Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Bega Group Full Year 2023 results conference. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Barry Irvin, Executive Chairman. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and welcome, everybody. I'm very, very pleased to be with you for this FY 2023 results presentation. I think it is fair to say, it's this year could be described in many ways, but I think dynamic may well be the most appropriate. We began the year with rapidly rising global commodity prices, which we saw farm-gate milk prices go to record high levels in the midst of coming out of the impact of COVID and having rapidly rising inflation in many other parts of the business. Of course, that saw us having to be very agile around how we might face into those challenges.
I'm pleased to report that I think we've managed those significant variations, which are actually included, are then rapid decline in global commodity prices in the second half of the year, as very well. I think importantly, we continue to position the business well for growth, and we continue to be very confident in our strategy, even though we're dealing with some very dynamic circumstances in the last year or two. I think if I take you firstly to the key messages slide, which is on page four. Sorry, page three, if people are following the presentation. I think the thing that we would say that we are delighted with is the branded strategy.
So that disciplined strategy that we've had for some of the last five years in earnest, if you like, beginning with the acquisition of the Vegemite and Peanut Butter Grocery business, right through to the more recent acquisitions of Lion Dairy and Drinks. That predominantly branded strategy that leaves us with some of Australia's most iconic brands has certainly delivered for us in the second half. It delivered, of course, faced the challenge of getting some, you know, significant cost increases into the market in the early part of the year. But having those brands performed well with you know, retaining their positions in terms of market share and growing volume.
That, I guess, is the key theme as we look forward. We continue to invest in those growth categories. We continue to invest in our brands and in our higher-value products. While we recognize the challenges in the bulk commodity area of the business, we do still also recognize the opportunity in some of our high-end nutraceutical and dairy nutrients. We have announced at the end of June that we are restructuring the business to accelerate the alignment of the organizational branded strategy to the branded strategy. That was always part of the strategy, but we had some opportunities, which Pete also will talk to a little later, around how we could speed that alignment up.
I've mentioned, interestingly, the volatility of the year that we've been in. As far as the commodity markets are concerned, we did see those rapid rises, but we then equally saw rapid falls with the commodity milk market decreasing by in excess of 30% in the second half of the year, and that, of course, impacted the performance of our bulk business. Interestingly, while historically, we could have seen a farm-gate milk price reset to a reduced commodity value in Australia, historically, this year, we haven't seen that happen.
So as we look forward to FY 2024, we do continue to see what has been an increasing disconnection between the international commodity value of dairy products and Australian farm gate milk price, as volumes have decreased and indeed capacity has remained high. And again, we'll chat about that a little bit more later in the business, but it has caused us to make a decision to rightsize the infrastructure, make sure it's in a position to support our brands, and take opportunities in the international markets and in the commodity and nutritional markets when they arrive.
But it was I think it's an important decision to say that, we will steer into the challenges that we see across the industry in terms of milk production and overcapacity, right-size the commodity infrastructure, and of course, that has meant that we've also taken a large impairment on those assets this year that has impacted our financial results. It is important to note that that's a non-cash impairment. I think importantly, given the volatility, given the changing environment, but also given the great opportunity we see going forward, particularly in our brand business, that our balance sheet is strong. I'm really pleased to report that, we finished the year, the financial year with a strengthened Leverage Ratio of 1.6. If I do go to the results, I'll turn to the next page, page 4.
And look, we do think that it's more appropriate to chat to the normalized results, particularly in a year where we've had such a large change and indeed, a large non-cash impairment. And I would. The only other comment I would make about that non-cash impairment, it reflects, it does not - It's not a reflection of the quality of the infrastructure that we own, but it is a reflection of the fact that the volumes of milk available and so we have to pay for that milk is not seeing that infrastructure perform at the way we would like that to occur. So that's resulting in non-cash impairment.
From a normalized point of view, it was a volatile year and a challenging year, and in terms of those price increases, it's good that we'll talk a little more to later. They have impacted our overall performance. The two key things being the timing of getting the price increases through into our branded market, into our branded business, and indeed, the decline in the commodity sector presented a normalized EBITDA of AUD 160.2 million. I think I won't dwell too much on the other financial outcomes.
Obviously, from a statutory point of view, there was that large after-tax impairment of AUD 230-odd million that did see us announce a statutory loss. Perhaps the only other comment to make is that we'll be able to please, although it is a lesser dividend than last year, given the circumstances of the year that we've been, and we're pleased to add to the AUD 0.045 per share dividend that we announced at the half year with a further AUD 0.03, giving us a full-year dividend of AUD 0.075.
Moving to slide 5, and I think, as we manage the variations that can exist when you're a food and agricultural business, it's important to be confident in your strategy. The reality is that, our strategy has not changed. So actually, the circumstances this year have reinforced the importance of the strategy that we have been working on over the last five years, and indeed, the strategy that we will adopt in the next five years. That still remains to become that great Australian food company and create great food for a better future.
So what we wanna do is make sure that we're producing food that is good for people, that is created as sustainably as possible, and is delivered to people in a manner that they can easily use it at a price that is affordable, and in a way that is sustainable. So our strategy has not changed, and the strength of our brands reinforces the fact that, we're very confident that we will execute that strategy well.
If I take you to the next page, and many of you would have seen that, this page or variations of this page in terms of how far the business has come from fundamentally, a small, largely commodity business, into now what I would call an emerging brand powerhouse. I think that, interestingly, as this page is presented, you see some of our most iconic brands there, and the arrow to the future is pointing to those brands, which I think is metaphorically and literally true. We see the future in our branded business being full of great opportunities. That, interestingly, does include the fact that we think that our infrastructure, our existing infrastructure, including our commodity infrastructure, will play a very important role in supporting those brands.
So it still has a very important role in our business going forward in our forward-looking five-year plan. But there's no doubt that the brands this year, and particularly the second half of this year, demonstrated the strength in this business and demonstrate the opportunity for us to be able to increasingly deal with the volatility in farmgate milk price, the volatility in farmgate milk volumes, and indeed, the variation in opportunity that might come there. The reality is which again Gunther and Pete will talk about later is that we've just seen great momentum in those brands once we actually did the step change in pricing that was required. On page seven, we talk about our approach to sustainability and the circularity, the circular economy.
We've obviously historically made our undertakings regarding Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and are working hard to understand our Scope 3 emissions and the actions that we and our suppliers can take in that area. I won't dwell too long here. We obviously align ourselves to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I think we have a number of programs within this business across the various footprints and areas of environmental impact that we have, and I think, you know, we're making very solid progress in all of them, and actually quite excited about a number of the programs that we've implemented or intend to implement as we look forward. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a small introduction from me.
We do have I do have Pete Findlay and Gunther Burghardt with me, our our CEO and CFO, who are both presenting their first full year set of results. It is fair to say that Pete's been with us for a while as CFO and then C- and then, and then Chief Operating Officer, and stepped up into the CEO role, and, and taken the challenge with, with both hands, and, you know, I'm delighted with the the executive team that Pete's put together and his vision, and indeed, the the restructures that he's implemented to make sure this business is, is in great shape for the future. So I'll hand to Pete, who will then share his presentation with Gunther, to. And, and I'll come back to you and chat you at the end of the presentation. So, Pete, over to you.
Terrific, Barry. Thank you for the introduction, and I'll just move us straight on to the next slide and jump straight into the momentum that we feel we now have in our branded business just carry us forward. So as Barry talked about, we were hit with a significant cost increase across the business through the milk procurement period of last year, and in fact, in other materials as well, as we saw spikes in crude oil prices flowing through to resin and cardboard box and logistics. But I was just incredibly pleased with the team and the way our brands and our categories stood up in that, you know, period of significant upheaval. We're actually able to put through about AUD 260 million in price during the first half of.
Pretty much the first half of the year, to cover a lot of those- that cost exposure. And yet, as we get to the end of the year, we've still been able to grow volume across our branded business by approximately 5%. So we're incredibly pleased with that result. We feel that it really signifies the resilience of our brands and the way they resonate with, with our Australian consumers, so we're very pleased by that. We're able to, to get volume growth across our core grocery channels, but also in, in other areas, in particular in the convenience channel, where our team did a great job with our milk-based beverages, white milk and juices, where we saw 20% volume growth, and, actually 30, 30+% volume growth in that channel.
Also, doing particularly well in food service, using our strong distribution team and our unparalleled coverage in that space to increase field sales volume by 25%. Really good growth outside of our core grocery range. We also did a restructuring program during the year. As part of that, we consolidated our brand of business now from three divisions into one, and then we've allocated that division across core grocery and non-grocery. We've brought together a number of different sales teams, marketing teams, R&D teams, logistics and planning teams. During that process, we've eliminated about AUD 20 million annualized cost, of which we'll pick up about AUD 12 million in this financial year. Around about 200 people have come out of the business.
It was fortunate that we're able to drive a fair bit of that through vacancy rate, but we have separated over 100 people in the last month. But we now face into this new year with a structure we think aligns with our strategy, will enable us to win in market, but it is a sustainable cost base for us moving forward. We've also focused on our capacity rationalization. So we closed our Canberra plant during the year, maintained our Canberra Milk brand and presence in Canberra, but we are now manufacturing that volume out of Penrith, which I think is a good initiative. We've also put in a substantial amount of automation into our site.
So, you know, through AGV, automated driverless vehicles, automated palletization, just to give a few examples, which is allowing the blockages in our sites to be eradicated, getting better flow through. And I think that that'll actually allow us to get better equipment effectiveness rates as we move forward. So we're happy with that. We've also maintained a strong CapEx program.
We finished our Wetherill Park sustainable packaging project, which is the blowing of fully recyclable PET bottles on site, which gives us a great sustainability outcome, but also, the blowing on site provides us with a good cost benefit, and in market, the new bottles look fabulous, and that's probably one of the things that contributed to an outstanding MBB result for us during the year, which obviously drives significant margins for us. We completed our new pouch line at Morwell that was commissioned just at the end of the year. Happy to say that that's now up and running and it's driving a lot of significant product innovation in that area and also cost out for us. So we're really excited about that. We commenced work on a new digital sales platform.
So, as you know, we do about 40,000 deliveries a week to a very big customer base. And we were using a 15-year-old portal. Our customer experience was very poor, but we did some work on that prior to launching the project. We worked on over 100 customer pain points, and I'll be really pleased to see that our new portal for those customers will be put in place in October, and it will drive a significantly different customer experience for us. So we're really happy with the way that some of our key CapEx projects have gone forward. We just turn to the next page, which is really about the innovation and growth in our brands.
I firmly believe that the performance or our volume growth in a period of very unsettling, unprecedented cost increases, was driven by the strength of our brands and the innovation and focus we continue to put into our brands. We had a substantial amount of marketing investment to enable that pricing growth. And really, there was a focus around fewer better programs in our high-margin, high-growth categories. So we trimmed that down. We got great focus into those high-margin, high-growth categories, and I think that the volume performance speaks for itself. We did celebrate our Vegemite 100th anniversary, which has been superbly executed by the team. We've got terrific exposure around that, and it's interesting to note that our Vegemite volumes actually grew this year.
which is only the second time in 20 years. So we've always had good value growth in Vegemite, but the fact that the team were able to get volume growth out of that category, which is incredibly important to us, was outstanding, a tribute to their work. Also worth noting that with Vegemite celebrating its 100th birthday, we now have four iconic brands in our stable that are more than 100 years old, so a huge amount of heritage there. And I think most pleasingly is that they remain incredibly contemporary. And all of those brands actually grew last year, both in volume and in value, which was exciting for us. And I think that bodes very well for our future. Really strong milk-based beverage performance.
So, milk-based beverages grew by 5% in volume last year, double-digit value growth, and we had some you know, terrific activity happening across those. But that is our second highest margin category, so we're incredibly pleased with the performance of that product and the way it's still resonating with our customers. And the fact that you know, customers chose not to trade out of that category, even though price did increase. And our second half in our international branded business was also strong for us. So, you know, we did more than AUD 200 million worth of sales in branded product across Southeast Asia and the Middle East last year. We think we've got continued growth in that area.
We've pulled in our focus really around cheese and yogurt, processed cheese, cream cheese, fresh cheese and yogurts. We've pulled in our focus, done a lot of work on our rebranding, and we're really pleased with the results, and we actually think that that part of our business will continue to grow next year. Just move on to the next slide. Just talking around that, the innovation programs that we've had. So some really good innovation around yogurt, MBB, white milk, and yeast spreads in particular. Obviously, very focused as I said, high growth, high-margin items. We delivered some really good campaigns around lactose-free, which I was particularly pleased with. Taken us a long time to crack the white milk lactose-free market, but we've launched in South Australia and New South Wales with really good success.
Our growth rates there, all being off a very small base, are actually quite stunning. So we're looking forward to where that's gonna go this year. That obviously lifts the margin of our white milk business. We added lactose-free into milk-based beverages, which has been a tremendous lift for us. And we've done a number of reduced sugar launches. We've also pulled milk-based beverages into a small 300 ml bottle, which is going incredibly well. So just helping extrapolate the number of occasions that people will consume our products on. We did our milk-based beverages flavor rotations. We had Dare Intense and Butterscotch. Dare Intense was particularly successful for us.
I'll talk about that in a little bit further down the track. We did banana split and chocolate malt rotations to our flavored milk lines, and we couldn't be happier with where that flavored milk business is going. You know, 52% market share in retail. Would have a higher market share than that if you went across non-structured retail. We just don't have that data, but we're incredibly pleased with the way it's performing and also the doors have opened for us with the rest of our range. So just incredibly pleased with that. And it was one of those key contributors to our petrol convenience growth. A key yogurt innovation, including the expansion of our pouch and snacking opportunities and range.
So we see pouch as the fastest growing category in yogurt. We're really excited now that we've just doubled our capacity with our new line that's gone in at Morwell and actually reduced cost. So the ability to drive our equipment effectiveness there will be a huge fill-up for us if we can get that volume through. We've done some really successful launches around our children's pouch category, which is an area of high growth, and we're really delighted with some of the early signs of that launch. And you know, we've also gone into sugar-free, lactose-free yogurt, which we're really excited about.
We did exit the Vitasoy joint venture, and look, we had a terrific relationship with Vitasoy for a long time. It was mutually beneficial to both of us. But by exiting that agreement, we really feel that it unshackles our potential to move into further plant-based opportunities and use our range and our brand to do that. We're really excited to announce a distribution agreement with MilkLab. MilkLab's obviously the most premium plant-based milk in the country and is very strong in the route trade. So once again, allows us to open doors for our range in that space and gives us really strong presence there. We obviously launched plant-based cheese, which we're really excited about.
And I'm very pleased to announce that we will have a plant-based flavored milk range coming out late in the financial year, early in the calendar year next year. You know, based on the strength of our milk-based brand, brands, we think we can really drive some value there. So really excited about some of our plant-based opportunities as they arise. Just turn on to the next page, and this is a page that will be not lost on our investors who have been following us for a while now. And it really just shows the journey that the business has been on over the last 20 years, but particularly the acceleration in the last sort of four or five years of really growing our revenue through our branded business.
You'll see now that we're now an 85% branded business. If you look back to sort of pre-2016, we would have been lucky to have been, you know, a 40-45% branded business. So the transition has been quite significant, and I think it's just worth noting that as we grow towards, you know, or we grow in excess of AUD 3 billion of revenue, we are now predominantly a branded business, through that revenue growth. We just move on to the next page. This is a page we'd like to reflect upon. We look at this page on a monthly basis. It's our brand shares in the Australian retail category, so it's really across core retailers and convenience. It doesn't talk about our route business.
But you'll see that what we're really pleased about is we've retained our number one position in yogurt, milks, milk-based beverages, and spreads. They are our three highest margin categories. They're categories that are in good growth, and we've maintained our number one share. So we're very pleased about that. That's something that we continue to focus on. The other thing is that it looks like it's hidden a little bit within this, but it's our fresh white milk business, and what happened with that business last year. We were actually able to drive growth into fresh white milk last year for the first time in a number of years. Our fresh white milk, as a total across all channels, actually grew by 10%.
In that process, we're able to clean up profitability, we're able to add lactose free to it, you know, to offer more functional benefits and increase our margin. And we're also able to win on the street. So we're able to take a lot of good volume in that unstructured space, which is traditionally in the business, was a strength many years ago. We've probably lost our way a little bit in that. And if you take out the ROB factor, we're a clear number two and closing the gap on that number one player quite rapidly. So very pleased with our white milk business. It is important because it drives volume throughout our plants and our distribution network.
So while we love the margins on MBB and on yogurt, that milk, that white milk business through volume and improvement in margin is still really important to us, and so we're absolutely delighted with the way that we've been able to win there. We'll just move on to the next page. Something that we continue to focus on, we think is key to growing our brands and our brands standing up in a tough environment, is our connection or engagement with our consumer. And so we've been very focused on four key consumer trends and try to play into those consumer trends. And I think that stood us in really good stead over the next 12 months and will continue to stand us in good stead as we roll out our strategy.
They are, you know, the key things we always look at are better value, functional health, the demographic changes that are happening within this country at the moment, and sustainability. So if we just focus on better value at the start with, you know, we are seeing cost of living pressures happen across retail. We are seeing a number of consumers switch into retailer brands. And so that's why we felt it's been incredibly important for us to play to that space and to keep attention to the fact that our offering has got to be able to provide good value.
And, you know, I was delighted across eight or nine of our top categories, we really only lost volume in one, and that was peanut butter, where there was a shift to ROB, imported ROB product out of South America. But, we've been able to hold our, our volumes, and in fact, grow our volumes, across all categories except for peanut butter. So we were, we were really, really pleased with that, and it's something that we, we need to stay, very much attuned to, as we see continued pressure come on the consumer in the next 12 months. Functional benefits is something that our customers are constantly looking for.
We firmly believe that dairy product has a huge amount of functional benefits, but it's how we ready that for our customer, and continue to tweak that. And so we did offer sugar, more sugar-free offerings, lactose-free offerings. We reduced salt in our peanut butter and Vegemite. So, and we really tried to drive probiotics, added calcium and added protein into our offerings. So very conscious of building on that functional health position for our customers. Also, you know, demographic evolution of Australians. We're seeing, you know, a lot of Australians from the subcontinent. You know, we're seeing those numbers grow and from Asia grow.
And so how do we continue to make products relevant for them and relevant for each of the day parts that they use our products in? So, you know, we had a strong Farmers Union Greek-style promotional campaign around not just using yogurt at breakfast time, but also using yogurt in cooking for day parts around lunchtime and dinner, which was very successful. And also, you know, the fact that consumers are now shopping more and more on the go, which was playing into our convenience offering. So to smaller pack sizes, pouch which is able to be consumed easily on the go. So, we're conscious of that trend. And then sustainability.
We want to be able to meet our customers' needs and wants and desires around sustainability, and to be held to account by our customers around sustainability and what they see as important. I think that's something that we'll focus on. We need to be playing to sustainability in a way that customers, our customers see as important. So we'll just move on to the next page, and we'll talk about our branded market strategy. So, you know, we still want to focus on growing in core grocery. It's incredibly important for us. We have a strong heritage in this space. We have great brands that perform well in this space. So we wanna work with those key customers to continue to grow in those areas.
We were flat in Woolworths last year, but we had 3% growth in Coles, 7% growth in independents. That's volume growth. We actually had positive value growth across all of those three channels, but volume growth. And it's really getting more people consuming more often across more occasions, and with across our core categories and our core brands. And so that will continue to be something that we focus on and working with those big customers in a really constructive way, which I was really pleased with how the team did that over FY 2023. We're backed really well in core customers, but we're still under-indexed in food service and convenience or outside those core grocery channels. And so a real focus for us will be winning on the street and competing really hard in that space.
And there's no reason why we shouldn't. You know, we've got, we've got a terrific sales force. We've got a national cold chain distribution network. We've got great relationships with, with other distributors ourselves, so we feel that we can play well within that space. But we know that when we shift focus in this area with our sales team and our logistics team and get the product offerings right, we can win. And we've seen some terrific sort of insights there into, into petrol and convenience. We've seen some great insights into our food service channel. So we know that when we get it right, we can win.
And we're also really excited about this new restructure, the way we can now package our full portfolio together and go with this channel with a full, complete portfolio, not just across milk and cream, but cream cheese, cheese, butter, and all those terrific offerings that we have. And so, yeah, that's leading to our organizational enablement and how we set up and how we look at how we engage with our customers. And, you know, you're terrific when they're. You know, Dare actually became the number one impulse beverage brand in convenience in the last quarter of July, which is just an outstanding result. And that was really tipped over by that Dare Intense launch that we had.
It just shows that when you've got a sales team really focused on something, you've got an offering, you're working with that part of the market, you know, we can get significant lift. As I said, we grew convenience by 20% in volume last year, which was outstanding. You know, we will continue to streamline our sites. We've got a great set of sites, but, you know, they do a bit of everything. So how do we think about where we want those sites and what they actually do to up our equipment effectiveness numbers, but also to deliver a, you know, a better result for our customers in those specific geographic areas.
We still think that we've got great exposure to those international brand markets, and so we'll look to streamline, streamline our brands and streamline our offering and our distributors in those markets. I'll just turn on to the next page, and this talks about Australian milk production. And we've shown some of this data before, but I think it's really important just to revisit this because it talks a little bit about the industry and our response to the industry. It's pretty common knowledge that milk production has been in decline since certainly since 2002. And we see milk production in 2023 getting down to around that 8 billion liter mark. And during that period, we've seen relatively minor rationalization in industry manufacturing capacity.
In fact, in some instances, we've seen new capacity brought on. What that's done is, you know, most people will be aware that that's actually reduced milk availability and, through that overcapacity, and it's actually, you know, increased competition for milk in Australia. What we've seen, in particular, in the last three or four months, is this created a significant disconnect between farm gate milk price and commodity milk prices. During that process, as commodity prices fell, you know, down and rose again, which is a continual and consistent pattern, we would see the farm gate milk price roughly follow that, sometimes with some timing differences. But what we've seen now is a complete disconnect over the last three or four months.
How that's impacted us is that we've reflected that disconnect with an impairment of our commodity assets. Our commodity business will struggle in FY 2024. It is worth, though, calling out within our commodity business, we do have two different businesses. We have a nutritionals business, which produces lactoferrin and formula powders and high-end powders. That business is actually remaining reasonably stable. But our commodity business, which is based around bulk butter, bulk skim milk powder, whole milk powder, cream cheese, is actually going to suffer significantly from that disconnect in FY 2024. So that's why we've impaired our bulk business. What we will do, though, is we'll work on that business over the remainder of the year.
We have got some timing arrangements and some volume arrangements we're committed to for FY 2024, but we will look at that business over this year, and we will reshape that business for FY 2025. And what we wanna do is make a business that is far more agile, that has parts that can be rested, has costs that can be pulled out, that will make us far more able to deal with farm gate milk price fluctuations and volumes. And so, we think that there is a way forward for that bulk business, but in the FY 2024 year, it will really struggle, and it's one of the reasons why we remain, we believe, relatively flat year-on-year. We move to the next page. It just highlights what's been happening.
This page shows, you know, the red line shows where commodity prices are heading, from an index point of view. It also shows on the green line, our farm gate milk price in Victoria, which, you know, traditionally has been correlated with those export trends. And it also shows the major grocer's private label milk price index, which actually sets a lot of the retail shelf price for dairy in this country. And you'll see there, the graph demonstrates what I was talking about, which is something we're gonna have to face into, where commodity prices have dropped away quite dramatically. Farm gate milk price has stayed elevated. We paid a record price in 2022 of AUD 7.14 per kilo. That went up again to AUD 9.55 in FY 2023.
With the rising, you know, sharp rise in commodity prices, that farm gate milk price has only dropped marginally down below AUD 9.55 this year. But you'll see there that there's been a massive drop in commodity prices. I guess the good news out of this graph, though, is that farm gate milk prices have stayed in touch with domestic milk prices or domestic prices on shelf. And, you know, as I said, we stay heavily exposed to that and are very happy with the farm gate milk price and how that fits with our domestic branded business. So, you know, that's something that, you know, we remain very pleased about. But just go on to the next page. This is our manufacturing network.
I won't spend long on this page, except that, you know, we're down to 19 sites after the reduction of Canberra. We're pleased to have a geographic spread of sites. It's always good to be exposed to markets, but we will continue to look at how those sites play out with our network and how we might optimize those in the future. I'll just move on to the next page. It's talking about our dairy infrastructure and how it supports our brands and markets. So with that disconnect in farm gate milk price, we will look to restructure our commodity assets, particularly Koroit and Tatura. And we'll look to see how we can strip those back to fit the current circumstances.
The good news is that we think we can do that with early modeling. However, those commodity sites still play a huge part in our future. As we model the growth in our domestic business out over the next five years, we will need Koroit, Tatura in our network just to cope with the sheer seasonality of milk. And so they become integral to growing our domestic branding business. And you'll see there that in actual fact, only four of our branded sites are really standalone. The rest of our branded sites, milk sites, actually rely on connectivity with those with those large commodity sites, because they take volume that are going into those sites during peak season. And they also produce byproducts for those sites that are valuable in the manufacturing process.
So in actual fact, we see Tatura, Koroit, and Lagoon still being incredibly important to our branded future. I'll just turn to the next page, and I'll talk about our dairy commodity strategy in a little bit more detail. So I've alluded that we think we can change our commodity sites to fit what we need them to do in the future, and to be able to cope with a disconnect between, you know, farm gate pricing, commodity pricing, and also a reduction in volumes. So we'll do a lot of work on that over the next 12 months, but we think that we see a way forward with that.
We'll also continue to focus on higher-value commodity and nutritional products, so our lactoferrin business remains very strong. We think there's a future in that. We think we've got the ability to evolve our nutritionals business to take advantage of some of the things that are happening in the market locally here. We still think that we can retain commodity capacity within those plants. So if situations do change, we can take advantage of that. So we'll be looking at dryer capacity, we'll be looking at shift structures, and so forth, that enable us to ride out an environment like this. But if things were to change, we could ramp that scale up pretty quickly to take advantage of those market dynamics and market changes.
So we are still very comfortable with our commodity assets and how we can use them in the future. We'll just use them differently, I think is the point I'm trying to make. I'll now switch to Gunther and let him talk about some of our financial results.
Fantastic. Thank you very much, Pete. On the next slide, our profit and loss slide, I'm gonna focus mostly on the normalized table on the left side. As Barry said, that probably is the most sensible one in understanding our results. Our net revenue grew 13%. What you're gonna see as we get into segments later on, is that the branded side of the business grew 16%. Within that, volume was a little under 5% of that growth, about 4.5%, and we had over 11% value growth.
I think one thing I want to leave you with there is, because we took multiple waves of pricing throughout that first half of the year, in particular, by the time we hit Q4 of the year, we actually had well over 13% pricing across the branded business. And so some of that will carry across into next year. So that's very positive. Bulk was up 8% in its sales growth, and that was a tale of two halves, as Pete and Barry both allude to. The first half had very strong commodity prices, and they declined a lot in the second half of the year. Now, the EBITDA there, you see that at AUD 160 million. That's down 11% year-over-year.
The inflation that we had really was all there in July. Farmgate milk price inflation, logistics inflation, oil inflation, other sources of inflation, they were all there from July. But the pricing, of course, there's a notice period for some of our customers, and so the pricing lagged the cost inflation. Depreciation and amortization, a little under AUD 102 million. And as we look forward to FY 2024, what you can expect to see is that, we will have some increase in depreciation and amortization due to the sale and lease back of Vegemite Way, but that will be more than offset by the asset impairment that Pete discussed earlier. So we actually expect net depreciation and amortization next year to fall a little bit, just shy of AUD 100 million.
Net finance costs were definitely up and nearly doubled in the year, and that's really just about the rate, the rate that we pay on interest. I think you're seeing that across a lot of corporates these days. So that, that may even go you know, higher in FY 2024 as we get the full year impact of the higher interest rates. On the next page, we have the reconciliation between our statutory results on the left-hand side of the page and our normalized results on the right-hand side of the page. And I won't dwell on this one too long, but clearly, compared to our statutory results on the left, we removed the sale of Vegemite Way, which is a non-trading, you know, one-time benefit. We also removed the AUD 276 million pre-tax asset impairment, and the cost of restructuring.
And this restructuring program, obviously, as Pete mentioned, is key for us. It's how do we align our organization best to our new strategy and ensure success over the next five years? The other cost line at under AUD 5 million is really software as a service. So, Pete talked about the B2B platform. We were investing there and a few other IT initiatives that will help our efficiency and growth over time, and so that's that normalization. And I'll talk a little more later about tax consolidation. So when we take all of those, we arrive at our normalized P&L on the right side. Now, the next slide, which is called Profitability Overview, among the financial slides, this is probably the most interesting one that really tells the story of the year that was.
This is an EBITDA waterfall that moves us from FY 2022 to FY 2023. So on the left side, the prior year, we made AUD 180 million of EBITDA, and there you see the big red bar. So the, what I've done in the next three columns is I've split out the branded business, the branded side of the business. So first of all, the cost increases, mostly farm gate milk, but also, as I said, things like logistics, and other sorts of inflation, AUD 290 million. That impact was right there from the beginning of July. So the business reacted as quickly as it could, multiple waves of pricing and got AUD 256 million of in-the-year pricing.
Now, that's about 88% of the total price increases we took, which implies that about AUD 35 million more of the pricing we took will carry across into the FY 2024 year and provide a benefit. Then you see, finally, AUD 28 million benefit in EBITDA from our volume growth. And so, as I said, just under one-third of our entire volume growth was delivered, you know, across these market-leading brands. So that's great. Then you get to the bulk EBITDA. I've kept that. I haven't broken out price or volume or COGS in bulk. It's an AUD 18 million year-over-year impact. I think the thing I want to draw your attention to here is that actually, when you look at our EBITDA from FY 2022 to 2023, it goes down by AUD 20 million.
18 million of it is explained by the bulk business, so substantially all of it. So I think that's really important to note, and it sort of signals the strength of the branded business. The final thing I'll point out there is a AUD 7 million reduction year-over-year in unallocated overheads. And for those of you who are looking at that full-year result in unallocated overheads, you'll actually see that it has a slight negative overhead in the second half of the year. It is disappointing for our employees, but I want to acknowledge that we came out of the first half having put in place a lot of strong pricing and brand programs. We were very confident in the second half of the year, rightly so, in our branded business.
When we got to that second half of the year, the plunge in commodity prices meant we didn't achieve what we had internally set as our objectives, and therefore we did not pay bonuses across the organization. That's really the biggest single driver of that low cost in unallocated overheads in the second half of the year. On the next page, we have a few key performance measures, and I'm not gonna dwell on this slide too long. I think you know, strong growth in revenue in both years, and you see 45% in FY 2022, that's really the first full year of the Lion Dairy and Drinks acquisition, and then again, a robust 13% in the year that just finished. Very pleased with that.
What we're clearly not as pleased of, and it's an impact of the cost inflation and the higher farm gate milk prices, is the gross margin. It's dropped on a normalized basis by 3 points to 19.4. So if you look at the five-year strategy that Pete's described, and he's gonna describe more later in this presentation, one of the single most important things for us is driving that margin back up. We're committed to growing that margin by at least 1 point to 1.5 points every year over the next five years. And how we do that through pricing and promotional excellence, through mix, through cost efficiencies across our network, through procurement, that's gonna be absolutely vital in creating value for our shareholders and driving our results back up.
The final thing I'll point out at the bottom of that is the improvement in our leverage ratio from 1.8x at the end of the prior year to 1.6x. So we do finish the year with a balance sheet that has sufficient strength to weather these variable commodity markets. The following slide really tells the story on the quarterly performance, and it's entitled Brand Momentum and Commodity Impact. We haven't put numbers on the Y-axis here. What this is showing, though, is our EBITDA margins in an illustrative way on a quarterly basis in the most recent year, FY 2023. In the blue there, you see the branded result, obviously, hit quite hard in that first quarter with the cost inflation.
Then you just see it growing throughout the year very strongly as our price and mix and innovation initiatives begin to land. So very encouraging. But you can see from the peak of the commodities, which occurred really in October of 2022, a strong downward trend as that commodity business you know was impacted by the commodity pricing. And it actually went into the negatives in Q4, which you see on that graph. So really a tale of two halves for both segments in our business. The following slide is the segment slide, and I think we've talked to a lot of those key points. I would say something else on the unallocated overhead side, we have focused extremely strongly in that second half on cost savings.
So whether it's been things like travel or eliminating consulting or maintaining vacancies, we've had a lot of programs to optimize the result in the second half of the year. Final points I'll call out in this slide, in the bullet points below the table. In FY 2024, we really believe that substantially all of our profitability will be generated by the branded business. And so, you know, so that's a big, that's a big call-out. And finally, of course, Pete talked about the restructuring of the bulk business, really driven about flexibility and the ability to ramp it up and down in the future. It's about how that business supports our branded business that's important.
Next slide is our cash flow, and, you know, listen, the operating cash flow in the year just passed by shows us AUD 8 million on this chart, and the key issue here, obviously, is inventory. Inventory is up AUD 110 million. Now, I think it's important for people to understand, if you go back to the prior year, at the end of FY 2022, commodity prices were rocketing. You know, they were climbing very fast from sort of March 2022 up to a peak in October. And if anything, in the prior year, when there's rising commodity environments, very easy to sell all sorts of inventory. We're now selling inventory at a much more normal pace. We finished the year with inventory at AUD 430 million. That's seven or eight weeks of stock.
So we're not concerned by our inventories. They're trading more normally, but in the prior year, if anything, we sold at a much faster rate given the climbing commodity markets, which prevailed at that time. So not the operating cash flow result we want, and clearly, that's gonna be a big focus at FY 2023, how we optimize that. In terms of investing activities, though, the Port Melbourne site sale and obviously, the Vitasoy joint venture sale are absolutely critical. So, I think the final thing I'll say about inventory is, it's not about a big increase in weeks or cover. It's really the effect of farm gate milk price being substantially higher and other sorts of cost inflation, and those things make up the majority of the change in inventory value rather than weeks of covers.
I'll finish off on the last slide, which is the balance sheet slide itself. You know, the trade receivables are up, essentially in line with sales. Again, no change in terms-- no major changes in terms of the days receivables, so that's good. And then you see through areas like lease liabilities and right-of-use assets, they're going up as they're sort of impacted by the Port Melbourne sale and leaseback. And then impairments are impacting areas like the intangible assets and the properties, plant, and equipment. So hopefully, that gives some insight to our financial results. Back to you, Pete.
Terrific, Gunther. Thank you. So if we just swing on to the next page, and I won't spend too long on this because it's very consistent with what we've been talking about for a number of years now. But the business is very committed to the United Nations sustainability standards, which means that we have a focus around food nutrition, diversity, inclusion, and quality, greenhouse gases, packaging, sustainability, and water sustainability. And I'm pleased to say that we've moved forward in all of those areas, both through our products, initiatives that we've got within with our people within the team, how we're looking at our greenhouse gas and carbon footprint into the future and the targets we've set ourselves for 2030.
I've talked about packaging sustainability, which to this point in time, it's been about, not just about driving sustainability outcomes, but driving cost outcomes and obviously, water sustainability is something that we look at on a continual basis. So if we just switch on to the next page, it's just, I think, a point to reflect on where we are at today and how I see the business. It's been terrific to spend time at all of our factories and get out in the market with our teams to see how we show up with consumers across different channels, both here in Australia and internationally. And I must say, I'm actually really energized and feeling extremely positive about the tools that we have at our disposal for this business.
Obviously, we've talked about the headwinds that our commodity business is facing at the moment, but as I said, I think we have a path forward with those. But if we look at our branded business, where, you know, we think that our momentum will come from over the next five years, we have got some unbelievable brands. They're iconic, they resonate well with our customers. They fit within the right price points, and they continue to be extremely relevant with where we're heading, and we think that we can grow those. We think there's not just growth within the current context, but also some adjacencies, and we're incredibly excited about that. We do have integrated manufacturing processing across our sites. We can cope with seasonal milk.
We can cope when milk comes at us, and we can, we can optimize value, and we think that's, that's a really important part of our business, and we think it gives us a competitive advantage, particularly in the dairy space. With what's happening around our commodity sites, we can be agile to changing markets. If the commodity market stays bearish, as it is at the moment, we, we feel that we can set ourselves up for that in the future. But if we do see opportunities and that changes, then we can respond to that, and, and that can be. We can make money out of that. We have, you know, both of our branded acquisitions are now traveling ahead of business case. The Bega Foods business, the Mondelez Spreads business, has been an outstanding acquisition.
It's now well ahead of business case, and the BDD business on its second half run rate, and how it's traveling over the first couple of months of this year, and how we believe it will travel in the next year, will also be well ahead of business case. So we continue to be ecstatic with the opportunities that those two businesses provide us with. There's a plethora of opportunities for further branding, pricing, innovations, and efficiency programs and margin improvement. We feel that we've got white milk, which is a huge part of our volume, heading in the right direction, but we've got some terrific margins to play with. And certainly, you know, the fact that yogurt, MBB, and spreads are in growth is something that we think gives us huge opportunity.
Just the channels that those categories are playing in, there's still an enormous amount of upside. So we're really excited about that. Therefore believe that, you know, the brand contribution that we've seen in the second half of last year into the first quarter of this year, and that we think we can maintain through our FY 2024, will be really exciting. And it will, in FY 2024, counter those commodity headwinds that we're seeing, and through FY 2025 and 2026 and beyond, will actually push the business forward. So we see a terrific amount of opportunity there. You know, those challenges remain in the commodity market, so we have to face into those.
We've done that with the accounting treatment, the impairment, but we will make tough decisions throughout FY 2024 to ensure that our commodity business is set properly for FY 2025. And with that, we see FY 2024 normalized EBITDA of about, you know, AUD 160 million-AUD 170 million, so within that range. But within that, we see a significant reduction in our commodity earnings, but, you know, being mitigated by, you know, a significant growth in our branded business. And both of those movements are quite material, and we remain therefore excited about that branded business, and so it'll be the full encounter, those commodity headwinds that we're seeing. We turn onto the next page.
So just to sort of talk a little bit more about looking forward, I've spoken about our strategy, but just to reiterate that, we are disappointed with where our share price sits and the impact that has on shareholders, but we believe that we have a way to turn that around. We have implemented or taken to the board a five-year strategic plan earlier in the calendar year. That's been signed off, and we're in the process of implementing that. And you know, I think we're already starting to see benefits, and part of that was the restructure program that we put in place.
It's therefore, with a strong level of confidence, that we can call out that during this period, we think we can lift our EBITDA target to AUD 250 million plus, with a growth rate of greater than 10% during that timeframe. That will be primarily driven by our branded business. We think that the new business looking forward and the changes that we will make to our commodity infrastructure over the next 12 months means that we'll be far less exposed to farmgate milk price volatility and farmgate milk volumes.
And obviously, when you go back to that chart, I showed you where we had the alignment between farm gate milk price and the branded value of milk on shelves in Australia domestically, we feel that the farm gate milk price will play less and less a role in our profitability and sustainability. And so, you know, we now feel that we have the people capability and the people set up, and that branded business structured in a way that will enable really strong growth, not just across our core grocery business, but into that non-grocery part where we're still very significantly under indexed.
So I look forward to the next five years with, with a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism, and I think that we'll start to see that change in our business during FY 2024. Barry, I think it's back to you now.
Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Gunther. I hope everybody found that presentation very responsible. Probably save my concluding remarks until after questions. So happy to go to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press Star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press Star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. Your first question today comes from Evan Karatzas from UBS. Please go ahead.
Morning, all, morning, guys. Just looking at the five-year targets you've given, I was just hoping you could provide some more information around the, I guess, the building blocks to get to that number, you know, from the FY 2024 guidance of this AUD 160 million-AUD 170 million out to AUD 250 million. Like, I mean, like, what are you assuming bulk earnings return to? Is it the, the AUD 40 million you did this year, and the rest is driven by branded? And then, I guess, like, what underpins the, yeah, the growth in branded. Just some of the, the buckets or the building blocks, however you want to look at it, just to bridge out from today out to AUD 250 million, if you can, please.
Yeah, sure, Evan. So we think that the restructuring work that we will do over the next 12 months with our commodity business will alleviate the performance we're gonna have in FY 2024. Does it ever get back to where it's been traditionally? Perhaps not. So our longer-term modeling has our nutritional business staying pretty steady, our commodity business coming back from where it is this year, but probably the bulk business never getting back to that AUD 40 million mark. Yeah, maybe a little bit below that. But it really is around the branded business. So if we look at our branded business, we've still got upside and capacity in milk-based beverages, which is growing. You know, as I said, was growing 4%-5% last year, very strong margins.
We've still got capacity in our yogurt business. And we think that that can continue to grow at its current rates. In fact, if it grows at its current rates, you know, we could add up to another 20,000 tons of yogurt over the next five years. That's certainly not certainly not a stretch. That's simply maintaining our growth rates. And so as you start to get those volume performances through those, those two particular categories, you know, you're starting to get some really significant margin drop to the bottom line. We also are significantly under-indexed in non-grocery, so across food service, hospitality, QSR, a number of those channels. So if we can if we can start.
It's never really been in the business's DNA, but if we can start to grow those channels, even at modest levels, you know, we start to see a significant improvement in our margin, and in margin growth. And then that optimization or that footprint, you know, we saw what happened with Penrith. We think that there's the ability to restructure a lot of our plants, simplify a lot of our plants, get our equipment effectiveness up, our OEEs up, which drops money to the bottom line. You know, we may close some plants.
We're still looking at that, but we think that footprint allows us to take out a lot of cost and continue to attack and reflect on our overhead structure as well. So if you look at those different pots across our branded business, we still think that there's significant growth. And so that target is an organic target. It doesn't build into count any inorganic growth. And, you know, it obviously has us with a very strong balance sheet at the end of it. So, you know, I think the business is, you know, gonna attain that. It's really, really well poised. Does that give you some color, Evan?
Yeah. Okay, so, I'm just sort of picking up the tea leaves. It seems like around the mid to high or mid, let's say, mid-single digit type top line in branded. Can you, can you put any, like, numbers or quantify the, the, the costs out or the efficiency program, just so we can have that as a, you know, a bridge item or a building block that you're sort of expecting in your modeling?
Oh, it's a bit hard to go through the five-year model with you over the phone. But there is more cost to come out of the business, there's no doubt about that. The way we, the way we operate, you know, a very large cold chain distribution network, we feel there's opportunity to optimize that, more opportunity to optimize our plans. With that comes overhead reduction, you know, flows back through overhead structure, non-manufacturing overhead structure. So there's still lots of opportunity there, and we'll come at that, but probably a little bit early and probably the wrong format to go through specific building blocks.
I think, Evan, the only thing I would add to what Pete was saying is that it is fair to say that in the year ahead, you know, the disconnection is the largest disconnection I've ever seen between farm gate milk price and milk commodities. Now, inevitably, with those milk commodities, they do turn as global supply responds to those changed farm gate milk prices. You know, in other parts of the world, obviously, farm gate milk pricing has already responded. Supply, therefore, response.
So, as we look into FY 2025 and beyond, you know, there is, you know, a statistical likelihood that there will be a greater alignment between farm gate milk price and global commodity prices, given that the data likely to improve, but we're not relying on that or waiting for that. So, when Pete sort of thinks about cost out, the cost out in our commodity infrastructure, if you like, will be a cost out that delivers greater flexibility. So, we take costs out, so we are not so exposed to that big disconnections, but we would still retain the flexibility and you can probably.
So as you interpret what the guys are trying to do, we're not reliant on commodities, but they are actually dragging the results in the year that we're in. You know, they may not be quite as much of a drag in FY 2024, or in FY 2025. There are even scenarios that they could go back to helping us a little, but we're not reliant on that.
I think, when you look at Pete's terminology of AUD 250 million+ in the five-year strategy or within the five-year strategy, I think you can probably interpret from that, that there are scenarios where that plus can come from commodities or the timing in which we reach 250 can be quicker, given that we take that exposure away, but remain able to respond to opportunities as they become in that space. So the real effort this year is to get that flexibility and cost out in commodity, so it doesn't drag because the branded by metric is doing the job for us really well, but it's the drag to actually earnings on commodities. All right. No problem. I'll pass along. Thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from David Errington at Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, Barry, Pete, and Gunther. If I could follow up on that, Barry, I mean, I was talking to the guys at Treasury Wine. They face a similar situation, different circumstances, but they're also trying to get flexibility in their bulk production capabilities. But I've, I've got to be honest, I've never seen it done where you can keep two large facilities open, Tatura and Koroit, where you keep them open, and I think where you, as you say, try to reduce volumes, but at the same time, keep that flexible capacity.
I don't think I've ever seen that being able to be achieved, and I think Treasury Wine themselves are closing Karadoc and then trying to outsource it. In other words, take capacity out. I don't know how you're gonna be able to do that. Would you be able to give us a bit of an overview as to how you can achieve that objective? Because if you could, it would be fabulous, but I just don't know how you're gonna be able to do it.
So I'll make some opening comments, and then I'll hand over to the guys that have actually executed. But the opening comment would be, I think, and Koroit is a good example, right? So I think it was what Pete was alluding to earlier. I think when we look at our two big sites, Tatura and Koroit, we can't step easily past the important role they do play in supporting those branded businesses. So, you know, milk is processed at Tatura to be sent up the road to Sydney and beyond in terms of making sure that we've got the right volumes to service our branded markets. And then it's a matter of what other things it does.
Of course, it does lactoferrin, which is a very good contributor and makes a difference to us. Koroit, a little the same in that it's marshaling milk from the west, and it's sending it off into our facilities in Chelsea or over to Salisbury, or even to Morwell, or indeed, even to Tatura, if cream cheese is more valuable than milk powder, so they are integrated. Now, if you.
I guess the comparison I would give is that in the more seasonal parts of the world, if we think about Ireland, and if we think about New Zealand, the process of mothballing and then bringing online dryers, so they operate for parts of the year or indeed, in the spring peak, 6-8 weeks of the year, is well established and been part of their practice for a very long time. So there's no doubt that, say, at Koroit, where there are four large dryers, one has not been utilized too much in recent years.
But the opportunity to make sure you've got your core higher value nutrient dryer working and your other dryer flexible to work for parts of the year and have a workforce that's actually attuned and aligned to that is part of how people deal with it. So it is probably more looking at how that practice is done in areas that do rely on seasonal volumes, and then making sure that we bring those practices into those facilities.
Taking those facilities out and closing them, actually could create challenges around how we support the branded growth, and particularly, as much as David, I know we've talked about it before, whilst I'm a, I'm an optimist around where milk supply may go into the future and what may occur, reality is I can't deny the statistics that are in front of me, which is it continues to decline, and you need to make sure that you can source milk from the pools that are stable or indeed have the opportunity to grow. And that, and if you look at areas, say for example, there's just a continued decline in Queensland, there's a continued decline in New South Wales, it becomes important that you have.
To take the capacity away to actually source milk in the areas we want would also have the potential to worry the brand business. But I think, and Pete, I'll hand over to you now. That was meant to be a short answer, but it turned out to be a bit long, Dave.
David, I'm certainly not going to pretend I'm an engineer, so that would be a grave mistake. But so Barry's right. So for us to get milk, contract milk with farmers to provide milk for our branded business, we will inevitably have excess levels of milk during the flush or during the spring flush. We do need big dryers to be able to process that, but these factories are actually quite compartmentalized.
Mm.
So, the biggest and most expensive infrastructure on them is often the dryers. And so if you're taking through a certain amount of volume, you may well have four dryers running. And you know, to give you an idea, a dryer has a replacement value of AUD 70 million-AUD 150 million. They're big bits of kit. They heat milk and turn it to powder, so the energy costs are extremely high, and they need to be cleaned regularly and maintained regularly. So if you decide that you want to switch off volume because those dryers aren't running at an optimal rate, you can actually switch them off, and the cost actually do drop out in big chunks.
Then, so if you right-size your milk and you absolutely optimize the use of certain numbers of dryers at certain times of the year, you can actually take large chunks of cost out. So you sit there with all of your capacity running, manufacturing capacity running at a certain level of milk, and you hold on as you want to cover overheads. But if you actually decide to make step changes, you can actually carve out big chunks of cost, and that changes the financial outcomes of that plant pretty substantially. So we've probably mothballed some of those assets, have the ability to turn them back on if dynamics change, but more than likely, we would be running those plants well under capacity, but able to take significant costs out if required.
Okay, sounds promising. Sounds very promising. If I could go on to a second question, and it's a compliment here, but I suppose a bit of concern, but it's on page 23, which Gunther said, and I think that slide really does highlight how well you guys have executed your pricing strategy and being able to get those costs back. I mean, it really is a superb chart there, and it's kudos to your management team. I suppose the concern is that when I look at that, it means that the consumer in Australia is wearing all the cost of the inflation in the supply chain and in the cost of goods.
I'm just wondering, you know, this came in the last quarter or so, you know, you've got to be positioned so as that you can meet, as you say, a value proposition. What can you do, if you could elaborate a little more, but Pete, if, and Barry, what can you do to ensure that your brands can compete against retailer-owned brands? Because, you know, listening to retailers all week, they're talking about consumers are really now becoming increasingly value-conscious. You've had a fantastic year, second half been wonderful, and that slide is brilliant and congratulations. But going forward is the big issue, because I'm not necessarily certain that the consumer is going to be able to pay for the entirety of all the cost increases that's coming through the supply chain.
Yeah, David, I think, I think you're spot on, and, and that's why when I talked about those four consumer insights that we, we basically run everything through in our business, you know, daily and weekly. You know, better value is one of them. And, I think within that significant price increase, what I will say is that I think the team, you know, Darren and Adam, who run that, that retail, you know, the front end of our business, did an amazing job because they, they put the prices through at a point that still enabled us to grow volume. So I think we've done a, a really good job of it in 2023, and I, I am, am incredibly pleased with the, the way that, you know, the sales team, the category teams came together to do that. And we did do five price increases.
So it was done in a pretty controlled, you know, some people sort of said, "We should have, you should have done fewer, bigger," but we, we did do it in a very responsible way. But it's always a challenge. And so we will, we will look to try and optimize that network, optimize formulation, optimize, our, our, our procurement, to ensure that we do stay competitive.
It probably is worth mentioning that when we look across the portfolio, which is where the portfolio becomes important. So when you look at that consumer behavior in a more indulgent brand like yogurt, they still want the brand that they trust and they like, and they. And, and, you know, and if you think, and if you go, if you take that to, to, to probably at, you know, the biggest power brand that people mention a lot, so you look at Dare Iced Coffee, they, that, that, that brand is less price sensitive, you feel like, in terms of people thinking they might trade down to something else because it's really, it's there.
It's a bit of a treat, if you like, as a tradie drops or a convenience or whatever else on the way to the building site. So Pete mentioned earlier, where do we see some of the trading down? We did see it in Peanut Butter, for example. But of course, we don't see it in Vegemite at all because the consumer is just, you know, 100% loyal to that product. So I think we'll see it in different parts of the portfolio, but overall, I think it's probably fair to say that in the first quarter, the brand has stood up very well as we've seen some of that consumer behavior come through, but it's not coming through in all categories of our brands, if you like.
And I think one thing I'd add, David, is we have taken another round of price that's effective at the beginning of this fiscal year. It's more like a low- to mid-single digit. But you're right, that the headline pricing we took in the double digits, that's not going to happen in FY 2024. What will be important is promotional excellence. So how do you vary depth, frequency, to focus on the more profitable parts of your range? It's going to be much more nuanced, how you do that in an environment where we know the consumer is going to hit the mortgage cliff and get a little fatigued. But our portfolio is pretty well positioned for a difficult economic times, you know, things like yogurt and milk.
Yes, so I think respect the consumer data and take a real eye on it, continue to provide innovation, continue to focus hard on working with your customers, and to keep sort of showing up and investing in your brands, and to keep growing away at cost. So, you know, I think one of the traps we could have fallen into, and I hope we haven't, is just to put the price up. And we've been really focused on the team, being honest, trying to be honest with ourselves, saying: Are we still growing volume? Are we still driving efficiencies through our plans? Are we giving back to the consumer? That has been something we've certainly talked about and thought about a lot as a team. But you're right, it will continue to be a challenging environment over the next 12 months.
Well, it sounds like all your controllables, you're executing really well, so well done on that. It's just the uncontrollables that are causing grief. But really, thank you for your answers. They were great.
Thanks, Dave. You're right, the uncontrollables that tend to hit you in the side of the head sometimes.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Josh Kannourakis at Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi, Barry and Pete. Thanks very much for taking my call. Just a couple of questions. Just firstly, on guidance into 2024, could you give us a little bit more of a breakdown just on within the branded side, sort of price, volume, sort of assumptions, on that? And then on the commodity side or the bulk side, just what you're sort of underpinning in terms of the sort of commodity environment, any improvement or any deterioration, from the sort of current levels? Thanks.
On my end, a good turn.
Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, Josh, for the question, and Pete alluded to it earlier to say, actually, we expect pretty much all of our profitability in FY 2024 is going to come from that branded side of the business. And I would say that some of the building blocks for that, the amount of price we take will moderate to David's question. So instead of being something in the double digits, you're expecting something in the sort of low to mid single digits in terms of net price accretion. So we're going to be looking to things like mix and cost savings to drive margin higher.
But as I said, when we talked about the five-year strategic plan that Pete and Barry laid out, we need to have at least 1-1.5 points of margin expansion every year, and it's going to be how we achieve that margin expansion through promotional excellence and cost savings. That's going to be the thing that drives our branded business forward. So I'd be looking for the branded business to earn all of it. We are assuming that the commodity prices remain subdued throughout the year. Is there a potential in Q4 that they start to come back up seasonally, as they sometimes do? Maybe, but we are not banking on commodity prices bailing us out in FY 2024 within that number.
So, you have a result in FY 2023, where the bulk business earned over AUD 40 million. We're assuming almost no contribution from the bulk business in FY 2024. So it is branded business momentum driving all of the result. We did, as a final thing in our June announcement, call out a AUD 12 million in-year benefit from our restructuring efforts, and that will annualize at over AUD 20 million, which will bring some benefit to FY 2025 as well. So that's probably the other building block to think about.
Yeah, I mean, just on that, the commodity business, yeah, you've got New Zealand farm gate price, GDT in is around 6, mid-6 dollars, mid- to low-6 dollars. You've got sort of, you know, production has come off in the US and Europe, but only just come off and you've got sort of demand. So supply will start to re-correct, but you've got demand hasn't taken off yet in China. And so we're not forecasting any improvement in commodity prices between, you know, now and certainly April at the earliest. So we haven't built in any rapid rise in commodity prices.
Perfect. That's great. That's great. Thanks, Pete. And can I just ask, just in terms of a broader question then, in terms of if we look at some of your peers in the market that have maybe been a bit more exposed or less exposed to the branded side, more exposed to commodities, you know, how do you think that shakes out across this year? I mean, we've sort of been aching and praying for some rationalization in manufacturing capacity that hasn't really happened. Maybe we could just have a little discussion on that and how you sort of think about the year ahead.
So, Josh, I do feel like I've been here before, which probably just says that I've been around too long, but, look, I always have the view that inevitably the market has its way, for want of a better way of putting it, and sometimes it is a little slower than you may expect. I think, you know, we probably thought for a number of years now that rationalization was necessary and needed to occur, and even sometimes, as Pete mentioned in his presentation, been a little surprised by people building more infrastructure rather than rationalizing infrastructure.
I think we are seeing some genuine pain points from some of our competitors, particularly the, the smaller ones, the ones particularly product exposed or exposed to international commodity markets. Again, what I would probably say is that the, the I think, I think for some, this year will be very painful because, I mean, it was what Gunther and Peter alluded to earlier. It's very hard to see, no matter how effective or efficient or what you might think you can do with a liter of milk that is part, that is parked that is priced well over international trading commodities. If you're extending into a commodity, I think that, that there's just not a return there.
I think it's what tolerance might remain after a number of years of difficulty, but I would expect that tolerance for some businesses might be growing thin, which might bring about some rationalization. Certainly, I would not want to see the sort of impact that we saw back in, you know, 2015, 2014, 2015, 2016, when you did see, you know, major upheaval in the industry. But I think if rationalization does occur this year, you would expect it always occurs slower than you expect. And to a certain extent, Peter alluded a bit in the question, those tech change decisions can be hard. So in the end, when you're looking at a piece of infrastructure, you do all you can to keep it efficient and keep it operating well.
Quite often in commodity, you think you will do that because there'll be a better day next year. I think it's been a while, and really, that we've seen a better day because every time there has been an improvement in commodity, it is reflected strongly in farm gate milk price will be on. So my view would be that rationalization is likely to occur. My hope would be that it occurs in a safer manner because we think that the industry doesn't need significant upheaval that impacts, particularly, impacts farmers. I think my only other statement would be that we're not waiting for it. So we are not reliant on it.
Part of, I guess, part of what we've been working to get toward, and despite, you know, some of the volatility and headwinds we faced, we now have a business that we say is very complete and a strong business. We need to make those hard decisions ourselves around our commodity infrastructure. We'll do that. We're not reliant on other rationalizations to take this business forward, and we'll go forward with them. It may go forward a little more effectively if they were to occur.
Great. Thanks very much, Barry, Peter, and Gunther. Appreciate your time.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Phil Kimber at E&P Capital. Please go ahead.
G'day, guys. I was just gonna ask on, and sorry to be quite specific here. On, on the unallocated overheads, I know you've explained the issue there, that they move around a lot. I mean, how should we think about them into FY 2024? Hopefully, you guys, you know, bonuses come back. You know, is FY 2022, which was just under AUD 20 million, a good sort of place to start? Or, you know, if I took the first half of 2023, you know, they're probably gonna be closer to AUD 30 million in a normal year. So I just was a bit confused around those.
Yeah. And I think, yeah, thanks for that, Phil. And I think your second one there, we sort of said, let's take the first half of 2023 and kind of double it, and obviously we'll get some savings in there. So of the AUD 12 million in-year savings that I talked about from the restructuring effort, some of those are in the branded business, some of those are in the bulk business, but there'll be a few million that also are in unallocated overheads, and in the corporate function. So I would double the first half of FY 2023 and then take AUD 3 or 4 million off, and you'll have a reasonable estimate.
Okay. And then just mechanically in the second half, 'cause that number was actually a gain. I get when you. You know, if you don't pay bonuses, you don't have a cost, but it actually was a positive. Was that like a rev, you know, reversing a provision that you'd taken for those bonuses in the first half? And again, sorry to be, you know, drilling in on six-month numbers, but it was actually- I just want to make sure there was no abnormal gain or anything in the unallocated line.
No, no, there wasn't. And yeah, we had, I mean, we, we came out of the first half, and by that point, a commodity peak was reached in October, and the commodities had started to slide, but we certainly didn't predict where they were going. And we knew we had done so much in terms of price and mix in our branded business. So we accurately predicted a huge second half in branded, and it was delivered. What we didn't predict is what would happen with commodities. So we had been accruing bonuses throughout that first half, and unfortunately reversed them entirely in the second half of the year. And then we really went hard on cost, travel, consulting, everything, right? To sort of optimize the result we could get in that difficult commodity situation.
It is a big reversal, and it's a complete, you know, reversal of all of our bonus provisions, unfortunately.
Sure.
I feel well. I think the only thing I'd add, which, you know, gives me no pleasure in adding. I know that everybody would observe that the key management personnel didn't receive any bonuses, but there can be circumstances within parts of the business where you will give bonuses because of extra effort, all those things. Because and Gunther's right, that commodity crash, which is the only way to describe it, really, was way more brutal than we expected. We did expect that we would be looking after some people in the business. We made the decision reasonably late in the piece that that just wasn't going to be possible.
Okay, thank you. And then with the, I mean, we can, you know, you've got enough data points now on your guidance to think about the composition. So just to confirm, I mean, if I look at that second half branded business, you know, which basically doubled on the first half, I would have thought, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the first half, you know, in a normal year, if we ever get to see a normal year, the first half for the branded business should actually be stronger because milk costs, in terms of how farmers are paid in the farm gate price, during the Spring Flush, they get a lower price. Should we assume that, you know, actually, the first, first half will be quite strong for that branded business, even, you know, just for that issue, that milk costs are lower in the first half than in the second half?
Yeah. Yeah, I'll let the other guys add to it. I mean, I think we've got to be a little bit careful when we think about milk costs, because we've got to think about it across the country, you know? So we've got to think about. So, so everybody tends to focus on, and indeed, our, our published number tends to be the, the Victorian price, because that's the one that's linked to commodities. But the, the milk price is linked to our branded products, particularly in the states where there's deficits, you know, that as we go into this year, they're the same. You know, they're, they're, they're the same, could be significantly improved if I thought about it across the, the spectrum of, of, of the other states.
So it's always, it is always a little bit opaque, and I understand it's opaque, but, short of, short of breaking down sort of every, every regional milk price, and indeed, some, some pricing, that, that's required, around volumes and, and indeed, around profiles, it means that, the milk that is fundamentally destined for those brands, it's traditionally pretty stable in price, and, is reflective of the brands that it's going to, you know, but where we can, Phil, we, we allocate milk to the branded business at, at, at that cost. So, you know, it actually reflects the more expensive, flatter milk that goes into it.
And so, you know, if you look, you have Queensland Milk, New South Wales milk, WA milk, Tatura's a smaller volume, even, you know, chunk, quite a large chunk of that South Australian milk, that's all going to branded, and that's costed as such. So the, the branded business tends to bear pretty flat, evenly priced, expensive milk.
Yep. Okay, got it. And can I ask one last one just on inventory? I heard the comments there about sort of normalization. How should we think about that, given global commodity prices have come down a lot, I mean, farm gate prices a little bit. You know, should that, if we think about the value of the inventory, I would have thought that would probably drop in FY 2024. I was a bit surprised it hadn't dropped already in FY 2023. Is that correct, or is. You know, am I thinking about that wrong? I get that there's a volume part of inventory, but the, the price part, if anything, is coming down.
I think, Phil, you know, if you look at it, it is mostly value that drove up the FY 2023 inventory. So the big thing in that chart that [ete showed with the, with the sort of difference in farm gate milk price, I mean, farm gate milk was up 30% year-over-year, right? And so that, that's the biggest part of that, of that sort of AUD 290 million COGS bar. If I were to break out the bulk section that I showed in that waterfall chart, actually, our total cost increases were almost AUD 400 million, right? So the main driver of inventory was value rather than liters, if that makes sense.
Yeah. And does that, I mean, in theory, that should unwind in FY 2024. I'm thinking of your cash flows in FY 2024. I mean, your inventory values should actually come down or, you know, if they're based, if in part, on global commodity prices.
So I would say we what we'll do is we're starting the year obviously with that value of inventory than the higher farm gate. What we've seen in the procurement season obviously for FY 2024 is that milk hasn't dropped that much. So the value per liter if you want to think about it this way for the year ahead that we've just started is gonna be very similar to the year that we finished. And so what that means for me is we'll have a bit more of a normal seasonal pattern that we would expect for inventories which is inventory investment will go up to December as we have our Spring Flush and we receive the spring milk.
Then you'd expect to see inventory drop back again in the second half of the year as you sell through after that spring flush. So I sort of expect a normal build-up and then draw down of milk, but from that higher base valuation.
Okay. Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Once again, if you do wish to ask a question, please register by pressing Star then one on your phone. Your next question comes from Mark Topy at Select Equities. Please go ahead.
Hello, gents. First question, just around the milk optimization, I guess. Can you just give us a feel of how perhaps milk is being now allocated more into the retail business and perhaps moved away from the commodity or the bulk business? Also, you alluded in the bulk business to being able to perhaps take advantage, get away from skim and whole milk powder into higher value export products. Maybe if you could touch on that point as well.
Yeah, sure, Topy. So, I mean, the business has been successful, you know, very successful at doing this over the years, finding, you know, niche or finding profitable streams for milk in the bulk business. So, and in fact, during the year, the guys did a terrific flip. You know, we, as cream cheese volumes softened, which has traditionally been a really strong mix for us, as cream cheese volumes softened in China, they swung into cheese, into mozz and parmesan, which is a really nice move. You don't see that within the numbers, but that actually added AUD 1 billion to a result that was under pressure. So we'll continually do that.
What I would say is, though, that with this disconnect now, you know, the skim of butter, you know, mix or some of those lower commodity mixes are completely underwater. And so, you know, we need to try and avoid those, at all costs, which is what we're trying to do. So as we look to our domestic business, and I think, you know, just going through the numbers the other day with the guys, we've just swung another 50 million liters of milk into our domestic business, in our planning since we acquired our volumes. So that's the growth in NPD, that's the growth in cream. That's and we will, you know, continue to try and find more and more opportunities in that domestic mix.
Then within that, so, you know, volumes within that core grocery space are sort of growing in a reasonable clip, and we're happy with that, but it's where we really under index the market, you know, outside of grocery and food service and so forth. That's where we'll start to really focus our attention and try and shift commodity milk, you know, from the commodity market into those higher returning domestic areas. And we have the capability to do it. We've got all the finished good capability, we've got the distribution network, and we've got the sales team. It's just a matter of continuing to push that. And then, you know, how do we use our skim in different ways? Skim is obviously the core by-product of our milk intake.
You know, we produce more fat items. That's how we continue to use that skim in a really effective way, and the guys are continually looking at ways of doing that, both within the domestic market, but obviously also exports. So continually trying to add value to that. That was a long answer.
No, I suppose when we, you know, when we look at the cheese price, it's probably been a bit more resilient than, for instance, the whole milk price in that global index. I'm just, you know, sort of wondering, there's that, you could be able to tilt in that. But, but more broadly, I guess the point you mentioned in terms of now competing against the Kiwis, in terms of their farm gate, where they're at in export markets, you know, I just wonder how does the export business. When the Kiwis got the ability to drop their farm gate the way they have, how does Australia- is Australia at a structural disadvantage going forward now in not having that ability? And how do we compete in export markets, even in the current year?
Well, I think, you know, I think we can still compete across our higher returning streams. So cream cheese market remains strong, lactoferrin remains strong, yeah, some of the infant formula powders remain strong, so it's just a matter of trying to focus on growing those markets. And so we're still making money out of those streams. Certainly not making money out of our bottom streams.
Yeah, so I think, Mark, that the reality is in those, you know, if you like, pure commodities, and it's not just New Zealand, where we're not competitive with it, it's a number of other exporting regions around the world. It probably goes more to my discussions with Josh around how the industry rationalizes and how the industry faces into those challenges. It is part of how, you know, why we've never, it's never enjoyable to have to take an impairment, but it is important to restructure to it, you know, and I think that we will inevitably see that there will be a realignment.
This year, as I've said earlier, this is the biggest disconnection I've ever seen. I don't think that disconnection can be sustained as we look into international markets. The ideal outcome, of course, is that the disconnection is dealt with if the commodity markets return and or at least, you know, go halfway back to where they might have been. So I think it'll, it will probably be a combination of a return in the strength of the commodity markets, which, ironically enough, I think will be driven by the fact that those low prices around the world will impact supply.
You'll probably see a little bit of a halfway meeting, which will mean that Australia will still have to be very specific about the styles of commodities and the sorts of product it produces into the future, but I don't think it needs to totally exit.
And just perhaps following in, just to touch, obviously, I suppose the reality is that China's been the crux of the lower demand in global markets. Barry, I just wonder if you can talk to their own, give us some read of the landscape that you're you, you're sort of perceiving in the China market. Obviously, they've cranked up their own internal whole milk, skim milk production, but you know, what is the outlook, particularly when we look at this China economy?
Yeah. So I think you're right, Mark. I think we are seeing, you know, we're seeing ongoing softness in demand out of China, and it has been a big driver, particularly in those global commodity markets. I think it's the weakness in demand that is perhaps more of a concern than the fact that they're producing a little more themselves. I think it is the general slowness of the China economy that we would probably note as more material in how we look at globally traded commodities around the world. So again, I think, you know, we have to adjust to that.
I mean, the only other commentary I would perhaps add to it, which is a little bit inverted, but of course, we're seeing some of that weakness in demand across the various industries result in a change in the value of the Australian dollar. As the Australian dollar continues to decline, and of course, if you're an exporter, you're rather pleased to see that occur because it does help your competitive position. So we are seeing a weaker Australian dollar mitigate some of the, if you like, competitive pressure or pricing sensitivity, obviously. So I think, you know, we did see with those huge lifts in milk price, and Pete, I believe, talked about it in his presentation.
We did see in our Asian markets in particular, you know, we reached price points that were not acceptable to the buyers, and we did see that those price points did see a decline in demand. So, you know, that's been largely absorbed, but I think the Australian dollar does play a bit of a mitigating role in that. But certainly, I'd agree with you that China is a big part of them, or China demand is a big part of the reason why you're seeing those slides as well.
The comment seems to be that they're just destocking completely at the moment, so they're out of the market. Is that how you're reading it? And so they might come back into the market the second half?
Yeah. It's always a combination, Mark, but you know, I think we've all been around long enough that, you know, when commodity prices are rising, the warehouses fill up rather quickly because people want to try and avoid the next level of rise. And when they're falling, the warehouse is empty, and they live hand-to-mouth because they're hoping that the next week it might be a little bit cheaper than last week. And I think we are obviously seeing that behavior. It's why at the extremes of the volatility, it tends to overswing and then overcorrect because there's always those that are trading in commodities, you know, particularly things like milk powder.
They can put the, they do have an ability to warehouse it. Certainly, when. It's interesting, in my long experience, Pete might have something to add to this, but when global commodity prices are rising, all your customers want long-term contracts. And when they're falling, they want to ignore the long-term contracts and talk to you about what you might be able to sell to them next week at current market price. And so that's just the nature of that business, and you know, you try and you manage that, you know, by the mix that you have, by the mix of customers you have, et cetera.
But I think, you know, that that's a long way of saying it's always a little opaque when you're trying to work out what's in pipeline for particular in countries like China or what's in warehouses, particularly like in countries like China. But the behavior seems to indicate that as you described, they're destocking in a falling market, and they'll restock us when they start seeing the market rise.
Good.
No, I think that's, I think that's right. We've, we've seen the market go very short on the way down. Yeah.
Sure. And lastly, just to confirm in terms of that guidance commentary earlier, that that sort of or factors in the latest sort of declines of the, honestly, of the farm, the GDT tanked in August pretty severely. So does that guidance kind of incorporate that, or just to be clear on that?
It's current, Mark. Putting its current guidance. So it's, you know, yeah, so we're taking into account all the dynamics we're dealing with. Yep.
Right. Very good. Thank you for that.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Carlene Dowie at Australian Dairy Farmer. Please go ahead.
Hi. I was just wondering about the disconnect you pointed to between the market and the farm gate milk prices being down to declining production and the underutilization of plants. I was just wondering, to what extent has the mandatory Dairy Code of Conduct and the changing in the way that dairy farmers contract with companies contributed to the disconnect?
Oh, I don't think, not, not significantly. I would say that the reality is the two big factors are the ongoing decline. So if we think back to, you know, the early 2000s, we were looking at 12 billion liters of milk in this country. We're now looking at 8 billion. And so 4 billion liters of milk sort of exiting for a variety of reasons. So if I was to point to some of the big reasons, I would say when you look at the impact of the Murray-Darling standby in Northern Victoria, that was where once 3 billion liters came down to half.
You know, the impact in regions like Queensland or New South Wales, southeast, those areas are all operating in deficit. So, if you looked over the period of time that came down, you would say, you know, farmers went through very difficult weather conditions over an extended period of time, the Millennial Drought and then further droughts has followed, interesting in some regions, then floods that actually damaged them almost equally as much. We saw international commodity prices and currency mean that the pricing for milk, you know, did not make dairying attractive, and therefore, you saw that decline. Really, while you've seen the decline in supply, you've seen a decline in manufacturing infrastructure. So quite frankly, it is just straight out competition for milk.
Now, in saying all of that, one of the challenges with the code is that, there are limited abilities to risk manage major movements in things like global commodity prices, because you're operating within a year. When you see other, if you like, exporting nations throughout the world, there is more flexibility in how you can manage that risk circumstance, if you like. But that would be the observation I would make. But in terms of where we see the disconnect coming from, it is scarcity of milk and for a number of the reasons that I added, and a non-rationalization of dairy infrastructure, that sees.
You know, from the farmer's point of view, it sees plenty of people wanting their milk, plenty of processors wanting the milk and bidding hard for it. The danger is, which we see in many industries, that sometimes that bidding can be too hard, and actually in the long term is not the right outcome. You know, what you prefer is, you know, an industry where profit is made in all parts of the sector. That will generally mean that it's a healthy industry. So, you know, very important for farmers to be profitable, equally important for processors and customers to be profitable, and everybody in between.
When you get to a circumstance where there's one sector that is not successful, whether it's the farmer or whether it's the processor, in terms of the long-term health of the industry, that's not what you want.
Great. And in terms of the milk supply growth, how important is that to Bega? And, are they, are you trying to do anything to grow your milk supply?
Look, I think, I mean, it's interesting. From my perspective, we have seen in the last two or three, in particular, you know, some of the most record prices that we've seen and actually quite seasonal conditions in a lot of areas. It hasn't prompted milk supply growth. I think there are a number of reasons for that, whether it's labor scarcity, whether it's succession planning, whether it's scale and innovation. So I think there are a lot. Or even it can be some of those issues around sustainability as well.
So my view is that we need to be working really closely with our farmers to try and help them address whatever the issues might be and encourage the good economic growth and any innovation that we can help them bring or any practices that we can do with them. So I think there's still, it's interesting, you know, my observation, again, in the area of farm supply is that I have some wonderful suppliers and wonderful examples that you see, not only Bega, but other companies where you see a large percentage of, or a good percentage of young farmers in particular, investing in new technology, growing, expanding their operations, looking to buy the farm next door.
So, I'm always keen to say, I don't see the dairy industry as an industry that across the board, all farmers are either shrinking or thinking about exiting. That's not actually what's happening. What we're seeing is a section of the industry very keen to grow, very keen to bring innovation. And we're seeing another section of the industry that have got to retire, got close or near retirement age, and particularly in the last 12 months to two years, they've seen their property values increase substantially. They've seen the value of their animals increase substantially, and when they see and they've seen, you know, properties trade rather quickly. So if they were thinking about retirement, they may have even brought that retirement forward.
I think it's so it's not that there is not people growing in the industry, it's just that really they are not offsetting those that for other reasons may have decided to leave, which is why I think it's really important to think about succession. And even it's important to think about models that may see young people enter the industry, because I think that's become increasingly difficult as we've seen the explosion in land prices and you know and even the you know the costs of constructing a dairy, for example.
So I think there are things. I'm not entirely jaundiced. I see some great work done around dairy farms growing. I think it's about, you know, how we get that succession right, and indeed, how we encourage the new entries, which I think is other challenges. And they're challenges, I might say, that are not unique to Australia. We see them around the world.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, everybody, I think that might be the last of the call, is it?
Yep. Thank you. No further questions. Please go ahead.
I'll wrap up. I think, thank you all for listening. It's turned out to be quite a long investor call, but I always think that is good. Always pleased to share a comprehensive view of the business. I hope that from all that people have heard, the realities with we have a business that we think has great opportunities. For me, we've got a great team that have shown their capability in the year past and will show greater capability, and will continue to demonstrate that in the year ahead.
It is indeed important to have a team and an infrastructure and a business that can take opportunities, but it's equally important that you have a business that is willing to face into challenges and accept them. This is a year where we've had to accept some challenges that has meant that we've impaired assets, which, as I said earlier, is never something that you would like to do. But I think importantly, it is about facing into those challenges, making the changes you need to make while taking the opportunities that you've identified. I think we're really well positioned to do that. I thank everybody for their support, and look forward to chatting to you again soon. Thank you.
Thank you. That concludes our conference call for today. You may now disconnect your lines.