Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call on the Newlat for 2022 full year results. I'm Benedetta Mastrolia, I'm the investor relator in Newlat, joining me today to discuss our results are Angelo Mastrolia , our Chairman, Giuseppe Mastrolia , CEO and Chief Commercial Officer, Rocco Sergi, CFO, and Fabio Fazzari, Group Financial Director. Apologies. Before starting our presentation, I would like to remind you that this presentation may contain certain forward-looking statements that reflect the company's management's current views with respect to future events and financial and operational performance of the company and its subsidiaries. These forward-looking statements are based on Newlat S.p.A.'s current expectations and projections about future events, any reference to past performance of Newlat shall not be taken as a representation or an indication that such performance will continue in the future.
This is also not a, an offer or a solicitation of an offer to buy Newlat's securities. We move directly to the presentation. I believe it's Slide 7, where we have the key financial highlights. As always, we're starting from the revenues. In terms of revenues, we had EUR 741.1 million in revenues, which is a marked increase of around 18.5% versus the pro forma revenues of 2021. These numbers include Symington's, but they, Symington's from 2021 in the pro forma numbers, but we didn't include EM Foods in this presentation. In terms of increase, we had the highest increase in pasta with + 41%, apologies, and + 25% in dairy.
In terms of the reference markets, we had the highest increase in Germany with almost 24.4% of increase in sales. The U.K. being the second with 18.5% increase, and Italy with 16.6%. Now we move on to the EBITDA quadrant where we have the adjusted EBITDA number of EUR 57.5 million this year, versus adjusted EBITDA of EUR 58 million in 2021. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 7.8% versus 9.3% in 2021. As already mentioned in previous earnings calls, this year we had a negative impact of the general inflationary trends that we've seen in which impacted all the raw material prices, plus packaging, energy and logistic costs.
We can see that in the sort of slight decrease in EBITDA margin for this year. In terms of EBIT, we had EUR 20.1 million of EBIT versus EUR 20.4 million in 2021. However, we had a very good performance of EBIT in the last quarter, as well as the other sort of financial figures, as we had a recovery in margin in the last quarter, and we generated almost half of the EBIT for the year in the last quarter with the increases and price increases as well. In terms of net income, we had net income of EUR 6.6 million, which compares to an adjusted net income of EUR 7.97 million in the year 2021.
Looking at free cash flow, we had free cash flow, which for this year we decided to exclude the change in net working capital, as with the year we had to sort of invest in net working capital for the year. We're looking at a EUR 16.8 million free cash flow, without the change in net working capital. This impact in net working capital has already been neutralized in the first months of 2023, so we expect to have sort of a positive free cash flow, including the change in net working capital going forward from the next quarters. We had an EBITDA free cash flow conversion of 72.6%. Lastly, we have net financial position.
Looking at the net debt, excluding IFRS 16, we had EUR 34.6 million of net debt, which compares to EUR 13.8 million in 2021. Looking at net debt, including the IFRS 16 lease liabilities, we had EUR 81.4 million on net debt compared to EUR 52.9 million in 2021. This year net debt was influenced by a number of factors. The first one being renewal of lease terms, which were expiring this year, which influenced the number of lease liabilities for the year, as well as an increased share buyback amount of EUR 28.4 million, which compares to EUR 15.8 million in 2021. Basically, doubled compared to last year, as well as some lower liquidity levers ended last year.
Moving on to the next slide, we have sort of a very short summary of the key milestones of 2022 for the group. As we said, despite the very challenging scenario, we had quite a successful year, and we have these sort of interesting milestones that we are sharing now. The first one being the EM Foods acquisition. As we mentioned in previous conversations, we acquired EM Foods at the end of the year. With this acquisition, we acquired the production, sales, and distribution platform of the company in France, as well as well as a. Sorry about those requests.
As well as a new type of addition in terms of dessert mixes and baking kits to the categories we have. In terms of pasta sales in Germany, we had the best performing year in Italian pasta sales in Germany despite the exit of the Buitoni brand. Delverde was able to set a new record in terms of volumes of pasta of Italian pasta sold in Germany. We had 42,450 tons of Italian pasta sold, Delverde pasta sold in Germany in 2022. In terms of organic sales, we had a very good organic sale increase of 6%, which is well above the industry average, and we had the highest increase in pasta sales sales volumes.
Also looking at sort of more ESG topics, we were ranked among the under 30 companies ranked by Corriere della Sera as the most climate-conscious companies in Italy, and we had the best results in the food and beverage industry. We were also recently awarded with a leading, or awarded as one of the leading sustainability companies in Italy by Il Sole 24 Ore as well. This year we invested a lot more in our brands. We increased our focus on the core brands of our portfolio in the reference markets. We increased our exposure to social media. We had some TV adverts. We did new line expansions and brand relaunches in different countries.
Definitely we can say that the Number 1 brand that we focused on this year was Naked, both in the UK, in Italy, and in Germany. We had collaborations with influencers in the UK, which is something that will come up in Italy as well in the next few months. We've done on-site brand activations for Naked, with university in Italy. We've engaged a lot of young people, and we've made sure to make sort of the Naked a very well-known brand, which was already well-known in the UK, but now we've kind of penetrated the Italian and German market as well, and the brand awareness has grown by a lot in just under 12 months since its launch in these two markets. We're really happy with that. Lastly, very important for our strategy is M&A.
By the end of 2022, we actually entered into some interesting talks with a few companies in particular for the acquisition of a very big company in Europe, which has different categories, kind of like us, but has over EUR 1 billion revenues, in EUR 1 billion revenues. We also have some talks with another company which specializes in the special food sector with around EUR 200 million revenues of sales. Now, I think there was Apologies, there was someone that requested to do something, and I can move my slide. I'm really sorry about that. Sorry, there's Okay. Okay, now we can do it. Okay. Apologies about that. Now we move on to the next slide, which is about the growth rate in the food and beverage sector.
If we look at the sort of our peers, we selected a sample of eight companies that we can kind of benchmark towards, and we can see that in terms of the growth rate, we had increase of sales, which was the highest among these players. Some of them are really big names. Actually, all of them are really big names. In general, we had a very good result in terms of sales growth, and we also had a result which shows the very good mix and price contribution that we were able to achieve in the last year. Now we move on to some marketing activities we've done in the last year, coming up with UK being the Number 1.
We're looking at the two core brands for the UK, which are Naked and Mug Shot. With Naked, we had an increase in the total market value of Naked of +7.5% and an increased penetration of 4% in the market. We launched Naked Ultimate. As I mentioned earlier, we had a campaign revolving around the launch of Naked Ultimate. We collaborated with different influencers, as you can see here in the pictures, and we've been working on new product development as well as the improvement of the current lines and current SKUs. Moving on to the next slide, we have Mug Shot, which is the other sort of core brand for the UK.
We are category leaders in the instant convenience snacking market, with Mug Shot being recognized among people who really care for their health and their sort of calorie intake and overall micronutrient intake. We had a total value increase of 3.2%, we were actually the Number 1 brand of trips, unit trips for in the category. We also had a new campaign, which is the Give It a Shot campaign, which was launched this year, this past year. We re-engaged with Living World , which we've been associated with previously, and we've been having really good feedback from the campaign. We've had a lot of collaborations, as you can see here as well.
Also for Mug Shot, we're working on new product development and launching new lines and new different products as well. Moving on to the next slide, we have some really interesting news about the UK. In terms of performance in the market, Symington's outperformed the market both in terms of value and volume growth. As you can see here in the slide, in the graph, you can see that we had sort of a 6 x better results than its peers, the total UK grocery market in the UK, with a 16.7% increase in value growth and as well as an increase of 4.4% in volume, which compares to a -6% for the overall market.
In general, we can see that these numbers kinda confirm the ever-evolving and ever-lasting brand awareness and competitiveness of the Symington's range in the UK and confirming itself as one of the best-performing sort of players in the UK. Now we move on to Italy. In Italy as well, we had some very interesting launches and line extensions. We've worked on the Cristiano Donato line extensions. This is particularly interesting because we are incorporating some of the Symington's production. These, some of these products that you can see on the right-hand side are on the left-hand side, sorry, are being produced at Symington's. We also launched new pasta for Delverde. We've seen an increased interest towards high protein and gluten-free pasta in Italy.
We've enabled with our existing production to implement those very quickly, and we're launching the Delverde 100% legume pastas, both the high-protein pasta and a gluten-free pasta range. We're also launching different products such as Cappuccino Lovers, a Lover's Oat Milk, and other products. We will be launching Naked Ultimate in the next few months in Italy as well. We've launched different products in the dairy sector. We've done some communication here. You can see some pictures. Moving on to the next slide, where you can see sort of the investments that we've done in communication in Italy. We focused on our core brands.
In terms of milk and dairy, we focused on Optimus and Polenghi, as we collaborated with Bake Off Italia, which was where they used our mascarpone, our milk, and our sort of milk and dairy products to bake their cakes in Bake Off Italia, and it was really this was really a success and was one of the most-watched TV shows in Italy. With Gran feta and Cristiano Donato, we collaborated with Chef in Camicia, which is a online platform. It's a social media online community platform with different channels, Instagram, Facebook, and all the sort of social media platforms you can think of. We had a lot of very good feedback. We had more than 2 million impressions overall, and the campaign was very successful.
In Italy, we also really tried to push the Naked launch. We collaborated with different universities as well to launch the product. We had some brand activations on site at the most important universities in Italy, like Milan, Rome, and Bologna. We did interviews with people around the cities, and we had over 500,000 impressions on TikTok and Instagram with this campaign. Moving on to Germany, we had a line extension of the Birkel line with Menzi, which we already presented last year. We are also launching the Hafer, which is the oat pasta in Germany. Really, Minuto was redesigned last year, and we've had a very, very good reception with increased sales.
We, you can, you will see later on the increase in sales since the Minuto redesign. we're also, as mentioned briefly as well in the last presentation, we are working towards a Minuto range extension with the baking kits from EM Foods. we will incorporate a big EM Foods production into to create a new brand called Minuto, which we'll launch in the European market as a alternative to their Mixiz brand. The next slide, you can see some of the pictures from the German retailers where we've been pushing a lot for the launch of Naked as well as Minuto.
Maybe worth mentioning, which I forgot to mention earlier, is that Minuto is now being produced at Symington's, so we're also working on the sort of savings aspect of the product, which was previously produced at a third party, by a third party producer. We've had really good reception, as you can see in this very interesting slide where you can see that the volume growth in the last year has been of 48% since the brand relaunch and brand redesign. We had really good reception in Germany, and the product has been really appreciated by customers all over Germany. Onto the next slide, something I mentioned earlier on is the very well, very good performance of Delverde in Germany.
2022 was sort of a bet for us because we, it was the first year without Buitoni. Of course, we didn't know what to expect, but as you can see from the numbers, we were really, we were really successful in the sort of brand switch from Buitoni to Delverde, and we had the best performing year in terms of volume. This is purely volumes in Germany, with 42,451 tons of pasta being sold in 2022. This beats the kinda record that we had in 2020. Bear in mind that in 2020, we had the highest number because of COVID. This year, we just had an increase because of our really committed marketing and sales team in Germany.
We can say that we successfully transitioned from Buitoni to Delverde with no impact on the pasta sales in Germany, which is the Number 1, which is the Number 1 country for the Buitoni new Delverde pasta. I'm really happy with that. Now we move on to ESGs and ESG updates. In terms of environment, we've been working on different actions. One of them being the installation on a photovoltaic system with solar panels. We are working on a new system for water recovery. As already mentioned, we have been recognized as one of the most planet-conscious Italian companies by Portogruaro, Desia, and Il Sole 24 Ore.
This year, we recorded a decrease of 25.7% from 2020 in terms of energy intensity, and we've achieved also, besides having over 90% of waste recycled or recovered, which is really important for us. In terms of logistics, we've avoided 780 tons of CO2 emissions by using train transportation instead of truck transportation. We're also working towards a more sort of sustainable future for our employees with a training program aimed at increasing awareness and skills and knowledge about sustainability in general with our team. In terms of social, we've been doing a lot of different things. Some of them we already talked about in previous conversations.
We're also working on the sort of generational change we called it here. We've increased our headcount of people under 30 of about 40% in the last three years. We've been really working on investing in the newer generations and young people and skill to the young people to sort of invest for the future. We've been working with different different schools in in farm and with the different schools, and we've been arranging visits of plants and farms and having lectures about food and nutrition in general. Moving on to governance. We had a quite a nice adaptation of the sort of governance in terms of sustainability policies.
We've adopted a group ESG policy as opposed to different separated policies, and we're also adopting a common group code of ethics. Now we move on to the sales breakdown and analysis. As mentioned already quite a few times, we've increased our sales by 18.5% this year. This period saw a different strong acceleration in sales growth, of course, which is shown in an overall increase in organic sales of 6%, which confirms sort of the strong underlying demand. We had new launches as you've seen. We had new listings as well in different supermarkets and grocery stores.
This is kind of proving the commercial commitment and that our sales has had in the last year. We had also some, of course, some strong price increases to face the increase in costs that we've had in the last year since the war outbreak. In terms of key raw materials, as I said, we had an increase in production costs, which has been sort of partially almost rebated to consumers, to customers, sorry, and we have some new price increases that have been implemented in the beginning of 2020, 2023. Now we move on to revenue breakdown by business unit. As you can see here, all the categories had a positive growth.
In general, we can say that we had roughly 1/3 of the increase was influenced by pure sales volume increase and 2/3 by price increases. In general, pasta sales went up by almost 41%, and this was thanks to new sales volumes and new customers as well. Germany, as mentioned, has been the Number 1 country for pasta growth, and we also increased our exposure of pasta sales to large retailers as well as B2B customers. The milk segment grew thanks mainly to an increase in food service and normal trade sectors. Bakery products went up especially thanks to an increase in the Cristiano Donato sales as well as an increase in the private label and B2B sectors.
Dairy, as always, has been kind of carried by mascarpone growth, which grew especially in Canada with 62% increase. USA with +31%, France +35%, and Netherlands +25% increase. We had a really good year for mascarpone as well this year. Instant noodles, as we said, has been kind of pushed into new markets like Italy and Germany. We had an increase in which is attributable to the new launches in new markets as well as new product launches such as Naked Ultimate and generally better sales conditions than last year. In terms of special products, we had an increase, which is thanks to the development of dairy food and special products contracts in the sort of B2B channel.
We had a very good increase in this segment as well. Moving on to distribution channels. Also here we had a good increase in all the distribution channels with large scale, large retailers being the Number 1 channel with 61% of kind of weight. This was positively attributed to new customers and also the increase, of course, in average selling price. We had overall an increase in the pasta and dairy products in this segment in particular. In terms of B2B channels as well as normal trade and food service, we had an increase, of course, in average selling price as always, but also an increase in demand, especially in B2B, we had an increase in the pasta and special product segment.
In terms of private label, we had an increase in the pasta private label business. Geography. As we mentioned earlier, the geography that grew the most was Germany this year. In Italy, we had an increase in volumes in the pasta, instant noodles, and bakery sectors in particular, and we also had the addition of new customers for the other categories. In Germany, we had an increase in sales volumes, especially in the pasta and dairy sectors. We also, as mentioned, we launched the instant noodles segment, so of course, we had an increase in that, which was thanks to both Naked and also the Barilla Communo relaunch.
In the United Kingdom, we had 18.5% increase, which is attributable to pasta and instant noodles for the most part. In the UK, the instant noodles kind of growth was carried by the Naked Ultimate launch, as well as some new reallocations of the existing products. We also launched the Erbu pasta in the UK, as well as our own brand, Belverde. In other countries, we had really good performance, especially in the Q4, in Q4, with an increase in the pasta and dairy businesses in particular. We had the countries that grew the most were Netherlands, Sweden, Israel, and France. In the next slide, you can see more of the increases by country.
Here we're looking at the countries where we grew the most with a sort of significant revenue amount by country. Netherlands, as I said, grew the most by 242%, and we had a total revenue of EUR 6 million this year. Sweden, 137%, and Israel, 62%, and all the others you can see. We grew all around the world, especially in Europe. We also grew in Canada, U.S., and also in Israel. Now we move on to the slide about EBITDA, and sorry, the EBITDA margin. We're looking at adjusted EBITDA of EUR 57.5 million in full year 2022 compared to EUR 58 million in 2021. The adjusted EBITDA margin was 7.8% versus 9.3%.
In general, if we look at the breakdown by business unit, we can see that bakery maintained more or less the same EBITDA margin with around 17.3% EBITDA margin versus 17.9% last year. We also saw an increase in special product segments of margins of about 1.4%. We went from 10.8% - 12.4%, 12.2%, sorry. This was mainly due to the increase in the sale of some B2B baby food products, which had a higher EBITDA margin than the average we had in the last years.
All in all, if we look at the results, we can see that despite a very challenging scenario, we were able to sort of maintain margins to a good level, despite, of course, the dilution that was, of course, almost inevitable, seeing the increase in prices as well, so the mismatch between the cost increase and then the sort of cost rebate to customers. However, we're really confident that we will recover all the margins to normal levels in 2023. As a matter of fact, in the first two months of 2023, we actually recorded an EBITDA margin of 9.45%, which is well in line and even above the 2021 levels.
We have good expectations for 2023. Looking at the 2023 numbers, as we said, in the first two months of the year, we saw an increase in all the segments as well. We saw an increase in milk of 15%, in dairy 5%, pasta +25%, bakery was +40%, and instant noodles +15%. In terms of year-to-date, end of February revenues, we had EUR 126.7 million of revenues versus EUR 102.6 million in 2022. With an EBITDA margin, as I just said, of 9.45%.
If we look at this result, we can say it's been particularly successful and particularly good because usually the first two months of the year are very flat in terms of sales growth. We can say that the year 2023 has started on the right path. In terms of margin recovery, we will see, or we believe I saw a stabilization of margins at about 9% by the end of Q1 2023, with the final sort of prices adaptations that are being put in place in these months. We move on to the next slide where we can see more about the free cash flow and sort of margin improvement by quarter.
As mentioned earlier, we are looking at the free cash flow conversion that we call the underlying free cash flow conversion free cash flow, sorry, which is EUR 16.8 million. In this case, we are neutralizing the net working capital impact because of the material change that we had in the net working capital this year to sort of support the latest around CPI passthrough. In this case, we had an extraordinary impact on the operating cash flow, particularly in Q4. As mentioned earlier, we will be seeing a normalization of this number. In 2023, we're already seeing some good results now.
If we look at the margins by quarter, here we have sort of a recap of the margins that we had in the last year by quarter. We can see that we hit the lowest point in Q2, which is sort of when we had the outbreak of the war and all the increase in prices being at the sort of beginning. There you can see that our margin was 7.30%. Slightly a slight recovery quarter- by- quarter until getting to Q4, where we had 8.24% of EBITDA margin, which is basically to show that the price increases have been implemented.
There's, of course, always sort of a time lapse between the implementation of price increases and the acceptance of cost increases, which we had to account for in the first, I would say, nine months of the year. Now we move on to the next slide, which is about net working capital. Here you can see more about what we've done in terms of net working capital. We're also looking at the cash conversion cycle. As a result of the inflationary environment we've lived in 2022, we had to sort of invest in net working capital to account for the higher inventory levels.
This was mainly due to buying larger amounts of ambient and long shelf life raw materials to account for to have more room for lower purchase prices. We bought more in order to pay a little bit less. Also higher receivables. We used that a negotiation point to have consumers accept the steep price increase and have our already increase in prices and be able to support margins. For this reason, we had a shortened number of days in terms of cash conversion cycle, which went from -43 days to -9 days, which is still in our favor. At least, although we shortened it, we're still a good result.
This, as said, was sort of implemented to help with the increase price increase rebate and as well as the purchase of raw materials like prices with shorter payment terms. In general, as we said earlier, we will see a normalization in Q1 2023. Now we move on to M&A, the M&A slide, which is quite interesting because as we mentioned, we have two new targets in the pipeline at the moment. In general, we can see that M&A has been really interesting for the Newlat Food strategy for a few reasons. The first one being the interest rate level increase leaves less room for private equity activity.
The current credit market environment has leaves lower opportunity for heavily leveraged structures. That kind of clears the path for us. We're an industrial player like Newlat. Because financial investors we've seen in the last months are looking at targets with higher growth profiles than the average traditional food players. Therefore, their interest has been shifted from this segment, from this sector to high growth sectors, high growth companies as well. We've finally seen some sort of good signals in this respect. As we said earlier, we have two deals that we've recently been talking with the targets. One is the it's quite a transformational acquisition in Europe with over EUR 1 billion turnover.
This company is active in different categories and has very good synergies because it has some very complementary products with ours. These synergies are very, I would say, immediately actionable and realizable. We also have another acquisition, which is in the special product sector in Italy with around EUR 100 million in turnover. With these two in line and the one we've been working on for the past 1.5 years , we can say that we have some really exciting opportunities for the next few months, and we hope we can close one of these acquisitions this year. Now on to the last slide, which is about sort of the 2023 outlook.
The Newlat Food management is really focused and really committed further price increases. We are working on further price increases as we speak, that will allow for a recovery margins to more or less 2021 levels. We're also working on industrial efficiency and new product innovation plans. We're just confirming our focus on the M&A arena. With the 2/3 M&A targets we have mentioned, we are really confident that we will be able to bring home something really interesting in the next few months. That's it for the presentation. Now we can start the Q&A.
As always, I would like to ask the participants to either write their questions down in the group chat or unmute themselves and ask the question. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Arianna Terzulli from Intesa Sanpaolo speaking. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you. Yes, yes.
Thank you for the presentation. I have a couple of questions. You already mentioned this topic during the speech, but I would ask you to elaborate more on them. First, in terms of outlook, we understand that the scenario is really tough. You are not experiencing any kind of relief on the, on the inflation side with the tribes. If you could give us a clarification then on where does the recovery in margin over 2023 comes from. On the margin, with reference to energy prices, could you update us on whether you're signed to date some sort of long-term contract at these prices? The last one moving to M&A.
In light of your statements, and given the size of the potential transactions, could you give us more color on the deals that you are evaluating? Also in terms of what the effects on your financial structure, what kind of financing are you thinking about? If you have a set target leverage. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Arianna. About the general outlook, and a comment on the, on the inflation, we could say as we show in the presentation, that the year started very, very well. There is a strong underlying demand in terms of the volumes, and this I think is partly into a general positive environment. I have to say also most of it is also linked to the first results we are getting from the several commercial initiatives that we started last year and that Benedetta show in details during the presentation. This is a general outlook, very positive in all the countries and in all the sectors. There are no particular area with a particular issue in the portfolio.
In terms of inflation, what we are seeing now is, first of all, a general stabilization. The positive news is that we are not seeing the volatility of last year. I think that this is also visible in the preview that we made in terms of the expected margin recovery in the Q1. Because last year we suffer due to the fact that every week we experience additional improvement and additional increase of cost. There was a lot of volatility in terms of inflation, and this obviously didn't allow us to put in place the right size of the pass-through.
This changed this year in the sense that in Q1 we have been able to put in place the right size of pass-through already planned at the end of last year. The result is it was and is immediately visible in the margin. On this basis, we believe that in 2023 we can definitely come back to the margin of 2020, so the year before the start of the inflation wave that characterized the second part of 2021 and all the year 2022. This means that also in terms of outlook, we are also very positive in terms of growth because we still see.
we are still seeing a strong underlying volume growth together with the contribution from the price increase that we already implemented in Q1. About the M&A, we enter in two main process at the beginning of the year. We are obviously in an early phase of these two process, and we cannot share at this stage a lot of details for several reasons. In particular also because since we are in a primary stage of this of this process, we don't want to I would say maybe discover some trump cards that we can use in the negotiations.
We wanted anyway to make you informed and make you updated about the fact that M&A remain one of the most important area in terms of strategic area for the group. It's true that we are thinking about a sizable deal. It's also true that in particular for the deal that we presented as more than EUR 1 billion revenues, apart from the size, there are a lot of synergies really visible that we can implement immediately. This is obviously a part of the very quick de leverage that we have in our plan after this acquisition.
About the de leverage target, you know that we have a bond into the market, and we disclose a very clear covenants for the bond that remain strategic for the company. I think that our action will remain substantially in line with the covenants that we announced at the time of the bond issue. I repeat, even if the first look of the target could be, so someone could be impressed by the size of the deal, I can tell you that there are a lot of synergies, and the de leverage will be very quick.
Thank you very clear.
We have two questions in the chat. First one is from Gabriele Colasanto , who's asking: What financial tools or sources will be used to finance M&A in case that any of the commented acquisitions are closed successfully during the year?
At the moment, we are comfortable with the support of the banks that are following the company and are our partners. We don't need, at this stage for what we are planning, any other source of financing, also because, I think probably, other source like the bond market or other areas are not interesting at the moment also in terms of momentum, in terms of pricing. We are confident with bank financing at the moment.
We have another question, right, Benedetta? I see Mr. Ivan Ripepi that is saying, "Hello. Thank you for the call. Few questions from my side. Do you think that the 2023 year-to-date growth and EBITDA margin figures can be kept for complete 2023 estimation, or there was a specific situation getting this bigger than expected?" Second question that you can find in the chat is, "Regarding the possible big acquisition, how would you plan to finance these activities?" Thanks, Mr. Ripepi, for the questions.
About the last one, the combination will be the cash that we have available and the bank financing. About the first one, we are seeing, as I said before, still a strong underlying volume growth. This means that, considering that, we had in the first half already a round of CPI passthrough with a contribution in terms of pricing, we expect to have also mixed contribution during the year. I think that we expect to maintain a solid growth also this year, not only in the first quarter, but along all the quarters.
I want to add something to the first question of Mr. Ripepi is that even despite the fact that we made all the price increases, you see that we had an increase even of the organic growth. What I can tell you is that not only despite the price increase, we kept all the current customers, but we even increased the customer portfolio that we have in our company, as you see by the growth on the countries. For 2023, we are targeting even new potential area like the Middle East and improve all the European market. We can say that we see the margin figures can be kept for the complete 2023 year estimation. Is there Paola Carboni?
Carboni, I think she wants to. Thanks.
Yes. Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Yes. Yes.
Yes. So thank you. I have two quick question. The first one is if you can update us on the integration of EM Foods. What should we expect in terms of contribution for this year from the long-term supply agreement that you signed with the vendor, and the ramp-up of profitability we should expect? Also on the other side, the timeline of your investments, because if I remember correctly, you were planning some additional CapEx on that. Second question, if you can elaborate on the performance of the bakery and special division in the last quarter. Seems to me that they were the main driver for this recovery of profitability in Q4. What were the dynamics behind that?
You have mentioned in particular for the special business, the contribution of B2B contracts. I wonder whether these contracts have, say, an even split during the year or they had, for example, kind of one-off contribution in Q4, which we should be aware of going forward. Third question, if possible, is breakdown of the 23% top-line growth that you've mentioned for the Q1 so far. How much of that is pricing and pricing mix, and how much of that is volume? The last point, if you can update us on the expected CapEx at the group level.
I remember that in one of past press releases, you were anticipating a potential plan of investing more for expansion of production capacity at some of your plants. If you have taken any decision in this respect, and what should we expect for 2023. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Paola. About the integration of EM Food, we started at the beginning of January, and we believe that this year will be a year of integration. We will have in 2023, around EUR 35 million of additional revenues. We are making obviously investments there to reorganize the company, and the big contribution of EM Food will be in line with the communication we made when we complete the acquisition, is expected for 2024. The other question was about the performance in these two months of the first quarter. The performance is everywhere organic.
In bakery is mainly linked to some B2B contract that we signed, and I would say the one-off in this case is related to the fact that we start with this new contract, but it's not a one-off in the sense that going forward we will have this kind of contribution substantially forever. Until we keep this contract. In special products, we expect to continue to maintain this year- by- year and quarter- by- quarter improvement because this is related to the implementation step by step of the contract that we have with the famous pharma multinational corporation.
We started last year, the implementation of this contract is giving us improvement in terms of revenues and in terms of profitability because the margin of this product is generally materially higher than the current profitability of the division. About volume and price, I would say that the split during the year was around 30% volumes and 70% price contribution. In the first quarter should be around 60%-65% in terms of pricing and the remaining part in terms of volume. This it's an opportunity to highlight once again the fact that it's not just a matter of price increase, but there is an underlying business that is very solid, it's very strong.
We continue to get success with all the commercial implementations that we made last year. We are absolutely so happy for these results that we hope and we believe that they will continue also in the next quarter. About CapEx, generally speaking, I have to say that the CapEx of this year already includes some investments that we made, especially in the UK, linked to the integration and the improvement of the efficiency of Symington's. This means that we do not expect going forward on a yearly basis a different level of CapEx. It could be a bit lower, but not higher than the level that we reported this year. On one side we will balance all the investments that we plan for the group between all the different plant and the different companies.
Most of the investments that we announced in the past press release are supported by government, and this means that we don't have a net impact on the CapEx spending. I want to add that, for example, this year we got some room to start several initiatives in other plants because, for example, we end all the investments that we finished in the past years in Generale Latticini Italia , for example. This is the proof of the active management that we make on the CapEx to maintain a decent level of CapEx spending. On the other side, we want to support all the initiatives that we have on the table to improve capacity in some case, to improve efficiency in other cases, et cetera.
Thank you.
I think unfortunately there are no more question, to ask again about the energy contract. I think there was a question on that. I don't know if you have the same. If you can elaborate on how you have negotiated your energy exposure for, 2023 and beyond.
At the moment, we didn't close any long-term contract for energy. We still have in place a long-term contract in UK that will expire in September. We are still waiting to have maybe a better clear view on the situation. Generally speaking, I have to say that most of the alert that we experienced in autumn think that now is no more present because the prices are stabilized and in some cases also materially reduced. Now we are trying to find a view for the future, and then we will think about maybe a long-term contract signature, but nothing happened at the moment.
Thank you very much.
If there are no more questions, we may end the call. In case any one of you has any follow-up questions, we're available via email, by phone, or however you prefer, and we are really, we're at your disposal for any doubts. Thank you so much for joining today's call, and we hope to see you again soon. Thank you. Have a nice evening. Bye.
Thank you.
Bye, everyone. Bye.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone.
Bye. Thank you.