Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's JDE Peet's Half-Year 2025 Earnings Call. My name is Sharon, and I will be your operator for the call. For the duration of the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference call is being recorded. Following the presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. If you do have questions, please press the star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Once again, please press star one one if you wish to ask a question. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to our first speaker, Robin Jansen, Director of Investor Relations for JDE Peet's.
Thank you, Sharon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to JDE Peet's Earnings Call for the First Half of 2025. Joining me are Rafael Oliveira, CEO, and Yang Xu, CFO. After my introduction, Rafael will walk you through the operational and financial highlights related to our first half-year business performance, followed by a strategic update. Yang will then provide more detail on our financial performance and will provide an update on our full-year outlook. After that, we will be happy to answer your questions. Our press release was published at 7:00 A.M. CET this morning. Both the release and the slide deck for this call are available in the investor section of our website. A full transcript of this conference call will be made available there as soon as possible after this call.
Before handing over to Rafa, I'd like to draw your attention to the disclaimer on slide three regarding non-IFRS measures and forward-looking statements. Please take a moment to review this information carefully. With that, I'm pleased to hand over the call to you, Rafa.
Thank you, Robin, and welcome, everyone. I'm pleased to share the key highlights of the results of the first half of 2025 with you and provide you with an update on our five key priorities for the year, along with a brief recap of our new brand-led strategy we introduced at our Capital Markets Day on the 1st of July. As you saw in this morning's press release, we delivered another set of strong, broad-based results. On an organic basis, our sales were up 22.5%, our adjusted gross profit increased by 2.2%, and our adjusted EBIT grew by 2%. Our free cash flow was also solid at EUR 565 million, underscoring our strong cash-generating capabilities.
We are proud of this performance across top line, profitability, and cash, especially when considering the persistently high green coffee prices that we had to continue to deal with in the first half of 2025, which Yang will elaborate on later. Once again, we successfully managed to appropriately offset this semester's unprecedented level of inflation with efficiencies, productivities, and pricing across products and markets. This allowed us to protect our gross profit, enabling necessary investments for growth and profitability. Despite the short-term volume pressure we experienced during retailer negotiations in Europe at the start of the year, volumes rebounded quickly from March onwards, resulting in very resilient volume mix growth of 1% and overall stable market share performance, especially in faster-growing categories such as beans and aluminum capsules.
Especially in capsules, we are very pleased to see that again in the first half of 2025, we are outperforming the market with low teens organic sales growth fueled by mid-single-digit volume mix growth. We are also pleased with the progress we made on the five key priorities we set for 2025, which we shared with you when we published our full year 2024 results back in February. I'll briefly address the progress we've made on each of those five priorities in the next slide. Last but not least, we returned 43% of our free cash flow to shareholders. EUR 172 million was returned through dividends, while another EUR 71 million was returned through our EUR 225 million share buyback program, which we launched nearly five months ago as part of our EUR 1 billion share buyback commitment for the coming years.
By the 25th of July, we had completed 38% of the 2025 share buyback program. Overall, looking back at the first six months of the year, we are very pleased with the progress we made from a strategic, business, as well as financial perspective. More importantly, as a leadership team, we have clearly noticed that the organization is starting to refine momentum and that the new strategy and the size of actions we are taking are re-energizing and motivating our teams across the globe. Let's now take a stock of how we are progressing on the five key priorities we've made set for our team for 2025. First and foremost, pricing discipline.
It goes without saying that with an inflation headwind of about EUR 800 million in half one and an estimated total level of inflation at our cost base of around EUR 1.6 billion for the full year, the number one priority for the entire organization is to stay laser-focused and extremely disciplined on protecting our gross profit, our EBIT, and our free cash flow, which we did. We pulled all the levers we can to mitigate inflation and have built a robust pipeline of productivity and efficiency measures to absorb as much of the inflation headwind as possible. Only the part of inflation that we cannot offset, despite our efforts, has been and will be passed on to our value retail and out-of-home partners through price increases.
To this end, we are currently discussing pricing with customers across the globe, and I'm pleased to report that we expect to have successfully concluded price negotiations covering 87% of our total sales by the end of next week, which will then include France, where a different timeline is applicable due to the rules that apply to their market. To be clear, being disciplined on pricing and protecting our absolute gross profit is crucial to our ability to continue to invest in areas such as new product development, product quality, sustainability, capacity expansion, etc. This ultimately benefits all our stakeholders, including consumers, customers, employment, and the more than 1 million farmers we source from. Our second priority for 2025 is to identify and deliver additional efficiencies to fund incremental investments behind our leading brands, Peet's, L'OR, and our 10 iconic brands led by Jacobs.
We have done intensive granular analysis to identify the four main areas where we are going to get these productivities. We shared these four areas at our Capital Markets Day and started to execute on since the start of this year. The four areas we have identified are portfolio simplification, synergies in the way we work, drive continuous improvement, and focus on asset-light route to market and partnerships. We have a specific target for each of these areas and a very detailed zip code of where we are going to get these productivities from. In terms of timing, we expect to deliver EUR 250 million of net savings by the end of 2027 and in total EUR 500 million by 2032. Of course, we will update you on the progress we are making on this front on a regular basis.
Let me call out some of the most important initiatives we undertook in the first half of this year to simplify our operating model and optimize resource allocation. We divested our key business in Turkey, which was loss-making, to EFRA Holding. We discontinued the rollout of L'OR Barista machine in the U.S. We transferred our L'OR capsules business in the U.S. to Peet's in San Francisco to better capture the significant potential of the U.S. coffee market. In procurement, we implemented a design-for-value program that is already bringing productivity. Using our coffee expertise, we are able to mix our blends to optimize costs while maintaining quality. When it comes to manufacturing, we announced the intent to close our plant in Banbury in the U.K.
We also announced the optimization of our operating model in Europe by reducing the number of country clusters from 10 to 5, harmonizing ways of working across teams, and centralizing finance transactional activities in a Global Business Services model to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Yes, a good start has been made. As this is a significant and multi-year program, what we've done today is just the beginning, and we will continue to work on strategic initiatives to simplify and optimize the company. Stay tuned here.
Third, the strategic assessment we have done in the first half of the year and the new brand-led strategy that this resulted in provide us with a clear strategic roadmap to be much more selective and rigorous in our capital and resource allocation to drive brand investments behind our three big bets, Peet's, L'OR, and the 10 iconic brands led by Jacobs, with a bigger focus on organic growth. To reinvigorate the focus on organic growth, we are deploying, as the fourth priority, a spectrum of initiatives to increase agility, remove bureaucracy, and drive an ownership culture across the organization. An example of this is the two-day summit we organized right after the Capital Markets Day for the 100 most senior leaders of the company for alignment and deployment of the new brand-led strategy and crystallize what this means for the entire organization.
When it comes to the fifth priority, to put more emphasis on stakeholder value creation, I believe we are also making good progress. We continue to invest in the business with, for example, a mid-single-digit organic increase in A&P. We improved our engagement score. We are intentionally engaging an additional 165,000 farmers to reach a total of 1 million farmers by the end of this year. We deliver a solid free cash flow, which is used to return EUR 243 million to our shareholders and to reduce our net leverage to 2.5 times. Let me now briefly provide you with a recap of the new brand-led strategy we revealed at our Capital Markets Day on July 1st . We are simplifying the organization into one unified JDE Peet's with three big bets, Peet's, L'OR, and 10 local icons led by Jacobs.
These 10 local icons have amongst the strongest meaning, brand salience, and penetration in the markets where they are present and across all age groups. Very importantly as well, these are brands that enjoy very high rotation and have proven to be highly responsive to activation. These 10 iconic brands are 100% complementary since they mostly do not coexist, nor are they activated in one or same geography. Moving forward and leveraging the commonalities that bring these brands together, we will platform once and deploy multiple times. On the back of Jacobs, we will create a chassis that will adapt on the last mile for meaning and distinctivity. This is not a theoretical model. We have been experimenting over the last months, and we have proven the model can work.
The focus on these three big bets does not mean that the other remaining brands in the portfolio will, by definition, be neglected or sold. We see various future avenues for the second-tier brands and the ones that find themselves in the tail. These brands could either develop a plan that steps up their performance to aspire to become part of the group of local icons, or be transitioned to another brand like we have, for instance, done in the past with L'OR and Carte Noire that transitioned to L'OR, and Médaille d'Or transitioned to Jacobs in Switzerland. In some cases, we could conclude over time that we are no longer the best owner of certain brands, and thus we'll look for alternatives and state models.
Our transformation will be driven by five key catalysts: a winning culture of agility, ownership, and transparency, a consumer-led organization built on iconic brands, commercial excellence across four mission-critical capabilities, a simplified structure to an ambitious productivity program with financial discipline at the core. Before sharing some examples of the progress we've been making on these five catalysts, let me first highlight some of the promising product launches we have rolled out through our leading brands, Peet's, L'OR, and our 10 iconic brands led by Jacobs. The three big bets I just mentioned, anchored in our brand-led strategy, are creating a powerful focus for innovation. We are already seeing great results. We are bringing meaningful new products that meet changing and evolving needs and preferences at the right time while increasing the value of every cup. Let me share a few highlights from the first half of the year.
Peet's stepped into exciting new territory with the launch of Peet's Popping Pearls, a bold innovation designed to surprise and delight. These pearls gently burst with intense coffee flavor, delivering a unique and playful sensory experience. Because of its success, we've now brought Popping Pearls to more markets under the L'OR brand, where it's becoming a key feature in our experimental activations. With more than 50% of U..S coffee drinkers now choosing medium roast, Peet's is expanding its beans offering in the medium roast category. Off the Grid is our latest addition to the beans portfolio and specifically crafted to attract new consumers by offering the coffee they already love with the premium taste and quality that only Peet's can deliver. We are also building on the strong momentum of the fast-growing iced coffee trend, especially with millennials and Gen Z.
L'OR Coconut Iced Espresso made a strong debut in over 20 markets, and it's just the beginning. We are now preparing to launch a season lineup that reflects how our consumers live and feel throughout the year. Coming this autumn, L'OR Pumpkin Spicy, a typical warming blend with notes of cinnamon, clove, allspice, and nutmeg. In June, we launched L’OR Barista Absolute in six markets, our most advanced machine yet, offering 18 brew options, including a dedicated ice function to brew a perfect iced coffee through a machine. Whether hot or cold, each cup is elevated with richer flavor and aroma. To elevate the experience for consumers when brewed cold, our innovative plunge function pre-wets the coffee grounds, allowing them to bloom before extraction. This means you also get full aroma and flavor over ice when the ice button is selected.
Let's now switch to the iconic brands led by Jacobs and provide you with an example of the exciting opportunities we have to platform and roll out new innovations across these strong heritage brands, Jacobs Dubai Chocolate. In response to a fast-moving social media trend, this product went from concept to shelf in just 18 weeks. Its strong performance allows us to roll it out quickly across more than 20 markets under several of our leading brands, and it's already becoming one of the top-performing products in our mixes range in the U.K. Lastly, after Peet’s Ultra Coffee Concentrate opened a new category, Moccona launched liquid espresso coffee sachets in Australia. It's the first of its kind there and answers the growing need for convenience. 76% of surveyed consumers indicated that they will make it part of their daily routine.
With that kind of response, we are now planning a wider rollout across Asia. Let me now move on to share a selection of the progress we are making on each of our five strategic catalysts I just referred to. As I mentioned at the start of this call, we have clearly noticed that the organization is starting to refine momentum and that the new strategies and the size of actions we are taking are re-energizing and motivating our teams across the globe. This is also underpinned by the most recent outcome of our annual Gallup employee engagement survey. The score improved to 4.12 based on participation rate, which was 91% compared to 81% on average at other FMCG companies using Gallup.
We also announced a new setup for the central marketing organization aligned with our new brand-led strategy and aimed at consolidating all category teams under one portfolio strategy role to drive a holistic category agenda and align priorities. Scaling up expert capabilities and removing duplicities. To beef up commercial excellence, we have, among other things, set up a brand new revenue growth management platform and are enriching our key account management reach and capabilities. As you have heard earlier during this call, our simplification and productivity programs are in full swing, and our financial discipline remains strong, reflected in strong free cash flow, a leverage of 2.5 times, and 38% of our 2025 share buyback program complete. To wrap it all up, I would like to conclude that we've delivered a strong set of broad-based results. We've put a clear and simple brand-led strategy in place.
We've set the strategy in motion that are making solid progress since the start of the year. Taking these three points into account, we feel confident in raising our full-year guidance, which Yang will come back at the end of the session. With that, I would now like to hand the call to Yang to discuss our first-half financials and the outlook for the full year 2025.
Thank you, Rafa, and good morning, everyone. Following Rafa's overview of our H1 highlights, I will now provide more details on our financial performance and then update you on our outlook for full year 2025. Slide 14 shows that we have delivered a strong set of results across top line, profitability, and cash in the first half of 2025. Organically, our sales increased by 22.5%. Our adjusted gross profit increased by 2.2%. Our adjusted EBIT by 2%, reflecting a strong delivery in H1.
When taking into account the net effect of Forex and the changing scope, our sales increased to EUR 5 billion. Adjusted gross profit increased to EUR 1.7 billion. Adjusted EBIT increased to EUR 709 million, and our free cash flow was EUR 565 million. Slide 15 shows more details on the drivers of our sales. Our organic sales grew 22.5%. It was driven by pricing of 21.5% as we continue to pass through the necessary and appropriate pricing to offset incremental inflation. In light of this pricing, volume mix growth showed a strong resilience with a plus of 1%. The negative foreign exchange impact of 2.8% was mainly driven by the depreciation of the Brazilian real. The 0.2% contribution from scope reflects the consolidation of Caribou as of the 31st of March 2024 and the exit of the key business in Turkey at the start of May.
Let's now go to Slide 16 to look in more details at our EBIT performance. Our organic adjusted EBIT increased by 2%. What this bridge clearly shows is two things. First, we managed an inflation headwind of about EUR 800 million, which is more than our entire adjusted EBIT we generated in the first half of 2024. Second, we maintained our absolute gross profit by implementing appropriate price adjustments to address inflationary pressure that could not be fully mitigated through productivity and other measures. The bar chart shows that we have successfully protected our absolute profit base, reflecting the resilience and strong market position of our brands. Our overall A&P spend was up mid-single digit organically, with a stable to increasing A&P spend across all four segments. Let's now take a closer look at the organic sales and adjusted EBIT performance by segment on Slide 17.
Looking at the performance by segment, you can see that all four segments contributed to our top-line growth. When it comes to profitability, both Europe and LAMEA developed strong performance at gross profit and adjusted EBIT level, which were partially offset by declines in profitability at Peet's and APAC. Let me now go through each segment one by one. In Europe, volume mix performance was very resilient at 1.8%. Taking into account pricing of + 15.4%. Part of the relatively strong volume mix performance, we believe, reflects some consumer pre-buying ahead of planned price increases in the second half of the year.
We estimate this pre-buying effect had a positive effect of around 2-3 percentage points on volume mix performance in the first half, which by nature will therefore become the headwind for volume mix performance in the second half of the year and is fully reflected in our updated outlook of the full year. In H1, markets such as France, the Nordics, and Italy, and brands including Jacobs, L'OR, Douwe Egberts, and Gevalia drove organic sales growth. The adjusted EBIT increased organically by 8.6%, reflecting an increase in gross profit supported by the retailer pre-buying I just mentioned, and an increase in A&P spend as we actively reallocate funds to areas where we get better returns. In LAMEA, organic sales growth was driven by 55% price growth, which was offset by a decline in volume mix of - 1.2%.
Various markets in LAMEA actually delivered positive volume mix, which was offset by Brazil, which continued to experience softer market conditions. Organic sales growth was driven by brands such as Pilão in Brazil and Jacobs in Eastern Europe and South Africa. Adjusted EBIT increased organically by 19.2%, which mainly reflects an increase in gross profit, productivities, and a stable A&P spend. The freed-up A&P as a result of the discontinuation of the rollout of the L’OR Barista machines in the US was reallocated to higher impact opportunities elsewhere in LAMEA. At Peet's, organic sales growth was driven by 3.5% price and 0.6% volume mix. Peet's in-home business continued to deliver competitive growth across its Peet's, Caribou, Stockton, and Intelligentsia brands. In Peet's US coffee stores, same-store sales and ticket size were up, and Peet's China continued to deliver strong double-digit organic sales growth.
Adjusted EBIT decreased organically by 37.6%, which is a result of two main drivers. First, as a reminder, Peet's had a high base of comparison related to a one-off EUR 16 million insurance payout benefit in H1 2024. Second, Peet's saw a decrease in gross profit, reflecting the interplay of the phasing of inflation and pricing between H1 and H2. This is reflecting that Peet's is a challenger brand in the US coffee market and therefore follows instead of leads when it comes to passing through pricing. The level of A&P remained stable in the first half. In APAC, organic sales growth of 8.4% was driven by an increase of 7.7% in price and 0.7% in volume mix, mainly reflecting higher price elasticity in the region.
Sales performance was geographically mixed, with strong performances in countries such as China and Thailand, partially offset by softer performances in countries such as Malaysia and New Zealand. Organic sales growth was driven by brands such as Moccona, Super, and Old Town. The adjusted EBIT for APAC decreased organically by 14.7%, mainly reflecting phasing of productivities this year and last year and the interplay of the phasing of inflation and pricing between the first and the second half. A&P spend was relatively stable compared to the same period of last year. On page 18, as Rafa mentioned earlier in the call, the three big bets, Peet's, L’OR, and the local iconic brands led by Jacobs, they are core to our brand-led strategy, and that's where we allocate most of our management attention and resources. This means that we will also closely track how those three big bets will perform.
In H1, these three big bets altogether had solid performance with a combined organic growth of gross profit of 3%. Let's now move to Slide 19 and have a look at our net profit development in absolute terms and per share. On the left-hand side of this slide, you can see that our underlying EPS, excluding the effect of the fair value change of our equity swaps, has increased by 3.4% to EUR 1.02. This was mainly driven by better operational performance and foreign exchange gains in the net finance line. When keeping the effect of the fair value changes of our equity swap in, the underlying EPS increased from EUR 0.76 in the first half of 2024 to EUR 1.33 in the first half of 2025. Let me now share a bit more detail on our free cash flow and net debt developments on Slide 20.
Our free cash flow generation of EUR 565 million in the first half reflects solid operational performance driven by higher EBITDA while absorbing a net cash outflow from working capital. This net outflow in working capital reflects the following movements in the period. Inventories increased mainly on the back of higher green coffee price. Receivables increased due to higher sales. This was partly offset by payables, and the increase in payables on the back of higher green coffee prices was partially offset by euro/U.S. dollar related Forex effect. The net debt bridge on the right-hand side shows that our free cash flow enables us to return EUR 243 million to shareholders and reduce our net debt position by EUR 337 million. Therefore, contributing to an improvement of our net leverage to 2 1/2 times.
Before I update you on our outlook for full year 2025, I would like to briefly remind you on the next slide, Slide 21, of the refined capital allocation priorities we shared at our capital market day at the start of July. As part of a renewed strategy, we'll emphasize creating and unlocking value by focusing on absolute gross profit growth, adjusted EBIT growth, and free cash flow generation. We will deploy our capital in a more disciplined and intentional way to enable our strategy and further strengthen our financial profile. Our first priority is to reinvest in our business, especially in our three strategic big bets, using productivity from within to fund such growth. Second, as we continue to grow EBITDA and generate strong cash flows, we're committed to building an even stronger balance sheet through cycles and target now a net leverage of two times.
This is more conservative than our previous target of two and a half times, which we successfully delivered in the first half. Third, we also want to deliver a more consistent return to shareholders. We aim to increase our dividend gradually and steadily over time. Next to that, we will execute the multi-year EUR 1 billion share buyback program we started in March. As mentioned by Rafa earlier in this call, 38% of the EUR 250 million earmarked for this year had been completed by the 25th of July. When it comes to M&A, we will deprioritize leverage acquisitions and focus on organic growth. Our M&A focus will have a bias for asset light and, to the extent relevant, explore non-core asset diversities.
That said, we do believe that in the long run, we're still a strong consolidator in the category, but right now we're focused on getting our own house in order. Let me now update you on our outlook for 2025, starting with green coffee price developments, as these remain a very important factor in how our financial performance will take shape. As you can see on the graph on Slide 23, green coffee prices have gone up very significantly and have reached historical highs in the first half of 2025. As you know, we hedge our green coffee price exposure in a very disciplined and consistent way. This allows us to create sufficient time to take the right measures to offset the negative effect that such inflation would otherwise have on our absolute level of profitability.
It is therefore important to keep in mind that the green coffee prices in H1 2025 were on average more than 60% higher than the same period of last year. That is exactly why we're implementing significant mitigating initiatives, including appropriate and additional pricing to offset the significant headwinds in H2 and maintain absolute profit levels. Looking ahead, green coffee experts believe that green coffee price developments will remain volatile due to ongoing supply concerns linked to climate, tight stocks, and continued speculative activities. The good thing is that to date, we did not see meaningful signs that price elasticity is materially going up. We know that the vast majority of consumers do not lower in-home coffee consumptions when prices go up. Having said that, we expect to see some short-term volume pressure again during price negotiations with our retail partners, most notably in Europe.
However, based on the attractiveness of the category, the equity of our brands with our consumers, and the collaborative relationships we have with our retail and out-of-home partners, we expect that some of the volume impact can be temporary, similar to what we have seen in the first half of the year. This leads me to Slide 24. Our strong financial performance in the first half of the year provides a solid foundation for our full year results. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we continue to face significant inflationary pressure and ongoing volatility in green coffee prices. To address this, we're implementing further mitigation actions, including appropriate pricing adjustments. In addition, volume mix performance in H2 will reflect the impact of the retailer pre-buying effect in Europe that benefited in the first half of the year.
Taking the strong performance in H1 and these factors related to H2 together, we're confident in raising our full year outlook. We now expect organic sales growth to reach a high 10% and anticipate that adjusted EBIT will be at least stable on an organic basis. We also continue to expect to deliver a free cash flow of around EUR 1 billion. With that, we've come to the end of our prepared remarks, and with that, I will now turn it over to the operators so we can start the Q&A.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to take your questions. Please remember that you are limited to one question and a follow-up per round. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. We will now take our first question. One moment, please. And your first question comes from the line of Robert Jan Vos from ABN Amro Oddo BHS. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Good morning all. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. First one is, did you experience new delistings already or anticipate delistings with the 13% tail of the remaining customer negotiations? That's my first question. Second question, you increased the guidance for adjusted EBIT. Quite significantly for the full year. Why has this not? Why is this not reflected in your free cash flow guidance as well? That's my second question. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, Robert. I'll take the first one. Jan can answer the second. On the delist, no, we have not experienced.
I'll dissociate a little bit the two things that you mentioned because in terms of negotiation, no, we have not experienced delisting right now because of the price negotiations. I mean, the reality is we had, as we shared with all of you, we had a tough January-February negotiations, but then in March, everything rebounded. The volumes rebounded, showing the resilience of the category. I mean, we are still confident in the second round that a similar pattern will happen with the remaining customers that we haven't closed yet. Not associated to the brands at all that we mentioned on the capital markets day. In terms of delisting, nothing significant.
In terms of the brands, what you mentioned, remembering with you talking about the 33 brands that we talked on the capital markets day as the tail brands, I mean, we are now doing the work, and we mentioned briefly on the prepared remarks that we are doing the work to see which, and this is all over the globe, okay? It's not only Europe, but which brands, I mean, what should we do with each one of them? We are going very detailed on which one of them, which brands we should convert into other existing brands, which brands, in fact, it doesn't make sense, we should just discontinue, and which brands eventually will take different routes or will upgrade into becoming a relevant brand. I mean, we want to drive this process, let's say, proactively.
We will do this ourselves and then come to the retailers on the country that carry those brands to decide how to operate with them. It's not necessarily related to the negotiations of things. As I said, as we said on the prepared remarks, negotiations, we've done 87% of the global negotiations right now for the second wave is concluded, and there's still like 13% pending, but no delisting expected.
I take the second question. Hey, morning, Robert. No, we are very happy with our first half-year results and other results. We also raised our full-year guidance in terms of adjusted EBIT. As everyone may remember, our prior guidance was a low single-digit decline, and now we raised it up to at least stable. We are very happy with the performance, but cautiously optimistic for the full year.
However, when you think about the EBIT in the grand scheme of cash flow, which has been very consistent in the past two years, averaging a billion, the EBIT movement by itself, the raise of the guidance, we'll be talking about tens of millions. That's why in the grand scheme of the free cash flow of the $1 billion, that's why we confidently confirm our free cash flow full-year guidance, still around $1 billion.
That's clear. Thank you.
Thank you.
Sure.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Antoine Prévot from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Two questions for me, please. First one on pricing. I mean, looking towards the second half of the year.
This new price round, considering you have pretty much the same COGS headwind, about EUR 800 million incremental on each half, I mean, how much additional pricing are you talking about? What level of magnitude? On elasticity for my second question, I mean, overall compared to 2022, 2023, which was the last period of major inflation, I mean, you have much better elasticity around, even including the pre-buying in Europe. What is different this time around compared to last time? Why is elasticity much better this time?
Thank you. Hi, Antoine. Good to hear from you. I'll take the first one, the pricing first on the second. What we try to do in our model, obviously, is to offset as much of the pricing we can with productivities, efficiencies, then whatever we cannot, we pass through. As you mentioned, green coffee prices have remained quite high.
We expect about the same level of price increase that we did in the first half and the second half, so roughly like mid-teens, a price that will be required. Again, not very different in terms of absolute levels in the first and the second half. The second question on elasticity, what really happened, as you know, elasticity in coffee is quite low and has remained low. In fact, in the first half, has been actually lower despite the price, has been lower than historical, so at a very low level. What we do expect is in the second half, you're going to have some elasticity again back to historical levels, so a bit higher than the first half, but still quite low. According to many years of history here, elasticity varies a lot by country, okay?
Depending on the legacy of the country consumption, etc., you can have pretty big variations of elasticity, but you're talking - 0.3 elasticity on average. Again, elasticity on the first half was even lower than that. We do expect a bit higher on the second half. That's the answer on elasticity. You also had a question on. Comparing—no, that was it, huh?
Yeah.
Is that what you—the answer to your question, Antoine?
Yeah. And just as a follow-up on pricing, is it fair to assume that on LAMEA, considering pricing is probably more linked to spot price. Your pricing level here should clearly decelerate?
Yes. Yeah, it's fair to assume that. Indeed, as you're right, the price tends to move, let's say, quicker. And. The hedges tend to be shorter. So indeed, the market reacts much faster, especially in Brazil. Which is an important market for us.
So yes, that's indeed true.
Amazing. Thank you.
Thank y ou.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of David [Ruth] from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi there, everyone, and well done on the solid state of results. I just wanted to get a quick check-in. Perhaps in terms of your newer innovation, can you just talk about exactly when the pipeline will flow through and of the newer products that have come through? I mean, what sort of resonance have you seen with. Your retail partners and customers? And then the second one is, I know it's a smaller part of the business, but could you just quantify the impact from. Tariffs? I know there is some chat around green coffee beans. Possibly. Being exempted from. Tariffs into the U.S., but in terms of any finished product flow across the
Sea, can you just give us an impact, sort of an update on what you think the impact could be there? Thank you.
Just to see if I understand, David, your first question is just an update on where we are in terms of innovation. Is that correct?
Yeah. Of the products that we saw at the CMD and that you highlighted today, I mean, which of those have you rolled out yet? If not, can you just give us an understanding on the timing exactly of those coming through? And if you have any that have been rolled out so far, what's the feedback been?
Yeah. We highlighted a few that you saw in the CMD and you saw here on the. Prepared remarks. For example, the coffee pearls, it's something that. We launched in—we did a test, let's say, at Peet's stores. During the.
Second quarter, halfway of the second quarter of. The year, and it performed extremely well. So now we rolled over not only across Peet's, but also taking to different markets lower and starting to explore. Is it called a new category, the coffee pearls? We are quite excited by that. If you look at the parallel, it's the bubble tea, right, which is a multi-billion category. The parallel will be the coffee pearls. I mean, the acceptance of retailers, of consumers, has been really significant. In terms of impact on the P&L, frankly, to be material, I wouldn't expect this to be that soon. It probably takes one or two years to be a material thing because it's almost like you're creating a new category. That has been, like, the green shoots of it have been very, very positive.
The same way with what we mentioned here as well, the medium roast in Peet's, it's extremely important innovation because Peet's was famous or well-known for dark roast. Expanding the portfolio of Peet's, you remember from capital markets day we showed the details where it's going to be extremely important to have more SKUs in order to compete in the U.S. and conquer the rest of the country with more distribution. Again, the acceptance where we are distributed has been extremely strong. Those are two that I'm very optimistic with what the results are showing. The last one I would mention is the platformization, we call it, Jacobs and the Icons. The Dubai chocolate is one example that we launched in several brands now, and it's performing extremely well. We gave the example in the U.K. where it's one already, the top mix is in the U.K.
This product, I mean, we do expect to have a very good return on it. Again, as it flows to the P&L, you remember from the capital markets day, we do model this into more towards the second part of 2026 and then 2027 to have a real financial impact on it. On the second question you had on the tariffs, it's just important to highlight here one thing. The main one is the tariffs will impact everyone, and it's not positive, right? Coffee prices have been—green coffee prices have been up a lot already globally, as we talked about, as you know. Obviously, tariffs, it's a small piece of it, but it doesn't help. The big effect is the tariffs from Brazil because as of today, starting August 1, so in a couple of days, there's a 50% tariff from Brazil into the US.
That's a big impact on the industry. Remember, Brazil produces roughly 40% of the coffee of the world. Compared to our—this will affect the whole industry, right? We compare to our competitors in the US, the proportion that we use of Brazilian coffee is significantly smaller than most of other coffee players. I can tell you, it's, I mean, more or less. Less than 30% of what we consume, it comes from Brazil. Other players have much more, sometimes above 50%. The expectation is assuming these tariffs continue, goes through, prices will have to go up overall in the US. On a relative basis, we think we are better positioned because we do not have as much coffee coming from Brazil, but they will have to come up. It will be a further impact on passing through price to consumers.
Okay. That is great answer .
Just to follow up on those, firstly, on the Brazil impact, I assume within your expectation from the teens pricing for the second half that that is taken into account. The second point on your new products coming out, would they be accretive at an EBIT margin level, just given the amount of marketing, etc., that is going in? Yeah. Pricing, yes, it is taken into account right now, the pricing. Remember, as Yang mentioned, that in the US, although we have been probably pricing ahead of competition, we are more followers than price leaders, okay? Different than many parts of the world. Yes, it is modeling already. The margin on the innovations, our aim is always to be accretive. I am not going to tell you 100% of the innovations are always accretive because it is not the case.
Sometimes you will be incremental absolute numbers or in slightly new categories like bringing new consumers, but it might be margin dilutive. The aim is always to be in some of those mixes overall, they have a pretty high margin. When we are doing, for example, the Dubai chocolates of the world and this type of mixes, it is very high margin. Pearls is a pretty good margin as well. It is accretive. It varies. We have to go one by one. Our target is always to be margin accretive, but it is not going to be always 100% the case.
Very good. Thank you very much.
Thank you, David.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Feng Zhang from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. I have got two.
First one is about the new products. It is great to see that the new products are yielding some early results. Do you have a rough estimate how much the growth in H1 is driven from this product rolling out? That means, is there any factor like retailers are building up stocks, or is it still too early to talk about impact? My second one is follow-up on the Brazil impact on tariffs. Are you looking to change the sourcing in the long term to mitigate impact? Thank you.
Feng, good to hear from you. The new product's impact is negligible, okay? It's not relevant at all right now. It's still very small, and it doesn't affect the P&L, so no effect of it.
The tariffs, I mean, the reality is it will be frankly impossible for the whole globe to change the coffee sourcing, let's say, from Brazil because of the size of Brazil's production of coffee globally. As I said, about 40% of the global coffee comes from Brazil. I mean, there's a lot of other regions developing coffee plantations, as you know, and there are many countries in Central America, in Africa, in Asia, but it's far away to be able to manage to mitigate the impact from Brazil. Like I said, we don't source as much from Brazil. We are quite confident, and that's a lot because of the positioning of the type of coffee we have with Peet's. I mean, we don't source a lot. We source mainly from Central America.
If you take an average, most of the countries we source, the tariff is going to be around 10%. We don't really source from Vietnam, which is mainly the Robusta one, which is the second largest producer. The reality, the impact for us is going to be quite small now. I don't think we're going to change necessarily the sourcing, but it will impact the whole industry, indeed. There's a lot of conversations, rumors that Brazilian producers are going to try to deviate more of their production into different regions because it will be too expensive in the US. There's going to be a shift in the, let's say, the global equilibrium of where coffee goes, and that's expected. As I mentioned, we don't expect a major shift for us, but it will affect the whole industry.
Assuming this 50% sticks, right, which we also don't know if it will change. It could change, but it's hard to predict.
Thank you.
Thank you, Feng.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Folan from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I don't know if I missed it. My first question is just on the efficiencies to fuel brand growth. Can you comment on what the benefits have been there thus far, and has there been any cost benefits that can be quantified? Secondly, on Peet's, there's been more positive commentary on the US coffee market recently. Should we expect Peet's to continue the momentum we've seen in H1 into H2? Because I think the concern previously has been how high ticket sizes were before.
I guess, are we now seeing consumers becoming more used to these prices now, or how should we think about squaring two points of ticket sizes going into the second half versus the wider coffee market and Peet's? Thank you.
Hey, Patrick, this is Yang. Good morning. Let me take your first question about the productivity. As you have heard from us, we were quite excited with our entire productivity program, which we have. Specific initiatives behind the EUR 500 million that is our target. Half of it, we're confident we can deliver by the end of 2027. Now, what has happened in this maybe first half here, let me zoom in a little bit. When we talk about portfolio simplification as a concrete example, we announced our closure of a Banbury plant that is a processing and packaging factory in the U.K.
On the second bucket, we also talk about synergies in the ways of working within ourselves. We also just recently announced that we are streamlining and reorganizing our European businesses. We were having 10 clusters, and now we are leaning up into five clusters. On top of that, we also have centralized our entire European finance function into our offshore or nearshore GBS function, our Global Business Services. That creates a lot of synergies, by the way, of working. The third bucket is we talk about continuous improvement. Early on, Rafa also mentioned that our design for value program is well underway. We're very pleased to see that the momentum is going on. The last one, focus on the asset-light route to the market. We also have announced that we're well underway in the U.S. for our DSD.
As you may remember, our Peet's use the DSD route to market, and now we are transitioning into a direct-to-serve type of a business that will be much more asset-light and C&A-light. Those productivity programs are well progressing, and we have very detailed initiatives and owners and timeline. Of course, for now, at this particular moment, it's a bit too early to demonstrate all the ways. For every initiative, we have specific business cases and yields in a certain return for us. What we do intend to do is, as we promised, we will report our progress. As we continue this journey and on a full-year basis, we'll be able to give a snap update on that.
Patrick, on the Peet's, I mean, it's obvious you can see the numbers. We are very happy with overall performance of the company, right, in the first half, but not necessarily with Peet's.
I mean, we do not like to see that we decline a bit. Performance in Peet's. And as you noticed, I mean, the reality, as we mentioned also on the remarks. The market has been lagging a bit, the cost increase, the overall market, and consequently, we do as well. I mean. We have not been able to price as much as is needed given what happened to the green coffee prices. This is happening now, and the last. Signs that we have in the last couple of months have been quite positive on the market acceptance of pricing. We do think, as you heard in other. Companies' calls, the market is starting to pick up, and consumption is picking up. Elasticity remains quite low. We are still confident that we are going to have a much better. Run rate going forward on the Peet's performance.
As you know, it is a critical. One of the big bets for us is the development of Peet's across the country. Short term, let us say half one, we were not. As pleased with Peet's what could be. The market was not as good, but the last few months have been much better. Again, we are much more positive what will happen in the second half.
Okay. Thank you, Yang. Thank you, Rafa.
Thank you, Patrick.
Thank you. We are now approaching the end of the call. We will now take our last question for today. The last question comes from the line of Jeremy Kincaid from Van Lanschot Kempen. Please go ahead.
Good morning, all. I have two questions also.
The first one is just on the price increases that you have managed to put across in the different regions. You have obviously already talked about Peet's and LAMEA, but I was just wondering if you could talk to. Price increases in Europe versus APAC. Obviously, APAC is a little bit lower, so I was just wondering as to why that is the case. My second question is, if we look at the difference between. EBIT and adjusted EBIT, the difference is the largest this half compared to all your other halves you have been listed. I was just hoping if you could talk through the various adjusting items that have occurred. This half and maybe give an indication as to whether or not some of these larger adjusting items might continue into the future or not. Thank you.
Hi, Jeremy. I will take the first one on the price.
Yang can explain the difference on EBIT. The price, I mean, as I mentioned here, we do expect pricing first half and second half roughly about the same levels, call it like P18 in Europe. Again, we've implemented in the first half. At the beginning of the year, we had a lot of pushback. Eventually, due to, we believe, the strength of our brands and then the good relationships we have, the prices went through and the volumes fully recovered. Elasticity, as we mentioned on the full-year call in February, I mean, the impact you see in volume sometimes is very short-lived because it's retaliations. The consumption, which ultimately is what matters, remains strong, and we recover that volume, as you see on the full-year results. We are right now in the middle of these negotiations. As we mentioned, globally, we have 87% of this concluded.
There's still a few customers that we need to sign off and be there on the shelf. We do expect this to be implemented. We do need this to be implemented. Consequently, we also expect slightly higher elasticity, as I mentioned, than in the first half. I mean, it hasn't happened before to have two price increases of this same magnitude in one year. It is very high. Unfortunately, that's what needs to happen for us, for the industry. We do expect a bit higher elasticity, but not significant, and it's modeled already on our guidance. For this, I mean, that's Europe. Asia, it's a bit different because the mix in Asia is very different. There's a lot of mixes, which is not only coffee or pure coffee, but it has milk, sugar, other components on the product.
The impact of green coffee is smaller, albeit still high, but it's smaller overall. In some countries, we saw a higher elasticity in countries, as I mentioned before. Elasticity can vary quite a bit globally. In some countries where coffee is not a legacy coffee country, you saw more elasticity overall in consumption with the price increases. It has taken a bit longer. Consequently, we are putting through, as we said, we are a pass-through company, a pass-through category, and we're going to pass through everything that we need apart from what we can avoid with efficiency. This price is happening as we speak, and it should see a bigger impact. Maybe Yang can take the EBIT adjustment.
Yeah, Jeremy, I'll take the second one. As you see the adjustment, first of all, I think it's important to lay out that it's a very consistent approach and methodology versus prior.
However, it is true that this year, in the first half year, we had a big swing of mark-to-market results. Those are the derivatives, particularly for the commodities that we're hedging, that we have a mark-to-market swing year -over- year, almost a little bit more than EUR 140 million per se by itself. Of course, it's not yet settled and just a point in time of how the market is trending versus our hedging. Beyond that, smaller things, for example, the amortization of intangible that's mostly driven by because we sold off our offshore business. Some of the old books and the non-cash item is written off. That's an entire swing coming from that. Share-based comp is, I have to say, much more representative for the ongoing basis because last year, there was a one-off because of a departure of an executive. That's some forfeiture over there.
Last year's comp base was lower. This year's more representative. Rest of them are transformation activities, as I earlier mentioned, squarely to support our productivity program. In terms of our Banbury manufacturing closure, it was related to our operating model change and so on and so forth. Those things have a specific return and initiatives that support our overall productivity program. I hope this answers your question.
Very clear. Thank you very much.
Super.
Thank you. I would now like to return the call to the speakers.
Thank you, Sharon. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for attending today's earnings call and for taking part in the discussion about our results. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact the IR team. We're happy to answer your questions. Again, thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.