Good evening, everyone. I am Radhika Arora, the Head of Investor Relations at UPL. On behalf of the management team and all the other people who have worked tirelessly to make this event possible, it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to our FY23 capital markets day. Whether you are in the room or joining us via the webcast, I do believe the hour spent with us today will be very valuable in understanding the strategic direction of the company. You'll get the chance to hear from and interact with our deep bench of business leaders, the ones who build the systems and engaged in working towards our ambition to change the game. A few of these examples you would have already seen at the experience center created outside.
With that in mind, I will get off the stage in just a bit, but before that, a few logistical pointers. First on Q&A, there's a lot of information in today's in today's presentation, and we want to make sure that you hear it all before we open for questions. The session will start with a presentation by our Chairman and Group CEO, Jai Shroff, followed by Global CFO, Anand Vora, CEO of UPL Corporation, our international crop protection platform, Mike Frank, India Head, Ashish Dobhal for UPL SAS, our India Crop Protection Platform, Bhupen Dubey, CEO of Advanta, our global seeds platform, Raj Tiwari, Chief Supply Chain Officer for our manufacturing and specialty chemicals. Lastly, please make sure to check out the safe harbor statement about the forward-looking statements. With that, let me welcome on stage now, Jai.
Thank you, Radhika. Thank you and welcome everyone to our investor conference, our annual meeting of shareholders. I'm very pleased with. Sorry? I can see that. In challenging times, UPL once again has performed very well. I'm very pleased to share that all the divisions of the business are agile and, to be honest, probably some of the best performing businesses in each of its business units. This year, the consolidated revenue for the group cost INR 50,000 crores, and we had an EBITDA of almost INR 11,200 crores, and we had a net debt now of just a little over $2 billion. With this, we've already paid out $250 million to shareholders. We've restructured our businesses.
We've also had debt reduction of almost $440 million and invested almost $350 million in CapEx for future growth of the business. UPL continues to perform well in very, very challenging times as we are going through a post-COVID resurgence of production capacities in China. UPL has to unlock shareholder value and to unlock the true potential of our different business lines, UPL has built within the group some of the leading businesses in the space of food systems. Today we have a leading crop protection business. We have the UPL Sustainable, UPL SAS we call it, which is the leading company in India in crop protection.
We have the global seed platform, which is Advanta, and we have the specialty and manufacturing platform, which is also in India. In all these spaces, we are number 1 in our space in the world, in the sectors. We also were able to get marquee shareholders to invest in these companies, and also to demonstrate the true value of these separate business units. We have also been able to get a proper governance set up with different board members in each of these business units. We have a huge, I mean, beyond compliance, we have a huge amount of experience with board members who add tremendous value at the management level of the companies.
UPL has been focusing on really improving its market share globally. We are today leaders in agriculture transition. We believe the future of agriculture and food security is being sustainable. The whole world has talked about energy transition. The whole world is talking about mobility transition. I believe the future is about agriculture transition. With our whole platform of technologies, we are moving towards a more sustainable agriculture future. Not to lose focus on ROC and strengthening our cash flows, as I said this year, we have generated more than $800 million of net cash, invested some money, bought back shares, paid out dividends, and we believe that just shows the confidence in our business.
Food security is also one of the key challenges for the world. With our initiatives, with the Gigaton Challenge, with partnership with FIFA Foundation, with our partnership with Zero Summit and so many other initiatives with the World Bank and the UN organizations, we are completely, we are the leaders in developing technologies towards sustainable agriculture systems. We believe that agriculture transition is the only way. We cannot leave the whole agriculture community, the food systems out of this transition towards a more sustainable outcomes.
We believe that almost 30%, anywhere from 25%-30% of greenhouse gases are generated by agriculture, and that can definitely be reduced by more than 10% with the right incentive structure, the right technologies, and the right support from the governments as they are doing towards the other industries. UPL has a huge portfolio of what we call climate-smart technologies, which can reduce CO2 emissions, which can reduce heat and water stress on agriculture. I'm sure that you have had or you should take some time to see our small exhibition here to demonstrate some of the things which we are doing across the world in various platform.
Not to say the least, but to really create a farmer hero concept where we are recognizing farmers who are willing to transition from traditional practices to more sustainable practices. Some of the initiatives in the sugar industry in India, or the avocado industry in Mexico, or towards in the soya bean markets in Brazil, and vegetable farmings and projects in Africa. All these are amazing pilot projects, which we believe are leading platforms to really transition agriculture, which I believe will help UPL to increase our market share in these markets, but also promise farmers a more resilient future and better outputs.
UPL is also committed to various, as I mentioned briefly, you know, we've committed to science-based targets for our CO2 emissions. We are also one of the three companies, global companies to sign up to the water partnership at WBCSD. We have, you know, part of the UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate, and so many other initiatives which are creating more than action, creating commitments and creating a consensus among industry to move towards a more sustainable future. At UPL, we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 10 years to develop technologies to really be able to mitigate some of these things. We are very fortunate that the world has become so much more aware about that.
I believe that our company will benefit with all these initiatives or requirements or standards by food companies. As food security becomes a bigger and bigger issue around the world, and in all my travels in almost every country, the number one or number two issue for all the presidents of these countries and governments and all the governments at large is food security. In the face of climate change and such erratic weather patterns, there is a lot of anxiety about that. We believe that the tailwinds for the industry are huge in the future, just because food security is going to be one of the critical factors which decides how whether governments get re-elected or not.
We are very well-placed with a platform to deliver a product to almost every farmer. Today, I believe statistically that almost every farmer uses some of UPL products, one or two of UPL products. We believe that that platform gives us the ability to transition help transition agriculture to a more sustainable future. I will hand over to Anand. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Jai. A warm welcome to all of you for joining us today at this Capital Market Day. Before I get into the slides, I just will share with you some highlights and lowlights for the financial performance of the company. At the outset, I want to start with an admission that our performance for Q4 is well below the market expectations. Indeed, it is below our own expectations. However, it's worth pointing out that this was a very unusual quarter for us. In fact, in the last 10 years that I have been here, this is the Q1 wherein our EBITDA has declined for that of the preceding year's same quarter.
While back in January when we shared our performance and for the first nine months and gave the guidance, we were very confident of delivering on our guidance. The drop in profitability due to challenging market conditions in quarter four led us to miss out on EBITDA and ROC guidance for the year. There were several factors which resulted in strong headwinds in quarter four, particularly in the latter half of the quarter, which had an impact on our profitability. Some of these factors were decline in prices in the post-patent products with post-COVID surge in volumes from China, leading to distributors adapting a wait-and-watch approach. This impacted the sales in some of our key markets.
The contribution margins were impacted due to idle capacity costs as we took a conscious decision to curb our production in light of the falling raw material prices. The above two factors, combined with liquidating the high-cost inventory, led to the decline in contribution margin in Q4. That flowed down to the EBITDA for quarter four. Despite a subdued quarter four, we successfully achieved our revenue guidance for the full year as we delivered a 16% growth versus our guidance of 12%-15%. We improved our working capital cycle by five days to 64 days, which combined with a double-digit growth in EBITDA, helped us to generate significantly higher cash flows from the business. This helped us to reduce our gross debt by $617 million and our net debt by $440 million.
Let me get into the details of the financial results. I'll start with the quarter four numbers. In quarter four, our revenue stood at INR 16,569 crores, reflecting a growth of 4%. The contribution margin declined by 490 basis points due to the reasons mentioned earlier, leading to a 16% drop in EBITDA despite the fixed overheads remaining largely flat. The net finance cost of INR 840 crores showed an increase of 45% over that of the previous year. This increase was primarily on account of rise in the base interest costs. The tax rate for the quarter was higher at 24% versus 13% last year on account of the timing difference.
However, for the full year, the tax rate was 14%, which was close to the guidance that we had given of 15%-18%. The consolidated results for Q4 include the performance of our two platforms which Jai alluded upon, that is the UPL SAS platform, which is the domestic crop protection platform, and it also includes the performance of our AgTech nurture platform and the seeds platform, which is Advanta Enterprises. In fact, in quarter four, the UPL SAS crop protection platform delivered a 16% growth in revenue and a 31% growth in EBITDA on the back of strong traction in key herbicides and insecticide portfolio and the biosolution portfolio. Our global seeds platform, Advanta Enterprises, reported a revenue of INR 849 crores, or 12% higher than last year.
However, EBITDA was marginally lower due to higher overheads and R&D spend. Moving on to full year performance. At full year, we, as you see, it gives a good reflection of the resilient operating performance of the company. The full year revenues stood at INR 53,576 crores, showing a 16% growth over that of the previous year. Contribution margin at 40.3% and EBITDA at 20.9% showed a decline of 79 basis points and 112 basis points respectively. Net profit and earning per share were largely flat year on year, as net finance costs increased by 56%. 65% of this increase in finance cost coming from the increase in base rates in most of the geographies. The rest was largely on account of FX.
The UPL SAS delivered INR 4,326 crores in revenues, a 10% increase over that of the previous year, and EBITDA at INR 736 crores, showing a 13% increase over that of the previous year. Our seed platform, Advanta Enterprises, for the full year performed extremely well and delivered a revenue growth of 26% over that of the previous year, the revenue for the year was at INR 3,558 crores. The EBITDA grew by 29% over that of the previous year. The EBITDA for the year for this Advanta Seeds was INR 921 crores. Going forward, we would also be reporting the performance of our manufacturing and specialty chemicals business as a separate platform.
As regards to working capital, the overall working capital saw a reduction of 5 days, it stood at 64 days as against 69 days in the previous year. We saw a reduction in receivable days by 12 days on account of robust collection. As for inventory and payables, inventory days were down by 9 days. On the back of better inventory planning and reduced procurement, especially in the quarter four, considering the rapid drop in the raw material prices. This is reflected in the reduction in payable days by 16 days. Moving on to cash flow. As I mentioned earlier, higher EBITDA coupled with leaner working capital helped us to generate cash flow of close to INR 4,000 crores, an increase of 131% over that of the last year.
This helped us to reduce our net debt by $440 million and gross debt by $617 million. During the year, with the realignment of India Crop Protection business into UPL SAS, and the India and International Seed business into Advanta Enterprises, saw a net capital infusion of about $250 million. Further, we also returned close to $260 million worth of cash to the shareholders through the buyback of shares and dividend payouts. I particularly wanted to share this slide, which talks about the shareholder value creation over the last four years. The reason for selecting last four years is, as you know, in 2018 June, we announced the acquisition of Arysta LifeScience and which was almost a similar size company, which we bought for $4.2 billion.
As you would see, over the last four years since the acquisition, the company has maintained growth momentum, both in terms of revenue and EBITDA, with revenues growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 14% over the last four years, and EBITDA growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 15% over that of the last four years. What is more heartening to know, still state here is that we were able to reduce the debt in terms of dollar terms by $1.8 billion over this four period of four years at after returning $550 million to shareholders, either through buyback or by way of dividend. Further, our net debt to EBITDA has come down from 4.2x at the time of acquisition, to 1.5x as of 31st March 2023.
To share about the debt profile of the company. It just is a reflection of the low risk that we have despite having the debt which we have on our books. The long tenure, most of our debt are long tenure debt. The low cost of our debt, average cost is roughly about 6%, and most of the debt is unsecured and aligned to our earning, which, as you know, is largely in US dollars, is a clear reflection, the profile clearly reflects the low risk which we carry on our balance sheet. With this, I'll hand over to the business heads to make the, to share with you the update, give a detailed update on the business. I would invite Mike to take over for you.
Thank you, Anand, great to be here. Great to see everyone again this year. Over the next 20 minutes or so I'll hit on 4 topics. Firstly, I'll cover the FY23 performance, both Q4 and full year, followed by our outlook and strategy for FY24. I'll talk about our mid to long-term plan. Last year we introduced the path and a plan to FY27. I'll give an update on where we're at against our FY27 plan with a real in-depth look at our pipeline, our R&D pipeline, in a way that we haven't shown before. Finally, we'll conclude with guidance for FY24 for the UPL global crop protection business.
As highlighted by Jai and Anand, we demonstrated resilience and agility in FY23, we made several advancements on our overall UPL strategic objectives. Starting with Q4, our revenue grew by 4% despite the rapid decline, as Anand talked about, of key post-patent products in what I would call a very unusual quarter. This rapid decline was precipitated by the sudden increase in China, post-patent AI production following the COVID policy changes in China. That really occurred mid-quarter in Q4. This rapid price decline in post-patent pricing really froze distribution and their buying decisions as they waited to see where prices were gonna land. They didn't wanna take inventory positions in a market that had uncertain pricing. Additionally, we were impacted in the U.S. specifically as the spring season was delayed and field work really didn't begin until after the Q4.
Distribution there also took a wait and watch approach on their inventory position. As this situation evolved, we made the necessary adjustments on post-patent product pricing, which did lead, as Anand said, to a compression in contribution margins. We also made a conscious decision to clear off high-cost inventory and idle some plant capacity to ensure that we didn't bloat inventory and working capital. These actions, while compressing margins in Q4, have also set us up to compete aggressively in the new year as we are in a much improved inventory position relative to our industry peers. Moving over to the quarterly regional performance.
Except for North America, all of our regions posted moderate to strong growth in the quarter. North America, as you can see, was down 13% due to the rapid decline, specifically in glufosinate prices, which is one of our leading products in that market. As I mentioned, just the overall low on-ground movement of product that I talked about earlier. Among other regions, Latin America posted a strong growth of 13% driven by volumes of key insecticides such as Perito and Feroce, as well as from our new three-way fungicide mixture Evolution. Europe, as you can see, had moderate growth of 7% despite macroeconomic challenges, unfavorable weather in Southern Europe specifically, and bans on key products such as mancozeb, propanil, and bifenazate.
The rest of the world comprising of Asia and Africa grew by 8%, driven primarily by herbicides, but partially offset by insecticides. In the full year for FY23, our revenue has grown by a strong 16% versus last year, driven primarily by herbicide performance. Contribution margins were 31.5%, which comprised of strong expansion in the first nine months and then impacted, of course, as we talked about with the Q4 situation. Overall, the EBITDA had a growth of 9% driven by lower contribution margins from investments to strengthen customer relationships and capability building for our differentiated and sustainable product portfolio. All regions, except for Europe, grew in double digits with Latin America growth leading the way at 22%.
This last year was also a very strong year of new product launches, including what we believe will be future blockbuster products for us. Over 2% of our revenue came from new launches, around 2/3 of these products and the revenue came from our differentiated and sustainable portfolio. As we've talked about in the past, our path on these sustainable and portfolio to get to 50% by FY27 was really demonstrated with the growth of these products and these new products that we launched in FY23. In differentiated and sustainable solutions, our growth was lower in the first nine months as compared to post-patent segment, as you can see on the left side of this chart. This was really due to the positive pricing actions on the latter during this period.
As you can see from the chart, in Q4, the rate of growth for differentiated and sustainable products was higher, and this trend is expected to continue in FY24. I'd also like to mention here that the differentiated and sustainable growth was driven by volumes indicating strong demand at the grower level for these products. To summarize on FY23, while our revenue growth was impressive at 16%, we did have moderate EBITDA growth versus our expectations, as Anand had mentioned earlier. Despite these adverse conditions, our agile business model supported us in rapidly adapting to the challenging market conditions. In the first half of the year, we quickly leveraged on the pricing opportunity to improve our business quality and margins, along with higher cash generation.
While in the second half, our focus was on securing shelf space for our products, improving working capital through faster collections and clearance of higher cost inventory, along with improved receivables and inventory days. Further, we had a strong year in terms of new product launches, which are expected to ramp up in the near future. I'd like to congratulate our regional teams, some of them who are here with us today, for this performance in driving traction across markets, and I'm confident that we will maintain this agility in capturing volume-driven growth and improving our working capital going forward. Let me switch to our outlook and our strategy for FY24. Fundamentally, we see continued strong farm gate demand for our products. Farm margins are generally very strong globally in most crops.
Fertilizer prices have come down, giving farmers the opportunity to maximize yields, maximize their sustainability outcomes, and drive margins for them, and that's really where UPL sits and how we add value to our grower customers. When considering this backdrop, we will continue to see new product revenue from additional new products that we're going to be launching in FY24. Last year, we generated about $140 million of new product or of new revenue from new product launches. This year, we expect to generate again over $120 million from new product launches. We'll also accelerate growth in our differentiated and sustainable product portfolio through targeted promotion and margin accretion replacements with superior blockbuster offerings such as Feroce.
We're gonna continue to focus on gaining shelf space for our key post-patent products in targeted markets, specifically in soybean and corn crops by leveraging our strong supply chain and manufacturing base here in India. Finally, we'll continue to improve our profitability through focus on optimization in overheads, higher productivity in our plants, focusing on working capital and both receivables and inventory management. To support our medium-term growth, our three pillars are firstly, smart R&D. Smart R&D for us is our robust capability of an infrastructure of over 30 facilities globally, over 1,000 employees that are developing new innovations, protecting those innovations with intellectual property, and ultimately launching these products to create value for our grower customers.
The potential in our new product introductions, just as we shared last year between FY22 and FY27, is valued at two and a half billion dollars. We'll also accelerate our growth in key emerging markets where UPL is well-positioned to outperform and ramp up our differentiated and sustainable products. We'll leverage our reliable, sustainable, and low-cost manufacturing capability here in India and our footprint around the world. Looking at our crop protection and NPP biosolutions through the lens of grower pain points, our efforts are to introduce newer solutions either through new mixtures of conventional crop production products, ProNutiva, which is when you combine NPP products along with conventional crop protection products in a unique way to help growers both maximize productivity, but also create other attributes, whether they be zero residues or carbon outcomes.
Of course, directly through our NPP offerings as standalone products. On a risk-adjusted basis, our current pipeline is estimated to be north of $8.5 billion per annum, with $2.5 billion of that coming within FY27. We currently have 25 molecules in the development pipeline and 16 new solution platforms that are under development. Additionally, we also see that nearly 80% of this pipeline is in the category of differentiated and sustainable products, which is clearly our focus area. Lastly, with several products going off patent in the next 5 years, we see a strong growth opportunity in the post-patent segment as well. Over the next 2 slides, I'll take you through our robust R&D pipeline.
This is a level of detail that has not been shared with you earlier, so I'm really pleased to share this with you today. Looking at this table, it's evident that we have a strong pipeline under each major portfolio at various stages of development and spanning across every region and virtually every crop combination. On this page, you can see our new products in weed management, disease control, and insect management. All of these products have been either just launched or will be launched within the medium term. We also have several new products and technologies that we're developing in the carbon and bio-nutrient segment. As you can see, these are also to be launched in the near to mid-term timeframe.
We'll also show some of our new AIs and new technologies at the bottom of this chart that we believe will bring significant value to growers in the more mid to long term. I'd also like to add that several of these offerings, we're excited about the potential peak revenue, and we're confident of converting some of these into blockbusters over the next few years. To summarize, we'll continue to have leadership positions in post-patent AIs, and we'll continue to expand our offerings in the sustainable and differentiated segment. Basis on the pipeline that I just showed you, I'm confident of increasing our innovation rate from 14% today to 24% by FY27, along with our commitment to increase differentiated and sustainable revenue to 50% within the same period. For our go-to-market strategy, we'll continue to really leverage on these four areas.
Firstly, we'll expand geographically our reach to growers and distribution. This is how we go to market in every region through distributors, retailers, and in many markets, direct to growers. We're gonna increase our proximity to the growers on branding initiatives and in unique go-to-market strategies where we really have an opportunity to manage the de-demand for our products and really pull through distribution the products that we're placing into retail. In addition, we'll increase product mix and portfolio expansion through cross-selling and ProNutiva expansion. The final element of our go-to-market strategy is to focus on strategic alliances and partnerships, all to tap new markets and increase technology access through our OpenAg collaboration.
All with the support of digital tools and technologies across regions and operational effectiveness, we'll continue to build and grow our B2B partnerships for increased volume sales and improved working capital management, as well as increase our B2C sales for improved margin mix and even greater access to growers for better demand generation and wider offerings of our complete solutions. Finally, biologicals, biocontrols, and biostimulants will continue to remain the fastest-growing segment we believe over the next decade. Therefore, will continue to be a key focus for us. While the industry segment is paid to grow at 11% CAGR over the next five years, we are confident and well-placed to exceed this growth, and we are among the leading players in this segment globally. Which is still largely fragmented, and hence, will continue to drive our organic growth strategy.
Last year, we achieved a revenue of $409 million in this segment, and have made significant investments, including in technology, with feet on the ground to create demand, and to make sure that growers understand the benefits that accrue to them and to the environment. Going forward, we'll continue to expand our portfolio of hero products which are NPP big products such as Thiopron, Microthiol and Yukon, amongst others, through geographical expansion, innovation licensing and promoting through our ProNutiva approach. As we look at our FY24 outlook, we see a 4%-8% revenue growth opportunity, with the midpoint being at 6%, while EBITDA is expected to grow in the range of 6%-10%. We're confident of this growth despite the specific headwinds that we discussed earlier.
We are well-placed to take advantage of strong farm gate demand, higher expected growth of biosolutions offerings, and the ramp-up of our innovative products. The key takeaways, I just want to emphasize that we have a strong growth path, not just through FY24, but really through FY27 and beyond, as I shared with you the R&D pipeline. We are on a path to achieve 50% of our revenues from the differentiated and sustainable portfolio, which is also margin accretive and has less risk overall. We really believe that UPL Global Crop Protection will become the fastest-growing and remain the fastest-growing global crop protection company in the industry. With that, let me invite Ashish up to talk about India SAS. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Mike. A very warm welcome and good afternoon to everybody. I'm Ashish Dobhal, I'll be introducing UPL SAS. UPL SAS, also it's called. Before I start, many times people ask me what exactly is UPL SAS. SAS actually stands for UPL Sustainable Agri Solutions. The reason why we've kept this name UPL SAS, so that every time we take our name, we are reminded of our core purpose: to make farming sustainable and profitable, and also resilient for almost 100 million farmers which are there in India. What we're trying to do is transform Indian agriculture by a very unique outcome-driven approach. There are 4 main pillars to it. The first main pillar, of course, to drive such a big transformation, you will need somebody very credible.
I think there's no bigger name credible in the Indian market like UPL. We have a 13% market share, which makes us one of the biggest company in the Indian market. Whatever we do is supposed to be very, very trustworthy. I think it's very easy for the local farmers to buy into whatever we are doing. The second piece, of course, the crop protection. We have some of the biggest brands in the Indian market. We've added biosolutions to it, and we have added now crop establishment products to it. We are one of the biggest in the post-harvest space also. All these have to be delivered through a very wide network of distribution across India. We have a very highly penetrated pan-India market presence. Add to that, the digital leverage for millions of farmers and the distributors and the retailers.
To empower them, we have also launched an AgTech platform. How this story unfolds, we'll see in next few slides. The first thing is our broad portfolio, everybody knows about it, that it's, you know, we usually used to have insecticide as our major segment. What we've seen is because of the labor shortage and some of the amazing innovative introductions that we've done in last 3-4 years, herbicide segment has gone on to become our biggest segment with 36% of our overall portfolio. We also have still insecticide segment as our primary portfolio with over 26% of our total portfolio. Add to that the fungicide portfolio, which has been rock steady for so many years, which is 20% of our total portfolio.
What is really moving the needle for us and something which is very exciting, we are all very excited about, is the climate-smart solutions. These are the products which are so, so important in these times when there's a huge talk and huge disruption in terms of climate change. While insecticides, herbicides and fungicides are managing the biotech problems, for the abiotic stress, we have the biosolutions, which we also call sustainable solutions. You add to that the post-harvest solutions. Not many people would know, but most of the grains in India, the potatoes in India, we have a huge market share, dominant position of 90% plus in storage of these crops. We also have fruit coatings.
We also have, you know, coatings for apples and oranges. This whole thing sort of then combines into a universe which we call ProNutiva. ProNutiva is protection plus nutrition. These are packages which are designed for specific crops and which are designed for specific areas. India is such a big country, you need to have specific packages for specific areas. If you dice it in a different way, we also have, if you see our portfolio, we have about 65% of our portfolio as post-patent. Make no mistake, I think even in this post-patents, we have some of the biggest brands in the local market. 35% of our portfolio is sustainable and differentiated. What we mean by differentiated is we have proprietary position.
For example, we have proprietary position in some of the leading cotton insecticide, soybean products Rhythm, which we just introduced last year. We have proprietary position in some of the wheat herbicides. Add to that, the sustainable portfolio, which I just discussed, the climate smart portfolio. Now, what exactly is this portfolio? This portfolio goes right from the drought mitigation technology, like Zeba, which holds water and which holds nutrient for a crop. We also have, you know, range of biofertilizer. We have biostimulants, we have silica-based products. We also have insects and disease resistance growing products in this segment. All in all, this is how it is diced, and I think this is where we feel this segment of sustainable and differentiated keeps on growing for us year on year.
We can have all the fancy solutions, but if you don't have the reach, India has 28 states, and I think each state is like a different country. If you have to reach each and every nook and corner, you really need a strong presence, which we have over the years. We have very unique approach to how to reach the entire Indian market. We have two brands, one by the name of UPL, the other by the name of SWAL, which are selling the branded products into the local market. We have about 72 depots or the warehouses, as we call them. In addition to that, we have 5,000 people. Agriculture is applied science. You need people in the field to demonstrate it to the farmers and explain it to the farmers.
These essentially then cater to 25,000 big wholesaler. These are the guys who literally control the Indian market, who are then in turn giving the products to almost 3 lakh plus small retailers. To add to this, we have two very interesting approaches. One is called Unimart. Unimart is our experience centers. You know, our analogy would be an Apple stores where people come, go in the villages, see the product, experience different technologies, and then they take a call. They can buy the product from there or they can buy from anywhere else. What we've seen is wherever we've put Unimarts, we have 600 of them, we have seen the business grow in that in that entire area. These are physical stores just selling UPL, SWAL and Advanta products.
To add to that, we also have about 340 business partners. These are the B2B players. We supply the product to them. They also, at the end of the day, are serving a 100 million-plus farmers in India. The most fantastic thing is that with this network, we are covering 90% of the agriculture districts in India and 90% of the crops which are grown in India. That's not enough. I think India is a country with 100 million-plus farmers and almost 3 lakh-plus retailers. In order to be present with them and give real-time solutions, you have to go to tech. We have two AgTech solutions. One of them is nurture.farm.
This is an app with almost 3 million farmers transacting on the app. This gives real-time information. 24/7, UPL is with these farmers, and this gives them farm advisory if they want to book services like spraying services on the app or harvesting services on the app. If they want to get harvesters, it's available on the app. If they want to do soil testing, it is there on the app. The most interesting feature, of course, is counterfeit is a big problem. The farmers can just take the app and scan the product. 100% of our products are with QR codes and barcodes. Then, you know, you would immediately know whether the product is a counterfeit or original product. That's with nurture.farm app.
We also have nurture.retail app. In nurture.retail app, what we are trying to do is foster the local entrepreneurs, the small time entrepreneurs. Anybody who's got a license can come onto our marketplace. He'll not just get the crop protection chemicals, but he'll also get seeds, he'll also get feed, he'll also get, you know, machinery and other equipment. We have about 85,000 retailers on the platform, which makes it one of the biggest platform, perhaps, not just in India but globally. We also have about 9,000 SKUs which are being on the platform. I think this gives an amazing choice to the local retailer to select the product. It gives complete price transparency and so many other things. All this put together, this is my favorite slide.
All this put together, what we've been doing in last three, four years has given us tremendous benefits in the field. We have been growing by 18% in CAGR to reach to INR 4,326 crores of sales this year. This is the first year where we've crossed INR 4,000 crores of sale. The more interesting piece is that in terms of EBITDA, we've been growing by 25%, so this is the first year we crossed INR 700 crores of EBITDA, and this is primarily led by a growth in sustainable and the differentiated products. Coming to the current quarter, Q4 normally is a strong quarter for the India team. We have grown by 16%. 31% growth in terms of revenue. A 31% growth in EBITDA.
This is primarily driven by increase in differentiated and sustainable products that we sold in Q4 because India is the first country to get into season, I think that becomes a very natural quarter for us to place the products for Kharif. This sustainable and differentiated solutions for us in the Q4 went up from 18% to 24%. For the full year, I think it was a tough year. I think like Mike said, I think everybody knows about it. We started with the whole Ukraine war and the whole disruption in the food grains. Then there was COVID in China last year starting, unfortunately we got stuck.
The India business Which is the first business to get into a season, got stuck into the upward movement of the prices. We do have some of the strongest brand in the market. The entire 10% growth almost has come from the price increase. We are able to push prices in the market. Then, of course, we had a very, very tough season in terms of first it didn't rain, and then when it rained, it just didn't stop. We still managed a 17% contribution growth. This was slightly offset because of some of our very ambitious plans of opening up the UP market and the Andhra market. I think we wanted to go deep in the market. We have made some investments.
We also invested into some new products. For example, Flupyrimin in paddy, we also had another product in soybean called quizalofop. Both of them are doing very well. I think we had 3-4 big massive launches. For nurture, I think this was a year where we had almost INR 72 crores worth of revenue and EBITDA of -INR 284 crores. In this, in the entire nurture platform in last 3 years, we have invested almost INR 800 crores of money to scale up and build the platform, and we've done the most difficult job, which is there in tech, which is of customer acquisition. Guidance. Approximately this is how the year looks like.
We are looking at 12%-16% of growth and 14%-16% of EBITDA growth, primarily driven by launch of new products such as Sperto. Sperto is one of the biggest selling products in Brazil. I think it makes an entry into India market this year. We have products like Fascinate Flash . Larvin is supposed to be one of the best larvicide, which we are gonna launch this year. Spruce sort of complements our portfolio in the wheat segment. We continue to increase our portfolio in differentiated and sustainable this year. That's going to be our major thrust. We also will this year our, you know, we should benefit from some of the launches that we did last year, but we didn't get a full year.
For example, Triclum, which is a three-way fungicide, Apache, which is a mixture insecticide for cotton, and Vylora, which is the insecticide in paddy. Unimart, have, you know, we started them as experience stores, but we realized that they're also making us a good revenue. I think Unimart goes from 600 to 800. We want to do it carefully because we don't want to forget our core purpose of making Unimart as the experience stores and the technology dissemination stores. For Nurture, the plan is to reduce EBITDA loss by about 50% this year and in 24 months break even at the EBITDA level.
Increase the farmer reach to about 5 million and retailers on boards to about 120,000 retailers. Add about 50,000-60,000 retailers. This is how the story unfolds. I think if we are very confident that we are able to do it, I think we will take our next big step on transforming the Indian agriculture from a very product-driven approach to a very outcome-driven approach. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Ashish. Agrochemical part is over now. We are coming to the seed, actually reverse order. You know, without planting the seed, you can't start with the agrochemical business. Welcome to Advanta. Very pleased to walk you through a couple of slides, updating you where we are on Advanta front. I mean, there are key 4 points here. From Advanta perspective, we have a superior product portfolio, backed by the proprietary technology. In terms of, I mean, you are aware that the seed industry is basically based on innovation. That is how the sustainable results can come in. There's nothing like a me-too by and large. I mean, me-too in seed means trading business. Fundamentally our core is a R&D engine, that's really doing very well.
Superior innovation capability. At times you have a great product, but in terms of GTM, et cetera, if you are not really aligned with that, we are unable to capture the values. Here our team has been able to do that very well. Couple of example I would share with you in a couple of minutes. We have a strong presence, production and distribution capabilities. Probably in last 12 months, we added highest production and processing capabilities our own, as well as tolling arrangement, compared to last few years. The way growth is happening in Advanta, possibly that also we will be adjusting that capacity, and we may have to go for additional capability development, you know, CapEx part next 12 to 24 months.
Robust financial performance is just a by-product, you know, of all the things which we are doing right for a number of years in past. In terms of, you know, the key crop distribution of our revenue, number one crop is, you know, field corn. As you know, in seed industry is about $50 billion-$55 billion. In that, number one is corn. Corn has broadly two categories, temperate corn and the tropical, subtropical corn. Advanta is predominant in a tropical corn. We are leader number 1, 2, 3 in variety of geographies. That is contributing about 45% of our revenue so far. Number 2 crop is grains and forage sorghum. Now this is a very interesting crop
Globally corn is covering about 200 million hectare, while sorghum is about 45-50 million hectare. We talk about the climate change, sustainability, all these big words ultimately boils down to what does it mean in terms of let's say, input consumption. How can we get more output using less input in terms of water, fertilizer, agrochemical, et cetera? In that category, sorghum is one of the best crop which require let's say 60% less water to produce the same you know, an output compared to the corn or any other crop. There are certain challenges, very interesting challenges our R&D team is working on.
We believe that this 45 million hectare sorghum which we have right now, the way things are evolving, I think this area will go up $45 million to maybe $75-$80 million going forward. That also throws a lot of opportunity in terms of our business expansion, business development, new countries are opening up. At the same time, also, some of the challenges this throws up for our R&D team, for example, sorghum require more, let's say, digestibility. We have R&D projects which are, we are funding in to increase the digestibility for various application. Human consumption is very common in Africa and Asia. It's not very common in Americas, for example, right?
How do we identify the features of this crop which can really enhance the adoption in the human consumption in Americas? One example. Second example is a predominantly, you know, very high on the carbohydrate side, low on the protein side, maybe 9%-10%. Can we have a sorghum which can have 15%-20% protein, et cetera? These are the fascinating, exciting R&D projects we are working on, and these are the innovations which are going to take us forward in this crop. We have one of the widest variability in terms of germplasm in sorghum in the world. Be it the grain sorghum, forage sorghum both for the biofuel, et cetera.
That gene bank which we have is a very, very precious asset Advanta has it, and our team is highly excited to work on those projects. Going forward, contribution from this crop is likely to go up more and more. Third domain is vegetables and fresh corn is another area which we started with a small acquisition into 6, 7 years ago, Golden Seeds, Unicorn Seeds, et cetera. Those genetics we are spreading beyond India to some of the Asian countries and African countries. Also fastest growing segment for us historically speaking. Sunflower and canola, I think this is a oil seed category. Volatility is very high, as you are aware because of the European war. I mean, Ukraine supplies to globe about 50% of the sunflower edible oil.
India is one of the biggest importer from this country. Because of the war, the supply chain was disrupted and therefore many other countries picked up acreages, for example, Argentina, southern part of Brazil, India. Some of the countries which had lost the acreages from sorghum to other crops, they started gaining back, and that is reflected in our numbers. These are primarily four crop segments we are operating in, and this is the revenue distribution coming out of it. Differentiation comes with the technology. What are the technology which we have? iGrowth, for example. In a sunflower, like in corn, some of you must be aware about a GM corn and non-GM corn. Americas is about 95% GM corn. Sorghum so far did not have this trait.
No, no company invested in the technologies. We decided to invest in this technology for herbicide tolerance via non-GM route, which is expensive and long duration. Our team started in 2007 this project. After 10 years, 2017, we got first product called iGrowth. That we launched in Argentina. In last 4 years' time, I think Argentina's sorghum market, Advanta capture from about 14%, 15% market share to nearly 65% market share. It's 1 example. Now, this is something we want to replicate in country after country after country. Current scenario is, I mean, you know, the market is preferring non-GM. We are the only one in this segment whereby herbicide tolerance trait coming via non-GM. Adoption is very, very fast.
We are unable to really ramp up the capabilities in terms of let's parent seed production, et cetera. These are the areas of investment we are planning to really ramp up this activity. While we talk about... Again, GM or the trait is not a single trait game. What next? Therefore, our team started working on another projects. iGrowth gives a resistance to herbicide of one category of, you know, product. Another category of product resistance we started working on, and there are promising results coming in. We believe that in next four or five years' time, we will have another way of a trait we will be releasing it. In other words, sorghum is something we are technifying it, right?
Adding more and more feature from multiple angle, from a consumer angle or as well as from the grower angle. As a result of that, this crop is becoming more and more attractive. Of course, from climate point of view, require 60%, 70% less water than corn. Therefore, we believe that it is a future smart crop, sustainable crop. Your company Advanta is very well positioned in this area and via this technology also. Likewise, couple of, you know, other tech traits we have Vertix, Aphix, and all the traits which we have, unless and until we have a on ground technology transfer center, we will not succeed. Therefore, we have Advanta Innovation Center. In a key market, we demonstrate these technologies, whereby the key stakeholder can come and have a feel of it.
These are the kind of, in nutshell, the spread which we have, strategy which we are adopting in Advanta. Superior product portfolio backed by the proprietary technology, as I indicated earlier. The key crops are tropical corn, conventional primarily. We are into GM in Americas in a very small area, but by and large, we are into the, you know, non-GM crop. Sorghum and sunflower. All the key crop and key country, we have either number one, number two, or number three position at this point in time. Vegetable part, okra, we are globally number one. In fact, we are transforming this okra landscape. It's a tropical vegetable, but the way its adoption is very, very high. Hot chilies, sweet corn. Sweet corn is another interesting crop.
Center of excellence for tropical sweet corn in the world, in the industry is Thailand, we are very well positioned there. That genetics has a demand in entire Asia, Africa, and Central America. That portfolio is expanding very well. Our, as I indicated earlier, our R&D capability is coming from a world-class, you know, research and development team. We have nearly 45 years of experience in plant genetics. We have 32 R&D facilities across 11 countries, this is something we are augmenting. Our investment is happening in these areas more and more. We have more than 70 plant scientists with a very rich experience, qualifications, we are upgrading the skill on and off all the time.
Innovation pipeline, we have nearly 60,000 hybrids per year. We do nearly half a million testing plot per year. Any plant science company, this is a key indicator, this 500,000 testing plot per year. How many plot we are able to increase more and more so that innovation funnel, while we have it. Earlier days used to be like this, whereby, you know, you have a less number of crops you plant, and then you have a 7, 8, 9 years. We are increasing the base now. In stage 1 and 2 itself, we are trying to maximize that so the funnel can be shrunk.
Number of advancement of the year for any product which is about 8-10 years, we can shrink it to about 5-6 years' time. Company which is able to do that will be a really leader in this market going forward. These are some of the data points on the R&D side of it. Strong presence, production and distribution capability we are augmenting here. All the dots which you can see green color are the areas of own production center. Right now we have 24, and I see in next 3 or 4 years' time, we will be adding about 10-15 production center in this area going forward. In couple of earlier meeting also I indicated, maybe half a billion dollar revenue seed company.
There are n number of companies, that kind of business coming in 1 or 2 countries. All right? The, here actually we are a company whereby we have presence in, of course, you know, nearly 84 countries. Key countries are about 15-20, we have capability to ramp up as and when we want to, you know, be aggressive in terms of our market position, et cetera. That is a very, very, very good thing. At the same time, it throws a challenge for the leadership to manage multi-crop and multi-country. There is a challenge, we need to master that game. It's not easy all the time. We...
A couple of changes we are making, for example, we have market-facing brands like Advanta, Pacific Seeds, Pacific Seeds Thailand and Australia, and Ortal Seeds. There are a lot of, you know, legacy reasons for maintaining these kind of brands. One prime reason is that farmers are associated with this kind of brand so much, we don't want to change it, and therefore, we are continuing with that. One important point in distribution, we are making changes. Some of the countries, we used to have B2B. We have national distributors, and then they will distribute down the line. We realized that that model has maxed out and becoming an obstacle in ter ms of further growth. For example, Indonesia, our entire business was We were doing in B2B.
We realized we are not growing for last couple of years. We, of course, another area is, as you are aware, in a market where the small holding is very high, distribution is fragmented, credit risk is very high. We were just contemplating whether we should open or not. We decided to open finally in Indonesia and decided to go from a B2B, a single distributor to multiple distributor B2C model. Last 2 years, we have been working on it, and very happy to report to you here that we have huge successful, you know, big success we got from Indonesia. You are aware Indonesia is likely to be 1 of 5 top fastest growing economy in the world and agriculture base is quite strong, and we are building our position there very, very strongly.
Terms of historical numbers, how it's looking like. Revenue, your company Advanta grew at the rate of 21% CAGR every year on year. You know, and at the same time, EBITDA level, CAGR is about 31%. Very impressive results. I would like to take this opportunity to thank growers of the world, farmers of the world, at the same time, our distribution partner, dealers, our own employees who are very dedicated, and last but not the least, the trust of the investor, investors in this organization. As a result of that, we have been able to continue, you know, to deliver this kind of results, and we do hope that we have platform whereby this performance is going to accelerate further going forward.
Quarter four results, I think, while, you know, numbers are good, you know, compared to previous year, but definitely lower than the what we had budgeted, because external market dynamics which are changing. Not changing only for the agrochemical, but as such for the agriculture ecosystem. Everybody is impacted or likely to be impacted. The degree may vary based on the portfolio, et cetera, et cetera. That is impacted. We see the impact here. Our MU growth is 12% and EBITDA actually degrew by 5%. Here there is another element also important to highlight. One of the important crop which cuts the financial year, let's say canola in Australia.
Very strong brands which we have, markets start asking for the inventory sometime in January and February, but they start continue to buy in March, April, and May, right? This year, we also had a just-in-time kind of situation. The seed was coming from the market being processed. Unless and until quality department clears it, we can't sell it. If you see the calendarized number, these numbers are very impressive, but it's only. This will be reflected in the Q1 in the coming financial year. So in terms of total complete picture for the financial year, revenue for the year grew by 26%. Contribution profit, 28%. EBITDA grew by 29%.
In terms of regions, we have divided business into 4. One is Asia and Africa, Middle East, Australia, America and Europe. For each region I'll make a couple of comments. Very proud to share with you that Australia, we had highest ever revenues. We crossed $50 million for the first time. New product which are launching in sorghum as well as in canola are clearly reflected there. Of course, the historical commodity price, canola price in Aussie market was about AUD 800 to AUD 850, AUD 900 per ton. Never ever, this kind of price farmer got it. That also, you know, reflected in this, our performance. Coming to Asia and Africa, Middle East, India is doing very well.
India, we have divided into three domains. Field crop dominated by sorghum and the corn, et cetera. Another domain is the forages, and third domain is vegetable. Our field crop domain is doing very well. In about three or four state, we are number one, number two, and I think this next 12 to 24 months time, there's good chance that another three or four state also we will be in that kind of position. Product range is performing very well, and then the results are very impressive. Our forages are muted, less than our expectation. We are into the super premium category. I think in marketing, we need to really pay a little more attention. Positioning has to be right.
By and large, the forage segment is dominated by the commodities. In a commodity, you know, dominant market, converting that market into the brand and the super speciality is taking more time than what we expected, but our team is working, you know, rightly, and I think in a couple of years' time, we should have a turnaround that. We are the leader there and by big margin. Vegetable, I think, is also very muted. Segment is not doing well last 2 years' time. I think COVID impacted big way, vegetable segment around the world, not only in India. Because of this COVID scenario, a lot of seasonal migration of the agricultural laborer used to take place, is not happening.
Multiple reasons in different countries, different region, you know, this segment require high amount of labor for plucking and planting and transplanting, et cetera, et cetera. Mechanization is happening, but the pace is slow. Coupled with this, the field crop like corn, et cetera, they got highest commodity price. It was easy for farmers to switch from vegetable to soybean or corn or any other crops. We do believe that the acreages should come back in a year time or so, and I think next 6 months times are crucial for us to see how really it works out. Africa is a 50 years projects.
Africa is a marathon, super marathon, whereby you take 3 steps forward, 2 step backward because of variety of reasons in terms of political stability, exchange rate, et cetera. We believe in that market because of the macro issues, number of people growing there, young population growing there. At a macro level, next 5 years, 10 years time, we believe it's going to really give us reward, you know, if you continue to invest. We believe in that market, we'll continue to invest in that market. Middle East, for example, we were hardly there, but Middle East countries are realizing that they import maybe 50%, 60%, 70% of the food from outside.
They have a lot of money, they are now serious about investing back into R&D, that is where they are inviting us and we are partnering with them because the very adverse condition when the agriculture grows, like in desert areas, those areas, that mastery we will develop, will be definitely helpful in other countries which are likely to face that kind of adverse situation going forward. Therefore, that is how we are looking at that markets. Americas, I think, our team in Argentina are doing great. We are Segment we are operating in, we are top of the segment. Brazil, we have a turnaround this year. Brazil, we reviewed our portfolio.
Five, six years' time, we realized that soybean is not paying off, and we decided to mute our plan on the soybean part of it. We will be there, we are there, our presence we are trying to, you know, mute it. iGrowth we are launching there, and the reception is very, very high. 40,000 bag we sold, I think 40,000-45,000 bag. Results are very good. Probably 3-4 times acreages we will be gaining in next 12 months' time. There is a upside. U.S., we have been suffering a lot in terms of our operation there. Not very happy with the way results are coming in, but we have put our house in order in terms of... I mean, we are dependent on tolling arrangement last 2 years' time.
We believe that that should really help us, but we were wrong. That arrangement did not help us, and as a result of that, we could not service the market with the speed we wanted. Therefore, last year, we decided to invest about $12 million. We upgraded our plant there, and now that plant is now ramping up, and the production we have debottleneck. I do believe that we will record a growth going forward in next 12 months' time. Europe, small base, eastern part of Europe. Our focus is eastern part of Europe and the sunflower. We invested our money in R&D in 2016 onward. For the first time, we processed the EBITDA breakeven, and going forward we'll have accelerated growth coming from this region.
Broadly, I think overall geography-wise, crop-wise, a very balanced growth is happening right now. Revenue growth by region, our ACI Africa is about 23%, America is 27%, Australia 36%, I indicated, and Europe 13%. All geographies are firing with a good robust growth. Coming to outlook part, we do believe that this momentum in Advanta will continue based on what we see as outlook for the overall market scenario. Of course, there will be, I mean, we see that commodity prices are coming down, but that downward trend also is good enough for the farmers to continue to buy the good products, premium product. We believe that, as a result of that, our revenue growth likely to be 11%-15%.
EBITDA growth will exceed that, falling to 18%. That is how broadly looks like. Tropical yellow corn growth expansion is driven by market share gain in India and in Indonesia. In canola, we see Australia, South Africa accelerating it further going forward. Growth in sunflower portfolio in Argentina, led by renewed portfolio in couple of other geography like Ukraine, and couple of part of Romania, et cetera. Grain sorghum growth driven by Brazil and North America. We do believe that we have debottlenecked our supplies chain and therefore market demand is very good and therefore we will be able to service them. Vegetable fresh corn, as I indicated, last 2 years were muted. We are hopeful that this really pick up the demand this year.
B2C business, we are going to expand. One example I gave it to you about Indonesia. Few other countries we will open up now converting B2B to B2C. We will have investment, some risk will be there, but at the same time, the margin we are likely to gain because of the B2C transformation, that will offset our risk in this area. With this, I would like to thank you for your, you know, hearing as well as your support. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Bhupen. I'll be covering the specialty chemical manufacturing platform, wherein I'll be throwing some color on the current specialty chemicals market in India and how UPL is uniquely positioned to capture on those opportunities. I'll cover on how have we performed on last few years on this platform and the performance for this year, the guidance for FY 2024, and then of course I'll be covering the performance of UPL as a group on safety and environmental sustainability for FY 2023. If you look at Indian specialty chemicals market, it has actually tripled in last 10 years. From INR 53 billion to now almost INR 150 billion.
If you see the growth going forward, we anticipate that Indian specialty chemical market will grow at, you know, double digit at around 11%, as compared to China of about 7% and then the other geography in lower single digit. This puts an immense opportunity in India. One is that, of course, also coming out of China Plus One policy, a framework which many companies are looking at India as one additional source in addition to China. This whole Make in India policy of government of India has given a boost to the spec chem market, wh ich includes pharma and pharma in, you know, intermediate as well, which our business also serves in.
Going forward, you know, more than 20% of the incremental demand, or incremental chemical consumption, worldwide will come from India. That actually, you know, is a big number which will catapult into investments in India and spec chem. Of course, changing consumer preferences, you know. Now, consumer would, you know, is preferring bio and therefore the bio-rated, you know, rated chemistries and the investment would also be, you know, good in India. How are we uniquely positioned to capitalize on these opportunities? Today, we are the number one spec chem company in India with revenue of over INR 15,000 crores.
We are, I think, very few are, you know, one, you know, deeply and vertically integrated spec chem manufacturing company in India, which gives us, you know, cost competitiveness. We have a legacy of 50 plus years of manufacturing, handling hazardous chemicals and complicated chemistries, with best-in-class ESG metrics. What I also see is that, you know, we have immense opportunity on B2B side going into forward. If you have China Plus One, we have new chemistries. We have the vertical integration, the history, which will give us immense opportunity in B2B segment.
Of course, we have the UPL group companies, which, you know, the whole AgTech business will grow in double digit, which will also grow, you know, give us the opportunity to cater to those requirements. Oops, sorry. Yeah. This is how we have performed in last 3 years. Today, in FY23, our revenue has been more than INR 17,000 crores and our EBITDA has been more than INR 1,800 crores, which is around 10%. Our CAGR for revenue has been 33% and EBITDA has been more than 40%. Basically this platform serves to our global crop production business and of course, UPL SAS.
It also serves to more than 600 B2B customers, you know, not only in India, but, you know, across the globe, right? From pharma to paints, intermediate, you know, and you know, and you know, other sectors and of course AgChem. Last, you know, 50 years shows that, you know, we have been handling complex chemistry. We recently also commissioned our new phosgene plant. Phosgenation we were always there for last, you know, 25 years, but now we have our own phosgene plant and therefore we have entered that, you know, chemistry as well. We have more than 15 plants in India, which makes not only, you know, AgTech, but also intermediates and basic chemicals and specialty chemicals.
As I said, you know, highly vertically integrated and a great legacy of last, you know, 50 years. The outlook for FY24, we expect that our revenue would grow in the range of 10%-14% and our EBITDA will grow 12%-16%. Of course, we are entering new, you know, chemistry. Our B2B, you know, business we are looking to expand. We will keep on sweating our current assets, keep on expanding them, but also expand our new off-patented molecule which our global crop production business would enter as part of a GTM, and that will also will get served. Lastly, I'll cover the safety and the sustainability performance for the company.
So you can see that, you know, our process safety incidents over last few years have come down dramatically. This year, our TRFR has been 0.29 as compared to last year of 0.21. Three major areas where we have focused last year on people and, you know, process safety. What we did is that we identified key critical process safety operations, and we mitigated those with a layer of production analysis and also with the bowtie. We used digital as a tool for not only people safety, but also asset.
For example, we used artificial intelligence and robotics to a great level to be able to mitigate some of the risk emanating out of PPEs and also man machine interfaces. We onboarded external consultant for the safety transformation journey, which I spoke last year, which commenced last year. On hazardous chemical transportation management, which we focused last year. Now all our hazardous chemical transportation is managed through a central control room, which is out of Baroda. All our trucks and tankers are GPS controlled and their speeds and where they stop, everything gets monitored. Lastly, on the...
We also focused last year on our you know, you know, warehouse management from a safety point of view. We completed the gap analysis you know, audit for our all global warehouses. We have onboarded external consultant to help us on the safety process management on our warehousing assessments. We have also rolled out the crisis management plan for India, and we are at an advanced stage for rolling out the crisis management plan for North America and LATAM. On environmental piece, which is on the environmental sustainability, this is the performance over last 4 years. Our CO2 emissions have gone down by 22%. Our fresh water consumption has gone down by 41%.
Our wastewater discharge has gone down by almost 60%. We have our science-based targets has been approved, and we have targeted to reduce 63% of CO2 by 2035. We have commenced tracking the Scope 3 emissions, and we target to reduce them by 42% by 2035. We have partnered with CleanMax, and we have invested on green energy. This year, we should be able to take our green energy share or green power share from 8% in your company to more than 30%.
One of the significant number is that we have been able to recycle more than 1 million meter cube of wastewater back into our process, which is almost equivalent to 90% of our total freshwater requirement in our operations. Thank you from my side. Anand?
Thanks, everyone, for your patience. I think I'll come to the last slide, which is the guidance for the company. Before I go there, I think I would like to thank the business heads, Mike, Ashish, Bhupen, and Raj, for providing us excellent insight into the business, their performance, financial performance for the year, and at the same time, the financial outlook for the following year. Of course, thanks to Jai, giving us a good overview of where the industry is headed and his vision of where he sees UPL.
Giving the guidance for the full year based on what we have seen guidance given by each of the platform, we believe that for this full year, FY24, we should be having a revenue growth of about 6%-10%, EBITDA growth of about 8%-12%, and we see improving ROC by about 125-175 basis points to about 16.5%-17%. I would also like to state here that some of the headwinds which Mike talked about and Ashish also spoke about, in terms of post-patent products, we do see some challenges in the initial first 2 quarters, but we remain confident of delivering our guidance for the full year. With this, I would like.
Of course, as Jai mentioned, we'll also look at generating higher cash flows as we see that that's the key in, especially when we are seeing very volatile environment, both in terms of markets, at the same time in terms of geopolitical situations. With this, thank you very much once again for joining us today, and please join us for high tea. Sorry, we have the Q&A session, and then join us for the high tea.
Yeah. I'll just repeat the question that I think we heard just in terms of, you know, what created the margin compression in a bit more details.
Yes.
Yeah. In Q4 in particular.
And how-
How do we see it going forward? I'll start from a global crop protection standpoint. When you look at the margins, there were several factors that went into the margin compression in Q4. Firstly, we did overall sell at a lower average selling price. Price was down about 3% in the quarter. There was some compression due to selling price. On a go-forward basis, we also expect our cost of goods to also get adjusted. While we'll see price compression in the post-patent segment, we shouldn't necessarily, other than in glufosinate, see very much margin compression. Compounding the impact in Q4 was the fact that we did idle capacity to manage working capital.
There was some costs that we took through the income statement, as a result of lowering our production and managing down our inventory. Finally, we also liquidated some high-priced or high-cost inventory. We really looked at the year, the end of the year to make sure that we could take all of those actions to set up for FY24 so that we could really compete going forward. A lot of those actions won't repeat. We're gonna run our plants. We're gonna compete very hard in the post-patent segment. We will see some price compression, but we won't see some of the other one-time costs that we took in margins in Q4.
Can you sort out?
Our mic's on you.
Any other questions? Yep, there's a couple back.
Yeah. Do you got a follow-up question? Sir.
Hi, I'm Ramesh from Nirmal Bang Institutional Equities. Thank you for the detailed presentation. Just following up on the question he asked, today in commodities you have this problem in the top the revenue falls and your patent margin falls, and you have a problem. Can you break it into how much of inventory loss you have taken and what is the reduction in production which you refer to in terms of having to incur fixed costs because of the operating rate coming from some of your manufacturing? Then if you look at the next six months, what is the inventory you're still carrying?
A related thought would be, now if you say China has come back vociferously in the second half of the 4th quarter, and if you see the kind of numbers we see in terms of Chinese capacity addition, do we see the issue of Chinese competition, generally abating sometime in FY24? Because you're saying that in the second half you see improvement. If you can just give your thoughts on these three aspects and I'll be grateful.
I understood. All right. I, we got some of that. Sorry for the audio problems. Let's see if we can get that fixed. There's a number of mics up here, so if we wanna use some of these mics up here for the audience, let's try that. One of the questions was, what was the specific cost of idling capacity? That cost was in the range of 200-250 crores. Again, we wouldn't expect that to repeat going forward. The Chinese production, look, I would say on certain active ingredients, including glufosinate, which is one of our top 5 active ingredients. Today, they're running capacity and there's probably overcapacity for that active ingredient.
They're liquidating, we believe they're liquidating at less than their fully loaded cost of goods. That won't persist into the mid to long term, but we could see this take, I would say, a quarter or 2 to flush out till we get to, you know, a more normal operating margin. It's hard for us to predict exactly the margins that are gonna come out of China, but the current prices won't persist into the mid to long term because they're not even covering their fully loaded costs at this point.
What about the... and the excess inventory, can you-
Again, from a idling standpoint, the cost was INR 200 crore-INR 250 crore. I would say the variance based on selling out the high cost inventory and other variances in the quarter was probably about half of that total. in the range of say, INR 300 crore-INR 350 crore in total.
No, I think, in the industry, we are in a good position, and the reason was the raw material prices were coming down a lot. All the raw material prices have come down substantially. Just the natural gas prices are down about 60%-70% in India. A lot of the raw material prices are coming down, so we are in a good position now because we are probably the same level of inventory as last year. This is probably the lowest we can get to. It could be something, but not a major impact.
Hi, this is Vishnu from Spark Capital. I have a few questions. On the guidance slide, we probably thought there's one more line item, I was anticipating. Any thoughts on the debt reduction, that if we can get?
Can you repeat this? Can you fix this system, please?
Yes.
Yeah, Vishnu. Thanks. Vishnu, as you know, we're at this stage with net debt to EBITDA of 1.5x, which we have brought it down from almost 4. I think we feel fairly comfortable.
Hello?
However, we would, whatever cash we generate during the year, we will use that to repay the debt, besides, of course, investing in working capital as well as the CapEx. Our CapEx guidance is roughly about INR 350 million for this year. The rest, whatever cash we generate, we will use it to repay the debt.
In general, over the next three years, I mean, if there's a number that you want to kind of get on the debt side, beyond which probably you look at again investing back into the business, what is the number that we feel that, okay, we have kind of reached a very good number, so we start investing back a lot into the business again? Where would that number be?
As I said, you know, at this levels also we are comfortable. Net debt to EBITDA 1 is to 1 is something which we will strive to reach towards. We will continue to invest. As you know, we grow at much faster pace and for that we continue to invest. Of course, we focus on profitability and which we will continue to do it. I mean, if you want, I mean, a specific number, net debt to EBITDA 1 would be a comfortable position to it, to be in, but at 1.5 also. Because our cost of debt is fairly low. As you see, most of our debt is unsecured. The risk profile is extremely low, and most of debt is tenured with a complete flexibility of repaying whenever we wish to.
the bonds of course are fixed tenured, but the bank loans are all, We can repay them by giving a 1-month notice.
Understood. In one of the slides we mentioned, $8.5 billion of an opportunity where by FY27 we think we can address $2.5 billion worth of opportunity. How much of this is something that we can capture? Is it like, a 10%-15% of this $2.5 billion is something that we can capture? What percentage that we can realistically achieve? What is it that we are doing differently to get this opportunity versus the other players who are also competing for this?
As we mentioned in the presentation, through 2027 we would anticipate $2.5 billion of new product revenue and based on the pipeline, over $8 billion. Those numbers are risk-adjusted for, I'd say technical risk, but not necessarily for market risk. 80% of our pipeline, both in the near term and long term, are in the differentiated and post-patent segment, which traditionally has margins north of 40%. That should be the value capture on the differentiating sustainable products within that portfolio. That's how we would think about the value piece on a go-forward basis through our new product pipeline. What are we doing different? Today, about 85% of all of the active ingredients that are sold globally are post-patent.
What growers have realized is if they only use a single mode of action, whether it's for weeds or disease or insects, it doesn't take long for resistance to build up. What we're doing uniquely through our Thane R&D center, where we're, I think, the world leaders in developing new formulations of double or triple-mix products, we are innovating with high-quality formulations. We're using our IP team to ensure that we've got patents on new mixtures that we can bring into the marketplace.
We're doing that at scale and speed, and we're testing it through our global testing network so that when we launch those products, like we did this year, and we saw $140 million of new revenue from our new products, it's because we've prepared the market, we've worked closely with farmers, we've tested the formulations, and so when we get full approvals, we can ramp up quickly. That's, that's our strategy, and I would say we're executing it very well.
If I get it right, by 2027, and if everything goes right for you, then two and a half billion dollars will be the incremental revenue for us. It is not as an opportunity, it's actual revenue we think we'll get.
Yeah. Not 100% of it will be incremental. Some of it will be mixtures with glufosinate, with S-metolachlor, with clethodim, with some of our other products today, mancozeb. Some of it will be truly incremental, some of it will cannibalize our current portfolio of straight goods as well.
Okay. Thank you, and all the best.
Yeah, thanks. This is Rohit Nagraj from Centrum Broking.
How's that?
Yeah. Rohit Nagraj from Centrum Broking.
I beg your pardon?
Yeah. Two questions. One is in terms of retrospective. What did China do in the last 4 months after opening up that we being the largest post-patent player, were also not able to anticipate it, and there was a serious issue for the global market? Why do we think that it will not recur in future? Thank you.
I think there are 2, 3 things. Particularly in the U.S., the season was a bit late, so there is a delay in the season. It was a very cold, long winter. Planting is delayed, that's one. The end of December, a lot of the companies stocked, because that's their year-end, they stocked up the market. The channels are quite fully loaded. In the meantime, all the raw material prices started coming down, everybody's delaying buying decisions. This is not unusual. This happens every now and then, that they delay buying decisions. When they see further prices reduction, they postpone it. A little bit all that, they see the price going down. This can happen.
This is not unusual. Commodity prices are strong. We have good market reach. We don't think we'll lose market share as a company, so it should not be. This can happen, you know, when some of these things are off track. There is, we believe some of the products are below cost. How long will that last is anybody's guess. It shouldn't last too long.
Sure. Second question is on the manufacturing platform. This is right now only catering to the global crop protection manufacturing and the UPL SAS, or is it also catering to any external customers? Given that it is a specialty chemical company, what we have said, why the margins are so low at, say, 9% or 10%? Thank you.
Yeah. of course, we cater to everyone.
For UPL, the crop protection side of the business at India, that's majority of the business. We also cater to the other global players. We have a contract to supply at cost plus basis, it's at a fixed margin. It's a fixed business. The other industrial business is at normal 20%-25% EBITDA margin. That as it is growing, you will see the impact of that. It's a small business, still probably 15% or so, or maybe 10-12% of the current revenue. As it grows, the margin will change.
Just one clarification. 100% of manufacturing for our group is housed in the manufacturing or specialty chemicals platform?
Not 100%, but, all the whatever we make is sold globally through that platform, if it's a crop protection product.
Thank you.
Hi, this is Krishan from JM Financial. I have, like, a couple of clarifications. First is on the growth guidance that you have given for the UPL group is around 8%-12% EBITDA growth. If I look at the UPL Corp, EBITDA growth guidance is around 6%-10%. We understand that UPL Corp is about 80%-85% of the UPL group EBITDA, right? What am I missing? That's question number 1.
We have done the maths, and that's why we've given the range. We are quite confident of delivering. If you do on the EBITDA side, we would hover around 13% based on what the guidance is you saw. When we give a range, you know, that, you know, we have given a range of 12%-14% in EBITDA. 8%-12% in EBITDA. We are pretty much there. In case of revenues, we have given range of 6%-10%. We do believe that should be delivered.
Okay. Thank you. I think Rohit asked about the Spec Chem margins, but I just want to understand, like, how are you trying to reduce that 85% kind of a concentration which you have supplying the Spec Chem to UPL SAS and UPL Corp. What's the strategy there?
Can you repeat the question?
Sure.
I couldn't hear. Sorry.
Sure. What I'm highlighting is that on the Spec Chem platform, specialty chemical platform that you mentioned, 85% is to the UPL group, right? UPL Corp and UPL SAS. How are you trying to reduce that concentration from 85%, and what is the kind of concentration that you'd be comfortable with?
Yeah. That business was nonexistent three years ago, and it's about 15%. It's growing much faster than usual, the regular business. And all the investments we have made in the last 24 months, which will start giving results. That segment over the next five years will be much bigger than it is, probably 35%-40% of the business with whatever growth comes.
Understood. Thank you. One clarification. On the inventory days or rather, the inventory number that I look in the press release and that I look in the PPT. There's some difference. What is that? I mean, I just want to understand that.
Yeah.
No.
In-inventory days. Sorry, your question was?
Press release.
Or rather the trade receivables, if I just can give you the number. Trade receivables in the press release is about INR 182 billion, and in the presentation it is INR 149 billion, with a note that receivables sold were INR 115 billion. Just want to understand what is the difference. Where is that difference coming from?
We'll take it offline, if you don't mind.
No worries, no worries.
We can sit and give it to you.
No worries. Thank you so much for the opportunity, and best of luck.
Hi, Anand.
Oh, this side, sir.
Sir, Rahul Veera from Abakkus. Just trying to understand in terms of the hierarchy of ROCs within UPL Corp, UPL SAS, Advanta, and Specialty Manufacturing. Who will be the leading segments within your view?
Can you repeat your last bit?
Sir, wanted to understand the hierarchy of ROCE-wise, segment-wise for each UPL Corp, UPL SAS, Advanta, and Specialty Chemicals.
I mean, I'm not 100% sure of the numbers. Ballpark, I think, primarily because of the long payment cycles in Brazil, the crop protection global business has probably the lowest one. Advanta and UPL SAS and the Specialty Chemicals is much higher in the 20s or 30%.
Sure. Also the net debt of $2 billion, largely it would be sitting in UPL Corp?
All of it is there, yeah.
Sure. Sure. Thank you.
Okay.
Hello.
Hi, Bajrang here from Simpel. Can you hear me?
Yeah. Just put one or two more people.
Yeah, I just have two, three specific questions. First is, you know, so we have kind of realigned the structure, and now we have four different platforms, and each seems to be going quite good in terms of, you know, the momentum in the business, our positioning in each of that. If I have to look at the next three to four years, I mean, how are you looking at in the monetization or the structure thereof, you know, for, you know, each of those businesses, and in that, you know, the overall?
I think the original idea, there are two main purposes of separating them out. All the businesses are leaders in its own sector. If you look at Advanta, the specialty chemicals or the India SAS business, all of them are number one in its own ways and all have very good opportunities to grow. The idea was to really test the hypothesis through value discovery. We talked to some of the private equity leading brands to come in, and there was a lot of interest. We brought the first level of investment primarily to bring value discovery. These businesses will continue to outpace growth of their sectors.
The opportunities, as you know, are about 5 or 6 things we can do with it. Right now we are just concentrating on focusing on growing those businesses at the best possible rate. Then when the time comes, obviously we will figure out what to do. The obvious opportunities will be there. Yeah.
Okay. The reason I ask is because some of those businesses, say, the India business, or the seed platform, they're inherently a very high-return, businesses.
I cannot hear you very well.
you know, the India business or the seed platform, you know, the returns in that business are quite high. The business itself will keep on throwing us quite a sizable amount of cash. Do we have any exit arrangement with any of those PE investors or, you know, I mean?
No, no written agreement. It's the normal when they come in. Yeah.
Okay.
Nothing special, but we'll use the cash appropriately to grow those businesses.
Okay. Second question is on the specialty and the manufacturing platform. You know, so the 85% which we cater to the group entities, you know, if I look at individual B2B manufacturing companies, you know, they make somewhere between 18%-20% EBITDA margin, you know, pure play AI, intermediaries kind of companies. When we look at our, you know, supply to these individual entities, you know, while I understand there's a fixed cost plus a certain margin, but how are we arriving at that particular margin structure?
It's a cost plus. It's a formula based.
Okay, is there any thought process in terms of revision to the margin eventually? I mean, maybe in the future.
Sorry, I didn't understand, it's a formula based, cost plus.
Okay.
Yeah. This is Prashant from Elara Capital, this side. Innovation turnover rate this year has declined.
Yes.
Innovation turnover rate has declined to around 14% this year, despite such a good product pipeline that we have been highlighting over the last 2, 3 years, and for future also. What has caused this decline and so sharp decline?
If you go back a couple years, our innovation rate was in the low 20s. We had a really good class back in 2018, I believe it was, of several products. One in particular that when that class graduated, because the way we measure innovation rate, it's products that have been commercialized in the last 5 years. We had a specific strong class in 2018, and that dropped our innovation rate. As we shared in the presentation today, we believe we're gonna get back into the lower to mid-20s with the pipeline that we've got coming.
secondly, volume on the inventory side, while the absolute number is up 7% year-on-year, but we are in a falling price market. volume-wise, we are still way higher than last year in terms of inventory. Is the understanding correct?
Yeah. If you look at FY23, our growth was due to pricing, not to volume. We actually had degrowth in volume. We would expect in FY24 for that to flip, and our growth this next year will come from volume. At least in the global crop protection business, we won't get growth from a pricing standpoint.
I think the inventory is always at cost. Yeah.
Okay. It's not...
Hi, Tejas here from Nippon India MF. My question is more on the industry side. This AI-enabled robotics as a service is kind of gaining huge traction in last 12 months. Their claim to fame is that it will reduce the pesticide usage by 60%-90%. These companies are getting very well capitalized in last 12 months, I mean, despite of the liquidity crunch at the global level. I just wanted to understand if that precision spraying really picks up, what is your take on the pesticide usage at the farm level?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of technology coming in precision spraying. Cost of that is right now very, very high, right? When they do it. The number of acres being treated is still very, very small. When we look at our portfolio, we consider that and all our bio solution products and our soil health products and our climate smart technology, all these are agnostic towards just pesticide use. And, you know, there is I mean, when you look at that, it, we don't see a material impact happening as such because until the cost comes down dramatically, I mean, I think it's zero use in India right now, zero.
whole of, you know, in certain specialty, very specific, kind of, they are piloting it. I don't know, Mike, do you wanna comment?
Talk about drones maybe.
No, I think a very, very valid question. I think, the thing is that there are all kinds of technologies which are being tested in India. There are about 730 AgTechs, you know, having, where they're trying to disrupt at the retail level, farm level, less usage of chemicals, more usage of chemicals. I think what we have done is that we have touched base. I think in terms of mechanization, we are by far ahead of anybody else in the local market. In terms of AgTech also, we showcased two of our platforms where we're trying to reach the farmers and the retailers through that. At the end of the day, you know, it is not just about just the technology, like Jai rightly said.
I think some of these technologies are very, very costly right now. We also are, you know, looking at a mix which we talked about, Pronutiva, which is protection plus nutrition. I think if you use both of them, then any which ways, your overall chemical use comes down. I think a lot of technologies are being dabbled. We are in touch base with a lot of technologies, but like what Jai said, I think none of them seems to be economically viable right now.
No, I was talking more from the global point of view, because obviously India will be the last market to adopt to that technology, considering that the farmers in India are very marginalized. More from the U.S. point of view on the cost side, it is becoming more as a robotics as a service rather than they buying robots and implementing it at the large farm level. If that as a service really picks up, which we call RaaS, then the cost of really putting up that at the farm level comes down dramatically. If they save those costs on the pesticide usage side, as an industry, don't you think that it becomes a very big threat?
Yeah. One of the technologies that is developing, is what they call See & Spray technology, where they have sensors on a traditional sprayer, where you try and spot the weed or the problem and then just spray it. I think where the technology is today, it works in what you would call a pre-plant burn down. If you're just going into a field and you only wanna spray everything that's green and you don't have weeds in the whole field, that technology is working today. It still needs to develop, be developed. They still can't drive very fast with most of the technology. That technology could have an impact on the overall demand for, say, non-selective herbicides that get sprayed in a pre-plant situation.
I think once you get into a crop situation, whether you're spraying weeds or insects or diseases, none of the technology is close right now in terms of being able to go out there and precisely target the pest. I would say the other technology that we're doing a lot of work in, and we see developing quite rapidly, is in drone spraying and drone formulations, particularly in smallholder agriculture, but I think it could also expand to a largeholder agriculture. With every one of our platforms, with all of our formulations, we're doing a lot of testing with how can we be the leaders in having unique formulations that really work well for drone spraying. We see that as a trend that's coming.
Yeah. As a follow-up question, in the press release, you mentioned that the increase in Latin American sales has also been one of the factors leading to the decline in margins. It'd be useful if you can give us some idea about the difference in the spreads between LatAm and, say, U.S., because LatAm is one of the fastest growing regions for you through the last many quarters. To the other extent, is the increase in your UPL Corp, you know, EBITDA growth and margins implied in the guidance, a result of potential growth in U.S. in FY24? If you can give your thoughts on these two, would be great.
I would say we have a very good position across Latin America in most of the countries, including the large countries like Brazil and Argentina, Mexico, but also a lot of the smaller countries where we have very good relationships with growers and with distributors. And we saw even in the 4th quarter, when we look at our peer reporting, where most of them struggled in Latin America, we actually had a very strong quarter in Latin America, both from a volume standpoint and prices were okay. We did have a very challenging quarter in North America, specifically in the U.S. Canada performed quite well. As Jai mentioned, the U.S. situation was partially exaggerated because of the delayed in spring season. But there is also more pressure there on the post-patent segment.
Distribution is very consolidated, so unlike in Latin America where we have relationships and connection points across a very broad industry, in the U.S. in particular, there's a handful of distributors that control most of the marketplace. We have good relationships there. We're working on building our business with them. We've seen good growth in the last two years in North America, and we expect another year of growth ahead of us. We were certainly challenged in Q4, so we're diagnosing that, but we also know that some of it was temporary based on the weather season itself.
Can you throw some color on the difference in the spreads between LatAm and US? Because you specifically mentioned the margin pressure was from the increase in LatAm. That's why the question.
Look, I think if you look over the next five-year period, we will likely continue to grow at a faster rate in Latin America, in most of Asia, in Africa and Middle East. Those regions will likely outgrow the mature markets, which are North America and Europe. That would be our expectation. Now, again, as you saw in our pipeline, we have a lot of technologies coming that are gonna fit in Europe and North America, we do have an expectation that our business will grow there as well.
As a follow-up to the question on ROC, if you're looking at your FY24 guidance, do you see the ROC also improving in line with your expectation that in the second half you'll see the margins improve, or will the ROC, you know, lag that because you are also making investments?
That is our objective. We have a strong focus on cash, on EBITDA growth, we look at how we can continue to grow ROC. That's one of our KPIs that we focus on.
Okay, thank you very much.
Hi, sir. Good evening. Rohan here from Nuvama. Sir, first is once again a clarification required on the inventory-led losses which we have mentioned roughly INR 1,200 crores. You mentioned that, probably the impact of loss of production was close to INR 200-250 crores, and inventory-led loss purely was close to INR 300-350 crores. Overall impact was roughly INR 1,200 crore as mentioned in your presentation. That explains only some around INR 600 crore. It means that balance INR 600 crore is because of the deterioration in the product mix or change in the product mix? Is that assumption right?
The balance is basically the product mix and some increase in costs which we had, the high-cost inventory.
Yes.
It was towards the cost of production.
Sir, if you look at your guidance roughly 6%-10% revenue growth, we are sure that the way the prices has fallen, and you mentioned that the China impact may continue, the prices may fall more. 6%-10% kind of growth which we are building in the foreign current year, is it all or probably has to build in more than that volume growth? What is giving us the confidence except that flat volume growth last year? Why we are assuming that the, you know, global market will grow more than double-digit to meet this, to give us these numbers?
We have a number of growth drivers. Obviously, we talked about the headwind from a post-patent pricing standpoint. Our sustainable and differentiated portfolio, again, with the strengths of the products that we launched last year, those products are gonna continue to ramp up, so we see significant growth opportunity in those products. We're gonna be bringing a whole new class, as we said, of products that we believe will generate in excess of $120 million of new revenue. That'll be the growth segment for our business. We're also gonna drive growth in volumes within our post-patent segment. Again, we're not anticipating idling capacity next year.
We're anticipating running our plants and competing aggressively in the marketplace, with our post-patent business, both in the B2C markets, but also in the B2B markets. We'll find a spot, and we'll make sure that that volume growth is a part of our profile next year within the post-patent segment.
Sir, second is once again a clarification on China. Sir, though China has opened up significantly in last three to four months, we also know that the production capacities have never gone offline. The markets was still served by China very well in global market. Once we are definitely giving the reason that the fall in the raw material prices or inventory-led losses is primarily coming, huge capacities or supplies coming from China. Is it really so, or while China was sitting on a huge inventory in the market and they have dumped in the current scenario, has this led to huge losses? Otherwise, we are a manufacturing company as well, and if the scenario continues, the China continues to dump at the current pricing, how we are going to see the margin expansion?
Yes. China, you know, currently we definitely have an overcapacity. Currently, we definitely have an overcapacity, which is, you know, therefore, the capacities were anyway there. Now post-COVID, when China completely opened up, those capacities completely came online. You know, they started, you know, producing. Supply side, which was a constraint, is no more a constraint. Since there's an over, you know, overcapacity, definitely there is a competition and the prices have started, you know, falling down. More so in last, 8-10 weeks, it has a steep fall, right?
This is also coupled with the commodity chemicals, you know, prices which has come down, cooled off from the peaks in July, August, September to now. That has also helped in terms of, you know, bringing our prices down. In terms of margin?
Well, yeah, on margins, I think as Jai said, it's hard to predict the China margins going forward. I mean, right now we don't anticipate they can sell at these, on some of the AIs. Again, it's not across the board. There's certain AIs that they're trying to liquidate right now of supplies. I think once they liquidate those supplies and they're building new inventory, they'll only build inventories, I think, if they believe that they can cover their, all their costs.
This 8%-10% EBITDA growth which we are guiding for, are we building any further losses or inventory losses in Q1 or Q2 in this year, or we are expecting the scenario to normalize just from this year itself? This quarter itself, sorry.
Look, from a global crop protection standpoint on a quarter over a quarter basis, Q1 will be a challenging quarter. We don't guide at the quarter level, I would just say, you know, the pricing pressure that we're gonna face and we're facing right now in Q1 will be intense. I think the comp within global crop protection in the Q1 will be a challenging one.
just last on my side. sir, we are a our DNA is a manufacturing company, but we also have a nurture, behaving more like startups right now, incurring roughly INR 280 crore losses at EBITDA this year on a turnover of just only INR 80 crore. Though you are guiding that you are going to be EBITDA positive in this company by FY25, I don't know, I mean, how we are expecting these numbers to grow, how we are expecting our top line to grow, and what is our thought process behind it. I mean, are we just only want to participate in a global race right now or we want to make some meaningful platform out of this? Just some more understanding on this platform.
Yeah. I mean, this disruption, we continue to invest. We are more focused on... We have tested lots of platforms in, within the nurture thing, and now we are focused on three or four areas where we believe that we can in the next 24 months, you know, break even on those. By far, it is probably the most active and aggressive platform in the market. You know, it's something which is about to happen at certain point, and we are quite confident that the investments which we made in the technology, we have a lot of other nice, what do you call it, nice features, gonna be launched.
We are comfortable that it's gonna be a leading platform, not only in India but, in other parts of the world also.
Hi. This is Aditya from Investec. Looking at the current weakness.
Yes.
Yeah, looking at the current weakness in the crude oil prices, is there a likelihood of decline in, you know, the energy source from ethanol, which could have a bearing on acreages of corn in the U.S. and sugarcane in Brazil? Do you anticipate a decline in acreages if the weakness in the crude continues?
I can't predict that. I think the mandates are mandates. In many parts of the world, particularly in India, ethanol is gonna be short for at least next 10 years. I don't see, unless government changes their mind. At $10 crude not many things will work. At $50 crude it's very different, but that's not something which we can call on.
We don't anticipate a decline in acreages.
No, I don't see that. I don't see. These are government mandates, and other mandates which I don't think they will change very easily.
Hi.
It's not a voluntary use right now. It's, it's mandated. It's a law.
Hi. Good evening. This is Shriya Yao from ICICI Prudential.
Can you speak into the mic?
Yeah. My question is regarding S&P Global credit ratings. With the net debt reduction, do you expect any upgrades in the credit rating? If not, then what would be the debt reduction amount at which one can expect the credit ratings to upgrade?
We are engaged with the S&P. Now that the results are announced, we'll share the results with them. We do believe that this debt reduction is positive. However, we cannot, I mean, we are meeting some of their criteria, which as per their financial model, we cannot. It's their decision on the rating upgrade. Typically what we have seen in the past with regard to some other companies is they would not as quickly give an upgrade. We will keep pushing for it, but.
Yeah, thanks. Girish from Morgan Stanley. U.S., actually, we had almost a 20% decline in U.S. constant currency in this quarter.
Just wanted to understand the impact of glufosinate. Ex of glufosinate, what was the kind of degrowth or growth as the case may be in for Q4?
Yeah. We, we don't break out our product sales by quarter, but just to give you the shape of it, I mean, glufosinate by far was the leading impact on a quarter-over-quarter decline that we saw. There was a few other products that were caught up in it, but glufosinate would make up the vast majority of it.
The payable days are down quite sharply. Can you throw some light why exactly this has happened?
I think the reason largely, as I mentioned, we slowed down on our procurement as we saw the raw material prices dropping. At the same time, the demands were low, so we reduced our procurement in Q4, and that resulted in reduction in the payable days.
Do you remember the losses in nurture.farm for fiscal 2022? Was it similar or higher?
20?
Two. Fiscal 2022. Last year.
Last year was slightly higher than this.
Okay. Because when I just reconcile your guidance, 14%-18% growth for UPL SAS, the range of EBITDA is INR 840 crore-INR 870 crore.
Yeah.
When I back out this halving of losses, it doesn't add up because then you're actually saying India business will be flat. I'm not sure of the guidance here.
This is. Yeah. The guidance is crop protection only.
Okay.
For Nurture, we said that we would reduce the losses by half.
Okay.
That's our guidance on Nurture.
Fair. Now on CapEx, can you break it up in terms of various businesses, how much you intend to spend, the larger parts there of the $350 million?
Raj, you want to? INR 150 on your side, right? INR 160 million is for the manufacturing. Then we have. Yeah. Intangible, yeah. The rest is.
The rest is in the intangibles.
The rest is in the intangibles. $160 million is for manufacturing, and the balance is all intangibles. That will be largely in the Cayman crop protection global business. We have some CapExes also in Advanta, roughly $20 million, right?
Okay. Last question was on channel inventory as we see it across regions right now. If you can comment on where your peers are right now on inventory to the extent that they've declared results.
I'll make two comments on channel inventory. First, of UPL products, as we talked about, we didn't increase our volume into the channel, globally last year, our inventories are sitting in a good position. We worked very closely with our distributors and our retailers. We planned production. We helped with forecasting their business, and that's what we sold in. Now, I would say if you look at their inventories in total, you know, partly because of the supply chain concerns during COVID and then the Ukraine war, there was some increase in overall supply into the channel. Now with high interest rates, I would say globally, there's a desire for most distributors to de-inventory.
I would say, again, our inventory levels in the channel are well positioned. Generally, distributors have a desire to de-inventory this year, which I think will impact others more than us, just because we didn't load up our products into their inventories.
I think that's the last question, yeah? We can continue over coffee. Thank you very much. I think please join us for some coffee and... Thanks.