Good morning everyone, and welcome to the presentation of Royal Unibrew's Q3 Trading Statement, which we published yesterday after market close. With me here today, I have our CFO, Lars Vestergaard, and my name is Lars Jensen, and I'm the CEO of Royal Unibrew. Before we jump into the presentation, I would just like to remind you on why we are here already today. Originally, we had scheduled the release for November 8th, but as you all know, we had to pre-release the results of the third quarter, Tuesday the 18th of October, last week. Since then, we have worked hard and accelerated our efforts to be able to present a full set of results already today or yesterday, almost two weeks ahead of the original schedule.
Today in our presentation, we will focus on a few key topics if we now turn to slide number three. We started with the key highlights for the quarter. It has been a very challenging quarter with continued pressure on our cost base, which is a result of the input price inflation we have experienced during the past almost two years. Back in August when we presented our half year results, we talked about how the consumer increasingly used the discount stores when shopping, a trend which has strengthened towards the end of the quarter and into October, and that will likely continue. Despite these and other headwinds that I will return to later, we continued a strong underlying business momentum.
We delivered 2% organic volume growth in the quarter with tough comparisons to last year and despite increasing prices for the second time this year. On behalf of all of my colleagues around Royal Unibrew, I'm very proud of the resulting 12% organic revenue growth we delivered. You have all done a fantastic job, and it is because of you that we can present these strong results in such a fluid and uncertain world. To me, it's a proof that our growth formula with a focus on key structural growth categories is working. It is a result of our strong local brand portfolio, the resilience of the affordable categories that we operate within, and the evidence sits in the fact that we are gaining market shares in our key and with our key brands.
This is the base for future earnings growth and is why we will continue to invest behind the key brands, even in these uncertain times. As I said in my intro, we did cut our EBIT outlook for 2022 last week, so that is now expected an EBIT of around DKK 1.6 billion compared to the range of DKK 1.7 billion-DKK 1.85 billion previously. This is still an EBIT which is 9% higher than the pre-COVID level of 2019. The cut in EBIT outlook came down to three different challenges impacting our business towards the end and after the quarter, and which all to some degree back to the inflationary environment that we are currently in.
Towards the end of the quarter, we saw destocking at our wholesalers in Italy as they work to optimize their cash management in the current uncertain environment. This is a one-off adjustment of inventory levels that will be fully included in the second half of the year and therefore, should have no negative impact on 2023. The impact, the input inflation is causing a tougher pricing environment across the business because the competitive landscape is characterized by different levels and timings of price increases. It is not, as we have seen, some commenting on, that we no longer have pricing power and that we no longer can increase our prices. We do increase our prices, and it remains our aim to neutralize the inflation by price increases, but we need to do it while at the same time remain competitive in the marketplace.
The issue, as I will show a little bit later, remains the fact that there is a time lag from what we experience on the cost level till we have negotiated and implemented sales price increases. Finally, we did see a sustained change in consumer behavior in relation to where they shop, and that is driving a negative mix. I can assure you that we believe in and will stick to our overall strategy. Nothing is broken. We will, though, adjust our discretionary spending to the current circumstances and drive the efficiency agenda even harder, but nothing is broken, and we continue working towards growing the business and keeping the momentum we have in the business for the greatness of the company in the long run.
I would like to go to slide number four and take a closer look at our pricing versus cost inflation. I will start by saying that this slide is illustrative and that we are trying to do it here to show you how we are working hard and close on closing the gap and that we as soon as possible will try to close the gap alongside the inflationary pressure. As we have mentioned on several occasions, we have experienced the inflation in waves. The first wave came during 2021, where especially raw materials and freight costs increased and added around DKK 450 million to our cost base.
We entered Q1 2022 with a cost base that originally was around DKK 450 higher than at the beginning of 2021. As many of these costs were known at the time of the annual negotiation, we succeeded in covering most of the inflation by price increases during the first quarter of 2022. Towards the end of Q1 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and we saw a spike in raw material prices and energy costs, adding another DKK 300 million to our cost base.
During the summer months, energy prices increased even further, and the total cost inflation at the end of Q3 2022 is around DKK 800 million compared to the beginning of 2021. We have implemented price increases during August and September, but not enough to cover the inflation, which is illustrated in the graph with a widened gap. We know that we will experience further cost inflation from the beginning of 2023 as we reprice some of our fixed price agreements with suppliers.
We will also raise our sales prices during Q1 2023, and we expect that 2023 will also bring at minimum a second round of price increases so that all these, everything else being equal, will catch up with the input inflation during the second half of 2023, bringing the absolute earnings per hectoliter back to the level from the beginning of 2021. In other words, we are able to and we continue to raise prices as long as the inflationary environment is out there. With that, I'll give the words to Lars, who will talk a bit about the financial development in 2022 so far.
Thank you, Lars. If we could please turn to slide five. On this slide, we have shown how the EBIT is developed during 2022 compared to 2021. Reported EBIT is down 10% year-to-date to DKK 1.21 billion for the first three quarters of the year. M&A has accounted positively by 6%, resulting in an organic EBIT decline of 16% in that period. As you can see from the graph, COGS inflation is around DKK 651 million compared to last year, whereas pricing efforts have recovered roughly DKK 511 million of that, leaving a time lag effect of DKK 110 million.
The positive impact on EBIT from volume and mix changes amounts to DKK 143 million. Looking at the effect from the reopening of on-trade, that includes the effect from reopening of on-trade and the event business. If we look at our international business, freight costs have impacted earnings negatively by DKK 64 million, a topic we will dive into a little bit later. Organically, costs are up DKK 155 million compared to the same period last year, and a majority of that is deliberate investments into our organization and its capabilities, which we will also return to a bit later in the presentation.
In particular, on-trade and events have reopened after years of COVID, and this have driven up sales costs, but also marketing have been increased to support our brands, and a substantial part of that was committed before the war in Ukraine broke out. Our message on this slide is therefore that adjusting for the time lag effect, the cyclically higher freight rates in international and deliberate investments into the organization and capabilities, the underlying earnings momentum in the business is intact. With that, please turn to slide number six. On this chart, we show the development in EBIT, in revenue and EBIT margin, in the year-to-date numbers.
At the left-hand side, you can see that revenue for the first three quarters of the year amounted to DKK 8,669 million, an increase of 37% compared to the same period last year. 14% came from organic developments, including positive price effects, positive channel mix, and a low single-digit organic volume increase. The remaining net revenue growth corresponds to 23% comes from the acquisitions of primarily Hansa Borg and Solera Beverage Group. This means that the very strong top-line momentum is coming from both organic and inorganic sources. On the right-hand side of the chart, we have shown what has contributed to the EBIT margin development. The EBIT margin declined 7.2 percentage points to 14% in the first nine months of the year. We have broken the impacts into three different buckets.
The acquisitions we have done this year, of which Hansa and Solera Beverage Group is by far the biggest, have an expected dilution effect of that number, which amounts to 1.7%. There is the base effect, which is coming back to the fact that we are trying to safeguard our absolute earnings per hectoliter and not our margin through price increases. Therefore, we get a mathematical dilution of our margin, and that number amounts to 2.2%. The remaining EBIT decline of 3.3% is primarily the result of the time lag explained by Lars earlier, and the investments we have done into the organization and capabilities.
With that, I turn the word back to Lars.
Thank you, Lars. Now turn to slide number seven, please. On this slide, we are giving an example of how much we have invested into the organization and what results this has delivered. This is particularly in Italy that we are showing on the slide, where we have invested a solid double digits DKK amount into organization sales and marketing efforts. Italy is one of the areas where we, since the beginning of 2021, have invested significantly into strengthening the organization and building capabilities. As we have talked about on several occasions, the number of salespeople has increased and almost doubled in Italy over the past years. These investments have driven a significant growth in both our CSD and our beer portfolio.
That is what you see on the bars in the individual months. Ceres has outperformed the market by an average of almost 10 percentage points per month over the period shown in the graph. Whereas Crodo's portfolio has outperformed the market by an average of almost 15% per month. As Crodo is outgrowing our beer, we dilute our average margin, but it is a very healthy development underlying. This is a result of the strengthening of the business and its capabilities in Italy. As illustrated in the slide, the investments have been significant, but also with a very good return.
During 2022, the increase in investments have been decreasing, and we expect that the year-end change in Q2 2022 will be very small and close to the same level as Q4 2021, where we ramped up quite a lot on our capabilities. Please move to slide number eight. This is to illustrate how much increased freight costs have impacted earnings in the international division. The cost base in international has increased by almost DKK 100 million since the beginning of 2021, alone because of increasing freight rates, which is mostly sea freight. That number is expected to increase further during Q4 2022 before it stabilizes and hopefully get down to a more reasonable level again.
In 2022, the international division made an EBIT of DKK 171 million and an EBIT margin of 22.3%. At the half year 2022 result, the international division made an EBIT of DKK 67 million and an EBIT margin of 12%, a little more than 10 percentage points below 2020. Almost all of this is explained by the increase in freight costs. This is a big challenge to our international export business model, as we in many countries are competing against local competitors and therefore cannot push these freight increases short-term onto our customers and consumers, and we will become uncompetitive.
We have decided to take this cost increase on our P&L to protect and maintain our important market position in the international division so that we can, once the freight costs normalize and we can potentially move production closer to the consumers. To mitigate, to further mitigate the short-term headwinds from the higher freight costs, as well as the longer-term challenges on the CO2 footprint of the international division, we are investigating the possibilities of moving production of our products closer to the consumption. As we have talked about previously, we see three different models to this. There's either third-party production agreements, license agreements, and the third one is own investments into assets. We have a couple of examples of that.
The first one is the acquisition of Amsterdam Brewery in Toronto, which is an example of the option number three, where we have acquired assets to support our business in the international segment. Whereas the license agreement with Carib for the Trinidad and Tobago market for the malt beverages is a good example of option number two, expanding our license agreements in relevant territories. Before I return and give you some insights into what is on our agenda at this very moment, Lars will go through our outlook for 2022.
Yeah. Please, turn to slide number nine. As Lars said, I will now go through the outlook for 2022. Last year, we upwardly adjusted our net revenue outlook to the upper half of the previous range of DKK 10.7 billion-DKK 11.7 billion as a result of the continued strong top-line momentum. On the other hand, we have cut our EBIT outlook from the range of DKK 1.7 billion-DKK 1.85 billion to around DKK 1.6 billion for the three reasons we described earlier in this presentation, and that is the destocking effect in Italy, tougher than expected pricing environment, and changes in consumer behavior.
The outlook is now based on a lower expectation for the development in consumers' general out-of-home spending during the last months of the year, although we are expecting a fully open on-trade throughout the rest of the year, as opposed to last year, where it was locked down during most of December. We also expect that the mainstream and below mainstream will gain share on the market, while premium products will likely be consumed by fewer consumers at fewer occasions. With that, I will give the word back to Lars for the final remarks.
Thank you, Lars, and please turn to slide number 10. I would like to take you through our agenda for the coming months or coming quarters. As I said at the beginning, we do believe that our business model is strong and that our growth algorithm is intact for now. For now, we are lacking the input cost inflation as we are not able to pass on sales price increases as fast as needed, even though that the Q3 reporting that we have seen from our peers over the last hours of yesterday and today indicates that we are the one that have the highest level of price increases, mix improvements in the third quarter. We have a strong momentum in the business.
We are gaining market share in our key categories, and therefore the task must be to pass on the COGS increases that are still uncovered so that we can get back to the same earnings per hectoliter as we had in the beginning of 2021, before the inflation started to kick in. We will continue to be on our toes in monitoring the market development, following the price increases in the increasingly challenging macro environment, and take the actions needed to secure that we remain competitive, including a reduction of discretionary spending without sacrificing our growth opportunities.
We are still working with capacity constraints in some of our production facilities, and even though that some of our acquisitions eventually will help us to ease this, we need in the short to medium term to manage our CapEx and planning to ensure the necessary capacity across the group. The acquisition of Amsterdam Brewery in Toronto, Canada was closed during Q3, and we have now started the integration of that business. The integration includes a plan of moving production of beer, the beer we sell in Canada, from Denmark to the brewery in Toronto, which we initially timed for an implementation late Q2 2023. This will save significant freight costs, assuming that freight remains at the current level, and secure less out of stocks and thereby a better customer service.
In Norway, the integration of Hansa Borg and Solera Norway is going according to the plan. The organizations have been set and the commercial plans are being built. The next big milestone is to analyze and decide and execute on the future, set up, including logistics in Norway for the combined business, and then thereafter start the IT integration, which we plan right now towards the end of 2023 as a starting of the project. Finally, we will focus on executing well on the significant expansion of our collaboration with PepsiCo.
On January 1, 2023, Royal Unibrew will take over the sales, distribution and trade marketing of Lay's and Doritos and other snacks products in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which is an expansion of the previous contract covering Denmark, which has built the PepsiCo snacks portfolio from mid-single digit market share to double-digit market share in six years, meaning roughly a one percentage points gain every year. I'm also very proud and excited about the extended agreement on the beverage side with PepsiCo as we, from January 1, 2023, will take over the responsibility on the license, on a licensed business of the PepsiCo beverage portfolio on the border between Denmark and Germany.
The agreement is expected to support the strong growth we have seen in the No Low Sugar CSD category in the Nordics during the past years and strengthen our offering in energy drinks. The agreement includes production logistics as well as a sales and marketing operation. With these words, I will send it back to the operator and we'll be ready to take your questions.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question you will need to slowly press star one and then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Once again, it's star one and then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. This will take a few moments. We are going to proceed with the first question. Please stand by. We have the first question coming from the line of André Thormann from Danske Bank. Please ask your question. Your line is open.
Yes. Hello, everyone. My first question is in terms of these growth categories that you have invested heavily in the past years. Can you elaborate a bit on how these performed in the third quarter and maybe also how you are seeing the performance of these categories going into 2023, if we are to see consumers have less purchasing power especially in Western Europe? Thank you.
Yeah. I think, the way that we look at it is that, the only category where we would expect to see, maybe some change from a consumer point of view, and that is mostly off-trade related and not on-trade related, that is the premium category. We would expect, given that traffic is moving from traditional supermarkets into discounters and really low price operators, that the premium segment will probably suffer a bit from that traffic change. Apart from that, we are still, our assessment of the growth categories are still that there is a lot to do in these categories.
From a, call it a priority point of view, if you look at the biggest opportunities, then the two categories that stand out in terms of potential is still No Low Sugar because of the carbonated soft drink category. This is a very big category. The other one is energy drinks, where we continuously see that even though the growth rates have come down from the COVID period, we still see in most markets that energy drinks is increasing about double-digit growth rates. So those and at healthy net revenue per volume sales prices. So those are the two categories with the highest potential. We do not intend to change anything to the six growth categories. Those are intact in our strategy build-up.
Just to follow up, just to be sure. I mean, so both energy and RTD performed in the third quarter, I mean, still continued to grow fast?
CSD, not RTD. The carbonated soft drink category and the energy drinks category, those are the two, call it biggest growth engines of the six. Those categories are still growing, yes, also in Q3. Just looking at, as an example, if you look at the Danish market, which is the market where we have the most detailed set of external data, given that some of the markets where we operate do not have data from like Nielsen or IRI. When we look at the market shares in the sugar category, we operate with market shares in the 20's, whereas our key competitor is in the 50's in terms of market share.
When it comes to the non-sugar category, our key competitor operates with market shares in the 20s%, and we operate with market shares in the 60%. The conversion from sugar to non-sugar is an agenda that we have been driving extremely hard, and with our partner PepsiCo for many, many years, and that is something that we will continue to drive. We do see that there is a constant shift between the two categories, even though carbonated soft drink as a category is not a growth category by itself, but the dynamics in the categories are pretty strong.
Okay. Just one last question from my side. In terms of 2022 and the new guidance you gave, you still have to grow EBIT, I think around 27% in the fourth quarter in order to reach your new guidance. Can you maybe help us build the bridge on exactly how you will do this, considering how much EBIT have been falling back in the first three quarters of the year?
Maybe we take the building blocks. The comparison year-over-year is slightly different in the quarters this year. We already saw in the fourth quarter of last year some cost inflation. The comparison becomes a little bit easier on that. And then, in November and December, there was a lot of COVID around in our core market, so on-trade was very low in those two markets. And also a lot of the investments in people we have done was already in place during the third quarter last year. The comparison quarter-on-quarter is easier than last year. Those are the building blocks that drives the increased profitability in the fourth quarter.
Thank you so much. That's all for me.
Once again, please press star-one and then one on your telephone if you have any questions or comments at this time. Thank you. We are going to proceed with the next question. The next question comes from the line of Jared Tinch from JP Morgan. Please ask your question. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. Maybe just one from me. Can you confirm if you still expect a DKK 50 million EBIT contribution from Hansa Borg for this year? Like, I know the implied Q3 M&A contribution on EBIT was just over DKK 10 million. Do you expect that to contribute more in Q4?
The Hansa, we're not giving all the details, you know. There's a lot of moving parts, of course. I would say that the Hansa earnings is around DKK 50. It's not changed a lot since when we got the keys, so to speak.
Got it. Kind of, let's say, the less contribution in Q3 was due to planned investments. There's nothing that you maybe found in the business or more you need to spend on restructuring than you initially thought?
No, I would say that the acquired businesses are performing, you know, according to what we have expected when we closed the deals and came with the announcements. The three subjects that we have mentioned in relation to the change of the outlook is on the, call it, on the base business and not on the acquired units.
Got it. Actually, maybe just on the base business, you know, you've kind of narrowed upward the top line guidance. Obviously you have that reduction in EBIT. You're saying it's due to the base business, but I'm just. Maybe can you help with the building blocks? You know, we're thinking about a destock in Italy, you know, that should impact top line as well. Maybe some consumer down-trading should also impact top line. Yeah, it seems your top line is gonna come in towards the upper end of your expectations, but EBIT not. Like, yeah, maybe if you can help us fill that gap there.
Yeah. A few dynamics that we see in Italy is a wholesale market. They need our products in the wholesale warehouses, and if they don't have it, they would simply lose money because it's must stock. Given that we have a relatively good fill rate, as I showed on one of the slides, we are pretty comfortable in saying that this is, we need to see this as a one-off because they cannot continuously drive down the stock. What we have seen is that there's been a lot of price increases around the quarter. One of our hypotheses is that they have probably built up stock of competitive products because our price increase came a bit earlier.
We came with our price increase first of August, and most of competition came with a price increase first of October. Then that has led to that they're not stocking up on us. They are rather stocking down so that they use their cash for the other players, as well as they need to manage cash on the way out of the season, where they have a lot of outstanding from the point of consumption places. It's a bit of a special, I would say, dynamics that we have seen during the end of the quarter in Italy. The underlying business is extremely solid, and that's the reason why that we see this as a one-off.
I think when it comes to what is happening on the consumer side and how we see the competitive scenario, there's not a lot that has changed since we came out in August on the consumer side. As we have said also during the speech here, the biggest element we see is that it is the discounters, the hard discounters that gets more traffic, and it's the supermarkets that get less traffic. That drives a worsening of the mix for us, but not significantly changed since August.
When we look at the competitive landscape, and I've read through, you know, more than once the reporting from our, from our competitors, our peers, and I've also tried to figure out, through the analysts', reports, what is the real picture of what is happening out there. I'm also looking into a lot of market data, like from IRI in Italy or Nielsen in Denmark and so on and so forth. I have a very clear picture, and that is that our price increases are higher than competition. If you look at Q3 specifically, we have a price mix, but mostly of course on price, because it's difficult to change mix so dramatically, where our revenue is up by 10 percentage points. Key competition is up.
Our key competitor is up by 3% in Western Europe. The two other peers are up by 6% and 5%, respectively. That clearly indicates that we take more pricing than our competitors. This is something that we believe must level out at a certain moment of time, because at the end of the day, over a period, and I don't know how long the period is, we will have the same cost inflation. At that time, you know, our core hypothesis is that we are probably at least as well-positioned as competition. So this is what we talk about when we're talking about a time lag. That is that we have been hit by COGS, presumably earlier than our key competitors.
Got it. That color is very helpful. I'm sorry, just maybe if I can maybe push a bit on that. Again, coming back to, like, the change in guidance versus your previous expectation. I think it's fair to say that yeah, you do have an impact in Italy and from the consumer side and the big competition that you mentioned. Again, I guess I'm just not fully understanding why that wouldn't have also impacted top line and EBIT, but it seems to just have impacted your EBIT expectations. Again, maybe there's a missing piece I'm not understanding here.
I think if you look through the full year that has happened, I mean, the swings that we have seen in our business are extremely big. I think. If you look at the whole P&L, the moving parts are so big. I think what we generally see is that most of our top-line initiatives are working really well. What we also see is that there is mix impacts and different times of when price increases have been implemented compared to what we expected at the beginning of the year. I would say commercially, everything works or top-line-wise, everything works really well.
Of course, the timing of when we could implement price increases is a big change compared to our original guidance at the beginning of the year. You see some mix effects. As an example, if we see a destocking effect on premium beers in Italy, that has a pretty big impact on our bottom line because it's a high, very profitable product for us. We see growth in our soft drinks business in Italy, which is also a good profit contributor, but not as good as our beer business.
You see these mix swings, and there are so many moving parts in the business this year that you can say the mix effects and the time lag explains a lot of the impact that we have in the changed guidance.
Okay. No, that helps. Thank you guys for putting up with all my questions.
We are now going to proceed with the next question. The next question comes from Rolando van Rees Holman from Danske Bank. Please ask your question, your line is open.
Yes, thank you so much for taking some more questions here. First of all, in terms of COGS per hectoliter headwinds that you're experiencing in 2022 and also more interesting in 2023. I just want to be sure that I understand your comments correctly. Is it that we should look into a gross margin that looks like what we had in 2021 in the second half of 2023? Is that what you're indicating in terms of the price increases that will come in in 2023 in the second round? Or how should we understand this?
I think if you look at how we try to implement the price increases, what we have said is that it is tough times for our customers. If you look at the on-trade outlets, there's a lot of pressure on these customers, and also on the retailers where they're struggling with higher electricity bills and so on. I think what our approach have been that we cannot allow ourselves to price so that we keep the same percentage margin on our products. And what we're aiming for is to ensure that per liter we make the same amount of profits. That means that basically as a percentage margin, we will not get back to the same levels until we start to see some COGS deflation.
Because we simply think it's too much to take for both consumers and customers at this point in time. We're working very hard to make certain that our per liter profitability is the same as in the second half of 2023.
Okay. Thanks a lot. That's very clear. Then my second question is just a follow-up on Italy, which you also spoke about just before. Just to be sure on this, you call this a one-off. Why are you sure that this won't happen again or affect you again in the first quarter if wholesalers will stock up before another round of price increases that will be implemented in the start of next year as far as I understand it?
I think again there's no guarantee in life in terms of this. First of all, Q4, Q1 are smaller quarters in a bigger scheme. Movements in Q3 is normally of a bigger magnitude. It all depends on what happens, I think with price increases both from our end and from competition. Then of course, how much cash is available to build into the inventories of the wholesalers. I think we are in a very healthy situation with our sales outperformance. That means that our current assumption is that that shouldn't be an additional effect. I cannot guarantee it. This is a you know.
Okay.
Wholesale markets have a different dynamics than retail markets where we have or the multi-beverage markets where we have our own route to market and thereby do not have one or two wholesalers in between.
Thanks so much. Then just my last question in terms of cash flow. I mean, I wonder whether you could comment a bit on the working capital development that you saw in this quarter, and especially what you're seeing on inventory. Are you stocking up with some products that you cannot sell or are inventory primarily increases due to raw materials that you are stocking up? Then the second thing is in terms of 2023, should we expect to continue to see a headwind from suppliers wanting their payment faster than they have wanted in start of 2022 at least?
There's a couple of elements in the inventory. First thing is of course that the value of a pallet of beer have gone up due to the COGS inflation, so that of course drives up inventory. The second thing is we sold less in the third quarter than we expected, which of course leads us to having a little bit more stock when we exit the third quarter than what was originally planned. I think our approach is that we have some fairly significant cost inflation that hits us from the beginning of next year. We may decide to increase our raw material inventory in the remainder of the year so that we don't sell.
We get them at a cheaper cost than if we buy them early next year. Regarding your comment, if we have anything that we have too much inventory of certain products and there's a risk of obsolescence or whatever it was you were referring to. That is absolutely not the case. It's products that we didn't sell in the third quarter. Our inventory is not at an alarming level. I would say it's a fairly healthy inventory we have, which is a little bit too high because we sold less than anticipated in the third quarter.
We will build up a bit of stock in Q4 for the new agreements that will be in its making on the 1st of January with PepsiCo. We will build up snacks in all countries from an inventory point of view, so we are ready from the 1st of January. The same will be the case for the border business. That's positive.
Okay.
That's more business.
Thank you so much then. Yes.
We are now going to proceed with the next question. The next question comes from the line of Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. Please ask your question, your line is open.
Morning, Lars and Lars. Apologies if this has already been covered. There's quite a lot on today. You've obviously had the impact from your input costs going up before your peers, and you covered what that meant in terms of pricing. Clearly some key costs like energy, oil, aluminum, and logistics are already starting to drop materially. Can you comment on how quickly you expect those costs to normalize, when you could start to see that benefit? Then linked to that, as those costs come down, given your hedging position, I would imagine you're likely to benefit from those reductions sooner than some of your peers. Although I appreciate this is competitively sensitive, can you maybe comment or give us some color on how you expect that to impact your pricing going forward? Thank you.
Yeah, I think we cannot go into the details. There's always a time lag, both getting in and getting out of an inflationary environment. I think that is, if you look at historical data, that is what you'll find. I think the day that you will start to see a consistent and sustainable downward trending input scenario, which predominantly right now has been driven by high energy costs. You look at the equivalent of what happened after the financial crisis, it will take two to three years before that you'll get the full effect on the reduced cost. Then a part of that you would likely see being reinvested in the market, or given back to the consumers, by a more fierce competition.
I said on numerous occasions and not saying that this will be a copycat of what happened after the financial crisis. About two-thirds of the reduction that the industry saw in input cost prices went to the bottom line during a three year period of time between 9% and 12%.
Okay. Thank you.
We have no further questions at this time. I hand back the conference to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much for participating, and we wish you a nice day. Thank you.