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Water Tower Research

Water Tower Research is a leading equity research firm that provides research on micro, small and mid cap companies.

Water Tower Research was founded by Wall Street veterans after witnessing a fundamental shift in the investment research industry with the result being a declining knowledge base among investors, a lack of awareness and a shrinking pool of fundamental research being conducted on companies across the small-cap and micro-cap spectrum. The same issues are now increasingly occurring in the mid-cap space. This sea change within the investment community is impacting not only the companies themselves but also current shareholders and potential investors. With significantly less active sell-side sponsorship by Wall Street, a substantial information gap has developed between companies and various constituents in the financial community. The net result is fewer channels for insight and information to flow between companies and investors.

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Equity Bottom-Up

Rayonier Advanced Materials / Equity Bottom-Up

<ul><li>CEO announces plans to retire. On December 10, 2025, RYAM announced that CEO and President De Lyle Bloomquist will retire as soon as a new CEO is hired and will leave the company’s Board of Directors prior to the Board’s Annual Meeting, which is scheduled for May 2026. </li><li>Bloomquist came out of retirement to take an active management (CEO) role at RYAM in May 2022 and has been instrumental in shaping the company’s strategy of pivoting it away from its commodity cellulosics business toward specialty cellulosics applications and emphasizing value over volume.</li><li>Under his leadership, the company embarked on its biomaterials strategy of expanding its product offering beyond cellulosics into higher-value, faster-growing opportunities in bioethanol, prebiotics, and tall oil production and successfully created the BioNova JV to fund the initiative and accelerate infrastructure buildout and go-to-market strategy for Biomaterials’ Portfolio 1 slate of products.</li></ul>

CEO announces plans to retire. On December 10, 2025, RYAM announced that CEO and President De Lyle Bloomquist will retire as soon as a new CEO is hired and will leave the company’s Board of Directors prior to the Board’s Annual Meeting, which is scheduled for May 2026. Bloomquist came out of retirement to take an active management (CEO) role at RYAM in May 2022 and has been instrumental in shaping the company’s strategy of pivoting it away from its commodity cellulosics business toward specialty cellulosics applications and emphasizing value over volume.Under his leadership, the company embarked on its biomaterials strategy of expanding its product offering beyond cellulosics into higher-value, faster-growing opportunities in bioethanol, prebiotics, and tall oil production and successfully created the BioNova JV to fund the initiative and accelerate infrastructure buildout and go-to-market strategy for Biomaterials’ Portfolio 1 slate of products.

RYAM: CEO Change Could Bring Strategy Refinement