behemoth down in Brazil. It probably has most of the market share in Brazil as Mausipac, Fabrima. These guys are offering complete lines. A lot of their equipment maybe is not as good as most PMI members, but they are offering a number of different solutions and have huge product portfolios. How do you see them evolving? Are they going to be able to defend their market share in Brazil? Are they going to kind of lose it? Are they going to be looking at expanding into North America? What's the makeup of some of the Brazilian companies and where you see them going? Yeah, I mean, they've all obviously started off as one-trick ponies, right? For example, Indumac is very, very focused on vertical packing for commercial commodities. And if you look at them, their largest market outside of Brazil is actually Nigeria, now India, Indonesia, Thailand, and they've just opened up a couple of companies in the US. So yes, these Brazilian companies, the good ones like Indumac you mentioned, they're growing and they took advantage of when especially the last three years where the Brazilian exchange rate was beneficial for Brazilian companies making acquisitions abroad. They're taking advantage of establishing presences abroad. Now with the Brazilian exchange rate the way it is, they are taking full advantage of all that export, right? So even if you look at Missal or Fabrima, and I won't get into the weeds of the cultural issues with these companies because I don't think they're particularly well-run, but there's a very, very clear directive towards exports and towards line integration. So they're increasingly either acquiring companies or acquiring talent away from companies to be able to grow into consumer lines. And I don't think that's going to change. I think that's actually going to get even stronger with the slowing economy. Very interesting. I've got a couple of questions coming in here. The first one is a very important topic down in Brazil, financing. You know, Bendis Bank and Finama, the OECD has been very critical of their lending practices. They lend at rates well below market value and they just saturate the market with tons of money out there if you're a local Brazilian company or if you're manufacturing in Brazil. Having access to Finama and Bendis Bank money really can give you an advantage down there. Is Finama money drying up? Is it still being released at the moment with the current economic situation in Brazil? Right, it is drying up. That's not to say that it's stopped. Finama is still a very, very well-capitalized program. The issue is that it was growing at 30% a year and now you're going to have somewhat of a correction on that. A, as a government tries to – and this is a little bit – this is almost more philosophical at this point because the finance minister is a very pro-market guy and he's over the last six years. We've had that with him in seminars where we're both presenting to a group of investors in New York and he's outright – I outrightly criticize the BNDS and the Finama program for what he termed as a crowd-out effect, meaning crowding out the private banks, the commercial banks from what they should be doing which is lending commercially. Having said that, if you're lending commercially at 5% or 6% a month, if I get access to BNDS money at $1, I'm going there. I'm going to go and try to get that. So it's a little bit of a pull-and-push thing right now. I don't think we can do without the BNDS because local capital markets are just too expensive for capital goods. But I do think that there's going to be a definite increase in quality of credit at the BNDS. There's going to be a lot more scrutiny in terms of takers. As an example, look, we sitting at an advisory firm a few years ago got a credit card from the BNDS mail to our office without us even asking for it. With the idea that you can use the BNDS credit card under the Finami program to go buy capital goods for your office, computers, automobiles, what have you. That type of aggressive mending is definitely stopping. But good vendors that are accredited with the Finami program, they're still going to be able to offer that program to their customers. Very interesting. So going on a little bit past Finami and talking about some tax breaks, loopholes that importers might be able to take advantage of, I remember in the past that Brazil would always do an ex tarifico kind of tax break where there would be a holiday on some of the import duties for imports that are coming into Brazil. Is that something that Brazil is going to continue doing? Is that something that you can see coming down the pipeline? And how do companies take advantage of that? Do you have to prove that you're importing a product that isn't being manufactured locally in Brazil? What are some of the steps to take advantage of some of those tax breaks for importers? So the ex tarifico is relatively simple. Usually you're looking at about 14% import duty. And what happens is that there's a cascading set of duties and taxes on that. So it's 14% import duty. Say you're exporting your FOB or your landed price in Brazil which is FOB plus a freight is $100. You pay 14% on not only your equipment but you also pay the 14% on the freight. So you pay 14% on your landed cost. After that you still have another 8% which is the IPI and then another 18% which is the ICMS which is the value added tax. And that's all cumulative on that landed cost meaning your cost plus the freight plus import duty plus the IPI. So what happens is that the ex tarifario is something that a lot of our clients use it over here and it's very simple to do. It takes about 3 months. It costs about $5,000 to do. The caveat is that you need to prove that you have a unique equipment that's not currently produced in Brazil. If you can prove that then it's about a 2.5-3 month process, $5,000 total cost. And you get a reduction of duty from the 14% on the import duty to 2%. So that doesn't mean that you get a 12% reduction. You get a much more than 12% reduction because you have cascading taxes on those 14%. Now you have cascading taxes on only 2%. So it's definitely something worth doing if you are confident that you don't have any local manufacturers that produce your product range or your product speed or your product patent in Brazil. So that's all you need to do is just establish that some differentiator in terms of maybe it's the patent or IP or something like that that is something that's not yet produced in Brazil. We did two of these for our clients this month. It's really not that difficult at all. So if you're interested in exploring that possibility of taking advantage of exterifio, contact Anant and it looks like he'll be able to help you with that. I have another question that came in for private consumption in Brazil. There's been a lot of talk about it. You mentioned it was stagnating. I assume that's largely due to the inflation in Brazil right now. Nestle's CEO just recently said too that he's very concerned about inflation in Brazil and some of their investments there. There is record low unemployment. There has been government stimulus programs and tax breaks to kind of spur consumption. But with the stop and go cycles in the economy, do you see the consumer base continuing to be the engine of growth and maybe not in general the consumer base, but are there any pockets or segments, whether it's pharmaceutical, cosmetics, food. Where do you see growth coming in markets for packaging machinery? We've done a lot of work on that specific question. We created a few scenarios for ourselves and some of our clients. The short answer, and I can go on for as long as you want me to on this, but there is going to be a stagnation in consumer growth in Brazil. That doesn't mean that consumers are going to stop buying what they're used to buying. Because they were just buying exponentially more than what they did last year and the year before that because there was a lot more offer in terms of number of SKUs out there. And then B, there was a lot more credit. So today we're in a situation where consumers, 58 million consumers are what we call at the credit bearing limit capacity. So there's going to be a couple of quarters of some stagnation in terms of consumer growth. That doesn't mean that consumers are going to stop buying processed foods and packaged foods and cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Do I see a small potential dip in cosmetics? Yes, but I do see that being short lived. I don't think that you can selectively take a vertical like cosmetics and tail as well as pharmaceuticals. For example, the hair products in cosmetics are still growing in double digits, despite the recession. And then you look at some of the demographic social classifications. And you look at the A and the B classes, and they really haven't been affected by the crisis and they won't be because they're not levered. In fact, when they put money in a bank, they're earning 1% interest per month. So if you have $100,000 in a bank, you're earning $1,000 by doing absolutely nothing in the zone. So from that social demographic standpoint, the product lines that cater to the rich and the upper middle class, they're actually enjoying the growth. The bulk of it, what we call the CD and E classes, yes, they're retrenching. How many quarters are we trenching for? I don't know. I'm estimating at least two quarters. The government is talking about within the next month we'll see an uptake. I don't see that. I see it as being somewhere close to six months, and potentially even nine months. And one of the interesting parts about this is also we do a Brazilian consumer product manufacturer. And they're actually launching smaller pack SKUs. And you now have multinational companies adopting what strategies that they were adopting in India, which is just reducing the size of packaging and increasing the number of SKUs that every product line has. So from a packaging standpoint, it's actually arguably good news. You know, Ryan, Clive Ed is an animal consultant. I always have to be positive, right? And there's still a lot to be positive about in Brazil, absolutely. I know it's a tough time. We're kind of in a down cycle right now. But I mean, if you look at some of the numbers, Brazil is a behemoth of a market. It's here on our backyard, same time zone. Great place to visit, but it's a market that just can't be ignored. If you're looking at numbers, Brazil has unbelievable potential to grow, particularly if some of these reforms start going through and they achieve a little bit more financial stability. There's going to be tremendous opportunity there for packaging machinery manufacturers. We're up against 11 o'clock end time here. I want to thank Anand and AJ for a great presentation. If anybody has any questions for Anand or AJ, please contact them. There are contact information I believe is at the front of the presentation here. Well, I'll be sending you an email with a recording with the slide deck here and I will be sure to include their contact information. These gentlemen are a great resource in Brazil. Talk to them before you decide to go to Brazil. If you are already in Brazil and you need help navigating the market, feel free to reach out to them and be sure to download the report they just did. It's an excellent report. I also want to remind everybody PMMI will be at FISPALL this year. FISPALL is probably the biggest packaging show in Brazil. It's in Sao Paulo between the 23rd and 26th of June. If you're down there, please visit our booth. Anand will be around and I think we're going to have a luncheon with Anand where he'll be sharing a presentation. You can get to talk to him in person if you're in Sao Paulo at that time. We invite you to come visit us in Brazil. Again, thank you everybody for joining the presentation today. Thank you Anand and AJ. Good luck with your business ventures in Brazil everyone and have a good day.