Gisele, please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased that you could join us today. I am Gisele Remy, Managing Director of Finance and Productivity and IRO at Alicorp. As presenters today, we will have Mr. Alfredo Perez, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Manuel Romero, Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Patricio Jaramillo, Vice President of Consumer Goods, and other members of the management team who will join us during the Q&A session. Today we will be discussing Q1 2022 results after the financial results and earnings report we issued yesterday. If you have not yet received a copy of the earnings report, please visit www.alicorp.com.pe, where you will also find the webcast presentation to accompany our discussion during this call. Please be advised that today's call is for investors and analysts only. Therefore, questions from the media will not be taken.
If you are a member of the media and wish to direct any questions to the company, please contact the company directly after the call. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that forward-looking statements may be made during this conference call. These forward-looking statements are based on several assumptions and factors that could change, causing actual results to materially differ from the current expectations. Thus, we ask you that you refer to the disclaimer located in the earnings release prior to making any investment decisions. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. Alfredo Perez, Chief Executive Officer of Alicorp, who will begin the presentation. Alfredo, please go ahead.
Thank you, Gisele. Good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Alicorp's Q1 2022 earnings call. We'll start today's call by giving you an overview of relevant events impacting our business, starting with an update on Peru, followed by an explanation on what we're seeing in terms of inflationary pressures and also internal as well as external factors that mitigate some of these pressures. We'll move on to an update on our efficiency program that aims at protecting margins without impacting our market positioning. I will continue with comments on our consolidated financial results, followed by Patricio and Manuel, who will cover our financial results by business unit, and an update on liquidity and our balance sheet.
At the end, before the Q&A, I will take the floor again for an update on our guidance for the full year 2022. Now, let's move on to slide 5 for an update on Peru's macro situation. On the sanitary front, indicators are looking more and more promising, which has enabled the government to lift the outdoor mask mandate. Vaccination levels are high, with 81% of eligible population, people over five years old, having already received at least two doses. These have allowed higher mobility rates, which have already surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Nevertheless, as in many Latin American countries, Peruvian families have not been able to recover the disposable income as a consequence of higher unemployment rates and higher informality. This, combined with 25-year high inflation rates, leads to significant pressures for Peru's most vulnerable families.
In this situation, the government has reacted with some temporary tax reliefs, exonerating the value-added tax for five basic products, bread, chicken, eggs, sugar, and pasta. In addition, also the Selective Consumption Tax has been cut for the 84 and 90 octane gasoline. In line with this new regulation, Alicorp is no longer charging the value-added tax for our pasta products and pre-cooked breads. We hope that these reductions will translate into lower prices for the end consumers. However, this will depend primarily on the rest of the value chain. This challenging situation has also led to protests during the last months. During April, we experienced a week-long strike of transport workers and a curfew in Lima imposed by the government. Fortunately, there were only minor disruptions for our company's logistics that allow us to secure the availability of basic goods everywhere in the country with some preventive measures.
Let's move on to slide 6 to discuss the impacts of the ongoing upward trend in commodity prices. As you know, since mid-2020, we have experienced steep increases in commodity prices. These increases have accelerated recently, mainly due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and several climate-related events hindering the supply of several key commodities. This is already generating tight demand-supply balance, which we expect will continue over the next quarters with higher prices for commodities in the international markets. As a consumer goods company, our cost of goods sold is directly affected by this situation.
As you can see in the slide, our cost structure has an important component of agricultural raw materials whose prices have increased significantly during Q1 and have continued increasing so far in the second quarter. For example, as Russia and Ukraine are responsible for 29% of the global wheat exports, the international price of wheat increased by an additional 17% since the beginning of 2022. Moreover, the price of soybean oil, which is our most representative cost for our edible oil category, has increased by 47% year-to-date. In addition, the price of crude oil climbed because of higher activity around the world and more constrained supply due to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, putting pressure not only on our logistics costs, but also in our packaging and all the oil derivatives used as raw materials in our home and personal care platforms.
In direct response to these relatively relevant increases in our costs, we have accelerated right sizing and design to value initiatives. Moreover, following the situation we experienced in H2 of 2021, we are cautiously passing through our higher costs via pricing actions, ensuring that our clients and all our channels have sufficient time to adjust to the new prices. We are happy to announce that so far, these initiatives have proven successful, and we continue to recover volumes, market shares, and profitability in key categories. Additionally, our company has first-class capabilities for the procurement and hedging of commodities managed by a highly experienced team. Thus, our company practices active and constant hedging of our most representative agricultural commodities such as wheat, soybean oil, soybean meal, among others.
Our strategy aims at layering our exposure and providing the necessary visibility and timing for our business units to react to the cost evolution through pricing, other revenue management initiatives, and also efficiency strategies. These skills represent for us an important competitive advantage that leaves us in a relatively favorable position when compared with our competitors that tend to have shorter positions and less sophisticated hedging strategies. Another factor that helps us mitigate our exposure to commodity price inflation comes from the composition of our business portfolio. As 2021 showed, our crushing business in Bolivia serves as a natural hedge for other business units with exposure to commodity prices. The profitability of the crushing business depends on the crush margin, which has a positive correlation to commodity prices.
Even when the price of soybean and sunflower seed increases for us, in these scenarios, higher commodity prices lead to incremental EBITDA, thanks to higher crush margins. Finally, another factor that helps us is the 4.5% appreciation of the average exchange rate of the Peruvian sol against the U.S. dollar compared to the previous quarter. Now, let's move on to slide 7 for an update on our efficiency program announced two quarters ago. We continue on track with a multi-annual efficiency program announced last year and expect to deliver over PEN 200 million in run rate savings by 2023. The program aims at supporting profitability in line with the strategic prioritization without impacting market positioning. As we have already talked about the program during our last two calls, we'll focus on an update compared to last quarter.
Regarding cost initiatives, 28% of our SKUs in Peru were rationalized in 2021. This has allowed us to reduce SKUs with negative contribution margin, reduce storage costs, and reduce working capital needs as well. We will continue simplifying our portfolio, looking to focus on our products that drive our profitability and improving our return on invested capital. In terms of go-to-market and route to market, between PEN 30 million and PEN 40 million savings have already been executed, leading to a reduction in our cost to serve, mainly in storage and sales expenses. This will be reflected mostly in our 2022 results. Additionally, we have recently launched a profound revision of our go-to-market model to ensure that we continue optimizing and also strengthening these key competitive advantages for Alicorp in Peru.
Regarding our transformation programs, we have estimated the contribution of the announced transformation program in our Aquafeed unit at over PEN 30 million in savings by 2023. As mentioned in our previous call, while the PEN 100 million in savings executed in general and admin expenses was partially reflected in 2021, most of these savings will be reflected in 2022. However, we will only see the entire impact in 2023 as we continue executing several efficiency programs during this year. All these multi-sectoral efforts contribute to the different metrics we use to track our progress, and we expect further improvements on our SG&A over sales and SG&A over gross profit indicators by year-end, an estimated 3-4 percentage points relative to gross profit versus 2021.
Let's now discuss our consolidated results for Q1 2022 on slide number 9. Consolidated revenue grew 35%, while volume increased 12% year-on-year in Q1 of 2022, mainly driven by the solid performance of our Aquafeed, crushing, and B2B businesses. Our consumer goods units also exhibited an important increase year-over-year as a result of our price actions to partially offset the continuous increase in international commodity prices. Moving on to profitability. Let's now review our consolidated EBITDA for Q1 2022 on slide number 10. Consolidated EBITDA exhibits an important increase of 18% for the quarter compared to 2021, mainly explained by the strong performance of our Aquafeed, crushing, and B2B platforms.
These are partially offset by the decrease of our consumer goods unit due to cost pressure and also tiering down effects. It is important to mention that our consumer goods unit saw an important improvement compared to the last quarter, but still does not reflect on our year-on-year figures. Moreover, it is also important to mention that despite the dramatic increases in several of our costs, our Peruvian business, both including consumer goods Peru, our B2B business, performed pretty much in line with Q1 of 2021, which was a good quarter for us. We'd also like to highlight that we incurred in restructuring expenses, write-offs, and other non-recurring impacts with a net impact of PEN 13 million during Q1 of 2022.
During this quarter, we had about PEN 10 million of restructuring expenses and had around PEN 8 million of write-offs as we rationalize some unprofitable categories. These negative impacts were more than offset by the sale of real estate in Lima. We continue rationalizing our portfolio, we will likely continue experiencing one-offs and one-shot expenses. We're confident that despite these negative non-recurring and non-cash impacts in our results, these initiatives will be value accretive in the medium term. Let's now review our consolidated net income for Q1 of 2022 on slide number 11. Net income increased 18% year-on-year in Q1 of 2022 , mainly explained by higher operating profit and a positive base effect due to the loss of our discontinued operations, Brazil and Argentina, during Q1 of 2021.
This was partially offset by an increase in our financial expenses and income tax. Excluding Brazil and Argentina, net income increased 4% year-on-year. Now, let me pass the floor over to Patricio, who will discuss the operating results of our Consumer Goods Peru and Consumer Goods International businesses.
Thank you, Alfredo. Let's begin with an update on consumer goods Peru market dynamics on slide 13. For Q1 of 2022, Peru's GDP is expected to grow at around 4.2% year-over-year, and private consumption 4.9%. Importantly, Alicorp's revenue growth outperforms these statistics with an 8.3% growth year-over-year. We continue recovering our business with Q1 2022 exceeding our Q4 2021 results in revenue by 5%, gross profit by 26%, gross margin by 4.2 percentage points, and a remarkable EBITDA recovery of 169%. This confirms that our strategy focused on accelerating the growth of our premium brands through increased advertising spending, while highlighting product differentiation versus key competitors.
Implementing design to value initiatives across key categories to reduce costs and capturing pricing opportunities is working well, and we're recovering profitability and volumes faster than expected. Additionally, our channel mix continues to tilt towards the traditional trade channel, which benefits the company's overall profitability. During Q1 2022, the traditional channel represented 77% of our sales split, 2 percentage points higher versus Q4 2021, and 7 percentage points higher than Q3 2021. Also, we are starting to see a faster than expected recovery of our core brands within our product mix that is also benefiting profitability, reaching a gross margin of 24.5% versus the 20.3% we achieved in the fourth quarter of 2021, despite higher cost of goods sold in several key categories mentioned earlier.
We continue to recover our market share according to Kantar. During Q1 in 2022, we have recovered or maintained share of volume in 64% of our categories when compared to our last reading in 2021. In the modern trade, value shares for the quarter are up in more than 55% of our categories also when compared to last year. Regarding innovation, we entered a new category, salad dressings, with the introduction of Aliños AlaCena. This effort is aimed at converting the homemade salad dressing market to a more flavorful, convenient, and easy-to-use alternative. Since its launch in November 2021, we have achieved a 46.5% share of volume in the modern trade, doubling the market size in less than 5 months.
Other innovations during the quarter include the introduction of Don Vittorio Alfredo White Pasta Sauce and the relaunch of our pesto alternative to complement our existing red sauce product line. Let's move on to the financial performance of our Consumer Goods Peru unit on slide 14. Q1 volume grew 0.7% when compared to Q4 of 2021, however, decreasing 7.2% versus last year. Importantly, volumes have been recovering on a monthly basis, with March volumes growing 32% versus January and reaching more than 64,000 tons. Up 14% versus our average Q4 2021 results. This is despite the fact that historically, Q1 volumes have had lower numbers than Q4 volumes due to seasonality. Volumes grew in categories such as pasta, domestic flour, and cookies and crackers when also compared to last year.
Revenue in Peru grew 4.6% compared to Q4 of 2021, and 8.3% versus last year. Growth versus last year is predominantly driven by pricing initiatives in several categories, such as edible oil, pasta, flour, laundry soap, and detergents, to partially offset raw material increases in soy, wheat, and palm. As we can see, in this quarter, we are also able to increase our gross profit per ton by 25%, reaching 1,417 PEN, still slightly below historic levels, but recovering versus last quarter due to a better channel mix and better product mix explained earlier. Despite this increase, our gross margin decreased 8.4 percentage points versus last year, reaching 24.5%, mainly due to higher costs of goods sold.
Recovering volumes and gross profit per ton gives us confidence that we continue on the right track and evidences the resiliency of our business and the strength of our brands. EBITDA for Q1 decreased 20.7% versus last year, however, increasing 169% versus Q4 of 2021. Our EBITDA for Q1 2022 reached PEN 130 million. Considering restructuring and one-off expenses, our adjusted EBITDA would have reached PEN 139 million. Let's move on to slide 15, Consumer Goods International Market Dynamics. Regarding our Consumer Goods International unit, we continue to focus on home care category expansion and strengthening our go-to-market initiatives to accelerate growth both in Bolivia and Ecuador.
In Bolivia, we're delivering significant satellite growth in our home care categories, achieving close to a 20% increase in revenue year-over-year. Importantly, regarding our key household categories, such as bleach, cleaners, and insecticides, we're experiencing a 35% increase in Q1 versus 2021 behind advertising, innovation, and improved visibility and distribution. This is part of our strategy to continue building our home care platform to reduce our dependency on our edible oils business, which has limited capacity to defend its profitability during cost increases due to local price controls in the country. Additionally, our horizontal distribution model is expanding with the opening of our second exclusive distributor in La Paz, El Alto, which started operations in April. This complements the one we have already opened in Santa Cruz during 2021.
We now aim to reach directly more than 15,000 points of sale by Q2 of 2022. In Ecuador, a positive economic momentum continues as unemployment numbers have improved from a 5.4% in February 2021 to 4.3% in February 2022. This means that around 80,000 Ecuadorians have found jobs and are generating higher incomes. In this geography, we're also focusing on our home care categories with new marketing initiatives in detergents, insecticides, and surface cleaners with our brand, Sapolio. Additionally, our new go-to-market strategy aims at increasing growth through an improved distribution model that will enable us to reach close to 45,000 points of sales by year-end.
This evolution of our model includes the development of close to 20 territorial distributors in key areas that will predominantly reach our mom-and-pop universe and will complement our 2 macro distributors that already operate nationwide. Let's move on to the performance of our Consumer Goods Bolivia on slide 16. Bolivia's revenue increased 9.5% year-over-year in Q1 , fueled by our focus on home care categories explained earlier. However, our EBITDA fell 32.2% due to a lower gross profit because of price controls in edible oils added to cost pressure and tiering down. Let's move on to the performance of Consumer Goods Ecuador on slide number 17, please. Ecuador's revenue grew close to 5% year-over-year, fueled by increases in volume sold mainly in home care categories, price taking initiatives, and gross to net efficiencies.
EBITDA increased 12.3% as a consequence of higher volume sold, revenue, and especially SG&A efficiencies due to savings compared to Q1 of 2022.
Thank you, Patricio. Let's move to slide 18 for an update on our B2B business market dynamics. The restaurant industry remains close to pre-pandemic levels as restrictions are loosened and consumers resume out-of-home activities. Our food service platform outperforms Peruvian restaurants GDP and exceeds 2019 revenues. This has been achieved thanks to our brand equity, our strong relationship to existing customers, and our successful new client prospection. Regarding active clients, we reached 21,000, slightly below pre-pandemic levels. We are very pleased to share with you that our results already surpassed pre-pandemic levels with volume and gross profit 8% and 22% higher than in 2019 respectively. These results include the impact of SKU rationalization. Excluding this effect, our volume growth would have been 9% year-on-year.
In this ongoing path to recovery, customers are looking for more value products, accelerating tiering down in most of our categories such as edible oils, lard, and flour. This client's need is addressed by our multi-tier strategy, strong brands, and service level, allowing us to maintain our clients' preference and gross margin per ton. Let's move on to slide 19 for an overview on our B2B financial performance. Revenue grew 45% this quarter compared to last year due to market recovery, client prospecting, and higher prices aimed to compensate the increase in commodity prices. Our food service platform showed a 37% growth year-over-year, and our bakery platform grew 50% year-over-year, thanks to our pricing strategy that balances market competitiveness and profitability.
Gross profit increased by a remarkable 45% with an improvement of the gross profit per ton of 12% on the back of our pricing strategies and our de-complexity initiatives. EBITDA increased 74% supported by our gross profit improvement and additional SG&A efficiencies. This quarter, we had restructuring and write-offs for PEN 2.9 million. Excluding these non-recurring expenses, EBITDA would have increased 64% year-over-year. Next, we will cover the Aquafeed market dynamics on slide 20. In Ecuador, shrimp exports grew 43% year-on-year, mainly due to the recovery of demand from China. China continues to regain ground among Ecuadorian shrimp exports. However, there are still significant volumes exported to the U.S. and Europe, consolidating the trend for a more balanced and diverse Ecuadorian shrimp go-to-market strategy compared to previous years.
To fulfill the demand from U.S. and European clients, Ecuadorian exporters continue to increase the offer of value-added and headless shell-on products, which are preferred in these two markets. At the same time, exporters also continue to focus on shipping greater volumes to China. We move further into 2022, we will expect strong growth recovery rates from the Ecuadorian market. International trade for shrimp continues to improve despite logistical disruptions and new COVID-19 related lockdowns in China. A positive demand scenario has kept global export prices relatively high compared to historic levels, even though we see a minor setback compared to the previous quarter. However, the prices paid to small farmers in Ecuador are currently low due to growing uncertainty that exporters have about the Chinese market.
This uncertainty stems from the Chinese authorities' zero COVID policy, which has resulted in the suspension of export licenses to Ecuadorian shrimp producers. Nevertheless, market experts see only minor short-term impacts. Despite the recent concern on the Chinese market outlook, we continue to see farmers maintain the production strategies that have boosted returns during the last quarters. Thus, they are increasing pond densities, which also increases the demand for feed, investing even more in automation and new technologies, which includes Vitapro's new digital ecosystem. Slowly gearing up towards more premium diets where Vitapro is a market leader, and reopening dry ponds and improving industrial facilities in order to better cope with growing demand from the U.S. and Europe.
Regarding the salmon feed business, exports of salmon from Chile increased 44% versus Q4 of 2021, and are expected to continue along the road to recovery in 2022. As with shrimp, the recovery of demand from salmon, especially from the U.S., but also from other main import regions, is above pre-pandemic levels and continues its upward trend, mainly due to higher out-of-home consumption, increased retail sales, and the recovery of the food service industry. Prices in the salmon market have bounced back to above pre-pandemic levels and are now at 5-year highs, which has incentivized farmers to rapidly start sowing. Therefore, we expect slightly higher export volumes in 2022 and especially in 2023.
To compete successfully in the Chilean salmon industry, Vitapro is continuing to deploy its differential go-to-market strategy in order to capture new tenders in 2022. All in all, during Q1 of 2022, we continued to see a recovery in both the shrimp and salmon industries, and we expect this trend to continue throughout the year. Vitapro continues displaying exponential growth, especially in Ecuador. This growth, plus our differential seed products and strong brands, allows us to continue generating value for Alicorp. Let's move on to slide 21 to cover Aquafeed performance. In terms of business performance, the 62% revenue growth is mainly explained by an increase in volumes in both our business units. The gearing up of our portfolio to value-added feed, mainly in Ecuador, and by price initiatives introduced to compensate for the increase in our raw material prices.
Gross margin decreased 2.8%, mainly due to price increases in our raw materials and technical problems in one of our Chilean production lines that is now under control. Despite this, EBITDA increased a remarkable 52% year-over-year, mainly due to the growth in volume, while EBITDA per ton increased 8% year-over-year, explained by the dilution of SG&A expenses. Next, we will cover the crushing business financial performance on slide 22. The crushing business had another notable quarter, mainly explained by the positive effect of price increases in meals and oils and higher soybean production. We would like to highlight that crushed volume in the first quarter reached 315,000 metric tons, growing 37% year-over-year.
Revenue increased 54% year-on-year in U.S. dollars, explained by higher prices and a 17% growth in volume sold to third parties. As you know, reported results in our financial statements come from the sale to third parties only. However, it is important to highlight that volume for internal consumption grew 17%, reaching 71,000 metric tons. This is a remarkable result, product of an outstanding margin management and sales contracts with first-class counterparts such as Cargill, Bunge, or Seaboard, and larger crops versus last year. These initiatives allowed us to increase our market share, highlighting the strength of our relationship with local farmers and the success of our strategy to become a one-stop shop for them with best-in-class service.
In line with this strategy, our agricultural solutions line doubled its gross profit year-over-year, reaching $1.5 million in Q1 . EBITDA increased $12 million year-over-year, based on our ability to negotiate prices and our commercial team efforts in developing the business. Let's move to slide 24 to discuss our liquidity and credit rating. Regarding our liquidity levels, as of March 2022, we reduced debt by PEN 699 million, repaying PEN 308 million. Despite these reductions, we maintained a comfortable cash position, which amounted to PEN 1,139 million, PEN 134 million more than by the end of last quarter. Both our prepayment of long-term liabilities and the partial repurchase of our global bond allowed us to reduce our financial expenses as we used cash available to complete such reductions.
During the rest of 2022, we will continue looking for ways to reduce debt and interest expense, prepaying or repurchasing debt with cash or readily available loans with lower interest rates. As of March, our liquidity covers 2.32 times the principal of debt maturing over 2022. Moreover, and to further boost our liquidity, we have committed credit lines in the amount of PEN 167 million, ready to be disbursed, and committed credit facilities for more than PEN 5 billion, and have room to issue debt securities in the Peruvian market under our local bond programs for PEN 1.6 billion. Both international rating agencies, Fitch and Moody's, maintain Alicorp's investment-grade rating. However, Moody's recently changed our outlook from stable to negative.
The reason behind the rating action was their expectation that our credit metrics will remain weak for our rating category over the next 12-18 months as a result of our exposure to an economic slowdown in Latin American countries, and negative consumer sentiment, and political risk in Peru. In order to tackle these concerns, we remain active in exploring opportunities to improve our maturity profile through the extension of our liabilities and the better use of our cash as a way to reduce our financial expenses and to secure our liquidity. We remain confident that with strong recovery throughout all our businesses, this should mitigate most of these concerns. Let's move on to slide 25 to comment on our debt metrics.
Regarding our debt metrics, our net debt to EBITDA ratio improved from 3.3 times as of Q4 of 2021 to 2.64 times as of Q1 of 2022. The decrease was mainly explained by a positive operating cash flow and an increase in our EBITDA over the last 12 months as a result of the good performance of crushing, aquafeed, and B2B units. This ratio will probably deteriorate over the next couple of quarters because of the purchase, storage, and processing of soybean and sunflower seeds, a process that occurs over the second and Q3 and makes our debt seasonal.
As you can see in the chart on the top of the slide, that seasonality is driven by the behavior of our Readily Marketable Inventories, which refers exclusively to the soybean and sunflower seed stored in our facilities in our Bolivian operations, and the advanced payments to farmers, advances that secure the purchase of Readily Marketable Inventories. It is also important to note that because of the upward trend in both the commodity prices and the purchase volumes, we expect an increase in the funds devoted to this business line over the following quarters. It is also noteworthy that since these Readily Marketable Inventories are hedged and the prices are sustainable through commodity exchanges in highly liquid markets, we believe that this inventory is a cash proxy that could further enhance our liquidity position.
Let's move on to slide 26, please, for an update on working capital and our average cost of debt. Debt maturities in 2023 are liabilities incurred several years ago at an average rate of 7.95%. Therefore, we expect to refinance part of such maturities by year-end at a rate close to these levels, despite the global increase in interest rates. This refinancing should improve our maturity profile while keeping our interest expenses at similar levels. Regarding our working capital over the last 12 months as of March 2022, our cash conversion cycle averaged 16 days. Despite higher inventories due to some supply chain disruptions, high commodity prices, and a volume increase in our crushing units, we were able to improve our cash conversion cycle by one day when compared to the last quarter as a result of efficiencies in our receivable management.
Looking forward, even though we are aiming to improve our cash generation for 2022, commodity prices and plans to protect against logistic disruptions could cause some volatility in our working capital ratios through 2022. Finally, let me circle back to Alfredo to wrap up today's presentation with a view of what we expect for 2022.
Thanks, Manuel. Let's turn to slide 28 for a glimpse of what we expect for our full year 2022 results. Despite all the factors discussed on this call that represent additional pressures on profitability versus our last earnings call, we see that both our pricing as well our efficiency efforts should be successful in offsetting most of these impacts, and we are therefore maintaining our previous guidance for 2022. In that sense, I would like to update the main assumption behind our guidance. In 2022, we expect the economy of our main geographies to continue the recovery from the 2020 recession. Even though inflation rates put pressure on families' income, we're confident that our consumer goods units will keep recovering in H2 of the year.
We also see clear positive tailwinds for the Aquafeed and crushing businesses that are surpassing our growth and profitability expectations. On the other hand, we do see some headwinds for our consumer goods businesses. Even though we had a very solid start to the year, the dramatic increase in commodity prices is adding pressure on our pricing actions. We remain cautiously optimistic that we will be able to pass through our rising costs, but it is possible that we might have some lag in the following quarters, which may temporarily impact our gross profit per ton. Considering the aforementioned assumptions, we expect revenue to reach double-digit growth in the full year. EBITDA growth should reach high single digits, which means that the contraction of percentage margins will continue.
Nevertheless, we will invite you to pay more attention to the gross profit and EBITDA per ton metrics, since commodity price inflation is generating a distortion of percentage margin metrics, given that they are relative to sales, as in the case of several other consumer goods companies. This makes current margins not comparable to the ones we had before 2020. CapEx should reflect our prioritization efforts, falling to $70 million, excluding Aquafeed. This represents an almost 30% reduction versus 2021 levels, excluding Aquafeed. Including Aquafeed and the expenses planned for this unit, CapEx should reach $125 million. For leverage, our net debt to EBITDA ratio should fall to approximately 2.7 times by year-end 2022 on the back of our solid free cash flow generation. This concludes our presentation.
Now, as always, we welcome any questions or comments that you may have.
Thank you very much for the presentation. We will now be moving to the Q&A part of the call. If you're dialed in via the telephone, please press star two on your keypad. That's star two on the keypad for any questions. You may also ask a voice or a text question if you are dialed in via the web. We'll now give a minute or so for the questions to come in. Once again, star two for any questions. Star two for any questions on the voice. You may also ask a voice or a text question if you are dialed in via the web. Thank you. We have a question from Mr. Felipe Ucros from Scotiabank. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good morning, Alfredo, Manuel. Thanks for the space for questions. Just a couple from my end. The first one on the Aquafeed business and the China shutdowns that we've seen recently. Obviously you've seen a very solid recovery in the division, probably above what you were expecting, definitely above what we were expecting. Congrats on that. You also mentioned last year that you embarked on a mission to diversify away from China, where you were receiving some export bans last year. You mentioned some of that in the call.
Just wondering, now that China went back into severe lockdowns in some cities, how has the impact been different and how well diversified has the business been, compared to last year, now that you're kind of refocusing your efforts on expanding the U.S. and E.U. a little more?
Thank you, Felipe, for the question. I think you're exactly right in the sense that the business has been performing above our expectations, especially our Ecuadorian unit. As we mentioned during the call, there have been some hiccups in the capacity of some of our clients to export and to get their products out to China because of those severe COVID-related lockdowns that prohibited import from China of certain products coming from the Ecuadorian farmers. That has not had a significant impact on the market and hopefully we expect that to solve itself in the very near future. You also mentioned about the diversification from Ecuadorian exports from China into U.S. and European markets, really. That has continued this year.
Obviously, China has been and will remain to be the main export market for the Ecuadorian shrimp. The share that both the U.S. and Europe are gaining is something that will provide some more stability to the export business from the shrimp business in Ecuador. I don't know if Hugo is present. He will have to add anything on top of what I just said.
Thank you, Alfredo. As you said, in this case, the growth of the export volume from Ecuador to U.S. and Europe is growing year by year. Now the volume of China represents less than 50% of the total volume, so we can manage, and the exporters can manage to redirect the volume to other countries, no?
Thank you, Hugo.
Perfect. That's very clear. Thanks for the color on that. Now maybe turning a little bit to Ecuador. You know, you've been having a lot of changes in this division, right? Bringing more introductory products, switching the distribution a little bit more towards direct and also reducing a portion of the production you have for third parties. You know, all that push points towards a push to grow the consumption and homecare businesses organically in Ecuador. Just wondering if you could give us a bit more color on the change of strategy here and where you see that business, let's say, five years from now or something like that.
Thank you, Felipe. We are very proud of the inroads that we're making into the Ecuadorian market and our consumer business platform. I would love to have Patricio provide more color into all the different efforts on the marketing, brand building, especially also go-to-market strategies that we are deploying there. Patricio, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Alfredo, and thank you, Felipe, for the question. Yeah, we're putting a lot of effort on developing, you know, Ecuador from an organic standpoint. I think that, you know, we have a tremendous opportunity to enter new categories where we have, you know, I would say significant competitor advantage versus, you know, the key incumbents there in the country. We have had a business that has been dependent on sauces and pasta for the last 10 years. However, we do see opportunities to enter new categories such as what we have done over the past year or so, entering cookies and crackers, entering detergents, you know, obviously expanding our home care portfolio with the introduction of the Sapolio brand. We continue on that effort.
I think that, you know, home care is a platform that we are heavily investing in, not only in Ecuador, but also in Bolivia, as I mentioned over the call. The biggest challenge in the case of Ecuador was getting our go-to-market strategy, you know, to work towards really what we wanted to do. We were only reaching, you know, anywhere from 7,000 to 8,000 points of sales. Now with the new strategy that we're implementing in place, we're hopeful to reach close to 50,000 points of sales by the year end. This is something that, as you know, Ecuador is a predominantly, you know, I would say similar to Peru in terms of the traditional trade and the modern trade, a little bit more concentrated on the modern trade, which we serve directly.
We need to get a go-to-market strategy that will enable us to reach that traditional trade, which is very important for us. That is where we have been, you know, focusing on with the introduction of this new, close to 20 micro-distributors that will enable us to reach those point of sales and will complement the efforts of the already 2 big, you know, distributors that we have in the country.
You know, there's a lot of, I would say, initiatives in terms of what to do in Ecuador. If you ask me, where would I like to see the country? I would like to see it, you know, in close to $100 million in terms of revenue over the next, you know, 3-4 years. That is where we're looking at developing it.
Very, very useful color and congrats on the push on that. Maybe since there are not a lot of people on the queue, maybe I can do another follow-up. Alfredo, you know, we've talked about the hedging position of the company and you mentioned on the call that you feel you kind of have an advantage locally versus some of your competitors and sound somewhat confident that you'll be able to fight the increase in commodity costs. Just wondering because I'm having a lot of trouble reconciling this. Obviously, on consumer, you're very strong on many categories, but some of your competitors are large international guys, which I would assume would be very well hedged and very long into the year.
Just wondering why you guys are feeling so confident versus the competition on the hedging angle?
Thank you for the question again, Felipe. I'm sitting here with Luis. I will turn the answer over to him to actually go for it. One very small comment. As you know, our company, given the businesses that we are in, we have different types of competitors depending on the category. A few are large international players, but many are much smaller, medium-sized, local, regional, and this is a Peruvian player that compete against us mostly in the food categories. I'll just turn it over to Luis, way better answer than mine.
Hi, Felipe. Thank you for the question. The reason why we feel confident in terms of how we're managing and hedging the risk position of the company is basically because we have I would say we have comparable processes, comparable risk policies, comparable hedging tools that we have access to, comparable to multinational companies. We have a team that we have developed their capabilities within the last I would say five years. We constantly have different conversations with multinational companies, with trading companies to you know not only get and gain market insight information, but also build the capabilities of the team. It's going to be a challenging environment, as you know.
Just to give a little bit of color and perspective, yesterday, the Chicago Board of Trade released expanded limits, which, what does that mean? That means that the price which the commodities can vary every single day have been expanded. To give you a perspective, just on soybean oil, as of up to last Friday, the prices could vary, roughly speaking, $88 per metric ton, up or down every single day. As of yesterday, the prices can vary $110 up or down every single day.
The environment is going to be challenging, but we feel confident of the capabilities of not only the capabilities of the team, but as I mentioned, the different processes, the risk policy and the limits that we have established in the company.
Understood. Thanks, for the color.
Thank you, Felipe.
Thank you very much, Felipe. Our next question comes from Mr. Alonso Aramburú from BTG Pactual. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for the call. I just wanted to follow up on the latest comment on hedging and COGS pressure. I mean, we saw an improvement in gross profit per ton from Q4 to Q1 , but this was really before the spike that we've seen in commodity prices in the last few months. I'm just wondering how do you think that is going to evolve maybe in Q2 or are you feeling now more the pressure of these recent spike in commodity prices? Or are you hedged into maybe Q2 of the year, and maybe we should be feeling more of a pressure in H2 of the year? My second question is just regarding the use of cash.
You have a nice cash position. You paid an extraordinary dividend last year. I'm just wondering if you are considering potentially another dividend like that this year. Thank you.
Thank you, Alonso, for the questions. Okay. The first one, I'll ask both Luis and Patricio to tackle it from different angles. On one side is just the hedging angle in terms of our strategy and how what we can actually say about our long position. The second part of that answer is how we as a business are planning to react towards this increased pressure from a cost standpoint because of the higher commodity prices. As we commented on during the call, myself and Manuel, our strategy in terms of how we pass along these cost increases quarter by quarter might actually show some margin pressures on the second quarter, for example. Okay. We're expecting that.
I will allow both Luis and Patricio to comment a bit more on that. On a yearly basis, we remain confident, as we said during the call. Luis, let me first turn it over to you.
Patricio.
Okay. Thank you, Alfredo, and thank you Alonso, for the question. Regarding the hedging strategy and what we can share with you in this call. One of the approaches or the main approach that we have when we hedge the different commodities that the company uses and the businesses use is very linked to what is the visibility that the different business units require. For instance, if the Aquafeed business requires a 3-month visibility on cost of goods sold, and we have conviction of where the market is going to be heading to, we tend to advance on positioning the company on soybean meal and the wheat that the Aquafeed business unit requires. Basically what we do is we give the required visibility that the business requires.
Going beyond that, Alonso, it's quite risky for the reasons I explained before. With such violent variations of prices, going, you know, too long can be a very risky proposition. The countermeasure to going long could be to, you know, buy optionality and buy puts, but volatility is at historical high levels, which basically creates the cost of optionality very high. So that's what I can share with you is that if we would be looking at our, at any given time, the position of the company, we have constantly been having an in-demand position, like we would be, it's been constantly below the market levels.
Regarding the B2B business, the ability of having a commodity team in-house give us a very fast visibility as to what are the different pricing actions that we're gonna have to make for the next quarter and allow us to make really quick and fast decisions. We've been approaching our pricing strategy on the B2B front for a leading position and so far has been working well. However, as Manuel mentioned, especially on the B2B front, as you have seen on the presentation, there's a tiering down in place. I do not expect that on the B2B front, we're gonna have a tiering up anytime soon.
When we go and visit customers and go through the markets, price, as you may imagine, is becoming the weight of price on the customer's drivers is becoming more and more important as you may imagine. I'm gonna let now Patricio comment on the B2C front.
Yeah. Thank you, Luis Estrada Rondón, and thank you Alonso Aramburú for the question. Yeah, I mean, we're experiencing important increases in costs of raw material and packaging supplies. This is something that will certainly be impacting several product categories such as, you know, pastas, edible oils, detergents, and the majority of our home care categories, I would say. In order to offset, you know, this cost, you know, either totally or partially, as we have done during Q1 , we continue to implement, you know, pricing initiatives. We have learned a lot from the strategies that we implemented in 2021 to trim them down and to, I would say, make them better.
Also, we're implementing, you know, several design to value initiatives, reformulations that we are gonna be implementing during H2 of the year. Right sizing of some of our important categories within the portfolio, while still, as I said before, continue to capture you know opportunities in terms of pricing. As Luis mentioned, for the B2B business, you know, in the B2C, we are also expecting some tiering down in certain food categories, especially in the ones that I would say are you know low differentiated categories, where we have, as Alfredo mentioned, low-tier local competition, more than multinational, I would say, local competition that you know are obviously being affected by cost increases in terms of their commodities. Perhaps their margin targets are somewhat different to the ones that we have.
To offset this effect, as we have done also during this Q1 , we are increasing our marketing expenditure of our core brands with the objective of highlighting our product's point of differentiation versus competition. Also accelerating innovation as we have done for our core brands for the remainder of the year. As I said before, we have learned a lot in 2021 in terms of pricing and how to capture those pricing initiatives and better balance profitability and sales. We feel that our plans are working. We still aim to manage cost increases with additional pricing, as I said before.
However, I would say that, you know, we are in the right track of recovering them and with the right strategies as we have been deploying them over the first quarter, I think we're gonna be able to achieve our targets.
Thank you, Patricio. Now, Alonso, on the second part of your question, let me just turn it over to Manuel to go ahead with the response. Manuel?
Thank you, Alfredo. Hi, Alonso. Regarding our cash position, as I mentioned, right now we have around PEN 1 billion in cash. However, as I mentioned, during Q2 and Q3 , we will probably need some of that cash to build up the readily marketable inventories for the crushing business. In Q2 and Q3 , we will probably see an increase in our net debt to EBITDA ratio. Regarding extraordinary dividend payments, we currently don't have any plans to distribute any more dividends during the year. However, if we see that in Q4 , cash generation and EBITDA is stronger than what we expect, we could evaluate the possibility of distributing additional dividends.
Right now, we are mostly focused on reducing debt and making prepayments for 2022 and 2023 to reduce interest expenses. Obviously, we will continue evaluating these alternatives, keeping in mind that we don't want to increase net debt to EBITDA above 3 times to ensure that we maintain investment grade. Great. Thank you, guys, for the color.
Thank you very much. We have two text questions that have come through. Given the time, I'll probably read them out both at the same time. The first question: Thank you very much for the presentation. Congratulations on the results. To what factor would you explain the disassociation between your operations and the behavior of the stock price? Have you considered a share buyback program? Many thanks. That's the first question. The second question is: Why higher EBITDA is explained by higher commodity prices, as it was the case in some other business units? Those are the two questions.
Thank you. Regarding the first question, regarding the difference or disassociation between our operations and the stock price. Obviously, the political situation in Peru is adding uncertainty, which has a direct impact on our share price. Additionally, there is a risk that Congress might approve additional withdrawals from pension funds. Local pension funds own between 30% and 35% of our share. There is an expectation that that might put short-term pressure on our stock. When that initiative from the executive branch was announced, that caused a direct reduction in our share price. Obviously, we don't believe that that relates to our current operations or our results. We strongly believe that current share prices are well below the intrinsic value of our business.
Regarding the second question about share buybacks, in line with what I answered to Alonso's question, that's something that we might evaluate in Q4 , taking into account all alternatives, making sure that we allocate capital in the most efficient way possible. But right now, we are not considering any share buybacks, mainly because of the debt situation that I discussed previously. Thank you, Manuel.
Thank you. We have one more text question: Hello, everyone. I have two questions. Firstly, what are your expectations on volume growth for CGP and CGI for this year, particularly considering the price actions in those businesses? Second, how much room do you see to rise prices in your businesses in Peru, taking into account the current political environment? In which category do you see less room to increase prices?
Thank you for the question. I think, for memory's sake, we have talked a little bit about this during the presentation and by answering previous questions. Please, Patricio, and then also, Lucio, could you please comment a little bit further on the question?
Sure. Thank you, Alfredo. On the volume front, you know, we're expecting Consumer Goods Peru to be mainly flat versus last year. This is obviously driven by pressures that we need to take on pricing to offset what we are seeing in terms of cost. In the case of our CGI business, I would say it's gonna be a single-digit growth, and this is mainly driven by volume growth that we're gonna be experiencing as we have had in the Ecuadorian business, and perhaps also single digit growth in the business in Bolivia, given the fact that we're getting very good results on the development of the home care platform, as I explained earlier.
In terms of pricing, yeah, I would say that the scenario is to be cautious. However, as I said before, we are taking prices in several categories. We have taken prices in pastas. We have taken prices in edible oils. We have taken prices in detergents. We are following, I would say, the upward trend that the market is providing us in terms of trying to recover our profitability. As I said before, also, it's not only about prices, it's also about you know, trying to reduce costs in terms of you know, implementing design to value initiatives that we are you know, putting in place. Also some right sizing of the portfolio to better fit in terms of you know, the out-of-pocket that consumers are paying today for several categories.
I would say that the strategy is a sound one. It's a very robust one that will enable us to reach our margin targets by year-end, and continue the upward trend in terms of the margin per ton, that the increases that we are experiencing on the year-to-date.
Thank you, Patricio. On the B2B front, we expect and we're prepared for increased volumes basically as we see again the out-of-home consumption growing and recovering in the country. We also see some growth on our cleaning categories that we started piloting actually last year, and we have launched this year. That is growing at an unexpected pace. Well, I think just to complement what Patricio mentioned, you know, how are we preparing to face the continuous pressure on cost of goods sold. We're trying to be very precise and careful as to what segments we serve.
We're also working very actively on what we call de-complexity, which in essence is identifying through ABC analysis what are those flows? Where are those categories? What are those segments that are not really adding value to the company and select and making some decisions, hard ones, and making some decisions that are aimed towards continue creating value for the company. Thank you.
Thank you, Luis.
Thank you very much. We see no further questions on the line right now. I would now like to pass the line to Mr. Alfredo Perez for his closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you again. Well, thank you all for the time you spent with us. As we always do say, please, if you have further questions, comments, don't hesitate to contact us directly in our investor relations department. Please stay safe and have a great day. Take care, guys.
Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. Have a great day.