Want to participate in a short research study? Help shape the future of investing tools and you could win a $250 gift card! If you want to know who really controls Village Farms International, Inc. (TSE:VFF), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. Insiders often own a large chunk of younger, smaller, companies while huge companies tend to have institutions as shareholders. I quite like to see at least a little bit of insider ownership. As Charlie Munger said 'Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.' With a market capitalization of CA$723m, Village Farms International is a small cap stock, so it might not be well known by many institutional investors. Our analysis of the ownership of the company, below, shows that institutions are noticeable on the share registry. Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholder can tell us about VFF. See our latest analysis for Village Farms International TSX:VFF Ownership Summary, May 10th 2019 What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Village Farms International? Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing. As you can see, institutional investors own 9.6% of Village Farms International. This can indicate that the company has a certain degree of credibility in the investment community. However, it is best to be wary of relying on the supposed validation that comes with institutional investors. They too, get it wrong sometimes. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at Village Farms International's earnings history, below. Of course, the future is what really matters. TSX:VFF Income Statement, May 10th 2019 Village Farms International is not owned by hedge funds. There is some analyst coverage of the stock, but it could still become more well known, with time. Story continues Insider Ownership Of Village Farms International The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Management ultimately answers to the board. However, it is not uncommon for managers to be executive board members, especially if they are a founder or the CEO. Most consider insider ownership a positive because it can indicate the board is well aligned with other shareholders. However, on some occasions too much power is concentrated within this group. It seems insiders own a significant proportion of Village Farms International, Inc.. Insiders own CA$155m worth of shares in the CA$723m company. This may suggest that the founders still own a lot of shares. You can click here to see if they have been buying or selling. General Public Ownership The general public, who are mostly retail investors, collectively hold 69% of Village Farms International shares. With this size of ownership, retail investors can collectively play a role in decisions that affect shareholder returns, such as dividend policies and the appointment of directors. They can also exercise the power to decline an acquisition or merger that may not improve profitability. Next Steps: I find it very interesting to look at who exactly owns a company. But to truly gain insight, we need to consider other information, too. I like to dive deeper into how a company has performed in the past. You can find historic revenue and earnings in this detailed graph. If you are like me, you may want to think about whether this company will grow or shrink. Luckily, you can check this free report showing analyst forecasts for its future. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the last twelve months, which refer to the 12-month period ending on the last date of the month the financial statement is dated. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.<doc-sep>What happened Shares of Village Farms International (NASDAQ:VFF) were moving higher today after the produce grower turned cannabis grower posted a solid first-quarter earnings report. As a result, the stock was up 10.2% as of 11:15 a.m. EDT. So what For much of its history Village Farms was a humble fruit-and-vegetable grower, but its network of greenhouses attracted attention from the cannabis industry, and in 2017 the company formed a joint venture with Emerald Health Therapeutics (OTC:EMHT.F), known as Pure Sunfarms. Investor enthusiasm for the JV's potential has led the stock to more than triple this year. Today the stock tacked on more gains when the company said Pure Sunfarms' revenue tripled to $10.8 million in the quarter on a sequential basis. Unlike most cannabis companies, Pure Sunfarms is profitable, as the JV reported a profit for its second straight quarter at $8.6 million, though that benefited from a $6.1 million gain on the valuation of its cannabis crop at the end of the period. Without that gain, the JV still would have had a $6 million operating profit. Overall the company reported a per-share profit of $0.16, driven by a gain on an asset sale; it reported a per-share loss of $0.03 the year before. Village Farms said the company continues to make progress at its Delta 3 facility, beginning planting in Quadrants 1 and 4, meaning the entire 1.03-million-square-foot facility is in production. It also said it's on track to reach full run rate annual production of 75,000 kilograms by mid-2019, and with the Delta 2 facility, it expects to have 150,000 kilograms of annual production by 2021. CEO Michael DeGiglio said, "We are thrilled to report that our Canadian cannabis joint venture, Pure Sunfarms, delivered its second consecutive quarter of profitability. ... The success of the Delta 3 facility, with quality, yield and cost continuing to meet expectations, and the resulting ability to rapidly achieve profitability, is further evidence of the considerable advantage of building a premier, large-scale, vertically integrated grower on the foundation of the people, capabilities and know-how of Village Farms -- a foundation that can only be achieved through decades of operational experience." Now what Considering the cannabis venture is profitable, Village Farms shares are arguably cheap, as the company is still only valued at $600 million, much less than some of its rivals. Like much of the cannabis sector, however, it carries plenty of risk, especially considering how high and how quickly the stock has jumped this year, and the long-term uncertainty in the industry, as oversupply could crush prices for growers. And, as my colleague Sean Williams points out, the company's yields look lower than the competition's right now, and it has yet to secure buyers for most of its product.<doc-sep>Village Farms International, Inc. (NASDAQ:VFF) Q1 2019 Earnings Call May 10, 2019, 11:00 a.m. ET Contents: Prepared Remarks Questions and Answers Call Participants Prepared Remarks: Operator Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Village Farms' international first quarter 2019 financial results conference call. Yesterday, Village Farms issued a news release reporting its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2019. That news release along with the company's financial statements are available on SEDAR and on the company's website at villagefarms.com under the Investors heading. Please note that today's call is being broadcast live over the internet and will be archived for replay both by telephone and via the internet beginning approximately one hour following completion of the call. Details of how to access the replay are available in yesterday's news release. Before we begin, let me remind you that forward-looking statements may be made today during or after the formal part of this conference call. Certain material assumptions are applied in providing these statements, many of which are beyond our control. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements. A summary of these underlying assumptions, risks, and uncertainties is contained in our various security filings including Village Farms' current annual information form for the year ending December 31st, 2018 and MD&A for the quarter ending March 31st, 2019 which are available on SEDAR. These forward-looking statements are made as of today's date and except as required by applicable securities of law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise such statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Michael DeGiglio, Chief Executive Officer of Village Farms International. Please go ahead. Michael DeGiglio -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President & Director Thanks, Marcella. And thank you to everyone joining us, both by telephone and the internet today. With me for today's call is Village Farms' chief financial officer, Stephen Ruffini. The agenda for today's call is first, update on the significant progress on both our Canadian cannabis joint venture, Pure Sunfarms, and our US hemp/CBD program led by our outdoor program through Village Fields Hemp. Steve will review the first quarter financials. I'll return with some closing thoughts and then open to Q&A. So, with that, we feel -- here, management feels we're off to a good start for 2019. But before I begin, I wanna take a moment to provide our perspective on the false and misleading claims that were made publicly about our company a number of weeks back. I wanna be clear that as a public company, we fundamentally believe in the right for legitimate contrarian views of our company or any company, for that matter. And we acknowledge that legitimate short-sellers have a play and play a valuable role in the markets. But we despise parasites who engage in outright lies, distortions of the truth, partial and misleading information, and innuendo to manipulate the market for short-term, entirely self-serving purposes. This kind of activity provides zero value to the marketplace and especially hurts individual shareholders of all sizes, whereas we know the real culprits here aren't even the public persona. But as we say in Texas, these yellow-bellied cowards hiding anonymously in the weeds caused this issue. So, unfortunately, it's allowed to happen. And as a company with strong share price, a successful listing on NASDAQ, strong trading volumes, and a quiet period at the time as a result of our financing, we're an ideal candidate for this type of manipulation. We recognize that many of our shareholders wanted us to respond loud and strong and publicly. We have taken your comments, and, with that, we do appreciate your input. However, we also heard from many others, including our advisors and others in the industry who advised us clearly to push past the distraction, turn off the quote feeds, and focus our time and energy on continuing to execute on our multiple significant business opportunities. So, we chose the latter. And two days later, we closed a $20 million financing with no sweeteners, straight up equity, at $20.00 a share. There'll always be opinions in the capital markets. But what will always trump opinion is the undeniable business execution on financial results of both companies who are being targeted. At the end of the day, we are confident that our shareholders will do their own due diligence -- we encourage and welcome it -- and that they will make up their own mind to the best accordingly. The success of our company will ultimately be judged by our ability to execute on our business opportunities and deliver in growth and earnings and the integrity that we all have here in Village Farms that we've had for 30 years. We are a very transparent, honest, and a company filled with integrity at every level. And we're very proud of that. So, with that said, that's a great segue, moving forward to our financial results. So, as I mentioned, we are very pleased to, once again this quarter, report positive net income from Pure Sunfarms, the second consecutive quarter of profitability. And with net income increasing substantially to $8.6 million from $5.5 million in Q4, that contributed to positive net income to Village Farms overall of $7.6 million or $0.16 a share after tax. Pure Sunfarms' sales in Canadian dollars tripled sequentially to $14.4 million or $10.8 million in US dollars. And EBITDA was $4.3 million Canadian or $6.4 million US for an EBITDA margin of 59%, up meaningfully from 48% in Q4. And just a quick note that we had a few questions around our JV partner pre-releasing Pure Sunfarms revenue number on May 1st. And I just wanna say that it is our current policy here at Village Farms not to report preliminary numbers. So, with respect to our numbers, its' worth noting that Pure Sunfarms achieved these results with Delta 3 still very much in early ramp-up mode. Only quadrant 2 which is about a quarter of the one million square feet was harvesting throughout the entire quarter. Half of quadrant 3 was only licensed at the end of January and planted out in February and had no harvest in the first quarter. And quadrant 4, the final one, was only licensed mid-March by Health Canada and was brought in production in April this quarter. And quadrant 1 was also brought back into production in early April after being offline for several months with the installation of lighting. And those several months were during that first quarter. So, we're really proud of the results based on just 25% of the operation and harvesting. Having overseen the start-up of numerous large-scale greenhouse operations for 30-plus years, I can tell you that this is a significant achievement to be posting these types of numbers at this point in the ramp-up to the operations. The performance makes Pure Sunfarms stand out in the Canadian license produce of landscape despite most others having a significant head start, in many cases, years ahead, and having spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars more to start up their operations. I have said this many times before, but it bears repeating now, especially that Pure Sunfarms has exercised its option on the second delta facility, Delta 2, which is approved on a back of success with Delta 3 and the strength of the outstanding team that's been put together at Pure Sunfarms. Converting an existing greenhouse with the additional benefit of experience and know-how in developing and ramping up large-scale operations, the largest in North America, that Village Farms brings to the table has a significant advantage. As I have said before, lower capital cost to convert. And as a reminder, we were able to secure 24 megawatts of power for each of the Delta 3 and 2 facilities directly from the utility without spending nearly $2 million of megawatt for cogeneration. That's a huge capital cost savings versus competitors who have to put cogen in. Secondly, the speed of conversion is much quicker than building a brownfield site, new development.<doc-sep>
There's been something of a role reversal for Tilray (NASDAQ: TLRY) and Village Farms International (NASDAQ: VFF). In 2018, Tilray emerged as the best-performing Canadian marijuana stock on the market, with shares skyrocketing 215%. Village Farms, on the other hand, saw its stock plunge 27%. But so far this year, the tables have been turned. Tilray is down 29% year to date. Meanwhile, Village Farms is one of the top Canadian marijuana stocks with a sizzling gain of 289%. Does the swing in momentum point to a brighter future for Village Farms? Or is Tilray the better long-term pick? Here's how the two Canadian marijuana stocks compare. Hands holding $100 bills fanned out with a marijuana leaf on top. Image source: Getty Images. The case for Tilray Tilray doesn't have the greatest production capacity in the cannabis industry. It doesn't have the highest sales. But there's one area where Tilray arguably beats every other Canadian marijuana producer: its impressive lineup of major partners. Let's start with Novartis. In 2018, Tilray teamed up with the big pharma company's Sandoz Canada subsidiary to market medical cannabis products. That collaboration expanded later in the year to a global one. Novartis is a well-known brand across the world and could be a nice plus in convincing healthcare providers in Europe to go with Tilray's medical cannabis products. Then there's the beverages market. No, Tilray hasn't received a huge investment like Canopy Growth did from major alcoholic beverage maker Constellation Brands. However, Tilray has joined forces with big beer maker Anheuser-Busch InBev to research nonalcoholic cannabis-infused beverages. Tilray has the consumer brands box checked, too. Earlier this year, the company announced a deal with Authentic Brands Group (ABG) to distribute cannabis-infused products for consumers. ABG markets 50 brands, including Nautica, Nine West, Prince, and Spyder. In addition to its key partnerships, Tilray has also been busy on the acquisitions front. In February, the company closed its buyout of Manitoba Harvest, the world's largest hemp foods manufacturer. That acquisition enabled Tilray to jump headfirst into the U.S. hemp market. Story continues With these major partners and an important acquisition under its belt, Tilray is poised to grow significantly as the global cannabis market expands. The case for Village Farms It wasn't all that long ago that Village Farms was known only for its greenhouse cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. But a pivotal deal in 2017 with marijuana producer Emerald Health Therapeutics changed the dynamics for Village Farms. The two companies formed a joint venture, Pure Sunfarms, with plans to convert a greenhouse owned by Village Farms into a cannabis production facility. A lot of progress has been made since then. Village Farms shares soared in April on the news that the entire growing area at the British Columbia greenhouse now operated by Pure Sunfarms was in production. This greenhouse should soon reach an annualized production run rate of around 75,000 kilograms and will be joined in the future by a sister facility that will double the joint venture's annual production. Pure Sunfarms has already lined up one important supply agreement for adult-use recreational marijuana in Canada. In February, the Ontario Cannabis Store selected Pure Sunfarms as a supplier. Ontario is the biggest market in the country. Village Farms also plans to expand into the U.S. hemp market. The company formed a joint venture with Nature Crisp to grow hemp outdoors to be used in extracting cannabidiol (CBD). Nature Crisp currently operates a family-owned farm located in southeast Georgia. However, the joint venture plans to cultivate hemp and produce hemp-derived CBD in additional states down the road. Better marijuana stock I think that Tilray's partnerships and established presence in major cannabis markets give it a clear advantage over Village Farms. While Village Farms stock is beating Tilray so far in 2019, my hunch is that it will be a different story over the longer term. But although I view Tilray as the better marijuana stock between these two, I don't see Tilray as a stock to buy right now. I think that there are other marijuana stocks that provide a more compelling risk-reward proposition. More From The Motley Fool Keith Speights has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Village Farms International, Inc. The Motley Fool recommends Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and Constellation Brands. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.