... Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the first Capital Markets Day of the Magnum Ice Cream Company. Welcome to those of you on the webcast, and welcome to everyone here in the room. It's great to see such an amazing turnout despite the problems with the ube this morning. I'm Michelle Nege. I'm the head of Investor Relations here at Magnum Ice Cream Company, and today I'll be your moderator. So before I introduce you to today's speakers, let's have a look at the process, because we're already eighteen months into our journey towards becoming a standalone listed company. We started the demerger track in March of twenty twenty-four, and since the first of July of this year, we are operating as a standalone company within Unilever.
At the end of June, we hosted a sell-side analyst visit to Turkey, and it's really great to see so many of you here again with us in the room. We are well on track, and the demerger and the listing process are scheduled for mid-November of this year. I'm really excited to be here today with the full leadership team. We'll have multiple members presenting today. Shortly, I will be joined on stage by Peter, our CEO, Abhijit, our CFO, and Ronald, our CHRO. We will have videos by Julien, our Chief Creative Officer, by Tolunay, our President of MEAT, and by Sandeep, our Chief Supply Chain Officer. Later on, Gerardo will present on our Americas market. Mustafa will discuss our European market, and last but not least, Wai-Fung will come on stage to show and talk about our Asian region.
Let's talk about the program for today. In a few minutes, Peter will come on stage and give you an introduction to the Magnum Ice Cream Company. He will talk about how the ice cream market is large, growing and resilient. He will introduce you to our strategy and how we, as the largest ice cream company in the world, with a heritage of over a hundred and sixty years, have a portfolio that is well positioned for growth. We have great brands, leading capabilities, and world-class innovations. We will have several videos today showcasing these capabilities and innovations. We will present to you our supply chain management and highlight our away-from-home capabilities and playbook. We'll finish this first part of the day with Ronald taking the stage and talking about people and culture. He will highlight our revamped Frontline First organization.
Around 2:15 P.M., we will pause for a short break. We will invite everyone here in the room to taste and experience more of our amazing products in the brand court outside of the plenary room. For the webcast, we will go on silent for a little bit. After the break, we will dive into the regions, and as said, Mustafa, Gerardo and Wai-Fung will present to you the different markets in which we operate in Americas, Asia and Europe. They will show you how we execute in each specific market on our strategy, but also highlight the regional differences. Around 3:30 P.M., we will have another break, after which Abhijit will reconvene and, get on the stage to present to you our financials and the medium-term outlook. He will show you how our strategic plan is already delivering results.
After that, Peter will once more come on stage. We expect to end around 5:15 P.M. to wrap up for the day. But before that, because I forget, we will of course have another Q&A sessions where you can ask questions all about the financials, because in the end, that's why you're here, right? So, I kindly want to ask you to switch off your phones for now, and I do have to reference the safe harbor statement at the end of the presentation. But I think with that, having you all here, it's time to get started, and it's with great excitement that I give the floor to Peter.
Thank you. It's pretty amazing that you're all here. Some of you I've met in at different phases of my life, and of course, during the recent outreach. We really appreciate it. As you can imagine, it's an important moment for my team, the company, and myself. My name is Peter ter Kulve. I work in consumer goods for a long time. I've worked on most continents in many different categories. But I want to highlight three experiences that are actually quite relevant for the Magnum Ice Cream Company. First, I built a wellness and supplement business in the U.S. Why is this interesting? Because it's a digital-first business, and there's a lot of knowledge on functional foods, which I believe is interesting also for us.
Then I had the privilege to lead a huge home care business that had a margin problem. Sounds familiar. And we got the growth going on the back of some really cool innovation, like Wonder Wash and Infinity Clean. And when you don't use that yet, the probiotic product, you should. And then last but not least, I was chief technology and transformation officer in Unilever. To some of you, I presented in Mumbai, Unilever's tech strategy. When you set up a new company, like we do, from a piece of white paper, having a deep understanding of technology and how you need it and how you can apply it in the business is important. But we're here for ice cream, and ice cream is a super interesting category.
For those of you who have kids, it's always cool to say, "I go to an ice cream meeting." Everybody always loves it. Why I got really excited, because you don't often get presented an asset that is fundamentally good: good market, good brands, good channel positions, but the business is not doing well. It is below potential, both on profitability as well as growth, and that excited me. It was my inner activist. Before we go into the algos, the strategy, and all the good stuff, I first want to get you in the mood of ice cream. Can I see the first video?
There's a light, a certain kind of light, that never shone on me. This ain't for sale. No, obrigada. I want my life to be - I live with you. No, no, I'm brincando. Eu quero sim. There's a way. Everybody says to do each and every little thing. But what does it thrill? If I ain't got you, I ain't got. Hey, baby, you don't know what it's like. Baby, you don't know what it's like - Well, well. To love somebody - You're such a good big brother. Well done. To love somebody -
Thank you
... the way I love you. Absolutely not. Ugh! Merhaba. You don't know what it's like. Baby, you don't know what it's like, to love somebody. To love somebody-
...
The way I love you. Yes, yes, yes, yes!
But you should eat less, otherwise your wife will run away.
Babuji, in that case, I will start eating more. Oh. Ele sabe que compramos também. Ah, é? Mmhmm. Oh, no, you don't know what it's like.
Around the world, everybody loves ice cream. It's actually pretty amazing. Whether I'm in Pakistan or whether you're in Brazil, or whether you're in Finland, young, old, rich, poor, everybody loves ice cream. Interestingly, people cannot always explain why, and therefore, we conducted a very serious piece of brain research to find an explanation, because that's interesting for our marketing programs. Can I see the video?
At the Magnum Ice Cream Company, we asked a simple question: Why does life taste better with ice cream? Working with the University of Amsterdam, we measured brain engagement and emotional response in a real-world city environment. One hundred and twenty-five participants, each person tried both an ice cream and other common snacks from categories like crisps, biscuits, soda, and chocolate. Finding one: Ice cream triggers significantly higher cognitive attention than other snacks. The brain stays more alert, more focused, more present. Finding two: Ice cream sustains emotional engagement from the very first bite to the last. While engagement fades when eating other snacks, ice cream holds our attention, not only because you need to stay focused as ice cream melts, but also because ice cream is more than taste. It's an emotional experience.
At the Magnum Ice Cream Company, we turned that insight into lasting memories, building brands with extraordinary products and unlocking value. The Magnum Ice Cream Company, where science meets pleasure. Life tastes better with ice cream.
So these memory structures are actually really relevant because they make them. You know, a lot of products your parents grew up with, your grandparents grew up with, and to activate those brands, because they're so well-rooted, is not very expensive. But even more importantly, ice cream is a very competitive product category versus other snacks, and I will say more about that later. But now shifting gear, because we are not only here for ice cream. What are the key investment highlights? First, the market is large, it's growing consistently, it's resilient, and has attractive returns. Secondly, we are the largest ice cream company in the world, with over 160 years of expertise heritage. Our portfolio is well-balanced, with strong brands, leading capabilities, good channel positions, good geographic positions, and it sets us up for superior growth.
We have a clear strategy to unlock this growth, but especially a real detailed plan to unlock productivity. We've revamped the full organization and built a winning culture and an incentive systems aligned to the midterm goals. Let me unpack this, and I will start with the market. The market is large, 75 million. It's part of the broader snacking market, which is sort of 500 billion. Why is it part of? Because the core demand drivers are actually the same. People choose what snack they want to take when they enter the outlet. And snacking has very good returns ahead of the normal consumer good market. We did a lot of research on what is now actually market growth, and there are different numbers out there.
We looked at all the different models, but actually combined that with our very granular market-by-market knowledge, and could take high inflation countries and so on. And we believe that the market is growing sort of 3% -4%, half in volume, half in value, year in, year out, for a very long period. And what is driving those fundamentals? It's a snacking occasions. There are countries with lots of ice cream occasions, and there are countries with few ice cream occasions, and as an industry, we build those consumption moments. Then there is availability. There are countries with low availability, countries with high availability. There is a direct correlation. And last but not least, premiumization, and premium not only means more indulgent, but can also mean more healthy. Some stats.
When you look at these occasions, and we did a very deep occasion study in all the big countries where we are present, in countries with a high consumption, you tend to have lots of ice cream consumptions. America is a country where there is ice cream all the time, there's even ice cream in your soda. But there are also countries where there are hardly any ice cream occasions, and it is directly correlated with the size of the market. Then distribution actually is a little bit of a no-brainer. When you can't buy it, you probably won't sell it, you won't use it. And there is a huge difference in the sort of distribution depths between countries. And for us, very interestingly and also to be expected, in many emerging markets, ice cream distribution is far off where we believe it should be.
There's a big upside potential, and then the premium part of the market grows faster than the value and the mainstream part. Everything is growing, value, mainstream, approximately 3%, but 5% growth in premium. Interestingly, when you look at the channel structure, there is basically grocery sales, and there's away from home sales, and there is e-com. The big growth driving channel is e-com, and this is, of course, also logic. It's especially fast commerce and the delivery, food delivery services, because all of a sudden, you bring an impulse product as ice cream on thumb's reach of desire, and the digital channel grows almost 10% a year, and historically has been growing even faster, then when you look at the market competitively, there are two global players. There's, of course, the Magnum Ice Cream Company and Froneri.
We have a larger share at 21%. And then you have smaller players, all below sort of four, five, and you have some real regional players, like Amul is strong in India, Yili is strong in China, but it's basically a concentrated market. Now, many industries that you study get disrupted by new companies who come up with some amazing benefit. They scale it to a billion, like Liquid I.V., you know, like Unilever has done with Liquid I.V. You don't see that in ice cream because it's very easy to start an ice cream company and be the king of your village or the king of your neighborhood, but to scale it, you actually need expensive factory, skilled factory, you need expensive distribution.
What you see is that people get to sort of 60million, 70 million, and then they start to stop growing, or they sell out, or they sometimes invest too much and go, go bankrupt. It's a very concentrated industry for a reason. I often get the question, you know, like, "Ice cream, can I eat all this ice cream?" It's actually quite interesting that the caloric profile of ice cream is very different from its competing snacks. Chocolate, potato chips, even rich cookies, they tend to be 400-600 cal per 100 gram. A very loaded Ben & Jerry's or Magnum is around the 350, 300, and we go to water ice cream, 230. This choice is, of course, fantastic, but in the current discussion of GLP-1 and nutrition, it's even more relevant.
I know that there are questions on GLP-1 and the impact, and the long-term impact on our industry. Let me first say, it's a field in development. The drugs are in development. There's a lot of innovation, application, usage, benefits, problems, but we luckily have real data. Penetration in Europe and the UK is still very low, but in the US, we have sort of 6% of the people on the drug, and what do we see? People tend to consume and we discuss this not only internally and with our scientists, but especially also with our customers, because as you can imagine, our customers are super interested in this space, so what do we see? People on the drug consume less volume, especially less munching volume. Ice cream is slightly less impacted because we are more special occasions.
There is a lot of choice in ice cream, low cal to high cal. And what we see is that for every 12% of penetration on the modeling in the US on the data that we have, we sort of the market sort of loses 0.5% of volume. But there are also opportunities. I think a no-regret move, you would probably all agree with me, is portion control, and we do that big time and the Magnum Bon Bons. You know, my wife and I do not want to eat a Magnum every evening, but a Bon Bon in front of Yellowstone or Homeland is actually not that bad. So portion control works for everyone. Then protein. A couple of years ago, we bought Yasso, and Yasso has actually been a really good acquisition.
It's grown more than 20% a year for the last five years, and of course, the whole GLP-1 and the protein rage helps. But we also have Breyers Carb Smart, a high protein proposition that we developed ourselves and is delivering for a long time. Then, there's a lot we can do on the nutritional profile of ice cream. Over the years, we got 21,000 tons of sugar out of our formulation, and increasingly, we apply technology to take more sugar out. Because in ice cream, sugar is not only flavor, it's also a structuring agent, and there are new opportunities popping up, especially applying modern biotech science. And then last but not least, it's evolving.
Nobody really knows what's happening, and together with our customers, we are fully on top of every research publication, every trend, and every piece of data, because the reality is we need to be quick on our feet. But the immediate impact, even when penetration levels would double, is actually not that high. Doesn't mean it's not important, but we stay on top of it. So switching gear from the market to the company, this is a very beautiful photo. It's the Wall's Store. And Wall's was a sausage maker that ultimately got bought by Unilever, and in nineteen twenty-two they diversified into ice cream. No, we are not going to diversify into sausages, don't you worry. We have no plans in that space. But this business has a lot of heritage and experience.
I find it really humbling to think that in 1866, Breyers was founded in Philadelphia, in the States. You know, how many generations have been enjoying the purity pledge of Mr. Breyers? You know, Wall's, 1922. Popsicle, born in California. 1923, the 5-cent duo stick product. We ourselves launched Cornetto. We bought businesses. We launched Magnum. More recently, we bought Yasso. A long heritage, but more importantly, I think this is one of the things where you really have to admire Unilever. They helped us to build an unbelievable portfolio of brands around the world. We are number one. We are almost an EUR 8 billion business, 1.3 EBITDA. We have a 21% global market share.
We are the number one in away from home with three million cabinets, which de facto is four million square meters of prime real estate, and four out of the five largest brands in the industry are ours. You say, "Okay, you're number one, so what?" Of course, it's scale. There is moat in scale, but there is also an enormous moat in these cabinets, in these brands, in basically our global infrastructure. Very, very difficult to replicate. This is not an easy supplement businesses, where with all kinds of third parties, you can, you can do that. You really need the assets, and we have them. We're number one. Then we're number one in all regions. We're number one in the Americas, there's also great regional brands like Breyers, like Talenti, like Yasso. Klondike! What would you do for a Klondike bar?
90% market share, €3 billion business. Europe, €3 billion business. In AANSET, we have the famous brand Golden Gaytime, we have Carte D'Or, we have Twister, and we have 2 million in the fast-growing EMEA region. You know, there is an extra message here, that this is a hard currency business. 70% of our turnover is hard currency, but Turkey, we de facto run as a dollar business. So in reality, 80% of our turnover is hard currency, and that pleases us a lot because it gives a lot of robustness to the business. Then, you know, we have this global leadership, but, you know, ultimately, in an industry like ours, it's often about local leadership. We have local leadership in most markets. You know, how often do you find a business like this, honestly? We're number two in China.
I worked for five years in China. We were number five. Over the years, we have become number two. China is a super competitive company, country. We overtook Mengniu. We have Yili ahead of us, so ask Wai-Fung a difficult question, how long it's going to take? They're quite a lot bigger, so it will take some while. And we have Amul in India, a dairy cooperative, who's the number one in India, but we're also making really good progress now in our Indian business. Our footprint, you know, the market is sort of 35% emerging market, 65% developed markets. The Magnum Ice Cream company sort of reflects that. We're a little bit larger in the developed markets. Our largest competitor have a different footprint, so we are actually well positioned to outperform the industry on growth. Then, we were a very brand-oriented business.
We were not always a very customer-oriented business, but we still have very good position. We're category captain with most large retailers in the world, and especially in the United-
You have to get the mic.
Sir, mic? Oh, I'm back. So especially in the United States, category captain really matters because you help shape portfolio, promotional schedules, et cetera. Also, Europe, large category captainship. I already told you, we have double the amount of cabinets than our nearby competitor. Also, an enormous moat. And then, very proudly, over the last couple of years, we developed ice cream in e-commerce, and we are category captain with all large e-commerce players. I meet the leaders. I have my business reviews with Tony Xu of DoorDash. We work with the Chinese players, the Indian players. And ice cream, at a thumb's length of desire, is really, really important, and we know how to play this space. You will hear a little bit more later.
Then, we have these really huge global brands like Wall's, like Langnese, Algida, however they are called, Häagen-Dazs in China. We have Magnum, which we built to €2 billion. We have Ben & Jerry's, over €1 billion. We have Cornetto, almost €1 billion. And then we have licensed brands. Licensed brands with confectionery players, but also with entertainment companies like Disney. We have brands that are still local and are ready for international expansion, and we have real local brands. And these real local brands are really important because these are the brands deeply rooted in all these memory structures. They're affordable to activate, and they give a scale and depth in all markets where we operate. And for all the Dutch here, the Raket, my favorite ice cream, is our cheapest water ice cream. It's absolutely delicious.
I don't know why I believe it's delicious, but it's my ice cream, and in pieces, it's the largest ice cream in the country. Recently, the city of Amsterdam celebrated its 750-year birthday. What they ask, "Can you make an Amsterdam 750 Raket?" And we did. But also Klondike, what would you do for a Klondike bar or Grom in Italy? Amazing portfolio. We own our brands. Why is owning your brands important? Because we actually built them, and we invest our money in advertising instead of license fees. I also, not every five years, have a scary discussion: Will I keep my license fee because somebody else is bidding on them, or will I keep it, or with a change of ownership clause, will I lose it when I sell the company?
We like owning and building our own brands. I already said the market is premiumizing. We have a really premium portfolio. 77% of our portfolio is premium, and we are still growing that. And I will explain later that we actually do the whole price pyramid, but premium brands is really our strength. And this is underpinned by a very strong R&D capability. You know, making ice cream, you can make it in the kitchen, and when you eat it immediately, it's actually delicious. You know, we do it at home. But making ice cream is actually really tough. You need to control the base, you know, making sure that the microstructure is good. A lot of science. The blending, the forming, a lot of our ice creams are very complex. Assembly.
An ice cream factory, some of you have seen it. There's a lot of robotics in an ice cream factory. There's assembled products, packaging systems, sealing systems, increasingly digitizing. I will say a little bit later, and Tolunay will show you some stuff. We have lots of patents, research agreements, design registrations, and trade secrets, like the Magnum chocolate. We have an unbelievable footprint. This is a food product. Safety is super important, and I'm very proud that we can make quality, safe ice cream around the whole world. Our factory in Pakistan is as good as our factory in Sweden. That requires an enormous system to get that to a level. We have thirty-six factories.
We have 210 warehouses around the world, 2,000 distributors in every main market, development capability, and a state-of-the-art research center in Culworth between Oxford and Cambridge, and we're the only one with a serious research capability in ice cream. So we have a growth advantage portfolio. We have world-class premium brands. They grow faster than normal brands. We have a footprint in emerging markets. They grow faster than the rest of the world, and we have a fantastic growth advantage channel footprint. And now, the big question for you all is, why did you need a focused standalone ice cream company when everything is so great? It's the key question. I often get asked that question. We believe that, and Unilever believes, Fernando believes, and Gemma sitting here, she believes, that actually a more focused Unilever is good for Unilever.
For us, this has been such an unbelievable game changer. I worked in ice cream when I was very young, with lots of hair, when ice cream was run as a standalone business owned by Unilever. I've run with an integrated business, and now I'm running a standalone business again. The freedom to set your own strategy, in our case, stepping up growth, unlocking profitability to resource allocation. Where do you put your people? Which people do you want to have? What type of capabilities? Where do you put... You know, how much do you invest and where? And an operating model that is not an operating model made to do lipstick, home care, Hellmann's and ice cream, but an operating model only for ice cream, and with people who wake up and go to bed only thinking about ice cream. Think about it.
When you're a... Imagine you're a Unilever salesperson, you have all these categories, and now all of a sudden, you only think about ice cream. So to unpack that a little bit, because it's a big question, where do we see the benefits? Because we're now one and a half years in. Dedicated sales force. Dedicated sales force, only ice cream. Real expertise. Also, the customers love this because they need people to help drive the category. We can reinvest again in out-of-home and away-from-home system. We basically set up a supply chain that works for a frozen, relatively low-margin product, where actually logistics costs are as high as manufacturing cost.
With an investment algorithm, and Abhijit will take you through, that is aligned with the snacking industry and this business, and with people who are rewarded and solely rewarded, like myself, for making a success out of ice cream. And we can integrate it now, integrate all the functions only around ice cream. You knew that it was not working. No market share have been in a decline stable for a ten-year period. Profitability was flat for a ten-year period. But! I will take you through the strategy a little bit later. The new focus is starting to work. Last year was the first year we stepped up market share, volume, profit, and as you know, it has continued to improve in the first half of this year. And you'll say, "I was living in the U.K.
It was very hot. Guys, I look at market share, and I can explain you the weather, but the U.K. weather, unfortunately, was not everywhere. Otherwise, I would really have had a problem for next year. So the performance step-up is really happening. So what's now the strategy that unlocks this profitability and this growth? Basically, we believe in the magical powers of ice cream. It's truly a transformational product, and we believe that life tastes better with ice cream. As global market leader, our job is to grow the market. This is what our customers expect. This is where we hold ourselves to account. Also, when you grow the market, you tend to take most share, but the objective is not share, it's actually growing the market. We have a growth strategy, a productivity strategy, a reinvestment strategy, underpinned by a tech strategy.
It's really interesting when you set up a new company, like we did, you can apply new technology. As Chief Technology Officer, and you will know that from your own businesses, the biggest challenge is actually not the technology, but it's actually getting people to work with the new technology. We need to learn full stop new, so this is a fantastic moment to apply all the new processes, immediately the new technology, a focused ESG agenda and a new culture, the ice cream way, and Ronald will unpack that after me. What is the growth model? First, we build occasions with innovation. You price yourself competitively in the broader snacking market because we are not alone. Certainly we roll out our international premium brands. It's a proven way for us to premiumize the market.
We moved to a digital dynamic demand creation system. Later, Julien will unpack this, and we are very focused on driving availability. That is share of shelf, share of promo, and of course, also share in away-from-home. So at a high level, how does our marketing model work? We look at the macro trends in snacking, whether that is comfort, indulgence, chocolate, cookies, but also in control and wellness, protein, zero everything, energy, hydration, and all the celebration products, the release products. And we take those big trends and apply it to our occasion-led market development model, where we are very specific on the who, where, when, why question. And we have mapped this for all markets around the world. And then when we know who to target, where to target, when to target, we develop a marketing mix to unlock that occasion.
Okay. I will get back to that and explain it a little bit more. So we were always big in sort of indulgence, chocolate, cream, cookies, but when you actually look at the snacking and refreshment market, and you know that because this is your job, you do that every day, where's the mega growth? Where has it been? Protein, probiotics, zero sugar, hydration, energy. And where did you see that in the ice cream market? Where did you see all these benefits, sub- zero? So what do we do? You find occasion. We mapped all these occasions around the world, and then we say, "Okay, Ramadan is an ice cream moment. Christmas is an ice cream moment. Fourth of July is an ice cream moment. Easter is an ice cream moment.
But Diwali in India is not yet an ice cream moment." And then we say, "Okay, how can we unlock Diwali in India for ice cream? Do we need special products? Do we do promotions with retailers? Do we have a special Diwali festival of light ad?" And you build that over time, and you create an ice cream moment. Ramadan did not used to be an ice cream moment fifteen years ago. Now, it is in all the Muslim countries, an ice cream peak period. Movie night on the beach, for us, very normal. Pakistanis don't eat ice cream on the beach. Crazy! They should eat ice cream on the beach. Italians do. We learned the Turkish to eat ice cream on the beach. So how do we do that in Pakistan? Then pricing.
So, how we go about pricing is that we map at coinage level all the snacks in the country, from very cheap to sort of a little bit more expensive to very expensive. Then we say, "Where is the bulk in the market?" Volume and value. And then we say, "Okay, when this is how people consume snacks, how do we put an ice cream portfolio against it at the right price points?" And then you try to create ice creams that are competitive in that space. We explore. So from the occasion, a lot of work on premiumization and driving the premium brands. It works. You know, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto, Magnum have grown ahead of category and ahead of our own growth for many, many years, and there are other products we can do that with.
Twister is a premium water ice, is a combination of sort of dairy and sorbet. We're now bringing it to the rest of the world with the same success as we are driving Magnum over to the rest of the world. Lots of work on innovation. You know, I think, you know, I'm an innovation guy. I always loved this. That's why I love the supplement space. We need to get out of flavor renovations. Flavor renovations are very important because it activates the category. My first job was in an ice cream parlor when I was twelve, and people would ask, "Piet, what's new?" And I said, "Okay, we have this and this and this and this." "Yeah, give me a chocolate and vanilla." It still goes like that, but you need to have the new, because otherwise you're just a boring company....
Formats like the Bon Bons or bringing Magnum from the stick into the cone, in the pint, in the bites, stretching the brand. Yasso, famous for its sticks, next year also in a pint. High protein, very low cal, delicious products. Really new experiments like Hydro Ice. You can taste it here, which is a sort of attempt to create a sort of liquid icy in an ice cream format. Bringing Ben & Jerry's from pints to other formats, and the ice balls in Thailand. I've tasted them. They're great. Ask Wai-Fung when you want to know more. But before I close the bucket on marketing, I would like to hand over to Julien, who's our CMO.
Long history in marketing, Unilever, but also a long history in L'Oréal, and he will explain you a little bit how do we do marketing in the ice cream company. Julien, over to you.
Oh, you caught me in the act. I always crave for something sweet at 2:00 P.M. On that topic, did you know that more than 75% of adults snack daily, and over half of us snack at least twice a day? If we can identify the right occasion where we can be relevant to our consumers, we can generate more demand. More on that in a second, but first, let's give you a quick tour of the world of ice cream.
We are the largest ice cream company in the world, made up of iconic brands with a rich heritage: Magnum, Cornetto, Ben & Jerry's, Breyers, Viennetta, and more. We lead in most of the markets we operate in, and we are not stopping there. As a global leader in ice cream, we grow by expanding the market.
Our brands, product range, and innovation funnel caters to a wide array of consumer needs. Our brands are loved, and in twelve months, they'll be even bigger because we are transforming the way we market: faster, smarter, always on. We've built a marketing model made for today's world, social first, AI-powered, data-driven. Today, the brands that win aren't just seen, they shape culture. And we've learned people engage most with brands that feel like part of their world. From viral moments to everyday rituals, this is what we call culture that converts. It's how we generate demand, always relevant, always driving sales. Because people don't think in campaigns, they think in moments: a late-night treat, an indulgence after lunch, a birthday surprise. With collective intelligence, we understand the when, the where, and the why behind each craving so that we turn occasions into demand and demand into conversion.
Take our Magnum Bon Bon, launched across 12 markets. They tap straight into the snacking trend and helped us exceed our volume targets by over 40%. According to Nielsen, in 2025, every nine out of 10 EUR of ice cream bite-sized segments growth came from Magnum Bon Bon. Or look at how we tapped into the birthday occasions in the Philippines, a simple idea made powerful through flavors, consistent communications, and strong trade execution. The result? A 15% volume increase and 13% contribution to total ice cream sales in the market. We are constantly creating magic with flavor, from global hits like the Dubai-style chocolate and cherry Guindilla, to local legends like Magnum Chili in Mexico, ice cream that taps into culture and taste, driving more than 70% growth versus target and more than 60 million views on TikTok. Behind these successes is a market-making innovation engine.
We hold more than a thousand patents, more than a hundred and twenty-five registered designs, more than a hundred and fifty research agreements, and more than seventy trade secrets, from microstructure control to precision assembly to multi-sensorial formats. Our innovation cover every angle, best-in-class ingredients, culinary craftsmanship, breakthrough formats, and groundbreaking packaging. Our innovation system doesn't just drive growth, it redefines the category. We are pioneers in packaging, both for the consumer experience and for the planet. From Magnum Crack pints, to Cornetto cones, to Calippo tubes, or Talenti jars that speak for themselves, we are creating packaging that drives visibility, unlocks occasions, and builds rituals. And we're making it sustainable, eliminating over six thousand tons of virgin plastics from our ecosystem. And we're not just innovating the product. We are building the future of marketing with AI and technology.
This is our dynamic demand generation system, an AI-powered engine that enables end-to-end marketing execution, real-time insights, GenAI creative asset generation, smart media plans, dynamic optimization, and social commerce that connects content to conversion. For marketers, that means faster decision and better outcomes. For consumers, it means relevant, culturally connected content. And for the business, it means higher return on investment at scale. We are scaling this approach across our brands and markets, globally and locally. This is the future of marketing at the Magnum Ice Cream Company, where data fuels insights, creativity is enhanced by AI, and culture drives conversion. And this is just the beginning.
You make every sound thing sound better with a French accent. You'll have to do with my Denglish. We were always a good marketing company. I think we're stepping up. We're actually stepping in the digital age. We are sort of building up the marketing systems that I'm used to in Nutrafol, Olly and all this, Liquid I.V., way more digital. But actually the big step up for us as a business, so marketing we can do better, but what we could really do better was sales. In-home, we built a focused organization, people that only do ice cream. We added a thousand sales reps. Overheads, by the way, still go down.
We built up a strog Net Revenue Management capability and have way better discussions with our retail partners on their category development plans. In digital commerce, which we were leading, I think the Chinese now really know how to do all these TikTok stores, and we are rolling this out to the rest of the world. In QSR, there's still a lot of opportunities, and we can invest consistently year in, year out, and do it as the first investment. In away from home, we start reinvesting in our cabinets, but especially build a very strong digital ecosystem around them, and for that, I will hand over to Toloy in a video.
Right here at this exact moment is where the magic happens. Away from home is not just a channel, it's a retail network that we own, and one of our biggest assets. Today, it makes up around 40% of our global ice cream turnover, with 3 million cabinets in more than 50 countries, operating 4 million sq m of prime branded retail space. The away from home business is different. It has faster consumption cycles and stronger brand visibility at point of sale, and it delivers higher margins. It's a consumer touch point, a brand builder, and a value engine, a massive commercial machine which we haven't utilized to its full potential. Previously, cabinet fleet declined and productivity dropped, and a powerful competitive asset was underutilized.
Now, we are investing to reverse the lost sales from cabinet fleet decline and reduction in productivity, to ensure away from home returns to its full potential as a powerful competitive asset. As part of our new focus strategy, we have prioritized our away from home business as one of our key pillars to drive growth. What does this mean? It means we are now making the necessary investments to modernize and digitize our fleet, to boost productivity, to increase profit per square meter, and to lower our emissions. In 2024 and 2025, we are already seeing encouraging results, and it's just the beginning. Optimizing away from home sales starts with one big question: What are the right locations for the ice cream cabinets? And the answer starts with data.
We use geolocation and telecom data to pinpoint high-traffic areas, then layer in demographic and behavioral signals to understand who is walking by and what they are likely to buy. This helps us match the right location with the right portfolio. Whether it is a nightclub, a beach kiosk, a beauty store, or a metro station, we tailor the mix, the right products at the right price for the right occasion. Next, comes the execution. We install the cabinet, rent the space, and stock it to sell. From that point, it's about smart replenishment. The system reads stock levels, analyzes consumption, and proposes the next order in seconds. In fact, once we place our cabinets, it becomes a locked-in replenishment machine with low effort and high returns. That's how we make it easy to sell every day, in every store. And finally, the maintenance.
With a digitized fleet, we manage maintenance proactively, fixing issues before they appear, extending lifetime and maximizing uptime. This is not just smarter, it's also much cleaner. Our new cabinets have smarter components, high-efficiency compressors, better insulation, and lower energy consumption. Since 2008, we have improved cabinet energy efficiency by 35%. This is how we grow the fleet sustainably. This system works. Turkey is one of the proof points that our away from home system is successful. We have rebuilt the full model: data-led cabinet placement, tailored portfolios, predictive replenishment, and proactive maintenance. Today, Turkey is our second-largest global business, with nearly 70% of total sales from away from home, delivering consistent volume and value growth. What's next? First, we are now scaling a smarter, faster, more relevant away from home business.
We are investing to expand our fleet every single year, and more importantly, expanding into new occasions... from gyms and rooftops to clubs and offices. We are creating new consumption moments wherever demand is evolving. Ice cream vending is the next frontier, driving availability in new locations through unmanned machines. We also work on route-to-market options. In developing markets like Mexico, Indonesia, and Philippines, we are scaling an ambient last mile distribution model to go deep into untapped territories. And finally, we aim to have all our cabinets digitally enabled by 2030, operated with a harmonized system that is globally consistent, yet locally responsive, with built-in best practice capabilities from across the world. This is our away-from-home story: high frequency, high margin, high precision retail. A system that sells every day in every store and powers our next wave of value creation.
This is the Magnum Ice Cream Company, making life taste better away from home.
Rebuilding our sales capability is actually a real game changer. You know, it really did not work to have sales integrated with all these different categories, and this stuff is really cool. You need to love execution. I love execution, but granular, data-driven execution, the return on that is enormous. Now, let me get to the growth algorithm. The market grows 3%-4% a year. We were historically growing below the market, and we are committing ourselves to you and your investors to grow ahead of the market. This is a big step up for a company that over a very long period was underperforming. We said we, as a team, will make sure that we drive competitive growth, underpinned by volume growth. You can't price yourself to glory in consumer goods.
I'm really proud that we got the volume engine going again, and with these sales systems, that is also really possible. Growth will come from stepped-up innovations and occasion-based model digital demand creation, availability expansion across the world, and further premiumization. It's a long-term trend, and it we can ignite it even further. So we commit ourselves to 3%-5% growth over the medium term. Yeah, productivity. This business was really underperforming when it comes to productivity and profit. We have a really detailed, granular program that we built up with the best of the consultants in the different cost spaces to take €500 million cost out of this business. It's in the supply chain. It's about the end-to-end network. It's the way we run our factories. It's overhead reductions.
And I told you we're going to add a thousand extra sales reps. Actually, we did it already, and still, our overheads will come down versus the former situation, and a lot of work on tech. We had a tech stack, logically, which was part of the bigger Unilever tech stack, with a very broad functionality. Now, we're building a fit-for-purpose tech stack, and it will create savings. This is not a pipe dream. Already in 2024, we delivered €70 million, and we continue to deliver this year. It's actually accelerating. Big, big, very granular program. But let me now hand over to Sandeep, who, again, in a video, will explain our supply chain. Sandeep, over to you.
Welcome to supply chain, the engine room of our business, where speed, precision, and scale come together to unlock profitable growth and cash. Hi, I'm Sandeep Desai, Chief Supply Chain Officer of the Magnum Ice Cream Company. I've spent nearly twenty-five years at Unilever across various geographies, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and have led large-scale transformations across the supply chain. Today, I'm here to tell you about the global ice cream supply chain, and I'm excited to show you how we're scaling smarter, faster, and stronger than ever. With 30 owned factories, nearly 330 production lines, close to 200 warehouses, 2,100 distributors, and 3 million cabinets, we operate one of the most complex cold chains in the world. That's scale, but it's also our strength. But it hasn't always been this way. Let me take you back to where we started.
Historically, our network was built to optimize manufacturing cost, where, as an example, we moved production to Eastern Europe from Western Europe, creating large-scale factories. However, this led to an inefficient end-to-end network, and hence, we lost out on total end-to-end cost. CapEx sat well below 3% of turnover, and this stagnated our digital advancement, our automation agenda, and led to some underperformance. Service level dipped as low as 80% in the peak of the summer season, and waste levels were also quite high. But all of that is changing. Starting in twenty twenty-four, we began to unlock productivity to fuel growth, and the results are already showing, with an 80 basis points gross margin improvement in twenty twenty-four. How are we doing it? Well, let me talk to you about the five pillars that are transforming everything we do. First pillar is portfolio optimization.
We've simplified and harmonized our portfolio to drive end-to-end efficiency. We've reduced the number of finished good SKUs by 35%. By redesigning our formulations, we've also reduced the number of flavors, in some instances, as much as by 40%. Big examples in chocolate, strawberry, et cetera. This isn't just about cost saving. It's intelligent simplification for a leaner, faster network. Our sourcing strategy focuses on four priorities: resilient and responsive sourcing, we're reducing lead times, building agility to respond to demand variability, margin and cash improvement. We're using data analytics, AI, to drive competitive buy. From optimizing specifications to increasing supplier flexibility, we're unlocking value across the portfolio, improving both margin and cash. Strategic supplier partnerships. Through long-term collaboration, we're co-developing innovation and building supply chain solutions together. This is how we scale smarter. Procurement isn't just about cost.
It's also about building a network that's more resilient, flexible, and future-ready. We're building a leaner, more responsive supply chain by localizing production and adding flexibility for seasonal demand. We've cut distribution distances in some of our geographies by up to 25%, enabling faster delivery, lower emissions, and better cost. We've also stepped up our investment in manufacturing. In Taicang, we've built one of our most automated sites, where advanced technology and machine learning have helped reduce startup duration by 50%, and our waste is at benchmark levels of 2%. We're reengineering how we move our products. From optimizing last-mile delivery to rethinking our warehouse operations, we're reducing distance traveled, cutting costs, and boosting service with speed. This is logistics reimagined for reach and responsiveness. Plan and digitization. Our lines are getting smarter, especially on Magnum. Machines are now AI-enabled, learning and adapting in real time.
This has helped us cut waste in some of our operations by up to 50%. The program we drive is our Path to Excellence program, which is about focusing on extruded stick lines, which are interconnected and use artificial intelligence on machine learning to optimize process control and thus reduce waste and improve efficiency. As we embark on the de-merger, we will be developing a technology stack that helps us integrate demand and supply planning through automated S&OP, and we will scale this globally. What's exciting is how this transformation is coming to life in every region of the world. Each region has a role to play. Europe is optimizing its end-to-end network to reduce miles traveled while staying close to consumer preferences. The U.S. is building an optimized end-to-end supply chain, fixing the basics in our manufacturing, de-bottlenecking assets, and resetting the logistics network.
LATAM is scaling out-of-home and unlocking last-mile delivery in Mexico. MEASA as a region is all about powering explosive growth. Asia is doubling down on automation, led by our digital nerve center and lighthouse factory in Taicang, and already, we're seeing very, very strong results. Since 2024, we've delivered over EUR 130 million in cost savings, with EUR 65 million alone in half one of 2025. We've delivered an 8 days inventory reduction versus 2023. We've got a 30%+ drop in our total recordable frequency rate, and we've unlocked 20% extra capacity in the U.S., and we're well on track to delivering the EUR 350 million-EUR 380 million euro savings by 2028. This is the supply chain that powers profitable growth for the Magnum Ice Cream Company. Simpler, faster, smarter.
It's a supply chain that is built to develop the next practice and not just the best practice.
This is an unbelievable upside in this business. When Ian and Hein asked me to have a look at the role, I did a back-of-the-envelope analysis on the supply chain, supported by one of the leading supply chain consultants, and we found a lot of money, enough to bridge the profit gap versus my nearest competitor and the snacking industry, and the more we worked on it, the more money we find. We need this money because we need more profitability, but we also need more funds to reinvest, so what do we do? We have to step up CapEx. Our return on invested capital, as you know, is very high, 23%, but we had underinvested in the supply chain. It was not digitized enough. The network was not optimal.
We had the right factories sort of at the right location, but not always the lines. So a lot of money to help expand growth, but also to get more profit out, but also investments in sales and distribution, because we had underinvested in those cabinets. Tech is really important. We're in a very fortunate situation that we design a new company, new processes, and we can apply latest tech, build the agents and the AIs in our organization structure, whether that's in marketing and sales, and as you have also seen, in the supply chain. We're very proud of our history in Unilever and the very broad ESG agenda that we used to have.
We focused it for this new company very much on energy consumption in cabinets and cold chain, on the raw materials especially cocoa and dairy. It also has a social impact. Employee safety and health, obviously very important, and getting our governance framework really tight. When you set up a new company, you really need to make sure that governance is done in a very disciplined way in all parts of the business. I think this translate is not only good for the planet, but it translates in real business value, resilience, cost savings, retailer alignment. I believe we have a very good agenda, but I'm shifting gears, and I'm going to hand over to Ronald, because ultimately, a business is as good as its people, and we did a lot of work on people, organization, and culture. Ronald?
Thank you, Peter. Over to you.
Welcome.
Yeah, so Peter mentioned already that we have built a fit-for-purpose operating model, a fit-for-purpose people system, and a fit-for-purpose culture. So let me unpack that a little bit for you. What does that really mean, yeah? Starting with the most senior team. We feel this is a very strong team, and it has a great blend of business leaders, general managers in Peter, and our four regional presidents, who have run businesses end-to-end at country level, at regional level. They know their trade, and they're deeply experienced in the ice cream category as well. On the other hand, we have strong functional leaders. You saw Sandeep, 20 years experience in supply chain, has done many transformations. You saw Julien, 30 years of experience in marketing.
And then we have augmented that with two external hires in myself and Abhijit, two people who have served on executive committees, who know how to operate with boards, and who understands corporate governance. So we feel that this is a super strong team, moving into the next stage of the journey. Now, if you look at the organization, the operating model we've built, it is really fit for purpose. So we have twenty-four P&L units. That's where the business is run. So sometimes these are single countries like Mexico, sometimes they are multiple countries, like Central and Eastern Europe. We run these businesses, these P&L units, end to end. They are responsible for P&L delivery, for cash delivery. They own the consumer, they own the customer, they own their employees, and they basically run the company.
On top of that, we have four lean regions, and the regions basically support these 24 P&L units, and they have sometimes supply chain or sales capabilities, which they can augment and support the P&L units. And then we have one corporate center responsible for strategy and governance, a lean corporate center as well. So lean overhead, but very much focused on the 24 P&L units. In addition, we have upgraded 95% of our top 100 people, and the beautiful thing is, we were allowed by Unilever to pick the best of the best. And in addition, we were recruiting externally the best of the best as well. So we feel really good about our top 100 executives in the company. Best of the best internal from Unilever, combined with best of the best in the external market.
We're also building new capabilities. We have chosen four important new capabilities, which really will be strategic differentiators for us. Net revenue management, super important for us. Peter, Peter spoke about it already, and we're upscaling the top 5,000 in our company on really understanding deeply what type of net revenue management capabilities do we need to have. Sandeep spoke already about S&OP. We've codified what are the best practices in S&OP, and we're really investing in system capabilities to move from manual S&OP planning to automated S&OP planning, taking a lot of subjectivity out of the planning process. In addition, a deep investment in digital marketing and digital commerce, where we're looking not only about capabilities, but also what, what's the operating model, what's the talent base, and what are the capabilities we need to have to be successful in these two areas?
And then finally, we want to be a frontline company. The people who make, move, and sell our products are the heroes in our companies. They make this company come alive on a day-to-day basis. They need to have the right capabilities. They also need to feel appreciated and recognized in our company. You see a nice example here of a frontline recognition program we've started to recognize our frontline people. We had, I think it's sixty of our frontline people, we flew them into Amsterdam, and we celebrated their successes within our company. Now then, incentives, fit for purpose as well. So we have three layers of incentives. So we have the first layer for eight thousand people, that's the short-term bonus, the cash bonus.
There are four components here: organic sales growth, adjusted EBITDA margin improvements, free cash flow, and market share gains. The most important thing of this is that we set the target once a year, and they can see on a monthly basis, where am I performing versus my targets? What are the levers I can pull to get a higher bonus payout, and how do I have real control of my business? That's the key to success of a good bonus plan, in my opinion, then for the medium plan, medium-term plan, which applies roughly to the top 300 employees in our company, we will have two parameters: organic sales growth again, so we double down on making sure that organic sales growth is super important, and then EPS growth as the second one, and then finally, we're looking at a one-off program.
We call it the executive ownership plan, which will be about share appreciation. But for the top of the company, the top 60 to participate, they have to put their own money up. They have to invest into buying ice cream shares, and then they can participate in this program. Hence, the top 60 will be deeply committed in share appreciation and success of this company. Finally, we said we were gonna build a fit-for-purpose culture. So we looked actually at our founding fathers. We have multiple founding fathers, but let's say Wall's, Breyers, Ben & Jerry's. How did these people actually run the business? What was important for them? How did they behave on a day-to-day basis? And out of that, we codified six behavioral attributes we believe are fundamental to success for the ice cream business in terms of the culture.
The most important one, they were obsessed with growing the company. Growing was their raison d'être. Grow the company, and you will be successful, and they did that through continuous innovation, not only in their products, but also in their go-to-market systems, in their factories, in their warehouses. They were obsessed with rethinking their business model. They were also experts in the ice cream category. They were single, category play businesses, so they were focused on being an expert in ice cream, exactly what we want to do ourselves. They ran the business end to end. They were winning together, but they also enjoyed what they were doing. They had fun. They operated a simple company, quick: quick on your feet, simple, with speed. And finally, they challenged continuously their own ways of working, their operating model, but they did it in a way that they cared as well.
They cared about their people. We believe these are the cultural construct, the behavioral constructs, which will lead to success. Now, I'm gonna show you a quick video which we made for when we carved out the company legally on the first of July. It talks a little bit about the culture, but it's a little bit broader as well, but I thought it was a nice video to share.
For over one hundred years, we have been serving happiness around the world. Since the start, we have been founders, an obsession for entrepreneurship, building businesses, always taking pleasure seriously. When Lever Brothers acquired Wall's Sausages in nineteen twenty-two, they started making ice cream in warmer months to keep factories going. During seismic shifts in the economy, we adapted. The two-stick Popsicle launched in nineteen twenty-nine for just five cents, and as technology boomed, we dived in headfirst and bloomed. In nineteen fifty-nine, the Cornetto was born, a genius feat of technology and the first mass-produced packaged ice cream cone. And by the 1980s, color, design, flavor, and innovation went into overdrive, with category firsts bursting onto the scene and becoming instant classics. And by nineteen eighty-nine, once again, we pushed the limits, launching Magnum and introducing the world to an ultimate pleasure icon.
The combination of premium ingredients and expert craftsmanship set a new standard for indulgence, quickly becoming a cultural sensation. One hundred years later, we have a fleet of almost three million red freezers and over eighteen thousand employees serving over a hundred brands and a large annual production of ice cream across thirty factories. Today, we take over one hundred years of innovation to start on a new journey with a new business, a place where passion is an obsession, where we have the freedom to create and turn science into wonder, where together, we turn moments into memories, melt hearts, and blow minds because we take pleasure seriously, and we're in it to win and to grow and succeed. This industry isn't waiting for us to adapt. Speed and simplicity are friends. Challenge with respect and care, because we are doing this together, a global ice cream pure player.
This is magic, and dreams, and damn hard work. We are the largest ice cream company the world has ever seen. It's great to have you along for the ride. Life tastes better with ice cream.
... I hope you enjoy that.
It's nice, so Peter and Ronald are happy, and the senior team are happy, but what do the rest of the company say? And we did a couple of surveys amongst our employee base, and you can see it here. And one question was, "Would you recommend," the classical NPS, "Would you recommend your the ice cream company to a friend?" And you can see here that if you look at the top, the top of the house, the top 30, 100% would recommend our company to a friend. And the rest of the surveyed people, more than 80%, 82% recommend the company to a friend, which I think is a strong endorsement of where we are, and you see the progress as well of the three surveys.
And then finally, we asked, "What is your view on the business outlook of the Magnum Ice Cream Company?" So 92% of our employees are positive about the business outlook, yeah? So I think these are two nice proof points that we're on the right way and that we have our employee base with us as well. With that, I'm gonna hand back to Michelle, who's gonna lead the Q&A session for us.
Yes, thank you.
Good.
Ronald, for that, and nice to have you back on stage, Peter. So let's start the Q&A. We have microphones in the room.
Yeah.
We have the hostesses here. If you have a question, please raise your hand. When you get the mic, state your name for the recording, and then try to keep it with one question at a time, please.
Yeah. Just the one? Wow, I was at six.
I don't believe you.
It's David Hayes at Jefferies. So my one question will be, you mentioned the licenses at your competitors, and you mentioned that-
Yeah
... you've got an inverted sort of setup, and you mentioned they stress every now and then about those licenses going. As Magnum Ice Cream, do you go for those licenses now? Does it change the dynamic, and are you gonna put them under even more stress because you're gonna try and steal some of their business?
What a sneaky question. No, basically, licenses have a role in the portfolio, and we have licenses in different parts of the world, and obviously, we see which licenses we would like to have and are involved in bidding processes around these licenses. Steve.
Yeah, we have a microphone coming towards you.
Thank you. Celine Pannuti, J.P. Morgan. I wanted to understand, when you looked at framing the strategy and framing that-
Yeah
... in targets, so 3-5 and 40-60 basis points margin expansion, I mean, those are... You have to hit two goalposts.
Yeah
... and effectively quite an elevated margin expansion. So can you talk about why you choose that framework versus, say, a EBIT growth framework? And, yeah, when you say on average, what does that mean?
Good question. There was an enormous amount of money that we found in productivity, and it was just not decent not to get it out, and we put the organization internally on very serious targets to get the waste out of the system, and it is often like running the factories better, you know, running procurement better, running a very tight execution on the end-to-end value chain. Growth and market share, we had not invested, you know, especially in sales and distribution. Having a dedicated team and starting to put cabinets in, enabled by solid digital support frameworks, it just comes out, and therefore, we feel comfortable with both a growth target and a productivity target.
I personally believe that in consumer goods, it starts with driving volumes through the system, growing, but it would be insane in our case not to talk about productivity, because there's just so much to be had, and that's why we called it out. And for more detailed question, I have a very intelligent CFO, who will answer more detailed framework questions after his presentation.
Yeah. Here to the front. There we go.
Thank you. Good afternoon. It's Guillaume Delmas from UBS.
Yeah.
Couple of questions. An hour ago, Ben & Jerry's-
Yeah
... issued a statement saying they would like to be released from the Magnum Ice Cream Company. So clearly, it doesn't come as a surprise to you, but-
No
... would you consider this releasing Ben & Jerry's, and to what extent these constant headlines, agitation, are impacting, you know, your teams and the way they're managing the Ben & Jerry's brand?
Let me answer the question. Ben & Jerry's is doing phenomenally well. We bought the business twenty-five years ago. We grew the business by a factor of six. From a business that was hardly profitable, it's now a very profitable business. We invested €500 million in the social mission. The three-part mission construct that we have to grow this business has proven to be phenomenally successful. Jerry and Ben, from the beginning, were activists. You know, they're 75 years old. They're super passionate. You don't always want to agree with them, but you always want to hug them. They're really good people. But the business is not for sale. It's fully integrated in the Magnum Ice Cream Company.
It's a proud part of our portfolio, and we know how to operate it, its factories, its sales, its marketing, and we do so with big success.
Can we go over there, from the back? Thank you.
Thank you. It's James Edwardes Jones from RBC. Peter, you talked about having a dedicated sales force, and what does that mean? I can't imagine that you had the same people selling deodorants as ice cream previously. So is it more about having a good sales force than-
No, no.
A dedicated-
We had a truly integrated sales force. Our out-of-home ice cream was separate, but it got defunded in many countries. In Italy and France, we didn't even have an out-of-home ice cream sales force anymore, but for the rest, a senior account manager would come with the whole portfolio. Luckily, Unilever is now changing. Unilever is changing as well, and part of the good work that Fernando is doing, also already with the Compass structure, is getting more dedicated, but that is not where we come from. You can imagine, because the dynamics. You know, I'm a home care guy for a long period. The dynamics in home care, where you have a very stable purchase consumption pattern, you know, you have promotion, but so very different than a seasonal business.
We now have dedicated people who understand these dynamics and can work these dynamics with our customers in effective customer plans and help them execute. You know, it's an absolute game changer.
Maybe we stay in that corner over there, the lady. It's a bit busy in the room.
It's Sarah Simon from Morgan Stanley. Just a question on kind of SKU concentration. So, you know, you go to the store, and there's more and more funky flavors and whatever.
Yeah.
But can you talk about how much of your business comes from kind of core, you know, Magnum Classic, Almond, White, as opposed to, you know, Passionflower and all the other ones? I'm just interested in how much-
I get your question.
How concentrated the revenue base is in that respect?
Actually, most of us have our classics in many categories but definitely also in ice cream, and for a brand like Magnum, it will not surprise you, but the White, the Almond, and the Classic is the core of the portfolio. We activate it through new flavors, but you could not build a business only on new flavors. You just would not have the rotation. You know, in Cornetto, in some countries, it's the chocolate. In other countries, it's the strawberry. But these core products are super important, and it is an illusion to think that you can build an ice cream business on fringe flavors. People will try you, but will they repeat? Because we tend to come back to the classics because those is that we that we deeply, deeply like.
You cannot do without the elderflower whatever, but you need to have your core portfolio, and we are very pleased that in most core product segments, we own the core flavors. I'm not so worried about Magnum me-toos, who come up with all kinds of fancy stuff, because the core of the category is the core.
I see a lot of questions coming from-
Yep
... the webcast, but maybe we take one more from the stage, from the room. This side of the room.
Thank you very much. Callum Elliott at Bernstein. Very interested in the market modeling, Peter, the evolution thereof, especially. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how long that market model has been in place, and it, obviously, from what we could see on the slide, it looked very complicated, but maybe you could also add some thoughts on-
The occasion model, you mean?
Exactly.
Or... Yeah.
Maybe you can add some thoughts on, you had, sort of growth of occasions driving some of the sales growth accelerations. So where do you see the biggest opportunities for new occasions?
I think, you know, occasion modeling is actually not new to the snacking industry. You know, Coke, you know, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, most people have an occasion-based model. We didn't have it, and when I started, I started building that and doing the research market by market because you need to be more specific. You know, we need to- as a market leader, you need to be a market maker. You cannot just be sort of repeating what you do or just copy competition, and this is our model, so macro spaces from the comfort to the control to the release, translating them in occasions, making it very specific. How do we land something in a very specific market? And then building a marketing mix to basically unlock it. That's our model. I think it is very powerful.
It's also working, and I think it will fuel a very different type of innovation over the coming years.
... The one in the back there, the lady?
I think they were there as well.
Mm-hmm, thank you.
Yeah, there was, yeah. There.
Hélène, Hélène Jolidon, Union Bancaire Privée in Geneva. Just a question on innovation.
Yeah.
How much would you say is innovation which you've genuinely created alone internally at the moment, and how would you see that evolving in future, and how much will you be depending on your supply partners, for example, to push in innovation for you?
Oh yeah, it's a very important question. We have a whole network of academics, suppliers, flavor houses, who help us with our innovation program. I think the biggest shift that we are trying to make is move from more flavor innovation, you know, and a new Magnum variant, or a new Carte D'Or variant, or a new Ben & Jerry's format, to finding new occasions, unlocking them with new formats, and driving that very hard. I think classically, it was our portfolio was investment-wise, 90% renovation and 10% doing really, really new stuff, and we tried to balance that to more 50/50.
And it is important, because that is our role, but it's also culturally very interesting, because we need a little bit more risk-taking, a little bit more pioneering, a little bit more trying new stuff to make this really a phenomenal growth machine. And I think part of the work that we do as the organization is really in that space. Agree. Agree.
Can we go to the front, the first table there? So sorry, can I squeeze by? Then we'll do one from the webcast.
Olivier Nicolai from Goldman Sachs. Just one quick question for you, Ronald. On the incentives, going back to the short-term incentive for the 8,000 employees, you mentioned organic sales growth. Is there a component for volumes growth within that? And then is incentives different between the regions? Are some regions more focused on, let's say, you know, free cash flow generation, others on more on the volumes growth, for instance?
Yeah, so it's organic sales growth. Volume obviously plays a part in it, but it is organic sales growth, so, not directly, but obviously you need to drive volume to get to the organic sales growth. The... We deliberately keep the same metrics throughout the company to be consistent, because the regions are basically the sum of the parts of their individual P&L units, and the top of the house is basically the sum of the four regions again. We believe that if you flow through the same incentive plan, you are the most powerful. If you have a company which has different incentive metrics, I think it becomes more confusing, so we're very consistent.
Yeah, and of course, different regions and different countries have different targets, so that is how you do it.
But the basic drivers are the same, and especially for a new company like this, cash, cash, cash, cash. You know, when you're a division, you know, this is not your general focus. For us, of course, this is really, really important. Yeah. And share. You know, I like competitiveness.
Okay, maybe one more from the room. Warren? Yeah, the gentleman over there, please. Ah, thank you, Lothar.
Thanks, Peter. It's Warren Ackerman at Barclays. Just on the freezer numbers, the 3 million number that you have, can you maybe outline where those freezers are? 'Cause I guess they're not exactly correlated to the countries. Some countries-
Mm
... are more profitable. And where's that number come from? I guess it's been going down, and where do you want it to go to?
A really interesting question. Obviously, the freezer strategy is very much also dependent on your retail universe. In Western Europe, America, there's a lot of grocery with their own freezers. In India, there's less grocery, and there are a lot of smaller stores, kirana stores, that require a freezer. So they tend to be skewed to markets where, you know, big retail is lesser developed. Out-of-home here tends to be more leisure type of out-of-home. In the U.S.-United States, I think in general, is relatively underdeveloped. I don't know whether you picked it up, but have a look at the vending machine that is standing outside.
Right.
We found it very difficult to make vending machines work in the past because they were expensive, and you always had issues with temperature, stock-outs. But now these machines are basically affordable. They're totally digitally connected. You know what's in. There are sensors in there. You know when there is an energy, problem. The machine outside, Tolunay, do I get it wrong? $3,500 bucks. Payback 1.6 years. So especially in places where you don't have a lot of labor, I think there's a lot of space for ice cream vending machine. Think about London, how difficult it is to get a Wall's ice cream. There's so few outlets, it's an embarrassment. But we basically don't have the type of outlets to have place an open freezer with a person next to it who sells it out.
Yeah, there are a couple of tobacco stores, but there are not many. But imagine at every metro station you would have a beautiful vending machine. There are drink vending machines. Actually interesting on these outlets, I believe that in soft drinks, there's sort of 40 million sales units around the world. You know, in ice cream, it's just a very percent, low percentage of that. So vending machines, of course, very big in that trade. Not yet for us. I think it's not a really big opportunity, especially for developed markets. Although Wai-Fung will say, "Actually, vending machines are big for me as well," and Tolunay says, "I want some as well in India and Turkey." Yeah.
Karel Zoete, Kepler Cheuvreux. Can you expand on the task ahead for the supply chain team? We heard in the video more local, US, larger factories, but it seems they're probably not halfway where you want to be.
No, we made unbelievable progress because that's where a lot of the savings already come from. What have we done? We put a new team in place, very strong regional leaders, very strong, often new factory leaders, a new procurement team. We have locked a new strategy one and a half years ago. We have a detailed plan. I think, you know, do you have a thousand sub-projects and KPIs, names against, and we are unlocking it at a very high level. So what do we do? Actually, we need to get more local for local. Instead of Caivano in Naples, shipping to Sweden, basically Flen needs to do Sweden, and Caivano needs to do Europe, so they need to get broader in the portfolio. Second thing is we need to digitize these factories.
We have state-of-the-art factories, and we have factories which are basically a little bit, as the Chinese would them, mamahuhu, and we need to upgrade them, and then work on operational qualities, like bringing waste levels down, operational efficiencies up, quality standards up. It's an agenda which is a multi-year agenda, but the beauty is it will multi-year give us a lot of money flowing back in the P&L, but we are well on the way. We're well on the way. This is not new stuff. We started it last year, and we are full in.
So, let's take a question from the webcast because we have many-
Yeah
... people listening. The first one up is, "Your leadership team is overwhelmingly male. What's your strategy to ensure gender diversity becomes more competitive advantage for you?
Yeah, listen, I think it's a completely fair point. Yes, so we have work to do. If you look at the organization when we built it, if you look a little bit at the classical definition of white collar, which is roughly our seven thousand employees, we ended up with roughly 45% being female. So I'd say we're not in a bad place, but as you go up in the ranks, you see that it tapers off, and we have three females in the executive committee. I think we also have work to do in two areas, I would say general managers for our businesses, for the P&L units, as well as supply chain, so work ahead.
I think we're not completely where we wanna be, and we will use the opportunities ahead of us to get to a place where we wanna be, which is more like a fifty-fifty split of our leadership group.
We basically recruited top hundred new or at least sort of ninety-five of them. We had balanced slate. But it was a really sort of very specific job to be done in all these roles, and we said, "Okay, for this stage, prioritize experience and track record in this specific role." It doesn't mean we don't have fantastic female general managers. We also have them, but the choice for talent was experience and track record.
But work to be done, eh? So let's be clear that-
For sure
... an area where we need to do more work.
So there is another question from the webcast on private labels. It says, "Can you talk a little bit about private labels as competitors? Their products often look scarily similar at huge discounts versus your prices. How do you manage this?" Peter?
Yeah. So first, one step back on private label market share in ice cream, it hasn't moved over a ten-year period. Actually, more recently, especially in Europe, we've won share back from private label. Private labels have a role in the assortment. You know, they offer value. Sometimes we don't have these value offerings private label has, but, you know, private label can also not run without brands, because we need to drive the category, innovation-wise, price-wise, so we're in it together with the retailers. There is nothing that we can't handle in the private label space, so it's fine. It is how these categories are built and how they run.
Any questions from the rooms? Yeah, in the back there. Jeff?
Hey, Jeff.
Hey, I think you mentioned... sorry, Jeff Stent.
Yeah
... Exane BNP Paribas, and, I think you mentioned over a hundred brands, which just intuitively feels quite a big number. Discuss.
Yeah. So we have big global brands that we run in multi countries, but we also have the Flutschfinger in Germany or the Golden Gaytime in Australia or the Raket in Holland or the Klondike Bar in the U.S., and they are, you know, sizable entities with a huge loyal following, and just with a little bit of maintenance, making sure quality standards or packaging and products stay up to date, they keep on going and growing. You know, like the Popsicle in the U.S.? It's a phenomenal brand. A couple of years ago, you know, the business decided to deprioritize Popsicle because it was less profitable than some of the other businesses. Obviously, taking them out led to underutilization. But apart from that, when we brought Popsicle back, they became the biggest new product in the American market.
So, you know, it has to do with these memory structures. People love the products they grew up with. You know, I have one investor in this company who really likes the Fudgsicle very much, and always wants to discuss the Fudgsicle, American Fudgsicle, with me, and will explain to me again and again that the quality is not what it was seventy years ago. And this is this beautiful relationship that people have with some of our portfolio, and it's truly very powerful and often below the skin. You know, we do a lot of harmonization. You know, technology-wise, we do a lot of harmonization, but the certain expression is an expression just for that one country, and it's fine. We can deal with it also from a complexity point of view. Yes?
In the front. Fabio.
Good afternoon. Fabio Casoli from Berenberg. Thank you for taking my question. I've got a bigger picture, sort of industry question.
Yeah.
I mean, we've seen... it might still be a very small market, but we've seen more social media activity around appliances. There was David Beckham promoting the-
Yeah
... Ninja CREAMi product. I was just wondering, is there an opportunity for the industry, a bit like what Nestlé did with Nespresso, to bring out a sort of at-home appliance, for ice cream? And would that be an opportunity that you would've thought about? Is it an opportunity? Is it a potential threat to you guys? Just some-
It's a, it's a very good question, and I spent an enormous amount of time in my career looking at new patterns, ideas, et cetera. How many cup, cups of coffee do you make every day?
Three.
Four or three, family does. You probably at home make sort of, like, 10 coffees. How many ice creams would you make every day? 12, eight, six? The problem is the frequency is not there. And I have so many entrepreneurs who come with capsule ideas to us, and then at home you say, "Okay, I have this big thing on my kitchen top, you know, how often do I use it? You know, my wife complains about all the stuff I buy and stands there." And then you say, "Okay, but I bring it to HoReCa." But then these things are not fast enough, because when people come in, 10 people come in, want an ice cream, and you need a Carpigiani freezer who can just go very quickly, lots of volume. So it hasn't landed yet.
It always looks cool, but you know, I don't see it work yet. Would be great, though. But you know, I-
One last question from the room?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you. Victoria Petrova from Bank of America. I have a high-level question.
Okay.
Could you help us understand if ice cream is a great category, where Magnum just needs to be better than it was when it was a part of Unilever? Or is it? Is Magnum a great company which can push a so-so category-
Uh
... forward? And can you put it, kind of quantify it within the context of 3-4% category growth and your guidance of 3-5%?
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
Very, very good question. Challenging question. I believe ice cream is a good category. There are not that many consumer categories that grow actually 3-4% a year, half of its volume, and it is also not with sort of weird drivers, but sort of drivers that you can understand: disposable income, you know, occasions, distribution, so premiumization. So we understand why this would grow. We understand why India will grow relatively fast. Indians have a sweet tooth. Ice cream is hardly available. Nobody has really, really started selling it, so we understand why this category runs at a good pace. I think, you know, it's an interesting question, how good is this company?
I think we can be very proud that over the last hundred years, Unilever has built up, you know, this system, these brands, this portfolio, these capabilities, but the business was underperforming. You know, I think, maybe it's me, but when a business for ten years grows below the market, it's not even a business problem. It's a culture problem. How does this get accepted in the system? Because, you know, a normal state of business is that you want to win. So we created a strategy around wanting to win, and we actually got people in who are nicely competitive, who enjoy sending me notes when they have a market share gain at a customer or in a country. So this winning is a culture thing.
I think we're making good progress, but this company is one and a half years in. I think most of the heavy lifting, you know, on what's the strategy, who is the team, you know, how will this work, is now happening. But, you know, we can build on the execution day in, day out, because there is never perfect execution. You know, when I walk the street and I see a cabinet which is dirty with the wrong products in it, it's, "Ugh!" Then I make a photo, I geotag it, want to talk to the sales rep. A permanent improvement culture, where you come to a factory and you see stuff running off the lines. You know, I look at Sandeep and say, "What the hell is happening here? This could, this we could do better." You know, consumer goods are about execution.
It's, it's about driving volume through the system, through deep, deep, deep execution, and you need to love execution in consumer goods. And this is not like, execution is not a tweak. Execution is a culture. And what Ronald and I, together with the team, try to do is build a real execution culture. Sorry, a little bit long answer to your question, but that's... I feel very passionate about that.
I think that's a really nice end to the first Q&A, Peter, so thank you. We'll take a break for thirty minutes, and those of you in the room, I invite you outside in the plenary court to enjoy some of our products.
You have to at least eat two ice cream before you're allowed back in.
So, it's actually now you have to do.
Good. For those on the webcast, we'll be back in 30 minutes.
Welcome everyone back in the room and on the webcast. I hope you've enjoyed the ice creams. So it's time to dive into the regions. We will have, as earlier said, Gerardo talking about Americas, followed by Mustafa on the European market and last but not least, Wai-Fung on Asia. So with that, I would like to give the floor to Gerardo.
Thank you, Michelle. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gerardo Rosansky, and I'm the president of the Americas region at the Magnum Ice Cream Company. Let me start by telling you a little bit first about my background and my experience in the ice cream company. I started with Unilever more than thirty years ago. I've done a number of marketing and general management roles across several countries in the world. But specifically in ice cream and the Americas, I was once vice president of marketing for the North American region. I was later general manager for the Mexico operations of Unilever, that, of course, included our wonderful Holanda Ice Cream division. And later, I was general manager for the operations of Unilever in Brazil, that also had another wonderful ice cream business, the Kibon Ice Cream division.
As you can see, I worked in most of the big markets in ice cream, and I also lived in those markets. I'm no stranger to the region and to the category. This is why, you know, when Peter called me a couple of weeks after he was appointed and offered me this job, it took me basically four, maybe five seconds to accept it. This is because I know the region, I know the category, I understand the opportunity, and I also know that with a few interventions, we can really step up the performance of this business. Let me show you in the next fifteen minutes what we are doing to step up this performance and how it is going. Firstly, this is a big business, and we are number one.
We have cemented this number one position on a very strong portfolio and some key leading positions across different segments, and we have a very simple plan to step up performance. First, we will step up innovation. Secondly, we will reset our cost base, and finally, we will expand availability. I will later show you through examples in my presentation, and through some financials, how we are doing on these initiatives. But let's first start with an overview of the region. This is a one billion people region that buy, collectively, EUR 25 billion of ice cream. This market is expected to grow between 2% and 3% in the next few years. As I mentioned before, we are number one. We sell around EUR 3 billion of revenue, and we are fully one-third of the Magnum Ice Cream Company....
We're not present in every market, but we have organic presence in the largest markets that represent 90% of the total Americas market, sorry. In each of these markets, we have our own manufacturing capacity. We source locally more than 90% of our products, and in the largest markets, we have our own R&D centers that allow us to stay closer to consumers and to react quickly to the needs of the demand. But of course, you know, when you think about the Americas, and you have countries like Ecuador or Brazil or the U.S., you can imagine that under the hood, these markets are quite different. Indeed, you know, in the North, the consumption is much higher, and therefore, the markets are much higher. In the South, the markets are smaller.
There are also differences between channels and occasions. In the North, we sell most of our ice cream through the in-home channel, whilst in the South, we sell most of our ice cream in the away-from-home channel, whilst we have overall, you know, strong shares across the board, we tend to have higher shares in the South and lower shares in the North. Now, before the announcement of the merger, in the years preceding, the performance of this business was quite challenged. We only grew at mid-single digits. We saw volume declines. We also saw significant market share declines, and in spite of seeing a lot of progress in premiumization, that wasn't sufficient to drive profitability forward, as Peter mentioned, we're trying to turn this around, and we're building this turnaround plan on three key pillars. The first one is to accelerate growth.
We will do it in Americas through our innovation step-up. We will drive demand creation, and we will also work on channel expansion and product availability. We will also generate funds by working very hard on productivity, where there are a number of initiatives, but I will cover in this presentation two that are quite significant for the Americas. The first one is an end-to-end reset of our U.S. supply chain, and the second one is how we are reimagining our sales and distribution system in the away-from-home channel in Latin America. Finally, we will reinvest part of the benefits of this growth plan and the productivity plan into an expansion of capacity, which we'll do mostly through the bottleneck in our existing lines.
We will also spend or invest in an expansion of our cabinet fleet for the away-from-home channel, and then finally, of course, we will also invest in our brands. Now, we have a very strong starting point across the region, very solid positions, very solid portfolios. I could have a slide like this for each market in the region, but of course, I chose the U.S. because it's the largest market. As you can see, we hold a number of significant number-one positions across different aspects of the business. If you think about channels, we are number one in grocery, which is the largest channel in the U.S. If you think about segments or product or type of products, we're number one in super premium, we're number one in wellness, that is becoming increasingly relevant.
Even if you go to the most basic elements of ice cream, you know, flavors, we're number one in vanilla, number one in chocolate. These are obviously the most important flavors in the market. We have a wonderful portfolio that underpins this whole thing. We have a portfolio that covers different price points, different formats, different benefits. Some of these brands are more than a hundred years old, and they are still relevant, and we keep on adding to this portfolio as it is needed in order to refresh it and make it more relevant, for example, with the acquisition two years ago of Yasso, which is a product based on Greek yogurt, low calories, high levels of protein, and an incredible taste.
Now, innovation is critical to our success, and we are stepping up the number of innovations and also are trying to make them more on trend. This is an example from our innovation performance in 2024 in the US. We sold, or our innovation generated more retail sales than that of our competitors. And as a matter of fact, if you think of the top 10 innovations in the market, both in packaged ice cream and in frozen novelties, fully more than 50% of those came from the Magnum Ice Cream Company. And we are going to go deeper going forward by focusing on those segments where we think there is a lot of opportunity and where we also have strong leadership. One of those segments is wellness. We see that the wellness occasions will continue to grow. I spoke about our wonderful brand, Yasso.
We are already leading this segment. Very soon, we're going to be expanding this brand from sticks into the world of pints. That will expand its consumption base. But also, you know, as wellness occasions will grow, indulgence will continue to grow as well. Indulgence is what this category is based about. Indulgence is the most significant driver of consumption of ice cream, and super premium indulgence is a space where we have been investing for a long time and where we also have strong leadership. We will take our largest brand, Ben & Jerry's, that only exists on pints, finally into sticks. You will be able to find your favorite Ben & Jerry's concoction, but now in a stick. You'll be able to control those portions, but still have those wonderful Ben & Jerry's chunks.
And then finally, there are a lot of, you know, wonderful products out there that do not exist in the ice cream category, products or properties that do not exist in the ice cream category, but that can exist in the ice cream category, and that we will continue to bring in through licensing agreements. You know, there's a lot of that. A lot of people want to work with us. We focus on, on the best opportunities. Next year, for example, we'll take the number one candy bar in the U.S., Reese's, and we will create our ice cream version of it. And then we will take a number one streamed show in the U.S., and this is not just for kids, the number one streamed show in general.
Those who have small kids know who Bluey is, and we create a Bluey face pop, and we are sure that this will be a major success with the young ones. On top of stepping up our innovation, we will also step up our investment in media, and we'll also do it better. We are investing more in general. Last year, we increased our media investment by 12%, but we dedicated the majority to digital media, social media for the most part, which we increased by 33%. And this combination of more investment and a better media mix is driving, is converting into sales better. Last year, we saw our media-attributed sales grow by 25%. We will also continue to invest in the development of digital commerce platforms. We are investing heavily this year, and we already have a very good position.
We are now number one, the number one brand and manufacturer in five out of the top six digital commerce platforms in the U.S. And then finally, as Peter mentioned, this is a business about occasions. We drive each of our brands. We try to identify what are the best occasions for these brands. We activate against those occasions, and here is an example of Breyers. Breyers is around sharing. When is sharing more relevant? Around the holidays. Those holidays also happen to be the moments, the peak weekly sales in volume for the category in the U.S. market. And in those peak sales weeks, we also peak on our share. So that's a combination and the power of getting the right brand with the right occasion.
Expanding availability is also critical to our success going forward, and of course, we aim to win in every channel, and we do very well in the majority of channels. But there are three in particular that I'm raising here, where we're taking special action. And the reason is, you know, in the case of digital commerce, already a massive channel at EUR 1.4 billion, but this channel is growing at 10 times the speed of the overall ice cream market. It is critical, obviously, to succeed in this channel. We already have a leading share, we already over-indexed, and we continue to expand this share. In the last 18 months, we grew our share by 40 basis points. Then there are other channels where our performance maybe is not that good, and therefore, they represent an incremental opportunity. One of those channels is the value channel.
That becomes increasingly important in moments of economic stress. We have a decent share at 18% of a significantly large channel, but it's a tale of two cities. We have a very high share in some smaller players, but in the largest player, Dollar General, which makes fully $500 million of the sales, of the $700 million of the channel, we only have a 4% market share. We sat down with its customer, we presented a plan, we agreed on the terms, and they rewarded us with quadrupling our total distribution points. We are seeing right now, obviously, an increase in sales and increase in market shares, and we expect to do more going forward. And finally, the club channel, for those of you that don't know, this is the likes of Costco, Sam's, BJ's.
Again, another massive channel that grows very fast in the U.S., a $1 billion channel where we only have a 4% market share. But this channel has its peculiarities. They don't buy product ranges; they buy specific items. They also trade these items at a much lower price per gram than you would find on the regular grocers. And therefore, it's important to craft the right items to offer to this channel. We put together a team last year to re-engage with this channel. We are, this year, as we speak, pitching ideas to this channel, and we expect to start seeing benefits, increased turnover, and increased market share coming in next year.
Then finally, I spoke about how we drive innovation, how we step it up, how we drive availability expansion, how we invest more in media, and how we do it better, but also, we spend a large part of our time working on increasing our productivity. We've been working since the beginning of last year, supported by external consultants, on a massive project to reset our U.S. supply chain. This project, you know, combined, will deliver around EUR 200 million in savings. It's already well underway, well into execution. We saw benefit savings coming in last year. There are savings coming in this year, and there is more that will come in in the subsequent years. We covered everything from how we buy, how we transport, how we make.
We're making some investments into our lines to debottleneck them, through technology, accelerate the speed of our lines, reduce the time that the lines are stopped, and therefore, we are not only reducing our overall cost but also increasing our available capacity at the fraction of the cost that it would take to buy or to make a new factory. There's another area where we have to work on productivity, and that is the away-from-home channel in Latin America, which, as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, is the largest retail channel for us, and in many of these markets in Latin America, we don't necessarily operate with distributors. A big part of our sales, we operate ourselves. We're our own distributor, so we go from procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, to even selling and dropping the product in the cabinet directly.
And therefore, as you can imagine, this is a big source of a competitive advantage, but on the other hand, it's also it takes a big part of our operating cost in these companies, and therefore, it's imperative that we drive efficiency here. We are have a number of interventions that we're making, one that was covered in Tolunay's video. We're adding cameras to these freezers so that we can know real-time what's going on, how the demand is moving. We're transforming that data together with other pieces of data, like weather forecast or time of the year, weekends, and so on, to produce an automatic ordering through an algorithm. And then we are shifting that order directly to these store managers through WhatsApp Business, which by the way, we're very active.
Already in Mexico, we make 50% of our sales on this channel and then finally, you know, it wouldn't do us much good if we knew exactly what's going on in the cabinet, if we know how to make a perfect order, and if we can shift that order to the store manager, if it then takes a week for the ice cream truck to arrive with the order so we're working on one last leg of this whole system, which is flexibility in the delivery. We're setting up small microdistribution centers. We're piloting this in Mexico, where we have 10 of these, from where we receive these orders, and we can dispatch directly through a motorcycle to the cabinet so two hours total from the moment when we get the order to the moment when the ice cream shows up in the cabinet.
This combined system will allow us to reduce out-of-stocks, respond to demand more quickly, and eventually also then, also to reduce the number of visits of our salesmen, as we can get everything done in WhatsApp Business, reduce the whole cost, and therefore allow us to expand our availability through more cabinets. Now, how is this going? Really very good. We're growing in sales. Importantly, we are now growing in volume after many years of volume declines. And as I showed you at the beginning, our market share declined by one hundred and eighty basis points in the previous years. It is now showing consistent movements forward. And then finally, profitability is having a significant boost, more than a hundred basis points of increased profitability last year, and another hundred basis points in the first half of this year.
So in summary, we have a great region, a great, a large business with very solid positions. We're taking action on very specific points, stepping up innovation, resetting our cost base, increasing availability, and this strategy is bringing results. Of course, there is a lot more to go for, but I hope now that I have shared this with you, you understand more why I'm so excited and why it took me so little time to respond to Peter when he offered this job. Thank you very much. I'm passing over to my colleague, Mustafa, who will be talking about Europe.
Thank you. Thank you, Gerardo. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mustafa Secgin. I will take you to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Like Gerardo, I am also more than 30 years working in Unilever. Actually, I celebrated my 35th a couple of months ago. I worked 15 years in ice cream. I know some of you have been very recently in Turkey and had a chance to see our operations there in ice cream. I was very proudly leading 9 years, that business in Turkey, in ice cream, before I had been promoted as Executive Vice President for Turkey, for multiple categories of Unilever. I have been working at different categories, of course, for three decades, and different geographies. I'm very happy to be in that team, as of January twenty-fourth.
Before I start, the key messages that I want to leave you is, first of all, Europe business is large, attractive, and resilient. The second thing is that between 2019 and 2023, business had some serious challenges. It was quite tough. The third thing is that after that, beginning of January 2024, we had a new team in place. We made a lot of changes in the leadership team, and also we set a new strategy, which we are confident that it will bring the business back to growth, a growth which is profitable and also competitive. We are very conscious about our profitability position and totally not satisfied, and we see massive opportunity. That's why a very granular productivity plan is in place and already started.
Last but not the least, the progress in the last one and a half years shows very good signals, which I will share for you. Yes, of course, a lot to be done in the plan period. Let me start with the region first. It's a €3.1 billion region, which it makes 40% of the total business. We are almost everywhere in Europe. We are operating with nine clusters that you can see, and some of you may ask, "Why ANZ, Australia and New Zealand?" We believe that the consumer similarities are very large, customer similarities are very large, and this is the best way to manage this very high per capita consumption, ANZ, together with Europe. Time difference is large. This is the, maybe the disadvantage, which is quite manageable.
Coming to market position, we are clear number one, and relative market share, we have the double size of our nearest competitor. Last but not the least, 50% of this turnover comes through Magnum and Ben & Jerry's, which says a lot about the brand strength in the region. The market. The market is about 25 billion EUR, and definitely a large market. Per capita consumption in Europe is four times higher than average of the world, about 8 liters. Within that one, we have very high per capita, especially in the north, and also between, it varies 5-25 liters. So basically, average is 8. The second fact is that according to Euromonitor, the expected growth rate is between 2%-4%, and with volume, positive volume, and it is slightly ahead of the snacking category forecast that Euromonitor indicates.
The last part is also very important. I think in the last four years, four, five years, the business or the market has been tested quite interestingly by COVID, which was an uplifter in terms of volume. We have seen an inflationary period in Europe, which put some pressure on the consumer. Still, volume was flat or positive, and also, of course, the catastrophic of the cacao, even at that time, volume was positive. So we believe that it's a resilient market as well. The last four years, I said it was tough and challenging. I think the charts speak itself. I will not go one by one, but it was years of persistent volume loss, coupled with market share loss, and obviously profitability also eroded. So definitely it was a period which all key indicators were going to south.
One of the root cause analyses, of course, we have done a lot of analysis of this period. There are multiple reasons, as can be expected, but overarching theme is the lack of focus because as Peter mentioned, the five category leading that one, and ice cream definitely has some strategic priorities, different than sometimes the rest of them. So that was an overarching reason that we can identify across the business. But we have very clear strengths as well that we have to recognize and understand very well. First of all, we have admirable brands with very high equity, of course. Secondly, we have 12 factories, which are very well placed across Europe, and we have 1 million cabinets, which makes our reach really incomparable. We have triple leadership across channels. Last but not least, we have a team which has been completely renewed.
Seven out of the nine general managers, they started as of 2025, some of them earlier, so in the last 18 months. Secondly, track record, obviously ice cream knowledge, end-to-end capabilities are the things that we renewed in the new management. Our strategy is threefold, similar to, similar to Americas' growth, productivity, and reinvestment. Under growth, there are three vectors: strategic portfolio and innovation, demand creation, but definitely digital-led demand creation, and also physical, availability, which is very important for any ice cream business. I will unpack these. The second pillar is productivity. Mostly supply chain development, but not only, overheads is also under radar. Last but not the least, volume is a leverage for profitability, which is linked to growth part, and some of the productivity to be back invested to brands, portfolio, cabinets for growth and supply chain.
So let me unpack the first driver, which is strategic portfolio and innovation. What do we mean that one? Three things actually. There was a very good question about the core in the Q&A. Core is important and has to be renovated because when the parity comes, we have to go to superiority. It's a bit rat race, and every year we will renovate, and we are renovating our core at scale. 25% of the portfolio in 2026 will be renovated. It's a bit boring versus innovation, renovation, but it is very important, and it is in place. The second part, to me, is the part that we will hunt the most volume and the share as well. Let me explain. So when we need to ice cream category by need states, by format, and by price points, we have identified our opportunities. What are they?
For example, in the need states, we are pretty strong in the indulgence, but when it comes to snacking kind of sandwich, kind of, for example, ice creams or refreshers, this is not the case. Our competition is far stronger there. So we strategically innovate in these areas, definitely to hunt volume and the share as well, while keeping our very strong position in indulgence. On the format, same logic. We are very strong in some format, like sticks and pints, but in some of them we identified our opportunities, and we are again investing and innovating there. This part is also very important in Europe because the inflation and the consumer pressure is obviously there. And then again, in the premiumization, we have been very successful with Magnum Ben & Jerry's, less so on the bottom end, where we gave a lot of space volume to competition.
Definitely we are trying to make our innovation program addressing these areas as well. We can't leave in ice cream, especially in this 31% leadership place, an empty place that we definitely don't touch. This is the logic of the second part. The third part is market making innovation. One level up, this is not only share gain, but category growing also. Bonbon, for example, this is something very new, a new experience, a new occasion, and now it's launched across Europe, and we are expanding that one to Solero, which is different experience, not chocolatey, but more fruity experience. Volcanics, which started in Asia last year, has been launched in Turkey. Next year, that will be on the shelf in Europe. Totally new experience with the texture, everything. Last but not the least, another big experience change is in Magnum.
Very courageously, we are expanding to a cone experience. The cracky chocolate of the Magnum, combined with the crunchy cone, is totally an unbeatable experience. So on the demand creation, the difference is on four areas. We have been very stubbornly investing in two brands, Magnum and Ben & Jerry's. We will invest more brands. We will also change our footprint, and we will be more social. This is no-brainer. Things are changing, and we will double down our digital investment in the plan period. We believe in partnership, especially when and where it is relevant, and it brings us earned media for sure. And last but not least, it's not about what, but when also is important, and we will make our. We are making our media plans very agile, and especially skewed to 100 days of the summer, where the consumption happens.
On the distribution, it's news for away from home and also at home. So at home, the strategic agenda definitely is a very disciplined RGM, revenue growth management, of course, and how to bring our category captainship to the shelves is very important to the customer. We do a lot of shopper understanding, which has been started last year. On the execution excellence, our biggest enemy is nothing other than out of stock. So in that sense, on-shelf availability is super important. We are working on that one, and the service levels, of course, linked to that one is the KPIs that we are very rigorous. Last but not least, not only the portfolio expansion towards the lower end of the pyramid, we know that the fastest growing channels are discounters, where we are very underrepresented.
So we change our focus and strategy there, and we are growing in 2025 three times faster than average of our growth in discounters and value chain, which is the fastest growing, and definitely more consumers are expected to shop there. On the out of home, route to markets are very important. Managing one million cabinets every day effectively is a different skill set and capability, and we have identified in a few countries some tired and definitely a fixed requirement countries: Italy, France, and also Netherlands are the areas that we are refixing and looking every part of the route to markets. Cabinet operation expenses is key. When you have one billion, it can make a really big nightmare. So that's why bringing innovation, how to make it very proactively, you can see one example outside, is something that we are working on that one.
Also, smart cabinets, which has been talked today a lot, the live example, again, outside, for those who didn't see it, is the future of the out-of-home business for us that we are investing. Today, in Denmark and Hungary, which are two maybe relatively small countries, but we have very good working replenishment system with inbuilt camera. It's working extremely well, which we will expand. And the priority channels, especially after the COVID, no doubt, travel channels and HoReCa, hotel, restaurant, catering, are the two areas that we chose as priority to hunt and find growth, more growth. On the profitability, which is a very important part for Europe, we have a lot of homework to be done there. The productivity plan is in place. It's very large and granular, but I can summarize in three headings maybe.
End-to-end network optimization, which has been again mentioned today in the presentation. How to lower the kilometer traveled is very important. We see a 20% opportunity reduction there. The second part is definitely step change in manufacturing productivity, and we believe that there is an opportunity to decrease our cost per liters by 10%. On the procurement side, we identified €60 million opportunity simply by harmonization, not only formulation, but also the raw materials. Also, we have a very focused, compared to past, procurement team who only think every day about our own ecosystem and raw material, et cetera. It's quite different. A lot of focus and specialization has been put there. Results, always important. Basically, in 2024, we have seen some acceleration in our growth, which makes us quite happy.
But also, it was very important that it came with the volume, and we stabilized the share in 2024. After many years of the volume decline in Europe and Australia, New Zealand, first time we have seen small but important growth in volume. About 1.7% is a bit relative, is it small or not, but definitely a good one. First half 2025, even better. We have 6%, 6.1% growth in first half, volume 3%, and also we have seen our competitive has increased to almost 90 basis points, which is an indication of our strategy, and it gives us confidence that definitely the strategy is getting good results. But we are very conscious that we have a big homework and a lot to be done. So let me summarize the key messages that I tried to put in the beginning of that.
First of all, Europe is a large, attractive, and resilient market. Secondly, yes, we had a challenging and tough times for four years at least, but definitely a new strategy, which we believe is working, giving good results, and a new team is in place, and we are very committed to bring back this business to a accelerated growth, which is profitable and also competitive. We have a granular productivity program in place, which already started to definitely give us some results, and last but not least, the 18 months performance proves that the strategy is working well. Again, a lot of things to be done in the plan period. Thank you very much, and for Asia and MEASA, Wai-Fung will join the stage. Thank you, Wai-Fung.
Thank you, Mustafa. What happened to the applause, but anyhow. Good afternoon, everyone, and good afternoon to all those who are online. My name is Wai-Fung Loh. I'm the President of Asia and also the General Manager of China at the Magnum Ice Cream Company. I'm a little younger than my two other counterparts. I'm only, like, about twenty-eight years with Unilever, and I've done mostly sales and also with the categories over the last twenty-eight years, and I'm a Singaporean, so forgive my sometimes Singlish, yeah, but hopefully you understand me. I moved actually from Singapore to China when I was twenty-eight. Yeah, and that has been some time back, obviously, and I'm now living in Shanghai and looking after the Asia region.
Together with Tolunay, who's my other partner in crime, we're responsible for the Asia, Middle East, and Africa. Before I actually go into some of the details and explaining some parts of the region to you guys, you may be asking, right? "So yeah, okay, what's going to be new? I've heard your two other colleagues." Okay, this is going to be a little bit quite different, okay? First of all, yeah, first and foremost, and this is the one thing that I want you guys to remember, AMEA is the fastest-growing and the most profitable region in the group. That's number one, okay? We've had actually showed quite strong historical performance, which I'll show you in a minute.
Our strategy is really focused on volume net, market share growth, and we are going to do this through a couple of pillars, which I'll talk through. We're driving innovations through formats and on trends. We are pricing the right portfolio at the key snacking price points. We are growing occasions and driving digital-led social-first demand creation. We are also increasing availability across channels and driving digitization. We have already in-market dedicated teams end-to-end, that we are, and especially we have upgraded talents actually in sales and supply chain, and that's where we are actually going to grow our ice cream expertise moving forward to be able to lead the agenda in the region. I'll show you a little bit about who we are. First of all, we're about €2 billion in revenue.
Some of our largest countries are actually Turkey, China, Philippines, and Indonesia. We are on the average about 11% in market share. Yeah, but it actually ranges quite a lot across our region. So we have Turkey at more than 80%, Southeast Asia between 30 and 60, China at about 11%, and of course, there are white space markets like Japan, where we are not yet present. We have 17 factories in the region. Over 85% of our products are actually manufactured and sourced locally. We have R&D centers across Shanghai, Bangkok, Bangalore, Istanbul, just to name a few. And that's really important for us, right? Because that's where we actually get our local insights to be able to drive our localized strategies. Our current footprint stands at 1.3 million cabinets, and earlier there was a question on where these cabinets are.
So we have about half of where we are globally, and we are investing for more. And obviously, when you see this beautiful map, we are number one across most of our key markets, with the exception of China and India at number two. And yes, I hear you. Yeah, don't rush. We're about consistent and competitive growth, so we will get there and for sure it's going to be worth the wait, Peter. So our region actually is large, attractive, and growing, right? And why is that? So we have a large and young population. Large, we have 80% of the global population. Young, the average age actually is about 32%. And what does it mean, right?
It means really we have a large group of consumers who are actually in their prime, either working, spending, family forming, and literally growing up on digital. And this really opens up a lot of opportunities that we have in growing occasions and also building our brands as they mature over the longer consumer life cycle. The second point about us is we have a low per capita ice cream consumption. We are averaging at about 1.4, and you have seen Europe and U.S. a lot higher than that, and therefore, that's actually a huge headroom for growth. Last but not least, we are operating in high-growth markets, so the forecast is about between four to six. Yep, and it actually represents a 25 billion market size. Our historical performance actually has been strong.
We are growing low double digit actually on revenue, half of that coming from volume. Now, it's quite consistent with the strategy that you have seen. We are progressing a little on market share, and we actually have a strong margin position. So then you may ask, "Okay, then what then do you do next, right, to be able to sustain this?" So our strategic pillars for value creation are very much in line to the global strategy. We put it into three buckets. We have three pillars: growth, productivity, and reinvestment. On growth, I will go into a little bit of details and show you some examples of what exactly we are doing in some of the markets, just to give you a flavor. On productivity, yeah, two parts to it.
One part is really optimizing our supply chain end to end and to be able to improve our capacity utilization, and at the same time, better service and a lower cost. I think that's one area. We also want to lead through digitization, automation, and technologies, and Sandeep, in his video, showed you a little bit, and he called out Taicang, to be honest. Taicang is actually located in China, obviously. It's an hour out of Shanghai. It's the first lighthouse factory that we have in the ice cream industry, so we're extremely proud of it. But I think what's more, right, we have seen in practice, when we drive automation and digitization, it not only drive costs down but actually also improves our standard on quality and also on product superiority. We actually make the crunchiest cone in Taicang.
On reinvestments, we are investing into cabinets, we are investing into digitizing the front line, we are debottlenecking capacity and invest into safety and quality, and also we are building leading-edge capabilities. That's important because we want to be able to attract the top talents from the industry to join us. Moving forward, on innovations. Yeah, we talked about global innovations. On top of the global innovation agenda, what we're driving in the region are also driving format disruptions and on-trend innovations. One of the products you will recognize, the Magnum Dubai Chocolate. This is invented by my friend over there, Tolunay. It was launched in April. We have since sold 11 million pieces. I don't think we have the product here today, but hopefully you try it when you go to Turkey, and it's still growing. In Thailand, we actually launched the Ice Balls.
I saw some outside. I hope you guys have tried some of it, yeah. But you really have to try it in a DIY way, right? Because our consumers and KOLs are actually snapping it up. They're coating it with chocolate, they're adding it to their carbonated drinks, yeah, and they're creating new occasions for themselves. Since the launch in March, we have actually picked up about 6% of market share in modern trade in Thailand. Yeah, and that's a big win for us. And last but not least, it's also about how do we localize concepts, right? This is the first-ever seven-layer stick, and we launched it under Cornetto in China. Yep, and the beauty of it, right, when we actually innovate new formats, is that it brings new consumers to the brand.
Forty-eight percent actually of consumers who have actually tried the product are actually new to the brand. Moving forward, the second pillar is very much about pricing competitively in the snacking market. Yep, Peter talked about it. In Indonesia, this is an example of Indonesia, and I really believe I underrepresent the amount of snacks there are in Indonesia, that most of you guys know, right? It's a lot more than this. But if you look at the chart, historically, we usually perform at the upper end of our price spectrum, and what we have done over the last eighteen months is to really launch innovations at the lower snacking price points. Why is that important, right? Because then it builds up a basket of cabinet magnets that actually draws consumers to the cabinets and drive our throughput.
The third pillar, third item on the growth agenda, is really where we do the magic and really turn memories, turn ice cream moments into lasting memories. So we try to grow occasions through digital-led demand creation to increase consumptions, and here are some examples. In Indonesia, we have Max the Paddle Pop Lion, who goes into schools. You enjoy ice cream with him. The kids are happy. They go back to tell their stories, so that's very, very nice. Another occasion, which is celebrated across many parts of Asia, is the Ramadan or the Eid al-Fitr celebration. The kids love it because they don't go to school, obviously.
We develop campaigns to actually celebrate families breaking fast together at the end of the day, and this sort of becomes like a tradition, and it becomes an afternoon routine that is actually passed down for generations. So it's actually very beautiful. In the Philippines, you have seen the example on birthdays, and this requires multi-years, actually, of activating the occasions such that it becomes ingrained, right? And in China, we activated the Magnum brand against a City Walk event, yeah, that took a lot of consumers and KOLs into the city. So I'll share a video now.
In China, City Walk is increasingly becoming the trendiest activity among Gen Z and is the hottest buzzword on Red Note, China's top social platform. This year, the Magnum Pleasure Store took over the entire Anfu Road, the most popular destination for trendsetters in Shanghai. It's not just a static venue but a dynamic feast to drive away-from-home consumption and embrace Magnum's fine experiences. Jackson Wang, Magnum's global ambassador, was invited to the event. Let's follow Jackson's steps, inspired by Magnum's iconic crack, and experience the pleasure store. Popular influencers to play the one-day store manager, which boosted consumer engagement of more than 800,000 consumers, and leveraging user-generated content to create over 60 million impressions. Magnum continues to disrupt ice cream experiences in China, delighting millions of consumers.
Nothing cracks like a Magnum.
I hope you enjoyed that video. A little bit different. The next item actually on the growth agenda, moving on, is really increasing availability through our localized cabinet expansion programs, right? Internally, we have a measure called population per outlet. It sort of measures how many cabinets do you need, yeah, in a country, in a city, or even at a neighborhood, to be able to gauge whether we have got the right levels of saturation, and that number is 500. Obviously, when you see from the chart, Turkey and Thailand are meeting and actually over-delivering a bit of this. There are more opportunities actually in Philippines, China, Indonesia, and obviously India. And how do we actually implement this, right? We implement it in a very localized way, yeah?
From protecting cabinet leadership in Turkey and Thailand, to actually selecting provinces to go into in China, to actually expanding aggressively in Philippines and in Indonesia to gain market share. So that's really about how do we land the strategies. And you may ask, right, "How do we then run this efficiently? And how do I connect the dots over the route to market, yeah, without distributors and without outlets?" Tolunay and Sanjiv showed a little bit of this, but I will actually show you an example of how this is actually landing in our markets. Maybe I can have the video?
In China, our route to market system is going fully digital, driving sales and greater efficiency across the country. The four drivers of this digital journey are digital customers, digital selling, a digital sales force, and top-quality data and analytics. Additionally, cabinets, as crucial assets for ice cream, will benefit from comprehensive digital management throughout their life cycle. Digital customer provides smart ordering capabilities for customers, enabling digitally enhanced real-time tracking of orders, stock, finance, and execution performance. Digital selling. Store owners can place orders online directly from distributors or wholesalers linked with the customer ERP system to achieve end-to-end visibility of order, stock, and supply. The integrated BCRM program will further enhance customer loyalty and bring higher order conversion. We have recruited 150,000 stores, and by 2028, we aim to activate 450,000 stores on this platform. Digital sales force.
This tool serves as a unified interface for the sales force, utilizing smart route planning for store visits, store hunting, and targeting high-productivity outlets. It facilitates data-driven in-store tasks to boost sales efficiency. The entire sales and merchandising team will have the capability to monitor their individual KPI performance in real time. Data and analytics. Introduction of an integrated data lake and dashboard to facilitate store tagging and expansion. Our future execution will be more precise, which means better cabinet locations, better portfolio management, and more targeted promotions. This will empower our sales team to take decisions closer to the front line and respond faster to the market. Digital cabinets are being rolled out across the country. Asset status, GPS positioning, and cabinet display will drive cabinet throughput and efficiency.
Vending machines as our new digital cabinet model will further enhance availability in channels such as parks and mass transit stations, where consumers are able to buy digitally anytime. The digitized China route to market through these four digital drivers will bring significant benefits in terms of coverage capability improvement, optimal investment allocation, and an estimated 25% increase in people productivity by 2028. This results in more points of sale, better stores, and improved service. Coming soon!
Just a little flavor into that, and our strategy is really delivering results, right, so you have seen we had strong historical performance. In 2024, we grew 4.7%, a little negative actually on volume with the disruption in China. In half one, we are continuing our strong momentum. We are delivering again double digits in half one on sales growth and 7% at volume, so to wrap it up, yep, I hope you guys remember we are the fastest growing and profit ahead of the group. Historically, our performance is strong. Our strategy is very much focused on volume, because there's a large headroom for us to grow, right around innovations, around pricing, around occasions, and also around driving availability.
And really, we will continue to invest in people with end-to-end actually experience in ice cream, and that's why we will build a consistent and competitive growth. Thank you. And now I invite Michelle.
Thank you, Wai-Fung .
... So we'll convene for a short break, due to the time. We'll be back in twenty minutes. There is still some other ice cream to taste outside, and after you come back, Abhijit will come on stage, discuss the financials, and present the medium-term outlook, after which we will take questions on that. See you in twenty minutes. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome back after yet another ice cream session. I hope you've had your fill. If you've not, we have another session even after this, so hold your horses. And to those on the webcast, I can only apologize, saying, "Hey, you know, you missed a real great ice cream treat." My name is Abhijit Bhattacharya. I'm the CFO of the Magnum Ice Cream Company. A little bit about myself, I was the CFO of Royal Philips for the last 10 years. We, I had the good fortune of being part of the team that transformed Philips from an industrial conglomerate to a healthcare-focused company. Did a lot of M&A at that time. We acquired 30 companies, but we also divested seven, eight big entities. I had the good fortune of leading a lot of them.
When I counted, this is my sixth large carve-out. I was part of the carve-out of NXP, which is a semiconductor company, but also the television business of Philips, the IPO of lighting, which was Signify, the domestic appliances business. So actually, when Peter called me and said, "Do you want to be part of forming the largest ice cream company in the world?" It was very difficult to say no. But I had to cross his magic threshold, because he said, "If you don't have ten years of consumer experience, you don't make the team." I worked for twelve years in the consumer business, so I said, "Okay, that works." So Peter said, "Come on board," and here I am. What I'm going to attempt to do in the next forty minutes is to tell you a little bit...
You heard the plan, you heard, the actions we are taking. What does it mean in terms of numbers? Because, ultimately, I guess most of us have to see that it all squares. After that, we suspect that there may be a couple of questions, so we have time for Q&A, and then after that, again, the next round of ice cream. So what holds you back between the ice cream is just my presentation for the next few minutes. What do I want to tell you? You saw in the regional presentations that a lot of the numbers are delivering, right? You saw that, yes, we had troubled times in the U.S., we had a difficult period in Europe, but performance increased. I will show you how that works for the full company.
I want to share with you key parts of the self-help plan that we have to drive margin expansion. I think that's critical to understand that a lot of it just depends on us, and we have a fantastic execution team which is working on it. I will give you color on the capital allocation policy and how that supports our growth strategy. And last but not the least, I'll give you some detail and color in terms of the targets that we have set for ourselves, both internally and, of course, committed externally. But very importantly, there's complete clarity in the organization as to what we want to drive in the coming years.
If I move to our performance till 2024, you see that, you know, from a volume point of view, we have been losing over a 10-year period, we have been losing volume. It's the first time it came back last year. You see the same in terms of market share, you know, losing steadily, not by big chunks, but now we've turned the corner. Most importantly, you see that as you lose top line and volume, you lose margins. That's the problem with our business, but that's also the opportunity, because if we drive volume growth, we will get margin expansion. Last but not the least, you know, after a flat EBITDA for a number of years, you see a step up of €100 million last year, so that shows that the plan is already working.
I want to show you a bit of a balanced scorecard, not just on these parameters, but across the board in terms of growth. And you see that we grew 2.8%, and now I'm going to introduce a little bit of complexity in all of this. The numbers we present to you is the carve-out numbers that we have based on how we separate on day one, which is in the middle of November. We don't have India in these numbers because that comes later. So for those of you who saw the 3.7% growth in the reported number of Unilever, you know where the difference comes from.
Most importantly, we got back to volume growth, and I will compare ourselves later with a peer group, and you see that we are really at the top of the table in terms of getting back volume growth. Market share, and I will show you a few slides on market share as well, but important, gross profit, adjusted EBITDA, both up, and the margin up by 100 basis points last year. We've been talking about our productivity program. I will give you some details, but you see that this is not something that is a PowerPoint that still has to be implemented. This is up and running, and 70 million already in the P&L last year, another 80 million in the first half of this year, so 150 million done, but still a long way to go.
As part of the productivity that we are doing, we also get benefits in our working capital, and you see our inventory days reducing last year, continuing to reduce this year. I will show you that, and the promised step up in CapEx that we've already started putting in, because that is what is causing our growth engine to start moving. What you see here, and this is an important chart, you see that the improvement that is happening in the company is happening across the world. This is not driven in one pocket in Asia or a pocket in Europe or in... It's happening across the world. You see the step up in profitability is strong in North America, the Americas and in AMEA. Europe had a big productivity program, but challenged with the cocoa price increase, but still managed to step up.
So across the board, we are getting back to good growth. But looking at ourselves just, and comparing ourselves to ourselves, doesn't really matter unless you're winning in the marketplace. And this is the chart. If you look at the dark line, appropriately, I think, colored in the color of chocolate, you see that we have been consistently delivering on the market share improvement. We started the trend in Q1. We were still down, but improving, and over the last four quarters, we have been continuously gaining. An important point that Peter made. People often ask about private label. If you look at a ten-year period, their shares in the market have been flat. So they have a place to play, but it's not that they're coming after the bigger players or that you are able to challenge, let's say, the bigger established players.
Now, this was 2024 and a bit of 2025. How have we done in the first half of 2025? First quarter, 4% growth, half of it in volume. So we, I picked up a few questions on volume, et cetera. This is a key indicator for us. Q2, 7% growth, 5% from volume. It's a big number and a big growth, and also competitively a big advantage that we've started to now really clock in, and I'll now show you exactly the same dashboard for the first half of the year. You see the 5.8% growth, you see the volume growth in the first half of 3.5%, which is more than half the underlying organic sales growth, and you see us continuing to gain market share.
You may question me, "Hey, you know, your profit is down in terms of gross profit by EUR 4 million, and the EBITDA margin is down thirty basis points this year versus last year." Very, very important to know, we had a headwind of 340 basis points in the first half of the year. Unprecedented, three hundred and forty. Two hundred and ninety from commodity prices and fifty basis points from FX. So if you see that, we have actually been able to neutralize three hundred and ten basis points in half a year, and that would not have happened if we didn't have our pricing machinery working and our productivity engine delivering. On top of that, you see that the inventory reductions continue, and the step up in CapEx, we did, you know, EUR 43 million last year.
We did half of that already in the first half of this year. So we are putting our money where our mouth is, and that's reflecting back in the performance of the company. This is the dashboard. Let us now compare ourselves to the peer group. And if you look at this chart, this is, this has organic sales growth over a three, two-and-a-half-year period. You see 2023, you see 2024, and you see the first half of 2025. You see in 2023, we were at the bottom of the pack. In 2024, we moved up to second, and in 2025, we are at the top of the pack for the first half. But most importantly, for 2024 and the first half of 2025, we have the highest volume growth in the peer group. What does this mean for profit?
Because if we drive top line, we have the productivity program under control, what does it mean for profit? Same format, 2023, we were bringing up the tail. We lost actually seventy basis points when others were making money. Last year, we were almost at the top of the pack, five basis points behind. This year, everybody of our peer group is feeling the pressure of commodity prices. We have been able to mitigate by far the largest amount as anybody else in the peer group. Let me now move on to the next part, which is our overall strategy. Peter spent some time this morning giving us, let's say, the overview of what we are doing. I will go a little bit into detail on a few elements. The first pillar is growth, and I just want to emphasize that that's a key pillar of our overall strategy.
Why do I say that? Because we have built that in, into our incentive programs. As you saw from Ronald's presentation this morning, the short-term incentive has growth, the long-term incentive has growth. Both are critical. You know, if you, for example, have one tough year, you still have to make, in that period, your growth target so that you are able to catch the LTI. The second important part, and you will see that when I present the capital allocation policy, we have factored in the investments that we need, to drive growth. It is in the, the financial plan that we will present. You saw this, slide from Peter this morning, and I just want to provide a little bit of clarity on what we are doing, for growth.
So if you look at the past couple of years, we were around the 3%, just shy, and we are now planning to move to the 3%-5% range. The important point to say here is that this is an annual average improvement in a market that grows 3%-4%. So the market grows 3%-4%, we expect on an average over the medium term to deliver 3%-5%. That could be in a year which we are at the higher end of the guidance, could be a year where we are at the lower end, but on average, this is how we expect this to pan out. The three biggest levers, I know we've said this, earlier in the morning, somebody once told me that the power of advertising is in repetition, so let me try again.
Innovation and occasions are our biggest driver of growth. You see that? Availability, expansion, you heard about our cabinets, the money we want to put to further grow our distribution. And last but not the least, we have some fantastic brands. They are in particular geographies. We have the ability to grow them in other geographies. You saw many times the reference to Yasso this morning. We have done the first customer tests in Europe. They've come out extremely well. It's a business that grows, I think, 22%-23% CAGR over the last five years in the US. If we are able to replicate that success in the rest of the world, really gives us a boost to drive growth. On sales, I'm going to cover one more on growth and sales, one more slide, which may take you by surprise.
The slide may look a bit complicated, but let me walk you through it. On the left-hand side, what I've attempted to do is to look at how seasonal we are, because the often discussion around ice cream is, "Yeah, you're a volatile business," and, you know, "Oh, is the sun shining today? Are you in a good mood?" Actually, if you look at it overall, globally, we've looked at it here for fifteen years, but if you look at the last 20 years, for the period May to September every year, we do between 53% and 55% of our sales. You see the dark line there, it's flat as a pancake. You could have great years in Europe that's compensated somewhere else, but this is a seasonal business, but it's not volatile.
What we cannot predict accurately yet is what happens between the months. If is there going to be rain in June, is it going to be July, is it going to be August? And that gets capital markets a bit kind of nervous. But if you look at the period, it's actually very, very stable. Now, let me draw your attention to the right of the slide, and there you see us compared to other beverage companies. And why do I take beverage companies? Because there you see the volatility closest linked to weather. And for each company that we have taken, there are two lines. So for the time being, let's focus on the line on the left. It shows you from the period two thousand nineteen to two thousand twenty-four, in Q2 alone.
the kind of peak and trough sales that has happened in that time. And you'll see for the beverage companies, it's a factor two or three times higher in terms of volatility when you compare it to the Magnum Ice Cream Company. If you look at the bars which are just to the right of it, it's in the shaded area, that's the part where we've taken out the COVID period, because people think, "Yeah, you know, there's COVID, that may have spoiled the numbers or have created a favorable impression." We've done both. We said, with COVID, without COVID, you see that the volatility is less, and we are working on a few things to further ensure that over a period of time, that the seasonality is more spread out through the event through the year.
You know, we are working on the geographic mix because the seasonality is highest in Western Europe, less so in the rest of the world. The channel mix, you heard, the rapid growth in DCOM. That happens, I mean, that's indulgence buy, that happens irrespective of how cold or hot it is. But also the portfolio mix. As we drive more in the premium zone, more indulgent, you see that that is less and less seasonal. I'll come to the next part, which is productivity, and give you some color as to what we are doing. So we have a EUR 500 million productivity plan. You see the plan, the EUR 70 million we delivered last year. You see cumulatively how we build that up in the next few years.
This productivity plan is the gross saving plan till 2028, and there are three big buckets. The first one is on the supply chain transformation, the second one is on overheads, and the third is on tech-enabled productivity, and I'll give you some color on each one of these three blocks. Within supply chain, we have, again, three big blocks. One is optimizing our end-to-end network cost. I'll give you a few examples. The second is driving manufacturing productivity, and the third is product procurement efficiency. What does end-to-end network optimization mean? We have actually a fantastic footprint of factories around the world. We have, you may hear two numbers, 30, 36, that's because of the perimeter. Let's say, going forward, we have 36 factories around the world.
We don't need to build new ones, but the factories were actually optimized for lowest cost of production. When you optimize a plant for lowest cost of production, you make as few SKUs as possible so that you have less changeovers, and then you distribute. For a business like ice cream, the cold chain that you transport products on has a significant cost element to it. So the right way to do this is actually to look at the end-to-end cost, and when you look at the end-to-end cost, you realize that the factories we have should actually be producing many more SKUs, but serving a smaller radius of product, a radius of customers, so that your ice cream is not traveling a lot. In the US, our ice cream travels on an average 770 km.
If we bring that down by 20%, we get 100 basis points on margin alone. That is the big game-changing productivity that we are driving there, and the other important one is debottlenecking of the factory. For example, we have a factory where if your packing line is manual, you can produce ice cream at a level of 100, pack at a level of 80. You cannot produce the 100, because otherwise you can't pack it. These are small investments which we need to make, and that gives us, for a fraction of the cost, 20% capacity, and this is happening as we speak. In terms of network, for example, in Europe, we are reducing our distribution centers from 29 to 10, so we are cutting it by two-thirds.
So that is, again, you produce in factories, a wider range of products. They travel less, you have lower inventory because you have lower stocking points, and then we have smaller distribution centers for last mile distribution, which helps you really to bring the cost down. So that's a big thing. Give you another example: We were in our factory in Covington, in Tennessee, and there are issues around labor, and therefore, we were again constrained in terms of our packing capacity. We have now automated that line, and it gives us 8% additional capacity in the whole plant. We have another one in our... Maybe I give you the Ben & Jerry's example. We used to produce all our Ben & Jerry's for the U.S. out of Vermont. We have moved 25% of that production to Sikeston.
Sikeston, by the way, is the largest ice cream factory in the world for anybody, not just us. And once we've moved it there, we are able to distribute now from Missouri, and therefore, again, bring costs down. So it's quite a big program that we are running. In terms of manufacturing productivity, the big war there is the war on waste. We had a rejection or a waste percentage of 6% a couple of years ago. That means you take 6%, you make the ice cream, and because it's either not packed or not produced properly, you have to throw it away. We have, in the last couple of years, brought that down by 25%, and by 2028, we will bring that to just below 3%. You saw earlier today, Taicang at 2%.
If we get all our factories to around 3%, that's just 100 basis points in gross margin just on waste alone. I think the most exciting part is on procurement because you know, being part of Unilever and looking at the Pareto of big purchases you do, you don't get the same importance that you get when you just look at the ice cream category. So we have really, in four categories, we have very, very strong category teams who are specialists in cocoa, in dairy, in sugar, and in energy, and they make their curves, et cetera, in terms of what they expect.
On a weekly basis, Sandeep, me, and Peter, we sit together with the teams and decide what we are going to cover for what we expect market developments to happen together with the team, and it gets the highest level of attention in the company, and with that, you are able to do quite a few things that we couldn't do earlier. The other point is that we have much more flexibility also on hedging. So we are now able to look into next year, and not just with terms of futures, but also in terms of collars. We see where cocoa prices are going, and we are now actually pretty well covered into next year, which is something that earlier we were restricted in terms of time frame that we could go. So that's another big thing, and last but not the least is indirect procurement.
We think that that's a big opportunity. We are looking at outsourcing the big package to a service provider who does it for many companies, and therefore, you get much better rates, but also discipline in the way we spend our money. These are the three big initiatives we have there. The second big pillar I told you was on overheads, and you see that in overheads, we built a company that has 92% of people who make, move, and sell ice cream. Therefore, the part that actually works in the headquarters, which is primarily focused on strategy, capital allocation, talent allocation, dealing with capital markets, et cetera, is very, very narrow. And we've put all the functions into the businesses, into the regions, so that they have end-to-end accountability for the PNL and the infrastructure that goes along with it.
The last bit is on the tech-enabled productivity, and I think that's a big question that often comes up because it's a big transition that is happening. We started early, and I think that's what gives us the advantage. We started planning for this in the fourth quarter of last year, so we are almost complete with the design phase. We have actually already started implementing, so our treasury management system, our money flows through the company operates on our new treasury management system. Our consolidation for July and August runs on our own systems, and then the ERP, et cetera, are in the process of being built, so the design, like I said, is mostly done. We will now build and then deploy over a two-year period. This actually supports us in the global business solutions that we are building as well.
This will help us also to move out of the temporary service agreements or the TSAs that we have with Unilever, and we are looking at a broader scope, so include not just, you know, the usual finance and HR back office stuff, but also in areas of digital services, marketing, and many more, and we are building a couple of hubs around the world. We've just signed with the government of Maharashtra an MOU to set up a big global business services setup in Pune, in India. We will set up one in Central Eastern Europe and one in Mexico.
I think the biggest advantage that you get here is, apart from the big ERP implementation, if you have a lot of your back office processes running in one location, the use of hyper automation, agenting, et cetera, really gives you efficiency at scale. It's something that I've done before. We've recruited Florence Mui, who has done this for three large multinationals, so we are really up and running and ready to implement. Last but not the least is the reinvestment that we are going to make. Two big areas. One is on CapEx. You see here that about 40% will go towards growth. There is the cabinet in expansion we talked about, the innovation, but also the capacity expansion, not in terms of new factories, but the debottlenecking that we have to do. The other 40% is on productivity.
You know, the savings of EUR 500 million are not going to come for free, so that, I explained that in detail, and then, of course, you will have a remaining 20%, which goes into quality, compliance, and ESG-related expenses. The other area that we are looking at is our spend on advertising and promotion, and what I'd like to leave with you is three things that we are focused on: digitizing, social impact, and better activation. So we, instead of having, spending a big chunk of the money on producing assets, we need really to have a lot of it in activation, and that line, as we go more and more towards social, is getting blurred with the influencers and others that get used to this. The first priority in this is not to jump from EUR 12.4 million to EUR 13 million .
The first priority is actually to spend the EUR 12.4 million better, and if we need to up that amount, our financial plan and balance sheet give us that flexibility. The other area, of course, is working capital. I've spoken about it a couple of times. The inventory reductions that we are doing. Our receivables are actually in a very good place. We hardly have any overdues, so we collect on time. We have good payment terms, which we adhere to, and we work on negative working capital. So as we grow sales, that negative working capital will grow, and that gives us a little benefit into our free cash flow, what does this mean for the free cash flow?
The biggest contributor is the improvement in profitability, and this is the bridge that we have kind of built to give you a good idea of what are the main drivers. The main driver for closing the profitability gap, medium to longer term, is the driving of volumes. Yes, there is a certain amount of price inflation, most of it which gets covered by pricing. You heard Gerardo saying that, you know, he wants to get into areas like the Dollar, Clubs and the value channels. For that, we have to run the productivity program so that our cost of the product becomes low enough so that we make good margins. So part of it is reinvested. Over a longer period of time, we believe we have the strength in our brands to offset inflation with pricing.
So basically, what you get is then, the volume mix and overall productivity, which is going to drive the increase in margins. In this plan, we have for material-related, inflation, about 2.7%, and for non-material related, about 3%. Would be about 2% if you exclude Turkey. Turkey, given the hyperinflationary nature and the fact that it's our second-largest business, has a big impact on the overall mix. So this happens to the EBITDA. I want to also mention here, just for clarity, that this is the average annual increase that we are going to drive over the period. Again, you could have years which is a little bit less, year which is a little bit more, but this is the average that we are driving, and as we come to the years, we will give more clarity.
What does this do for cash flow? I think quite a significant step up. If you look at the average cash flow between 2022 and 2024, we were around €6 billion. You see that, you know, we will plan to go in 2028, 2029 between €0.8 billion to €1 billion. That's roughly a 50% step up, most of it coming from the improvement in earnings and a very good free cash flow conversion. So cash flow conversion to our net income will be high. What does this do? You know, this higher return, et cetera, actually put us in a starting position of a very good return on invested capital. We are at 23%. A lot of people were surprised by this number.
I got a lot of questions, you know, is goodwill included, not included, whatever. Everything is included. The goodwill that we have for brands like Yasso, et cetera, are all included. This is the ROIC. It will have a temporary effect of going down a bit, because we will have to acquire the business in India. That will add a little bit of goodwill. A couple of other countries, we will also make investments, but we will still be in and around the 20%, which is a fantastic return for our business and among our peer group. I also want to leave you with a few important points about our business as we exit from Unilever. Our hard currency, soft currency profile is significantly different from Unilever. We have 70% of our business operating in hard currencies.
It's what Peter showed you earlier as well. Turkey, yes, is hit by inflation, but we have demonstrated the ability in a hyperinflationary situation to price accordingly. So when the local market prices go up, we are able to price, and Turkey is about 8% of the remaining 30%. The second important fact is that more than 90% of our businesses are local for local, so therefore, the discussion on tariff is, let's say, not as relevant for us as a lot of other industries. You look in the US, we are above 92% local for local. Then, the last one is a lot of interest in, you know, how big is cocoa exposure? How big is dairy exposure? You have it all here.
You know, 22% of our overall material and packaging cost is cocoa. If you look at that as a percentage of sales, it's about maybe 8%, give or take. So then you have a good idea of what it is and how we manage it and what could be the impact, but be aware also that this is an industry impact. It's not just a Magnum Ice Cream Company impact. Couple of more things which people are often asking me is about the separation cost. We will spend about EUR 800 million on separation, most, more than half of it is on technology. So Mark, who is here, who's our Chief Information Technology Officer, has a lot of money to spend, but he has also a big delivery to give us.
We work very closely with him and the team. Important also is that 80% of the separation costs would be incurred by next year, which also means that our separation will happen at a very rapid pace. We are looking to exit all TSAs by 2027, and we will have restructuring costs in the bandwidth of 75 basis points to 80 basis points. Let me also update you on where we stand regarding separation. It's a very complex process. Around the world, multiple legal entities, factories, et cetera. We are a separate, standalone legal entity, company operating already from first of July. So this is something important to note, that it's not something to happen, but we are operating, of course, fully owned by Unilever.
Another important part is that we have agreed on a net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio, and that is at 2.4, which puts us nicely in the investment grade rating. We have obtained the credit rating from Moody's. Maybe between the time that I walked on stage and I will walk off, we may get it also from S&P. The lawyers are, I wouldn't say arguing, but discussing the last words of the press release, but there we should be in a good place. I think you've all seen the announcement that Unilever will retain a 20% stake. I think that clearly signals the confidence that Unilever has and the support that they will give us to ensure that this transition is done in the best possible manner.
And most importantly, not only have we signed the TSA agreements, we are actually now already, in the month of September, beginning to exit some of the TSAs, so the exit plan is pretty rapid, and I will show that to you on the next page. Bulk of the TSA is on IT costs, 60%. And why have we done this? Because we have chosen the most de-risked approach to separation. If we had rushed this, there could have been instability in the business. We continue on Unilever systems. We worked out a way where the data, et cetera, is fully separated within our control, and over time, we will start the rollouts of our own ERP system. There's 15% in terms of finance and supply chain back office that will transition to us as we ramp up our global business solutions.
There's a little bit in real estate, which we share, and then 20% in other smaller things like fleet management, et cetera, which we are exiting as we work the new contracts. So this, you see again, by end of next year, we would have exited 70% of the TSAs, and that's pretty rapid because, you know, for a company which has its day one in November this year, within a year, we would have exited 70% of our TSAs. Let me then take you on to the capital allocation policy. I want to repeat, you know, our strategy is based on driving organic growth, and therefore, we have ensured that the financial plan has the right amount of investments we need. We will have a very competitive dividend policy compared to our peer group.
We have a payout ratio of 40%-60%. The first dividends we will pay out for next year in 2027. I heard a few questions by the... You know, do we have to wait two years for dividend? Absolutely not. You know, since we are part of Unilever for almost all of this year, the dividend for this year, for the ice cream business and all of Unilever, will be paid by Unilever. And then from next year, as we run the full year, we will start paying dividends. So there is no dividend holiday in the plan. We do retain the ability of doing a bolt-on M&A where we need to, so that's also important, where if there are opportunities that come in particular areas that we want to invest, we have the flexibility to do that.
We think that by doing this, we give a good balance between attractive shareholder returns, but also maintaining a solid investment-grade rating. That brings me to the overall financial framework, which is the growth of the top line of 3%-5% on average. The margin expansion, 40-60 basis points. Strong improvement in free cash flow. A very, very competitive return on invested capital, a strong balance sheet with investment-grade leverage, and an effective tax rate of 25%-27%. That gives us. That's also roughly in the range of companies that are doing the kind of business mix that we have. What I want to leave you with is that the strategy that you heard all through the day is actually delivering results consistently over now, an 18-month period.
We have a self-help plan that we are working on, and also significantly are advanced on. The capital allocation policy, and the questions that people had, now you see that in terms of a balance sheet, we exit with a very respectable balance sheet in a very cash-generating business, and the targets that we've set for ourselves. Before I move to Q&A, maybe to sum up the day, because we've been here for a while, and you've heard multiple stories, you know, we play in an attractive market. The market grows 3%-4%, good and attractive returns, and the snacking category is very attractive. We have a lot of strengths from the get-go.
You know, 160 years of experience and expertise in the company, which is really an invaluable asset, strong brands, world-class capabilities, big part of local manufacturing, and a hard currency, soft currency mix that puts us in a very good space. We've also said that the separation is good for both companies. I hope by now we've made clear why it's an advantage for ice cream. We have the flexibility of tailoring our supply chain and operating model to the cold chain required for ice cream, and we are focusing our investment algorithm on what is needed for ice cream. And what does that give us? Gives us good growth and profit expansion through self-help measures, and then gets us to the targets that we have set for ourselves. Before we go to Q&A, I have two points to make.
You've seen on your table that there are some questionnaires. Please take a couple of minutes to fill them in, because it gives us very valuable feedback in terms of what we can do to make this more rewarding for you and help us improve. There is, of course, a great incentive at the end of it, because if you hand it in outside at our registration desk, there's a fantastic goodie bag that you get as well, and that goodie bag doesn't have ice cream, but you can have ice cream on the way to the goodie bag. The second most important thing is you saw on Ronald's slide that 92% of our employees believe in the future of our company. That has really improved. I really hope that this group is even better than the 92%.
So with that, let me invite Peter on stage. Thank you.
Next, Capital Markets Day, we're going to turn it around, and I will be the calm guy, and Abhijit will be the excited guy, and so we can flop this. No, we're actually. I must say, I feel very privileged. We're actually a really nice team. You know, you always, when you start a new job, you know, will you have work with a great group of people? You know, we were in the lucky circumstance that we could form our team. It's hard work, but we have a lot of fun as well. Questions and answer.
Yes. Let's go to the Q&A.
Warren has his hand up.
It's indeed the same. Put your hand up. People on the webcast, you can type it in the chat, and we'll get it into the room. Thank you, Warren.
Thank you. Warren Ackerman from Barclays, and two from Abhijit. You've guided on EBITDA margin, not EBIT margin. Obviously, you can't put EBITDA in the bank, so I'm just imagining that's due to Turkey, it's due to higher depreciation as on CapEx. Can you give us some help on how Turkey can swing the numbers for you? And on the go forward on depreciation and amortization, it looks like 5% is the starting point, what your expectation is for D&A going forward as CapEx goes up. Are you confident basically that you can grow EBIT in hard currency? And why not guide on EBIT and EBITDA? And then the second one, on Ronald's presentation, EPS growth is part of the LTIP criteria.
Are you able to tell us what the criteria for EPS is on the LTIP in terms of getting the full payout, and would that be a good guide to what you think EPS growth could be for the Magnum group? Thank you.
I think that was three questions, Warren.
Yeah, but let me a couple. So I think you answered the first question, right? We, the reason why we put EBITDA instead of EBIT is that the depreciation element, because of inflation accounting in Turkey, has an impact either up or down, depends on which way the currency goes. What happens is typically you have to recalculate your investment, your capital assets in Turkey from the time of inception and re-depreciate it. So the reason why we give EBITDA is that you see operational improvement, and it gives clarity to our organization on the elements that they can handle. So I think that is one. On the EPS, I think the answer is relatively simple because we still have not gone through our RemCo.
Our board, as you know, is in the form, still in the stage of being formed. We will make a proposal to our remuneration committee, and then as soon as-
Exactly
... that is finalized, we will have that made public as well. It's just a bit too early now.
Good. Over there? Does anyone have a mic? Thanks, Lota.
Hi, Jeremy Fialko, HSBC. Coming back to some of the regional presentations, I know that Peter will be able to give some perspective on this. You talked about getting growth from some of the value retailers, doing a little bit more at sort of-
Yeah
... lower prices. Can you talk about why you think that is a sort of good quality business for you to be kind of going after, and how you can avoid getting sort of, let's say, sucked into things becoming very, very, let's say, price-dependent one or two years down the line? Whether you think that the moat in those categories or at that kind of lower price tiers is good enough. So why you think this is sort of good business to be going after?
It's a really, really interesting question. A couple of years ago, the strategy is we are beauty foods, and we focus only on the premium parts of our portfolio: brands, channels, customers. And it did not work. Everything we gained on mix, we lost in utilization, and when you then don't have a magical god fairy that can wish all these far-flung factories away, actually, your profit doesn't improve. Actually, we moved out of Dollar and clubs, amazing channels. In Liquid I.V., the business in Costco was above and beyond. We moved out to improve our margin. We're very happy to move in. We need to fight ourselves back in because once you move out, you know, they don't just open the door. You need to come with really good plans. You know, we talked about that during the presentation.
But it is really good for the economics of this business to drive volume through the pipes, in the factory, in the distribution. Not only ours, but also our distributors have capacity, more volume through, margins up. So we're very bullish about that, whether that is Aldi, Lidl in Europe, or whether it's drug, or whether it's club, or whether it's dollar stores, really important, and a shame that we pulled out by choice.
More questions from the room. Maybe over there?
Yep.
Yeah, just on the India, when you take on India, is that gonna be treated as a just M&A, or is there some other way that's gonna be engineered?
No, it's. So in India, it's a joint venture or kind of there's a public shareholding, and Unilever, I think, owns 62.9%. So India is going through a separate de-merger process following regulatory approvals. The good news is that most approvals are now in place, including the shareholder approval. I think we got a vote of 99.7%. We just have to follow the process, and then at a certain time, when permissions are through and the necessary timelines have been achieved in Q1 next year, we will have to acquire the 62.9% from Unilever. We'll have to make a matching tender offer at the same price to other shareholders and see what, if they offer, and then decide. And we have to go. We could go to a maximum of 75%.
So even if more do tender their shares, you would temporarily go up and then have to go back to the seventy-five. That's how it works.
In the front here, Fabio?
Thank you for takig another question from me.
Yeah.
One of the charts that, I thought was interesting, it's not there now, but it was on the private label versus your market share in the last few years.
Yep.
And you also showed one of your main competitors, and what intrigued me was that your share was quite negatively correlated with the performance of private label. It seemed that you're more susceptible to private label pressures than your main competitor. Did I read that chart correctly? And if that's the case, why, why do you think that would be? 'Cause normally, when you look at consumer brands, the premium brands tend to be more protected from private label, but obviously, that chart disproved that theory.
They are. In 2023... Actually, yeah, I talked about building a pricing capability. In 2022, this business did not price enough. In 2023, we had to compensate not pricing enough in 2022, and we sort of doubled up on pricing. And as you can see, you probably have read in the reports, we actually lost more volume than we gained on pricing. And who took that volume? It was especially a European problem. It went straight into private label, and once we started to correct that, and we could correct because there is an insane amount of productivity savings, so partly pricing, productivity saving, it straight came back. It was shot in our own foot.
Just like pulling out of the Dollar General, you know? It's... Why would you do that?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we have a question there in the-
Jeff?
Oh, or Jeff.
Two questions-
I like you to ask now.
Sorry, thank you. So two questions, if I may. The first one is, are you able to provide any sort of guidance as to the likely ballpark cost of the Indian acquisition next year, just so that can get factored into people's forecasts? And secondly, just coming back to the point on EBIT margins, you know, I appreciate that Turkey will add volatility, and it's impossible to predict, but, you know, on average, what would you expect over time would be a reasonable expectation for EBIT margin expansion for the business? Thank you.
I think it will be largely in line with the EBITDA that we have given. The Turkey thing, and you don't know what is the degree of inflation and for how long, but the impact of that is 10 or 20 basis points, plus or minus. So it's not that it goes completely the other way. That's number one. On the India pricing, unfortunately, due to regulatory reasons, there is a set pattern, and we can only disclose it at a particular time when we have to disclose it also to shareholders in India. So unfortunately, I'm a bit tied up there from a legal perspective. But, we have that completely funded, so if you look at our overall funding plan, and-
Yes
... and you've seen the report of Moody's already out, it's all in the numbers there, so there is no uncertainty around the India acquisition.
Good, and the gentleman in the back, please.
Yes, thank you. Edward Lewis from Rothschild & Co, Redburn. I guess just a couple of comments around the Unilever side of things, in terms of your Unilever relationship. How much did the changes that were put in place, I guess, in 2022 at Unilever, where ice cream was sort of put out as a separate business group, how much has that sort of helped and the advantage that gave? And then what would you... What are you gonna miss from not being part of Unilever?
Good question. I think Unilever has evolved tremendously over the years. Alan Jope started with change, and now obviously Fernando is really trying to get Unilever to the next level. I think there's more category focus started, but first, ice cream was just at the very, very beginning, and because ice cream is so different from the rest, the benefit of separation is really much larger than the specialization in the other categories. But also, in the other categories, dedicated supply chains, dedicated sales force. It's a very different Unilever than the Unilever two years ago, but I shouldn't comment on Unilever. For us, the separation, as I showed, is an unbelievable game changer, because we're in a specific industry. We have a job to be done. We need to step up profitability, seriously.
We need to step up growth, and we could create the talent, the structures, the strategies, with a single-minded focus on delivering on these jobs.
And fully supported by the Unilever board as well.
Oh, yeah. I actually, it's... You know, we're not in... Like, it's different than margarine or tea, where it's sold, and then basically the buyer sort of need to sort it out. We have been working with Unilever, and I must say very collaboratively on the separation for the last 18 months, and they're still our friends. They're friends at a distance, but they're still our friends.
David?
All right, thank you. So I'm gonna do two as well. A few years ago, Halo in the U.S. caused a few problems, and-
Yeah
... the market structure you talk about, it feels like there's, you know, good, strong local regional players that can come in and do stuff. So, so question one, is that a fair comment, that that is a risk, more here than anywhere else? Secondly... It's gonna be three questions, actually. Secondly, does the way you operate now mean that is less of a risk than it would've been under Unilever? And I guess and the third piece was you mentioned Japan as a market you hadn't entered, and have you looked at that kind of entry? And then the question being, is it tough to get into new markets, or is that something that you'll now be doing more of 'cause you are agile, focused, and you'll do it when Unilever didn't do it? Thank you.
Okay, couple of questions. Insurgents. There will always, luckily, in this world, be people with amazing ideas who have business success. In ice cream, given the investments you need to make in both the supply chain as well as sales and distribution, scaling up is very difficult. In the end, Halo Top did not make it. To be honest, the products were not good enough. And so what happened? They got bought by Wells. So that's the pattern. You know, it is an industry structure that favors consolidation, and there are two large global players. On your second question, on Japan and Korea, I did a lot of work in Japan and Korea. The trade structure is dominated by the convenience stores, and when you look at the profit pools of the industry, a too large part of industry profit goes to basically the channel.
That's why I find it less successful. I tried actually, together with Ben, we were in Japan opening Ben & Jerry's stores. We didn't really make it, but now I have a very, very good Singaporean Asian lead who has all kinds of creative ideas. But, we still have so, and I hope she finds something really creative, and good, and profitable, and, you know, whatever. But when you look at our growth opportunities, we have massive growth opportunities in our existing businesses, whether that's the U.S. or whether that is India. I personally put, we put a lot of our time and effort in building up a really good business in India. I ran one of the best consumer goods businesses in India, which is the home care business in India, and now we inherited a struggling business.
We put our best, one of our best operators, Tolunay Yıldız, on it to build it. The two of us are involved. For me, that is lower-hanging fruit than going to Korea.
Maybe that's a nice
Prove me wrong, Wai-Fung, but,
Maybe that's a nice bridge to one of the questions that we got on the webcast. It's about China, and it says: "Could you elaborate on the transformation of China? Is the business well-positioned for the future?
We have an amazing business in China. I worked in China for six years, were some of the most fun and interesting working period in my life. Actually, in normal, in most businesses, we have a tiered portfolio and quite a broad portfolio. There was already a very strong local ice cream industry with Yili and Mengniu, and these are outstanding companies. These are really, really good companies who basically had a mass and mid-tier portfolio, and we decided to be more premium. Magnum, Cornetto are unbelievable power brands and, in our go-to market, more regionally focused, more convenience store, more e-commerce. One of the reasons Wai-Fung got this job, because she actually did the makeover of Unilever China sales from offline to online. This is the focus of the business.
We had in 2023 and 2024, the business was wobbling a bit. We basically put a new boss in, changed the team, changed the strategy, changed the portfolio, changed the distributor margin structure, and I'm very happy that we are humming again. We should hum a bit faster, Wai-Fung, but we are humming again, and it's actually a nicely profitable business, in the first half growing double digit. It's great to be in China because China is by far the most competitive ice cream market in the world. It's the most competitive market in many areas, and we, over a 20-year period, have proven that we can compete in China. And, you know, the products you tasted, the seven-layer stick, is an improvement on the Yili product.
We're now rolling it out to the rest of the world, and it's flying off the shelf. So I think increasingly, China will also become a source of innovation. I go there once, twice a year. Next year, I promised Wai-Fung I will live there for the whole month of May. You're amazed by the innovation power of China, and it's the way they digitize sales, the way they digitize their factories, the robotics, but also marketing execution. China is an amazing market for ice cream. Not only for cars, also for ice cream.
I saw some more hands here in the front, and then.
Hi, my name's Nico. I just was wondering if you could help me with the free cash flow for FY 2026 and 2027. I guess I should take the base of the average free cash flow, and then those cash costs, I imagine they're 100% cash, or the costs are cash?
Largely, yeah.
And so, with the Hindustan acquisition, these one-off costs, the dividends, does that mean that your balance sheet actually levers up? And, also, can you disclose the lease component? Is there a heavy component of leases here?
Yeah, there is. And I can, sorry, disclose it, but it has to happen with the prospectus. That's just legally, so that will come to you before the date of the listing. Your first question was, sorry, on?
Free cash flow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Levers up based on-
No, no, no, that's not the plan. So if you look at the free cash flow, the India acquisition is not part of free cash flow, right? That's just part of the financing, so that doesn't come in, but we do have the one-off cost, which therefore you started with the average of the past, and you take down the one-off cost to set it up. You take the additional CapEx, and then you're pretty much there, so it will be a bit of a dip in the first couple of years, given the separation costs that we have to incur, and then we will go up.
Good. More questions over there.
Thank you. Yeah, afternoon. Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank. Just on your out-of-home business, I think you said you've got about 4 million sq m.
Yep.
And it's, whatever, 40% of your business, so it's like, EUR 8.50 or something per square meter, which doesn't sound very much. What's the sort of spread of that? ... please, and where can you actually push that to? Because why should I, as a retailer, allocate space to you if you're gonna generate that per square meter when I could maybe generate more, by allocating to different categories, please? And maybe related to that, and Warren's question, was just do you expect the out-of-home business to grow more quickly than the rest of the group? Because it's obviously a depreciation to sales, along with your CapEx is at a higher rate than the group as a whole at the moment.
Yeah, so,
Thank you
... we believe when we have the right portfolio for the right outlets with the right assets, that this is a value creation opportunity for retailers. Interestingly, ice cream you don't sell every time you sell ice cream. You sell the ice cream business system, and at the end of the year, they look and say, "Okay, how much ice cream did we sell? How much margin did we make? How much money did I spend on electricity?" That's basically it, and for most retailers, this is a very, still a very, good game. It's actually more than just placing cabinets. Just placing cabinets... You know, I was in China a long time ago, and, you know, there was a period that we placed zillions of cabinets, and in the end, they were full with chickens. So you don't want to do that.
You need a system, and, you know, I hope that you saw what we are now trying to do in the digitalization of the whole cabinet system, which allows us to look very granular, outlet by outlet, where is it working, where is it not working? I believe it's still a big opportunity to extend distribution. You know, especially in places like India. I think we will end up with, you know, a very serious amount of extra cabinets in India, many D&E countries. I think the opportunities for the U.S. and Europe is different selling systems. I really like this vending idea, because it's just very difficult to find outlets where there is a man who is actually willing to do the transactional stuff.
They have disappeared, but there's still a lot of space for actually making ice cream available. You know, the return on cabinets is basically two to three years, basically on the location. So we are not constraining anything, but we want people to put a proper system in place. It's not like it's a sort of cabinets for free bonanza. You have a system. You can show us the opportunity. You have a framework around it. Capital, no constraint.
There's a lot of technology that goes into in terms of the choice of where we want to put cabinets. You know, through mobile phone data and all of the rest, we can really see the hot spots of where there is a population that wants ice cream, but we don't have cabinets, and based on that, we do the placement plans.
We had a real competitive challenge in China for a couple of years, because Unilever as a business believed that actually these cabinets was too much capital, too complex. There was Yili, Mengniu came into Indonesia, and they went to many outlets where we said, "Oh, too marginal, too marginal, we don't want it," and all of a sudden they had 40% market share in out of home, and now we need to compete them out again. When we would have been a little bit more logic in our capital allocation choices, we would have basically, you know, closed all the gaps ourselves. You know, you have the space. It's actually quite amazing. You know, when you go to all these places, and there is just, you have your two-meter, one-meter shelf space, it's yours.
Yeah, when, when your throughput is not good, something else might end up, but never a lot, and you control it. How many businesses have it? Yeah, Coke and Pepsi, they have their chillers, but it is, it's an enormous asset. You know, when you look at Mondelēz in India, they start putting chillers in their stores because it's a very good way to, to secure shelf space.
Any more questions from the room? Last questions, also looking at the time. Yeah.
The ice cream lover has a question.
Indeed. Well, sorry, it's going to be not very romantic question-
Uh
... but, so that, costs. So you had a lot of, I mean, the savings this year is quite elevated, and then you have unprecedented costs in terms of, raw mat and FX. So is that continuing in the second half of the year, and does that mean we have a bit of a benefit of your, savings that's kicking in next year? So basically trying to understand, the curve in terms of margin expansion, and can we as well understand how big are the TSA? Thank you.
How big in the sense of absolute amount?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's again something that is a piece of information that is between us and Unilever. We unfortunately cannot put that in the public space, but we will. Like I said, most important for the TSAs is to move out as quickly as possible, and there we have a very aggressive plan to move out. Regarding the cost savings, the biggest piece of the cost savings are this year and next year. You would have seen that in the chart that we have given. This year we were unfortunately impacted big time by the raw material price. You know, that-
Especially in the first half.
So the second half, we kind of lapped that, but the first half was incredibly big, and the fact that it didn't set us back more than 40 basis points just tells you that the rest of the operational plan is working extremely well. And we, from the prices that we see now, we don't expect that level of hit next year. Also, from the information that we have in terms of weather, crop preparation, et cetera, we don't believe that we will have a hit of that size next year. No.
Thanks. Are there... Oh!
One last from Fialko. Do we have a mic?
Okay, sure.
Thank you so much. I will be very, very short, and thank you so much for taking my question. You said that you don't see a reason why you could not reach a profitability level of one of the core competitors. If I'm not mistaken, it was 14.7%, last year. Structurally, it's slightly different businesses. They have exposure to private labels, slightly different-
Mm.
... geographical exposure, and a different share of licensing. Is there anything which is structurally different, apart from execution, et cetera, et cetera, which we should keep in mind when we think-
Yes
... about the direction and-
Maybe we give you two different angles to it. One is simply the footprint, right? You saw our footprint. We are, in the U.S., we are the number one, and in terms of profitability, you can see publicly available information, we are ahead. So that's a tick. If you look at Europe, we have double the market share, but they have then a private label, so you see that overall, in terms of sales, similar levels, but profitability for them is significantly elevated, and that's the gap we have to close. I think the one thing I'd like you to take away is the rest of the world, or AMEA, as we call it.
We have Wai-Fung mentioned it a few times, it's the fastest-growing and most profitable business, and our biggest competitor does not have that footprint. So fundamentally, from a footprint perspective, if we close the gap in Europe, there is no reason, over the longer term, why we should not be a structurally more profitable business.
Actually, we should be more profitable.
If there are no more questions from the room, I think we should give the floor to Peter for wrap-up-
Good
... because ice cream.
Thank you
... trucks are waiting for us.
Thank you.
You know, 18 months ago, Ian and Hein asked me, "Peter, would you be interested to do so?" And I said, "I'm not really sure. It's not a really good business. I like my home care stuff. It's, it's in momentum." But I took a month to look at the opportunity. I had some help of some friendly consultants who gave me a freebie, and it's actually much better than I thought 18 months ago. You don't often get a business with really good assets in a really good market that somehow is not gelling, and it was not gelling because the integration, operational integration with Unilever didn't really work, not in sales, not in, the supply chain.
There was so much money on the table in the first analysis, in our analysis that we do at this moment in time, and my dream was twofold: A, somebody needs to take this money off the table. It better be me. I put on my activist hat and said, "What would an activist do to unlock value in this business?" We created the plan, and we shared the plan with you. Not all our ambition, but the plan. The second thing I said to myself, "I'm in this business now for a really long time, in consumer goods. What is the sort of business where a 24-year-old Peter or Abhijit would love to work? Great people, entrepreneurial, growth-obsessed, creative, tech-forward, and a business with really decent values," because we come from a business with really decent values. We're putting this together.
I feel very privileged to work with an amazing group of people, and actually, everything we said that will come out is coming out. I'm going to put a large part of the Ter Kulve family wealth, it's not that much, but it's decent money, I'm going to put in this business, because I don't see a better opportunity to make my own, put my own money in, because I really trust that we and the team can get it, can get it out. I hope that we also created the picture for an interesting investment opportunity for you guys. You know, we really did our best to show as much as possible. And, you know, over the coming period, we will have more time to engage, and you'll get all our time for whatever questions that you have.
I first would like to thank my team. We're 18 months in. We have a lot of fun, but it is also really hard work. Thank you for putting this all together, Michelle, in the first place. And then I have to thank you, because you are here with this, you know, huge group. It's a huge commitment. Some people have flown in from far, and only for ice cream. You don't have to do that. So thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening to us. Thank you for all the constructive questions, and wish you a safe journey back, and stay in touch. Thank you.