Hello, welcome to the Scandi Standard interim report for the fourth quarter 2022 call. My name is Lauren, and I will be coordinating your call today. There'll be an opportunity for questions at the end of the presentation. If you would like to ask a question, then please dial into the conference call and press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Jonas Tunestål, CEO, to begin. Jonas, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Scandi Standard's results for Q4 2022. I'm Jonas Tunestål, CEO and Managing Director of Scandi Standard. With me, I have Julia Lagerqvist, our CFO. I'm pleased to have her by my side today to report a strong result in a challenging market. Next slide, please. During 2022, we have demonstrated ability to counter the ongoing strong inflation together with our suppliers and customers. I'm very pleased to report another strong result in a challenging market. The result is driven by successful implementation of price increases, profitable growth in Ready-to-eat segment, and high export prices.
Although I'm encouraged by the strong recovery, there are still significant gaps to be closed in terms of pricing, and our results remain heavily impacted by the large losses in our Ready-to-cook plant in Denmark. Provided a successful recovery, we are in a position to relax the strict cash preservation measures imposed earlier. This allows us to embark on a substantial expansion of our most profitable business, Ready-to-eat. The Board has also decided to propose a dividend of SEK 1.15 to this year's AGM. Although most costs are now stabilizing, we have contingency plans in place to forcefully counter further turbulence in our markets. Next slide, please. Over the years, Scandi Standard has been generating substantial organic growth with stable EBIT margin of around 4% and 10% return on capital employed.
In the second half 2021 and in Q1 2022, we experienced a significant drop in margins, mainly due to the lead time in obtaining compensation for high cost inflation and low export prices. From the second quarter 2022, we have largely managed to compensate inflation through price increases and profitable growth in our Ready-to-eat segment and high export prices. There are still significant gaps to be closed, costs are increasing into the first half of 2023. Next slide, please. When you look into this slide, major cost components as feed prices and energy and et cetera are leveling off even though the risk is still on. We will not see the full cost effect of an eventual cost reduction in the coming period due to hedges.
Chicken is well-positioned, even though the current prices meeting thresholds in the market, mainly due to oversupply from other proteins. Next slide, please. On this slide, I want to remind you of our leading positions in domesticated markets. We have been able to compensate inflation, mainly for price increases, supported by reduced throughput, and we expect the throughput still to be low during the coming quarters, even though it will differ from market to market. When other proteins are more in balance, Scandi Standard is prepared to increase raw material supply again. Next slide, please. Looking into export prices in this slide, we have seen continued increase in export prices within the quarter.
We think that we'll see more stable price levels into Q1, We also see that our efforts to build more solid export business within European and Southeast Asian retail and food service customers starting to yield results. We have the new regionalized export restriction agreement related to bird flu that also has lowered our risk in the export business. Next slide, please. This table shows the reconciliation of our segments. We see a positive contribution from all areas compared to Q4 2021, The category Other includes our Ingredients business and our corporate costs. We can note that EBIT for Q4 2021 includes a non-comparable income of SEK 26 million linked to an acquisition purchase price agreement. Next slide, please. When we look into Ready-to-cook, we see strong improvement in our profitability.
We have 21% increase in net sales and an EBIT of SEK 31 million compared to minus SEK 32 million last year. We also see good improvement in our LTI performance in all sites during 2022, but we still see large room for improvement. As noted in previous quarters, we have taken measures to address temporary increase in our biological indicators in Ireland, and we start to see improvements in the fourth quarter. Next slide, please. This slide shows that EBIT in Ready-to-cook is still lagging our historical performance. The performance is partly offset by strong performance in our Ingredients business. This business refines parts of our birds not applicable for direct consumption into mainly pet food and biogas. The earning increase is driven by strong price increase in this market.
Taking this into account, the combined business is still lagging historical performance, underlying the requirement to close outstanding gaps. When you look at the right side in tables, you see that these tables shows the combined continuous improvement we make in this part of the business. Next slide, please. As you know, we have realized large losses for a long time in our Ready-to-cook business in Denmark. The business has recently been further challenged by limited demand for premium products in the Danish markets. Our retail clients are reacting to this by largely abandoning high ambitions and meeting the changed demand by importing low-end products from Eastern Europe. In the absence of hard commitments behind the radical move into this segment, we have no alternative to selling the high-end products for prices largely reflecting those of conventional.
Thanks to a strong export business, we are partly compensated for this development. Naturally, the situation for this business is unsatisfactory, and we have hence implemented changes gradually taking effect from the second quarter of 2023. Most notably, we are adapting the consumer preferences by shifting towards higher proportion of conventional birds. This will also allow us to commence a higher degree of integration with our Ready-to-eat business, replacing volumes from external vendors. In parallel with the incremental improvements on the way, we are working actively to identify further measures to accelerate the turnaround. Next slide, please. On this slide, you can see the channel development more in detail. Through these details, you can notice the strong increase in food service channel in the quarter, which is driven by both price and volume.
We see somewhat slow development in retail, which is due to the price elasticity in this channel. Next slide, please. Now we move into Ready-to-eat, we see a significant and profitable growth in the Ready-to-eat business. 39% increase in net sales at stable volumes, an EBIT of SEK 53 million compared to last year of SEK 32 million. Ready-to-eat is by far the most profitable segment in Scandi Standard, we have now started to expand our largest plant. This investment will pave the way for capacity increase of 25% in this segment. Next slide, please. On this slide here, you can see examples of our Ready-to-eat products in retail. Worth to mention is that food service is our biggest sales channel in this segment. We move on further to the next slide. Here you can see it in figures.
It is of course, very encouraging to see that Ready-to-eat is growing and outperforming pre-pandemic sales. The development is driven by increased sales in food service channel. During the quarter, we also see that RTE, Ready-to-eat, is growing in the retail segment. Growth in this segment will be a priority for me in the coming years. Ready-to-eat will be an important tool on developing EBIT per kilo, i.e., increasing the value of our protein. With that, I hand over to Julia for a more deep dive in our financials. Next slide, please.
Thank you, Jonas. If we then move to page 16, we come back to the overall P&L. As you've seen, the quarter performance showed a clear improvement versus the previous year with an EBITDA at SEK 202 million and an EBITDA margin of 6.6%. There were no non-comparable items booked in the quarter and also the entire year of 2022, and the EBIT in the quarter landed at SEK 99 million. Finance costs are increasing. This is driven by higher base rates and also a temporary increase in margins linked to the new financing deal we have in place. All in all, the net income for the period landed at SEK 55 million, far above last year, indicating an EPS of SEK 0.86 for the quarter and SEK 2.02 for the year.
Looking at feed conversion ratio or feed efficiency, this is measured as the kilo feed needed for 1 kg live weight. Here, chicken has one of the lowest levels of animal proteins. In the quarter, we landed at 1.51 kg. This has been quite stable throughout the year and slightly improving versus last year. For the full year, we landed at 1.5, which is in line with our targets. Coming to the next page 17, we look at our return measures. The return on capital employed was at 6.7% for the last 12 months. A slight increase versus previous years and also an improvement versus the previous quarter. We are on a positive trend. Looking at the annualized return based on the Q4 results, the return on capital employed would have been above 9%.
Same time, our equity ratio has improved to 33.5%. This mainly related to retained earnings and also exchange rate differences related to translation of our foreign operations. Moving on to the next page, we have our cash flow overview. We have in the quarter relaxed our cash preservation measures. We have faced enlarged investments as per our plan to ramp up after a period of lower level of investment. We also have a large increase in working capital in the quarter. I will come back to this in the next pages. Paid financing items are also increasing, driven by the increased base rates, as previously mentioned. All in all, our net interest-bearing debt for the year ended at a similar level as the year end 2021. Coming to page 19, you have our overview of working capital.
The inventory has increased versus the same period last year and versus last quarter. This is an important focus area, of course, and I will share some details on the next slide. Payables and receivables both increased versus last year, driven by the cost and price increases as would be expected. We have also early in the year canceled some of our expensive factoring solutions. At the same time, we now also see the reverse effect of the positive timing effects and early payments that led to an exceptionally low working capital in Q3. All in all, this leads to a working capital to sales ratio of 0.2% in the quarter. Our target level is to be, excluding financing items, it remains to be around 6%. We are currently somewhat above this level.
Coming to the next slide, page 20, we look at our inventory values, which are increasing versus last year. Our volumes on inventory are actually down 6% versus the same quarter last year, and the value increase is mainly driven by cost increases. We normally see a seasonal increase in Q4, and in 2022, we also noted a fairly large Forex effect impacting the inventory value. We observe an increasing trend in the last quarters, and this is a clear focus area going forward. What we can do, we can use our flexibility in bird intake to balance the supply and demand. We also work on optimizing the sales and operations planning to make sure that we produce the right products. We use export channels for surplus sales to not interfere necessarily with our domestic pricing.
We continue to closely monitoring our inventory levels going forward, and we are ready to take forceful measures if needed. We do not speculate on our inventory as we know that the first loss is normally the least loss. Coming to page 21, you have our cash flow guidance. In CapEx for 2023, it's estimated to be around SEK 400 million versus the SEK 311 million we saw in 2022. Focus is on facilitating the further growth of Ready-to-eat, as Jonas has been talking about. We also have our ERP implementation on top of going maintenance. The paid interest level is estimated to be around 66.5%, and the blended tax rate is expected to be around 21%. We have, as previously reported, a new five-year financing in place since the mid Q2.
Finally, the dividend proposal from the Board to the AGM is at SEK 1.15 per share, which is close to in line with the policy of 60% of net earnings over time. Coming to page 22, we look at our sustainability KPIs. In the table to the left, you can see our 2022 performance compared to last year and the targets. As Jonas had previously mentioned, we are pleased to see that we have met our ambitious LTI target, which was to be below 25 in Q4. During 2022, we have seen improvements in all production sites here, and we will continue to focus on this every day. However, as reported in the quarters, we have unacceptably high figures on our main animal welfare indicators, the foot pad score, and also use of antibiotics. This is mainly driven by a decline in the Irish performance.
We have added group resources to address these issues, and we have seen some improvement in Q4 compared to the previous quarters. The focus is to continue this work throughout 2023, and this is reflected in the 2023 targets. CO2 intensity has gone down, but this is driven by changes in reporting practices and together with lower volumes, the real intensity has gone up while absolute emissions have gone down. We have set new ambitious targets for next year. Coming to critical complaints, we have managed to reduce significantly versus last year, now down to 2 for the full year. The target is to be at 0, and this is also the target for next year. Feed efficiency or feed conversion, as previously mentioned, has been improved, and we target further improvement in the next year. Coming to page 23 and building on the existing work.
In Q4, the Scandi Standard Board of Directors approved our new sustainability goals, setting the direction for 2030. The goals address key sustainability topics and provide a clear framework of key performance indicators that will be used in all levels at the company. The six goals cover all our important sustainability areas, and over 20 KPIs have been identified to follow up on progress. We are now working to make these more operational by breaking them down on country level and defining clear action plans. This will be our new basis for reporting in 2024. With that, I hand back the word to Jonas.
Thank you. Next slide, please. This work is one aspect of building a future-proof company, the thing that Julia mentioned, one of the pillars in the strategic framework that we have developed to take Scandi Standard to the next level. We try to keep it simple and focused. If we go to next slide. I will sort of mention that six areas of large potential that we see. Of course, one of the thing is an efficient S&OP process, and match demand, domestic demand and supply. We've talked about that in the presentation, the importance of taking up and down volumes to actually be in balance in our domestic markets. That is a key factor for profitability in our business. Another long-term key factor for our business is to increase the value of our whole bird.
We will be focusing on utilizing as much value as possible from the whole bird. We try to move up, as we call it, the poultry ladder, move up to products, and this is in the Ready-to-eat segment, one of our most important potentials we have now. Increase focus on increasing our Ready-to-eat segment has a huge importance for us. All these six pillars, they are vital for our industry, and we will be action-oriented. Some things will take more time, some things will be ongoing work for continual improvements, and some things we can change more rapidly. With that said, we can move into next slide and summarize. In summary, I'm proud to report a strong result for the fourth quarter in a challenging market.
Although we still experience some cost increases into the first quarter, I'm confident in our ability to continue adapting to the challenging market through full focus on, one, obtaining full price compensation. Two, continual adjustment to secure the right inventory level. The third thing, gradual turnaround of the Ready-to-cook Denmark. We are also preparing to gradually regain volume once beef and pork markets are in balance. As we are moving into calmer waters, my focus will gradually shift towards increasing value per bird processed over the coming years, and I'm confident in the long-term margin potential for which the investment in Ready-to-eat expansion is the first tangible step. The Board has decided to recommend a dividend of SEK 1.15 per share to this year's AGM. With that summary, we end the presentation and open up for questions.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, then please dial into the conference call and press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. As a reminder, that is star followed by one to ask a question. Our first question comes from Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank. Daniel, please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, guys. Hope you can hear me. A couple of questions from me then. Maybe starting with the cost increases that you mention in the report and also on the last slide, and the lead time and the lag to sort of catch up with those when it comes to price increases. Do you see that that's different in this quarter compared to what you experienced during 2022? Have sort of costs accelerated a bit more in the start of 2023 than what was the pace during the past three quarters? How should we view that comment?
No, I think that you should look it up upon that some lagging of the price increases that we see. We have seen huge price increases, price increases in 2022, but now we see the commodities are stabilizing, and we can see that in wheat, and we can see that in oil and gas. There's an uncertainty, and there are some delay of those price increases. That's how we should look upon.
Yeah. I'm just sort of how should we sort of stack it up against the past quarters? Is that uncertainty and that delay a bit bigger now, or is it more the same?
We see it pretty much the same as before. We just want to mention that the price increases, they're not finished for the fourth quarter, even though we see that the commodities are stabilized.
Okay. If I get you right, you don't wanna signal that the challenge is even bigger now. You're just saying that the challenge is still there. Is that a right interpretation?
Yes.
Yeah. Okay, good. As you say, we have seen sort of feed prices stabilizing and I guess sort of packaging and energy, or especially energy, hasn't turned out as bad as we feared a couple of months ago. That should be a relief, but it will take some time to catch up. I guess you mentioned some hedging as well. Can you sort of give us some insight on that as well?
We don't want to go in details in the hedging, but you're doing a right conclusion in that manner that we have some hedges. Of course that delay, even though we see that the spot market is stabilized.
Is it fair if we don't see a further pickup in terms of input costs and they stay flat now for the coming months, do you feel that as we go into Q2 that the challenge will be less when it comes to price increases? If it's an equal challenge now compared to last year, will we have a better situation in a quarter's time?
If we see things, if we see the commodities will stay stabilized, then of course we'll see it gradually stabilizing in our effective input cost as well as.
Yeah. Is it fair to assume that that is another quarter out in all else equal?
Yeah, it will gradually fade out, of course, if you see a lower price.
All right. Just coming back to the capacity investments that you're doing in Ready-to-eat. I think you said 25% increase from 2024. That sort of of course signals a lot of confidence when it comes to that market and your position in that market. In terms of that capacity expansion, how fast do you believe that that's going to be filled up?
Yeah. We're that of course, due to what will happen in markets, but we are confident in the growth we have and we are planning for gradually fill it up throughout the coming years. But as you say, it's in That we need to state that it's an capacity increase in the January of 2024, and then we will gradually fill it up. That will be due to market conditions, of course. But we are confident in that we see a growth in that segment.
Should we then expect some sort of under absorption of fixed costs at the start of that year as you go live with that new capacity, and then gradually see a better sort of absorption as we go through 24? Is that sort of the normal procedure?
Yeah. You can see of course, slightly higher fixed costs in that. Yes.
Yeah. All right. Coming back to Denmark, even though sort of the losses in Ready-to-cook were unchanged quarter-over-quarter, it does sound like you are making changes now, and you're pushing through things that will have a better impact from the second quarter of 2023, as I understand it. Could you shed some more light on that?
We are as we said in report, we are facing headwinds in terms of the price focus and we have more slower growing birds with too high cost. Now we're changing the mix to actually be a part of to have the right mix for the consumer. That focus together with the focus on increasing our general efficiency, we will see improvements. We see improvements in Q4 as well, but we are facing headwind. Of course, that will mitigate that improvement. That is what we're trying to explain for Denmark.
We are actually doing big shifts in the bird intake, and how we will integrate it even more as we're explaining to the our own RTE factory. It's a big change that of course, it will take time and then quarter two, we will start to see effect in quarter two now.
The headwinds that you are facing, is that relating to energy when it comes to the Danish business?
It's related to more price focus, that we have a high proportion of slow-growing birds.
Yeah.
That is in higher.
Also sort of internally. Yeah.
Yeah. internally, of course.
Yeah
W e are, as everyone else, affected of high input costs.
Yeah.
But, but the significant.
All right. I think you gave some guidance in connection with Q3, how you think about the sort of the next quarter for this particular business. Would you be willing to do the same now?
I think that will retake what I said in this presentation. That we are now focusing on short-term things, and we have been focusing on short-term things in quarter four, and we will do that for the coming quarter as well. As we mentioned in the presentation, now we're taking some bigger shifts as well when it comes to bird intakes and when it comes to how we integrate our business. That will be an incremental improvements, but it will take time, and it will come gradually.
Do you think that's going to be enough to get this business back to break even, or it's going to be, does it have to be more, does it have to require more actions further on in 2023 to get there?
We will do the preferred actions to get this business up and running, and we think we are on a good journey.
I was just thinking. I think you also mentioned in the last slide, if I'm not mistaken, or some of that slide, that you're integrating it more with Ready-to-eat in Denmark. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is that indicating that this business is not going to be spun off?
It's about optimizing the raw material between our RTC business and our RTE business. We can purchase from external and we can purchase from ourselves, and then we need to have the right size for selling into our RTE business. That is change that can be made over time. We see impact for us if we can have an efficient supply chain between our RTC and our RTE business. That will not change our ability to take other decisions because we're buying external today.
Yeah. Okay. That's, that is interesting. All right. I think that was, maybe one last question on feed prices. You indicate that they are sort of flattening out, which we also can see in the wheat price. Anything sort of else in terms of external factors that have changed recently or, any indications, Sort of anything that's going to impact, externally as of late that has changed?
No, nothing more than at present. We know that it's still a volatile market and of course there's an uncertainty in terms of the feed price and so on. We have I think the latest time we have seen stabilize more and that's what we are looking for and planning for.
Maybe just one final question on your financial targets and, they are of course, the same when it comes to the ones that are related to the P&L. You do mention of course, or you do write again, they exceed 10% in EBITDA, which you've never been really close to, historically. Do you still think that is a relevant target?
We will now in the, in 2023, look into and review the financial targets for the future.
Yeah. You sort of stand by the fact that this company used to make 4% or above 4% EBIT margin, and you see no reason why you shouldn't get back to that level at least.
In fact, we have said that we have historically 4% margin and our focus has been on recovery on the EBIT. We're also looking into margin to recover the margin when the inflation is flattening out. That.
Thank you. As a reminder to ask any further questions, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypads. Our next question is from Christian Nordby, from Kepler Cheuvreux. Christian, please go ahead.
Yes, hello guys. I have a question regarding your conventional share increasing in Denmark from Q2 2023. Can you comment a bit on the levels we're talking about here? Is it that conventional share is at 30% and going to 32%, or is it that it's, for example, 30% and going to 60%? What are we talking?
We can't comment on the specific percent. We will see so the demand will match the supply. We will as we see it now, have a high proportion of conventional birds than we all mentioned.
What's the pace of this increase? Is it that by Q3 it's similar improvement in the pace as Q2 or Q4 similar? Is it that it goes quite rapidly better in Q2 and then stable from there?
That will be gradually into Q4 and of course there's some time lag in that when it comes to moving out and slow growing. We will look into, so we have the right mix between the birds and a more flexible way of handling this for the future.
As of now, you hope that by the end of 2023 you have sort of the ideal mix with conventional and slow growing share. Is that what you're saying?
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the EBIT losses in Ready-to-cook Denmark today, what does that improvement mean for that segment on an isolated basis? Would that alone put it into break even or positive EBIT levels, or is it other factors too that matches there?
Take the question once again.
Yeah. I've just said once you finally get to the state that you want to be in unconventional share in Ready-to-cook Denmark, is that alone enough to bring EBIT into positive territory for that segment, or do you need other measures as well?
There will be improvements in that. We can't comment on where it will end. Of course we will, we are confident in the way that we're going to move the Danish business and of course there's some, there's some time lag in our change. We will not get into specific quarters when things will happen. We are moving it, and we'll see improvement throughout the year.
Yeah, I'm just asking if that's alone enough to sort of help the segment or if that's the sort of by far the most important part or if there are other things as well that are very meaningful for Denmark?
If we look into our Danish business, we have our Ready-to-cook business, and we have our Ready-to-eat business that is on Scandi production. Looking into our competitive advantage of having an integrated value chain, I'm confident that we will move and improve our total business in RTC Denmark.
All right. On the 25% Ready-to-eat expansion, what does this mean for your EBIT potential in Ready-to-eat overall in 2024, 2025 relative to today, assuming normalized margins? Is it 25% higher as simple as that? Is it some other impacts that we should think about?
We can't comment on that specifics that in the future. We can say is that you can see our margins today and presented in our Q4 report. We're also saying that we are investing in increasing our RTE segment with 25%, and we will have gradually gain business gradually from this capacity increase. Of course, we will see in medium term that will increase the margins in Scandi Standard.
All right. Thank you.
We can't comment on specific so far in the future.
Thank you. We currently have no further questions, so I'll hand you back over to Jonas Tunestål for closing remarks.
Yeah. We thank everyone for listening in to our presentation. With that said, thank you very much.