Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 2024 Annual Results Presentation for Health and Happiness International Holdings Limited. Before we start, let me introduce the management representatives who are with us today. Today we have Mr. Luo Fei, Chairman; Mr. Nick Mann, Group CEO and CEO of Australia, New Zealand, and Asia; Mr. Jason Wang, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer; and Ms. Mavis Luo, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Luo will first give some opening remarks, after which Mr. Mann will present the Group's financial review and outlook. Following this, Mr. Wang will present the Group's financial review for the 2024 full year. After this, we will open the floor to questions. I will now pass it over to Mr. Luo Fei for his opening remarks. Mr. Luo, please.
And investors. So, I'd like to switch to a Chinese channel, but Nick. Okay, [Foreign language]
Good morning. Thank you for making the time to attend the Group's 2024 results announcement. We have seen a lot of challenges in the past year, especially in terms of the switchover of the new Guobiao for IMF. We have seen more than 20% decline. It posed challenges to our profitability, but we remain steadfast in our strategic focus, steadily advancing towards our goal of becoming the global leader in premium nutrition and health, and we remain unwavering in this goal, and we have achieved the following milestones in key business areas. Firstly, focusing on nutritional supplements and demonstrating the operational resilience, our core business, and as we know, ten years ago, we conducted the M&A. Ten years ago, we focused on the nutritional supplements, which accounted for only 9% of our business. Now, nutrition supplements already contribute 67.7% of the revenue.
In terms of the EBITDA, it's even higher, around 80%, so with our years of development and strategic adjustment, we have realized the switchover of an infant formula-focused company to a nutritional supplements company, and we have realized 10% of contribution for our ANC, and together with Zesty Paws and other PNCs, we have realized 50% of growth.
Secondly, by continuing to win in core markets and strengthening our competitive advantage, as you know, our core markets are China, Australia, and also North America for PNC, and we continue to innovate in terms of our product categories, and for the Swisse, we continue to retain its number one position in the Chinese mainland, online VHMS market and Australian market, and for the IMF market, we have experienced the transition to the new GB, and as we know that in the past, especially during the COVID, we need to do overseas audits.
That's why the transition to new Guobiao for us was later than our competitors, because our audit was done overseas. During the interim results announcement, I already told the investors, "We don't need to worry. I have confidence in our channel, our team, and our brands, as well as our products." And in 2024, we continue to see a higher market penetration in the super premium IMF market, from 12.4% to 13.3% on a full-year basis, with our market share hitting a peak of 14.5% in December 2024. And we plan to complete the transition to the new GB in the first half of 2025. And we believe that we will see positive growth for our IMF this year. And ten years ago, we acquired Swisse, and Australia remained a very important market for us. And we have a very successful business in Australia.
We are the number one brand in Australia in terms of the volume and the values. The third core market is North America. We are mainly referring to Zesty Paws and the PNC market. We have seen good growth, especially for the online and offline penetration for Zesty Paws. We have tapped into new markets, such as markets in Asia. We have seen high double-digit growth for the Asian market, and we have also started to penetrate the European market for the PNC. We are certainly achieving a healthy level of profitability while strengthening our financial stability. As we have mentioned, IMF posed challenges to our profitability. However, we remained very steady in terms of our EBITDA margin, which is 15%. We have reduced our inventory turnover days by nine days to 150 days. Our operating cash flow also reached 81.8% of adjusted EBITDA.
In 2024 and 2025, we have achieved two major refinancing exercises. One is the low-interest RMB debt, and the other is the U.S. dollar debt, so in the coming two years, we do not have major debt maturities, so that our management can focus on business development. And in terms of the capital structure, we have a lot of partners. Our RMB debt now accounts for 36% of our total debt. In 2025, our financial costs in 2025 will be much better than that of 2024. Finally, we continue our sustainable development to drive long-term value. You have seen our poster outside. We planned to complete the B Corp certification for the whole group, but we are one year ahead of schedule, which shows our commitment to ESG, and I believe it will serve as a cornerstone for building our brand premium and long-term competitiveness.
We are very happy to announce that we will have a final dividend distribution as planned to express our gratitude for our shareholders and investors for your unwavering support. Thank you very much.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As mentioned, my name is Nick Mann, and I'm the Group CEO and also the CEO for our business in ANZ and Asia, and it's my great pleasure to meet with you all today and to discuss the Group's progress against our strategic agenda and our financial performance for 2024. In summary, 2024 was a year of significant progress against our goal of becoming a global leader in nutritional supplements. If nutritional supplements were a unique business, it would represent over 3/4 of our Group's profit, and nutritional supplements, adult, pet, plus baby, already represent over 2/3 of our revenue, and our supplement business is delivering growth at high margin. We'll have a look at the details of our business performance shortly, but before I do so, let's just explain the context of our business for our new audience.
As you can see on the screen, and I'm sure by now most of you are very familiar with our business, but I'll go through it very quickly. We operate across three pillars of nutrition, namely Adult Nutrition and Care, which is predominantly our Swisse brand, which is one of the world's truly great, great supplement brands. Our Baby Nutrition and Care business, which is spearheaded by our Biostime brand, which is the world's number one infant pre- and probiotic brand, and a leading IMF brand in the China super premium segment. And also our newest addition, our Pet Nutrition and Care, where we compete with the very vibrant Zesty Paws and Solid Gold brands. We also segment all three categories into three different types of products. We talk about nutritional supplements as adult, infant, baby, and pet supplements. We talk about infant milk formula.
We also talk about food and others, which is baby food, pet food, and baby accessories. Moving on to slide six, you can see that, as I mentioned, in 2024, 67% of Group revenue was derived from nutritional supplements, with particularly pleasing results being seen in our adult VHMS division, with +10.4% revenue growth for the full year, and our pet supplement business growing at 15.2%. This is particularly important because, as I said, nutritional supplement margins in all of our business across adult, baby, and pet are above 60%, but also, these three categories have all experienced a surge in consumer interest around the world due to increased penetration and premiumization in almost every country.
In China, despite challenging market conditions and the super premium IMF contraction, and our own slower-than-expected GB transition, pleasingly, we have grown our share of the super premium segment of IMF, reaching 13.3% share for the full year, with a peak of 14.5% share of the super premium IMF segment in China in December alone. Remembering, the super premium and above IMF segments in China are still incredibly important, representing over 60% of the market in China, with price points still eclipsing those found anywhere else in the world, and really importantly, in quarter four in 2024, we saw in the super premium IMF segment price realization, so we had some inflationary price of around 5% in Q4, showing and indicating to us that the whole industry is getting towards the end of the new GB transition and starting to realize price, which is an important consideration.
We maintain very high gross margins across our IMF business, and as always, we have very high cash conversion in our IMF business. Our Swisse brand continues to excel. We once again maintained our number one market position in China online, where our ANC growth remained strong at high single digits. Our volume leadership in the Australian market continued, where Swisse grew at an impressive 11.9%. Our global expansion of Swisse continues to gather pace, and we've exceeded our expectations across Asia, and there are very encouraging signs for Swisse in new markets in Europe and North America, where we've launched recently. In North America, our pet business grew at 7.6%, with particularly strong results being seen with our Zesty Paws business, which grew at 12%, and despite some supply chain challenges in H1, which we've already spoken to you about.
It would have been an even better result for Zesty Paws. Operationally, we also made some significant progress in 2024. We reduced our inventory turnover days from 159 to 150, and again generated strong cash flows, converting nearly 90% of Group's adjusted EBITDA to pre-tax operating cash flow. We also successfully completed, with the help of a lot of you in this room, refinancing our initiatives as we commit always ahead of time, and now with 36.1% of our debt in lower-cost RMB. If we turn to slide seven, once again in 2024, a lot of our growth was fueled in part by innovation, which remains at the core of our strategy. Consumer-led, on-trend, backed by science, innovative nutritional products at H&H Group have and always will be at the heart of our go-to-market strategy.
Across our ANC portfolio, we again innovated in new formats, such as innovative low and no-sugar pectin-based gummies, popping candy supplements, and innovative Smart Melts, to name a few. We augmented with new pack sizes, combo multi-packs, and our program of premiumization across Swisse Plus and Swisse Nutra+ continued to gather momentum with very successful launches. In BNC, we maintained our drive into pediatric supplements with innovative Biostime liquids and gummies. We successfully premiumized our original flavor Biostime probiotic product with the launch of Biostime Golden Probiotic. We also launched into the ever-expanding and increasingly important infant allergy segment, which will remain a core thrust for our business moving forward.
And of course, as we've mentioned to you on lots of occasions, we transitioned to our new GB products, but they were also upgraded IMF formulations that are proving already to be very popular with moms, particularly across our French range. And I think that often gets lost. We didn't just transition to new GB; we also significantly upgraded our formulations as well. Moving on to slide eight, we can start to have a look at our EBITDA delivery and some metrics for the Group. So Group delivered revenue of RMB 13.051 billion , a 6.3% decline on 2023, mainly due to the decline in our IMF sales and partially offset by increased nutritional supplement sales. Despite an 11.9% year-on-year decline, we maintained a healthy EBITDA margin of 15%, which is well in line with our guidance to the market on previous occasions. We delivered RMB 1.95 billion in earnings.
Again, this decline was due to our BNC revenues. Our adjusted net profit of RMB 541 million at a 4.1% margin was down 30% on prior year, impacted by increased finance costs and the previously outlined overall decline in our EBITDA. As I mentioned earlier, we improved our working capital position and again delivered high cash generation with operating cash flows at 85.8% of adjusted EBITDA. I'm pleased to announce that again we'll continue our commitment to our shareholders and pay a dividend. In 2024, this dividend will be HKD 0.35 per share, consisting of an interim dividend of HKD 0.30 per share and a final dividend of HKD 0.05 per share. This accounts for 38% of our adjusted net profit, allowing a good balance between managing consistent track record of dividend payout and also reserving liquidity for deleverage.
Moving on to slide nine and taking a closer look at our revenue mix by product category, you can see the evolution of nutritional supplements, as I mentioned before. In 2014, only 9% of our Group revenue was generated from supplements. In 2023, this number had risen to 60.4%, and in 2024, this number reached 67.7% of total Group revenues. I'll reiterate why this is important. Across baby, infant, and pet nutrition supplements, our margins are above 60%, and if they were to be a finite business, which they aren't, they would represent EBITDA of over 20%. And all three have consumer trend growth in the category. 25.5% of our revenue was generated from IMF and 6.8% from our baby and pet food plus baby accessory business.
Moving on to slide ten and zooming into our nutritional supplements, I'm pleased to share that once again we've achieved double-digit growth in our VHMS segment of 10.4%, which now represents 75.4% of our total supplement sales. Pet supplements now constitutes 15% of our total supplement revenue, and it grew at a healthy 15.2%. Now remember, when we refer to pet supplements, this is now Solid Gold supplements as well as our Zesty Paws supplement business. Due to the well-publicized structural shifts in the pharmacy channel in China, plus a high base in the prior year as we exited COVID-19, our pediatric probiotics and nutritional supplement business declined by 32.3%. Our pediatric probiotic and nutritional supplement business now represents less than 10% of our overall nutritional supplement revenue.
Turning our attention to revenue delivery by geography on slide 11, once again you can see the impact of our declining IMF business in China, with revenues derived from our China business dropping by 12.9% year-on-year to now represent 66.6% of Group revenue, down from 71.6% of Group revenue in 2023. We again achieved double-digit revenue growth in our ANZ business of plus 11.6% and 10.4% in our other territories, driven by strong growth in Asia and a second consecutive year of Swisse growth in our Italian business. In North America, we achieved 7.1% revenue growth, of which 12% growth of Zesty Paws was partially offset by the decline in our Solid Gold business as we control that decline and exit margin dilutive channels and margin dilutive products. North America now represents 12.4% of Group revenue as our strategy of geographical diversification gathers pace.
Looking at slide 12 quickly, you can see our 2024 reported growth contribution bridge, where the decline in China of 9.2% is somewhat offset by contributions in all other regions that were positive, led by ANZ with +1.5%. If we now look at our revenue mix and growth by segment on slide 13, you can see the continued revenue growth of ANC at 8.8%, PNC at + 4.4%, offsetting the 28.8% decline in our BNC business. ANC now represents over 50% of Group revenue, up from 44.1% of Group revenue in 2023, as our Swisse brand continues to perform exceptionally well in all markets.
Pet Nutrition and Care now represents over 15% of Group revenue, and it is the first time that the PNC segment has eclipsed this 15% mark, driven primarily by Zesty Paws and the very rapidly increasing penetration of pet supplementation in America and around the world.
Looking at the geographical distribution of each of our three segments on slide 14, you can see that China still represents the majority of our ANC and our BNC businesses, and North America is still the dominant proportion of our pet business. However, per our strategy to selectively grow our brands outside of their home market, Asia, Europe, and North America now make up 5.5% of our ANC business, and EU, ANZ, and Asia now constitute a significant 8.6% of our BNC business. On slide 15, and now turning our attention to EBITDA delivery, you can see the high proportion of our earnings that are generated from our ANC business, as I referenced at the start, with over 72% of Group EBITDA coming from this segment. Pleasingly, our ANC EBITDA margin increased year-on-year from 20.9% to 21.2% in 2024.
We have more than doubled our PNC EBITDA in 2024, growing from 2.1% in 2023 to 4.8%, highlighting the positive impact that the strategy of premiumization of both product and channel is having on the gross margins and EBITDA delivery of our pet business. While not where we need it to be or where it will be, this is encouraging signs for 2025 and beyond for our pet business. Our PNC EBITDA has been impacted by new GB transition. This will not come as a surprise, as the cost of investment required to acquire new consumers, particularly into Stage 1 and Stage 2, and the cost of exiting old GB products are front-loaded. All told, we maintained a healthy Group EBITDA of 15% in line with previous guidance.
On slide 16, we'll zoom in on just ANC and PNC adjusted EBITDA to highlight the evolution of our strategic initiatives and investments. From an ANC perspective, slight year-on-year EBITDA growth that we saw on the previous chart from 20.9% to 21.2% was driven by a strong performance from our ANZ team, reaching 31.4% adjusted EBITDA, driven by significant progress on gross margin and also efficiencies across our Australian business. Our slight decline in ANC EBITDA in China is symptomatic of the emergence of lower margin channels such as Douyin, where we have the double impact of slightly higher go-to-market costs and a slightly lower product margin mix. Our emerging markets of Asia and Europe continue to drive towards profitability, as our strategic investments in markets such as Malaysia start to work towards positively contributing towards our earnings. We expect Asia and Europe to continue on this trajectory.
If we look at our PNC business, and the reason we like to show you this is because it's a very, very similar situation to the EBITDA margin of Swisse when Biostime purchased Swisse in 2025. It looked very similar to this picture in China. So you can see the path towards higher EBITDA margins for our PNC business starting to emerge. Our PNC adjusted EBITDA margin in North America grew slightly from 11% to 12.1%, but Zesty Paws' EBITDA margin is already above company average at 20.4%, and we're seeing margins in Solid Gold starting to improve as well. In PNC other markets, which is predominantly China, they're also starting to show the positive impact of premiumization of both channel and product, with negative EBITDA improving from -29.4% to -25.5%. This is encouraging progress and all goes well for the future.
If we have a look at our performance by geography now on slide 18, we'll dig a little bit more deeply into some of the initiatives that led to these financial outcomes. The Swisse brand continues to inspire Chinese consumers with continued momentum in mainland China, where our revenue grew at 6.9% in all channels and 9.6% in the critical CBEC channel. We maintained our position of number one VHMS brand in the online market and our number two position in the overall VHMS market in China. Some highlights to note include the growth of Swisse Plus, which grew at 19.6%. This premium high margin range now accounts for greater than 10% of total ANC revenue in mainland China and also offers a good springboard for future growth.
We maintained or achieved number one brand position within the VHMS market in China on CBEC platforms in beauty, women's health, men's health, detox, and most importantly, the emerging high growth, high importance NAD, NMN, beauty and healthy longevity segment. Moving to slide 19, in mainland China, despite IMF revenues declining at 24.9%, we managed to grow our market share in the super premium IMF segment, and we have set up for a return to growth of our IMF business in H1 2025. I have been looking forward to saying that sentence for some time, and I'm glad I'm able to do so today. Yes, we're expecting our IMF business to be back in growth in 2025, and indeed we're currently forecasting growth for our IMF business in China in H1 of 2025, but anyway, back to 2024, because I know you all wanted to hear about IMF.
We reached a share of 12.4%, up from 13.3%, and we reached a peak of 14.5% in the super premium IMF segment, so despite decline in the segment and a little bit delay of GB, within our segment we are growing our market share, and we continue to do so. Sales of pediatric probiotic and nutritional supplements declined by 32.9%. As I said before, this is due to the high base as we came out of COVID, but also the challenge in offline pharmacy channels, which we can perhaps speak about in more detail in Q&A, but we did maintain our position as number one pediatric probiotic brand in China.
If we zoom in specifically on China IMF now on slide 20, you can see that we have definitely achieved steady GB transition progress, and we're on track to complete the entire cycle of new GB transition sometime, excuse me, in the first half of this year. Our focus on recruiting new users is becoming effective, with our share of Stage 1 IMF reaching a yearly high of 4.7% market share in Q4, representing a 24.7% year-on-year growth for our Stage 1 IMF products. Our strategy to expand back into distribution channels is also working, with our Pi-Star products now distributed across more than 17,000 stores. Importantly, this has now reached the same distribution level as the old GB products. Per our recruitment strategy, we've achieved rapid growth in brand search on social media.
Keyword searches among target consumers in China on platforms like Douyin and Little Red Book have reached 400% in Q4 to the levels that were seen in Q1 2024, particularly among those seeking newborn IMF recommendations, where Biostime's ranking reached the top five on those same search engines in Little Red Book and Douyin by the end of 2024. Again, all very encouraging signs as we move into 2025. Looking at the pie charts on the left-hand side, you can see a very good summary of our China IMF business and the contribution that each series makes. We remain reliant on Pi-Star and the Pi-Star X series, with almost 80% of our IMF revenue being driven from these series. But that said, we did not achieve final GB until August 2023 and full rollout until 2024.
So, as we've spoken to you about for quite some time, approximately six months behind some of our domestic competitors, so although we were late to achieve approval due to China authority inspections of our French facilities and transition taking slightly longer than we expected, we are very pleased to highlight today that we are very close to completion of new GB IMF transition, which will be completed in the first half of this year. Turning to slide 21, our transition plan for PNC in China remains on track, with the Solid Gold product portfolio premiumization and channel optimization program progressing very well.
Despite PNC mainland China revenues declining by 14.8% year-on-year, mainly due to the premiumization of channel and product exercises, our new high margin pet food and pet supplement products now contributing over 14.7% of our total PNC revenue, which sets us up very well to springboard for future growth off these premium products base. Indeed, our gross margins for PNC products in China improved in 2024, and they will continue to improve rapidly again in 2025 and beyond. Moving on to slide 22, a slide pretty close to my heart, which won't be a surprise, was another solid year for our business in ANZ, with double-digit revenue growth of 12.2% on a reported basis and impressive EBITDA achievement, as we mentioned previously, of 31.4%. Our ANZ business continues to grow on the back of cutting-edge innovation, increased channel distribution, and improved efficiencies.
Our marketing and branding of Swisse in Australia is second to none, with the brand now not only being the most recognized but the most salient and relevant brand in the minds of Australian consumers. 2023 was also an impressive year for external recognition for the Swisse brand in Australia. To name just a few, Swisse was honored as the most trusted vitamin brand for 2024 by Choice Magazine, a title that we hadn't held for over a decade, so we're really proud that Australians now trust Swisse more than any other vitamin brand. We won the Australian Marketing Institute's Marketing Excellence Award for social media marketing. And really importantly, we're one of only two runners-up in the TikTok Awards for the greatest use of creativity in a campaign, so the Swisse brand in Australia has never been in a healthier place.
Moving on to slide 23, if we look at our North American business, our growth is on track with positive adjusted EBITDA margin improvement and expanded offline distribution. As we've already noted, our North American PNC revenue grew at 8.2% on a reported basis, with Zesty Paws again reaching double-digit growth of 11.8% year-on-year, driven by growth in the Amazon channel and also rapid and impressive growth in the offline distribution channel in accounts such as Walmart, Petco, and PetSmart. Growth accelerating of our Zesty Paws business in Q4 2024 to above 15.3%. So we're accelerating our growth towards the end of 2024. The Solid Gold renovation program remains on track despite 7% revenue decline year-on-year on a like-for-like basis amid the ongoing channel optimization and portfolio premiumization efforts. Transitioning from the margin dilutive channels and re-engineering this range with newer, higher-end premium lines does take some time.
However, we remain on track. Remember, this brand is 70+ years old. So retracting from old channels where we've been selling for 70+ years into profitable national chains and into e-commerce does take a little bit of time, but the transition is on track. Zesty Paws and Solid Gold are now present in more than 18,000 and 4,800 stores, respectively. And as I mentioned before, we're in Sam's Club, Costco, Petco, Meijer, just to name a few. So an already well-established Zesty Paws e-commerce business is starting to transition into profitable retail as well, which is the next pillar of growth for that brand. Petco is a very good example of the potential that Zesty Paws has in the retail channels. Petco is the second-largest pet specialty retailer in North America. We launched in March, and we're already the fourth best-selling pet supplement brand in that large retailer.
Slide 24, having a look at Asia, where we are today, we're pleased with our continued growth and momentum in Asian markets, driven specifically by nutritional supplement business and strategic investment. In Asia, we continue to perform extremely well with reported revenue growth of 48.6% for the year. Hong Kong SAR and Singapore are now mature markets for us, and they deliver greater than company average EBITDA, and they're also primed for future revenue and margin growth. In our newer expanding markets such as Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Middle East, they also grew robustly in 2024 and provide a very solid springboard for further growth for many years to come.
Amongst the raft of awards that our Asian business won, we're very pleased that our Zesty Paws brand, launched in Singapore only 18 months ago, was recognized as the fastest-growing lifestyle brand by Shopee in Singapore at their awards in 2024.
Combined revenue from all three segments in our European business is back into growth at +6% in 2024. Swisse held on to its number two rank in the beauty VHMS market in Italy. Biostime retained its number one position in organic IMF and goat milk in the pharmacy channel in France, and Zesty Paws was very successfully launched across the EU and U.K. through omnichannel, predominantly e-commerce strategies. Moving on to sustainability. We're very proud of our achievements in 2024 towards helping make a sustainable future for all, and we remain committed to making a meaningful impact and taking decisive action for health, happiness, and sustainable value. In 2024, we further accelerated our climate action journey. We further future-proofed our product portfolio while further fostering an engaging and inclusive workplace and cementing our sustainability leadership.
This was most notably seen, sorry, when we achieved group-wide B Corp certification, which is pioneering among APAC multinational organizations, particularly in our segment. We sustained strong ratings of MSCI AA and an A+ HKQAA ESG rating on the Hang Seng. We also climbed into the industry top 20 in the S&P Global ESG rating with an increase of 22 points. And for those of you who know what it is, 22 points is a very large percentage increase for our ratings in the S&P Global. Let's move our attention into the future. And I'll briefly, moving on to slide 28, I'll now briefly talk a little bit about 2025 and give some guidance before handing back to Jason to go back and have a look at our financial performance in 2024 in a little bit more detail.
Suffice to say, in 2025, our strategy and framework for growth remains largely unchanged. We're determined to become a global leader in premium nutrition and wellness through our superior products, aspirational brands, and cutting-edge innovation, particularly becoming a global leader in nutritional supplements. Given the importance of deleverage, we'll always seek to find responsible, sustainable, and profitable growth through carefully considered investments. We'll continue to operate the three core segments of ANC, PNC, and BNC. We do not intend to add to our stable of brands in 2025. Rather, we'll strategically invest to grow our current brands and/or drive further profitability through channel efficiency and product efficiency. In our core markets in China, in Australia, and in North America with PNC, we'll continue to drive the growth of our high-margin nutritional supplements.
We'll maintain healthy profitability for IMF in China and return it to growth and focus on healthy growth and premiumization in particular for our Solid Gold pet food brand in China, where we're striving towards profitability. In 2025, we'll also progress on our pillar of globalization and diversification with strategic investments for expansion. We'll continue to invest to grow the Swisse revenue. We're still on slide 28, sorry. We'll continue to invest to grow Swisse revenue in Europe, namely, and Asia, namely, in Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, where we see lots of growth for many years to come, and drive further profit in Hong Kong and Singapore. And we'll launch Zesty Paws in ANZ and continue the rollout. As always, we must invest in the future. Innovation remains critical to our growth. We'll continue to invest in developing innovative wellness products. I'll show you some of them in a minute.
Our industry, like many others, is being driven by social media and social commerce. In both advertising and direct sales, all aspects of digital commerce are absolutely thriving in the wellness industry. Not only are digital and social commerce tools critical for growing brands, selling brands, but they're also critical for attracting new young consumers who, particularly for a wellness and a vitamin brand, represent extremely high customer lifetime value. So when we evaluate channels like Douyin in our market, although they might be slightly margin dilutive, we need to look at the total lifetime value of consumers that we are acquiring on platforms such as Douyin.
Therefore, we'll continue to invest in technology and capability to ensure that we remain at the forefront of digital commerce, a space where in many markets we already have a strong hold, such as e-commerce in North America, all channels of social commerce in China, and social media in Australia. We'll also continue to invest sensibly in sustainability, particularly as we embed sustainability into our innovation program. Moving on to slide 29, I have a few to go, maybe five minutes. I'm pleased to confirm in 2025 that we forecast to be returning to positive top-line growth and including positive top-line growth in our IMF business in China. In fact, we anticipate our IMF business in China to return to top-line growth in H1 2025. In mainland China, we'll maintain our number one position on CBEC. We'll revitalize the Swisse brand with new campaigns.
We'll invest in Above the Line for our Little Swisse brand for the first time. Our mega brand strategy for Swisse in China remains intact as we run our four sub-brands targeting specific needs of diverse audiences, namely Swisse Me, Little Swisse, Swisse Plus, and our Swisse Core range. In ANZ, we'll cement our domestic leadership position through innovation and premiumization, distribution increases in Australia into new channels, and further developing our e-commerce and our e-retail business in Australia.
In Asia and Europe, the key revenue drivers for the ANC business for the group will achieve even higher growth, especially in our selective countries in Asia. In China, we complete the new GB transition in the first half. We still focus on acquiring mums and dads, parents into Stage 1 and Stage 2, but then we quickly shift into a program of transitioning these mums through to our Stage 3 products.
We're expecting to see Stage 3 growth coming in the second half of the year. We'll also launch new advertising and marketing campaigns with our Biostime brand targeting digitally native younger moms. While we expect to see continued pressure on our pediatric supplement business due to the continued structural decline in the pharmacy channel in China, we will maintain our number one position in pediatric probiotics in the China market. We'll continue our positive expansion of Biostime in Australia and in Vietnam, and in Hong Kong, we'll further expand the range. We have a very successful business of Biostime probiotics in Hong Kong, where they're number two children's probiotic brand in this market. In 2025, we'll maintain Zesty Paws' leadership in North America through omnichannel strategy and continued innovation. Our e-commerce business in North America for Zesty Paws is already very, very strong.
We will now expand our e-commerce capabilities onto our Solid Gold brand and grow Solid Gold in e-commerce channels as well. We'll continue our expansion in retail, particularly with Solid Gold, and we'll continue our premiumization program with our Solid Gold brand. The impressive turnaround of Solid Gold in China will gather momentum and will return to revenue top-line growth for Solid Gold in China in 2025, another important headline. We'll continue to expand Zesty Paws in new markets, and we will launch Zesty Paws in Australia. We'll further deleverage our balance sheet and continue to optimize our capital structure at all times. And finally, my favorite slide, probably your least favorite slide, this is my favorite slide. As mentioned before, moving on to slide 30, innovation is and always will be at the core of what we do at H&H and be central to our go-to-market strategy.
Consumers, when considering their nutrition, are more engaged and interested in wellness than ever before, and that's across pet, baby, and adult. And that's why we're going to be a global leader in nutritional supplements. They're looking for new innovative products to help them become healthier and happier, and in 2025, we have the most exciting lineup of new innovations that I've seen at my time at H&H Group. In the ANC segment, the Swisse brand will continue to excite consumers as we continually rapidly advance our premiumization strategy with the launches into our Swisse Plus range in China, and we launched a Swisse Nutra range in Australia and New Zealand. These ranges are focused on cellular nutrition, particularly targeting healthy aging and beauty from within.
We'll also expand our recently launched Swisse Professional range, a very exciting range that we launched into the professional beauty channels in Italy last week. Leveraging the success of adult gummies in Australia and Asia, we'll launch Little Swisse Gummies with the introduction of these very, very cool Little Monsters range of pectin-based low and no-sugar gummies for kids. In Asia, we'll continue our strategy to focus on beauty from within with several key launches, including Asta-Gluta products, which will be our first multi-country launch in Asia, driving excitement on a broader level and driving efficiencies for our business. In our PNC segment, we continue to expand the Vet range, which is high margin, the Black range. We'll invest in pet grooming, which represents incremental sales and margin opportunity.
And in China, we'll really focus hard on the premiumization again of the Solid Gold range with launches into more premium pet food lines. We have lots of exciting developments, company-first and world-first coming in our PNC business. PNC business, pet, sorry. Can't show you them today, but we'll show you them next time we meet. Innovation in BNC will be centered around infant supplement business as we further expand our offering into pediatric nutritional supplements and the premiumization of our already world-leading range. Importantly, every one of our BNC markets will focus on launching into the allergy relief need state, which is an exponentially expanding need state in every market. So thank you very much for coming today. Thank you very much for listening to our update on our strategic agenda, a little bit of a snapshot into 2025.
I think, as I said at the start, we have made significant progress towards becoming the global leader in nutritional supplements. We're excited that our business will be back into top-line growth in 2025. Within that, our IMF business in China, back into top-line growth in 2025 in H1 and for full year, and also Solid Gold in China will return to top-line growth in 2025. So thank you very much. I'll hand over to Jason now. He'll take a closer look at some of our financial metrics for 2024. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Nick. So now I will actually give you more information regarding our financial performance. So let's move to page 32. So here, again, a quick summary of our P&L.
So as mentioned by our Chairman, Nick, just now, despite the decline of IMF business last year, we have managed to maintain a healthy profitability with the adjusted EBITDA margin at 15%, well in line with our guidance to the market. You may have noticed that here we made a kind of adjustment of RMB 546 million from the reported EBITDA to adjusted EBITDA. And these adjustments actually are quite well in line with the requirement in our loan and bond agreements. And I would like to explain to you in the following slide the major items we have adjusted and to make clear to you why the adjusted EBITDA is a true reflection of our underlying business performance on a recurring basis. So we can move to page 33 for you to see the details.
Actually, from this slide, very easy for you to understand is basically there are three major adjustment items. The first is this RMB 176 million adjustment for the net fx loss. And this actually net fx loss is non-cash by nature and also is purely accounting entry for the intercompany balance transaction. Why is it? Because we have a U.S. dollar intercompany loan booked under our Australian entity, which is payable to our parent company. And last year, as you may all know, the Australian dollar is depreciated against the U.S. dollar. So therefore, in the Australian entity's book, there is an intercompany loan payable loss due to this currency depreciation. So that on the group total base, this is why we have this loss, which is really non-cash by nature and is not payable to any third party. It's just intercompany.
The second major adjustment item is this RMB 124 million adjustment for the goodwill impairment. This is actually a true reflection of our strategic focus right now, which is to focus on our high-margin, high-growth nutrition supplement category. We took a kind of prudent approach to do this impairment of the goodwill associated with the two non-core brands in the baby food and the care category. Here we want just to remind you that the supermajority of our goodwill in our book, i.e., over 95% of our goodwill, is related to three core brands we have acquired in the past, i.e., Swisse, Zesty Paws, and Solid Gold. For this annual results closing, we have conducted a thorough review and test with our auditors. There is no any risk of impairment for our core brands.
Therefore, for the impairment we made here, adjust for our non-core brands, and it's also non-cash by nature. The third major adjustment item is this RMB 176 million adjustment related to our one-time marketing and promotion expenses incurred for this launch of new GB products. As you may know, this GB transition is the biggest thing for the whole industry during the last decade. Definitely, it is not like say recurring every year. And if you may recall, we have made the similar kind of adjustment back in 2015, 10 years ago, when we launched our new SN- 2 Plus IMF series at that time. So that we also made the same kind of adjustment for our syndicated loan arrangement and the bond offering at that time. Therefore, this is also truly non-recurring by nature.
We have been taking these very consistent adjustment principles for those non-cash and non-recurring items over the years. So therefore, we can clearly see the adjusted EBITDA we have shown here is a true reflection of our underlying business and financial performance on the recurring base. Next page, page 34, we are showing here the gross margin summary by the category. We are very happy to show you for 2024, we have achieved the gross margin on a total base over 60%. And on the left-hand side of this slide, you can see we have shown the breakdown of three subcategories under the nutrition supplement. And we are very happy to show that for VHMS, pet, and probiotics, they all have the gross margin above 60%. In particular, this is our very first time to show you the gross margin for pet supplements, which is close to 62%.
This is really showing, say, the group has the right strategic focus right now to drive the continued growth of both revenue and profit for this important nutrition supplement category from both adult, pet, and baby areas. Meanwhile, in the middle, you can see for the gross margin of infant formula, we also achieved the improvement last year thanks to the gradual completion of our GB transition. That then we have reduced the slow-moving stock reduction impact on our gross margin. Going forward with the final completion of the GB transition, we aim for the continued improvement of gross margin for IMF to be close to the pre-GB level of 60%. For the right-hand side, the baby and pet food and other care categories, we have a lower gross margin at 33%. This is more just to reflect the industry average.
So that then going forward with the lower kind of contribution portion from this category, we do see on the group total base, then we can maintain this healthy overall 60% gross margin going forward. Next page, in page 35, here we show the breakdown of selling and distribution expenses for the total group. Even though on the total group level, we have seen the increase of this ratio by 2.6 percentage points. Here we show you the breakdown by the segment, which really shows a different kind of say the drivers behind. For the ANC business, we have maintained relatively stable this S&D ratio just with a very slight increase due to the strategic investment required for us to expand in the new expansion markets. The major actually increase is mainly from the BNC area. Actually, it's just because of the decline of the revenue.
That is a change of the denominator. In terms of the absolute value for the selling distribution expense for BNC last year, we managed to cut by 16%. This shows a very effective cost control while we're still investing to drive the launch of the new GB products. For the PNC category, we increased a bit the S&D ratio for PNC, mainly due to the need to invest in the channel expansion for our PNC business in both the core market of North America and also the other new expansion markets in Europe, in China, Asia, and also ANZ. Next page, page 36 for the admin expense. For the total admin expense last year, we managed to reduce by over 8%. The expense ratio also calmed down slightly to 6% thanks to the very effective cost control and efficiency improvement.
We believe this is a kind of right level to support the business growth going forward. Now to page 37 to look at from P&L to balance sheet. Regarding the working capital in 2024, we are very happy to see the significant improvement, in particular in the inventory turnover. This is well in line with our guidance to drive down our total inventory turnover to around 150 days. We see this is a quite optimal level to also have an adequate level of inventory to support the business growth needs. We believe going forward, by keeping this high, healthy working capital level, can enable us to continue to generate strong operating cash flow, i.e., close to 90% of our adjusted EBITDA can be converted to the pre-tax operating cash flow so as to support our continued deleveraging needs. To page 38 about our liquidity status.
This is also quite an important kind of improvement we achieved last year with the total liquidity balance of over RMB 1.6 billion. Plus, on the right-hand side of this slide, you can see as of today, we still have on the combined base over RMB 700 million in total, the available credit lines which haven't been drawn and which can be available to the company if we need additional liquidity resources to support the business growth and also the financing needs. So overall, it's a very healthy liquidity status with the sufficient buffer for the company to tap into if needed. Then to page 39, this is a very important leverage status. As you can see, last year, we have successfully completed a series of refinancing exercises.
Now, for total $1.3 billion debt portfolio we have in place, we can see it has been significantly optimized versus one year ago. And this optimization can be seen in the three areas. First is the total maturity profile has been much improved with extended and the more stable maturity profile in place. Now we can see the next major maturity tower will come only in two and a half years so that then the company can focus on the deleveraging and also the business growth during this period. Secondly, our finance costs also being significantly improved. Now, with the interest expense margin after including the hedge benefit has come down to below 7%. And with the full year benefit of saving we can enjoy for this year, we will target for the interest margin and interest expense amount will both further come down this year.
Thirdly, also we see the much improved currency mix in our debt portfolio. Now, with the over 36% of our total outstanding debt are denominated in the low-cost RMB, which can be a better match with our underlying operating cash flow, and for this year, we will continue to drive this optimization exercise for a better currency mix, so overall, the leverage ratio status, despite the last second half of last year, the need to invest for the new GB transition of leverage went up slightly in the second half. For this year, with the continued growth of our nutrition supplement category and also the recovery of IMF sales, as just mentioned by both Chairman and Nick, we are quite confident to continue this deleveraging path for the full year of this year and also the years to come.
Plus, with the healthy profitability we are going to maintain and also the continued strong cash flow generation, we believe this kind of deleveraging path can be fully achievable going forward. And definitely, we will keep you posted on the progress and will appreciate your continued support to the company in this deleveraging journey. Thank you.
Thank you, management. We're now ready to take some questions from the audience. If anyone would like to ask a question, please raise your hand and we'll pass the microphone to you. Any questions? In that case, we'll take one of the online questions. Elsie Bellinger of Deutsche Bank asks, Can you elaborate on the delay in the GB transition, i.e., what is causing the delay compared to domestic competitors? And what percentage of total IMF sales have been transitioned to GB and how much percentage is still in transition? Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question. In response to the second half of the question first, we don't have any old GB left in our own supply chain. So we've fully sold through all of our old GB stock. Some of our customers have a little bit of stock left and there's a little bit left in the channel. So that'll work its way through. But we have been only exclusively selling new GB since the middle of last year and we don't have any old GB stock left. I think it's a complex thing transitioning through from an old GB to a new GB. And we've identified that there's about six steps to the process. I won't go into too much detail, but suffice to say one of the very important steps in this process is having your plant registered by the Chinese authorities.
This is a critical step in achieving new GB for your products. The majority of our products are made in France. They're made in a beautiful factory in Normandy, in France, which is great from a marketing perspective. During COVID, it was not great for getting inspectors to be able to come to France and inspect our property. Our factory was authorized and approved roughly six months after our domestic competitors. The New Zealand competitors were a few months after the domestic competitors, but a few months before us as well. That really started the process of being behind our domestic competitors from the very outset. We had to develop new products, make new products, fill the channel with the new products, and then recruit new mums into Stage 1 and Stage 2.
If you think about the process, you essentially have to fill your entire consumer pipe through Stage 1, Stage 2, and then Stage 3. It's unlikely a new mom will join your brand in Stage 3 . So we spent a large proportion of the second half of last year filling up this funnel with Stage 1 and Stage 2 moms. We have a little bit more work to do with that at the start of this year. And then we'll start seeing the Stage 1 and Stage 2 consumers transitioning across to Stage 3. And that should hopefully start accelerating the growth as well as we go through the process. So really, the whole delay was really caused at the very start by the factory in China, the factory's facilities in China being authorized by the Chinese authorities later than domestic competitors. Fei, do you want to add anything?
Yeah, you cover everything.
Is there any questions on the floor? Just one over there.
Thank you. I want to ask, can you share more detailed measures for the 2025 return of the growth of IMF given the current intensified competition in the market?
I think first and foremost, we think that birth rate in China will stabilize this year. We know that the government, both the central government and some of the provincial level governments have started to implement some stimulus measures to try and help birth rate. So we believe birth rate will stabilize or maybe get into slight growth this year. So that will fuel hopefully all competitors in the industry. I think the most important point to look at is we operate in the super premium IMF segment predominantly.
It's super premium and above, as I said before, is more than 60% of total IMF in China. And we have no intention to operate in any lower segment. So we'll maintain it. The super premium IMF segment was in decline last year, but the decline of the segment itself started narrowing towards the end of last year. And then at the very end of last year, as I mentioned before, we started to see those price points coming up. So the category that we operate in is becoming healthier. I think that's the most important thing to note. And then within that, as we've seen, we're growing our market share. So we had significant market share gains last year. The market share position this year looks to be continuing the trend. So we're encouraged by our own performance within that.
And that came with a lot of hard work, not just refilling the channels, gaining all of these distribution networks, but then also having to recruit new moms. So we spent a lot of time and energy particularly on search, on Douyin and Little Red Book, on climbing the rankings of search, so where we stood at search, and we managed to increase. So we know that our Stage 1 reached 4.7% of total IMF market Stage 1 products at the end of last year, which is, again, a high point for us and indicates that we are attracting new moms. New marketing campaign, so we're refreshing the brand. We have incredibly clever new marketing positioning, which we'll talk to you about in more detail later.
A transition from traditional marketing and media to a really pointy digitally led strategy where we are really seeing less wastage, more efficiency with our marketing, being able to really pinpoint these mums born around about 1995, 2000, so a younger mum that is more digitally native. So our efforts on e-commerce are also really important in this space. So I think that we've done the job with the channel. We've started to attract mums to Stage 1 and Stage 2. It's being reflected in our market share. And now we just really have to continue on that framework that we set up in the second half of last year.
I think one word I want to add, Mann. If you look at 2024 H1, the volume for super premium dropped about 20%. But birth rate never dropped 20%. That's because all the brands cleaned the OGB product.
So the ASP for super premium in 2024 is going down. So we're happy to see the whole category. Now ASP is going up. So that's also the reason we see the super premium category going back to growth. And as I mentioned by Nick, I think the team did a very good job to gain share in the second half of 2024. We also see the trend, the momentum happen in Q1 this year.
And it's really good that we've seen those retail distribution numbers, and particularly mum and baby shops and the key accounts are now back to the same level as OGB. So it took us a while to regain those distribution points, but we're now back to a comparable level.
In the interest of time, we can take one more question from the audience. Everybody in the front, thanks.
I noticed that a company has some presence in the South Asia area, and I have two questions, actually. One is, in those new markets, how does such a niche start to scaffold the growth? I mean, you start by setting up your own office or cooperating with some local partners, and secondly, because I saw that it's mostly for Swisse at the moment, so are these new distribution channels online or for the retail stores? Are these channels going to be shared among the products like PNC or BNC in the future?
Thank you for your question. It differs market by market, so depending on the dynamic and the shape of the market, it will depend on our go-to-market strategy.
So in fact, the question is very relevant because we take a lot of time and energy before we launch into a market to decide what the shape of the business looks like. Where we possibly can, we'll start an entity and we'll own the registrations of our products in that market. That's first and foremost. We need to own the registrations. And so we do that in most markets in Southeast Asia. From that point, we can then decide. So in Thailand, we operate a hybrid model where we have a sales and marketing team. We do our own sales and marketing. We do our own sales to key national accounts. But we have a partnership network to distribute into upcountry and to independent pharmacy channels. So it's a hybrid model. In Malaysia, it's entirely distributor-driven. We don't have any team members there.
Vietnam, we have a sales and marketing manager, but we work predominantly with distributor network, distributor partners in that market. So it's a little bit of both. It also depends very much on the channel dynamics. So in Indonesia, for example, we are 80% online. It's a very early business for us. So that's predominantly marketing partnerships to manage that business through social commerce. So maybe one-on-one, we can talk about it in a bit more detail, but it very much depends on the nature of the channels and the market. Where we launch our other brands depends very much on market opportunity. So we will expand geographically. We'll expand cautiously. We don't want to invest money with all three brands in all three countries in all, sorry, all three brands in every country at once. That would be too much of a burden.
But selectively choosing where we launch is important. We launched Zesty Paws in Singapore, where we're doing incredibly well. We've got a really good partner in Singapore. We'll launch Zesty Paws in Korea. It's a very big market for supplements. It's a predominantly 80% online market, the Korean pet supplement market. So that's an easier entry for us with a good brand. So we'll look at markets like that. We launched Vietnam in, sorry, we launched Biostime in Vietnam, growing market, growing middle class, very engaged mum population. We launched with a distributor partner in that market. And we're seeing really, I think we grew 80% or something, our Biostime business in Vietnam last year. So we offer a small base, but we're continuing to see really good growth.
And we'll continue to pick and choose which markets have the most suitable environment for us to launch our brands in a growing market and obviously a population that has sufficient middle class to afford our premium products.
Okay, I've been told we have time for one more question. I think there was one at the back there. Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for providing this kind of job today.
Oh, can you turn the mic on?
Okay, sorry. So I have two questions for here. So first of all, may I know more about when would you think the infant formula business can stabilize, as you mentioned, like if it is in the second half of 2025 or even further? And the second question is for 2024, what was the overall infant formula industry year- on- year at decline?
What about different segments such as premium, premium plus, and how you see the current competitive landscape in 2025 as well and how you maintain the market share? Thank you.
I think, if I remember correctly, total IMF market in China declined 3.5%, I think, last year total, where total market was -3.2%, close. Then in some of the other segments, we saw mid growth in super premium at, as Fei mentioned before, full year -17%. Super premium plus grew at 11%. Within the tiering, we're seeing a little bit of mixed messages as some products move in between the two. - 3%, w e think birth rate this year will be flat or slightly up. You can corroborate those yourself to get an indication of what IMF market might do. But as we said before, we have stabilized.
So we'll be in growth in H1 this year of our IMF business.
All right, thank you. In the interest of time, this concludes today's presentation. Thank you, management, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This brings the end of today's presentation. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.