Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Scandi Standard Interim Report for the Q3, 2023. My name is Seb, and I will be the operator for your call today. If you would like to ask a question on the call today, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad, or press star two if you would like to withdraw your question. I will now hand the floor to Jonas Tunestål, CEO, to begin. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Scandi Standard's results for Q3 2023. I'm Jonas Tunestål, CEO and Managing Director of Scandi Standard, and with me, I have Julia Lagerqvist, our CFO, and I'm pleased to have her by my side today, and I'm glad to report continued margins improvement and a strong cash flow in the Q3. Next slide, please. This is another step on our journey to improve our margins, and we have now recovered our earnings to historical numbers, and this allows me to turn focus from turnaround to long-term value creation. We see a 2% top line growth and 8% higher harvest volume, and it is encouraging demand in several markets. We have increased volumes in some markets, even though we still set earnings before growth.
We increased our adjusted EBIT with 16% and delivered an adjusted EBIT of SEK 130 million and a strong cash flow. The improvement was driven by a strong quarter in Ready-to-Cook, Ready-to-Eat, and Ingredients was however, weaker, as expected. The net interest-bearing debt was significantly reduced in the quarter due to the strong earnings, seasonal working capital release, and the divestment of Rokkedahl. Next slide, please. This slide shows our successful turnaround process, and we are proud to have recovered our margins after a tough period for Scandi Standard. I want to give credit to the organization for their resolute handling of our challenges over the past years. With recovered margins and a stronger balance sheet, we have a solid position for the next stage in our journey.
I look forward to sharing our thoughts on this, the 28th of November in our Capital Market Day. Next slide, please. This slide shows our input costs, and we have seen some reduction in our input prices during the last quarters, which we are increasingly benefiting from. Although we see calmer waters now, we, however, have to be prepared for the further volatility during the winter. We are encouraged to see demand increasing strongly in many of our markets in parallel with consumer spending is coming under pressure. Chicken require far less feed and resources compared to pork and cattle, and we're proud to offer high quality, affordable products to our clients.
Next slide, please. This one shows our strong basis for further profitable growth. There are strong macro factors that are supporting us, and I'm enthusiastic about the long-term opportunities in this industry. You can see in the left corner, we have a very strong historic growth in consumption and trends expected to continue, and they're driven by health trends, versatility, sustainability metrics, and not least in this environment, affordability. We move to next slide, please. This slide is to remind you on our strong market position in all our five whole markets, and the country is highly consolidated. These markets have large entry barriers, and they can individually be regarded as fairly closed markets due to the strong consumer preference for domestic produce. Due to our strong market position, our own supply decision had meaningful impact on the market balance, which has helped us in the recovery process from inflation.
We move into next slide. Here we look at the export prices, and they remain at high level. We have seen a slight increase of the prices in the quarter, and we are focused on building more solid export business with strategic international retail and food service customers. The aim is to be less exposed to the commodity market, which has and will have a positive impact on our export business. We're also focusing on broadening our export permits to the most attractive export markets in order to get more value out of every bird. We see a slight decrease in prices in the beginning of the Q4, though. Next slide, please. This slide shows reconciliation of our segments. We see a strong positive contribution in RTEC and a decline in RTE and others as expected, compared to Q3 2022.
W e want to remind you of the category other includes our ingredients business and our corporate costs. Move to the next slide, please. T hen we look into our ready-to-cook segments, and we have an increase in net sales of 7%, so we present an EBIT of SEK 97 million compared to SEK 34 million last year. I t is a strong improvement, driven by the turnaround measures and the increase in demand in several markets. We also see strong improvement in our animal welfare metrics, and they are mainly driven by Ireland, improved foot pad scores, and a 56% reduction of flock treated with antibiotics. We also have a strong focus on our LTI performance, and we continue our journey of improvement there. Next slide, please. On this slide, we look into the ready to cook over time.
We are now on a journey of a profitable volume growth in most of our countries, and as you can see in this slide, we've been able to recover our earnings in kilo per kilo. We see some downward adjustment in net sales per kilo, but that is reflecting lower input costs. We also see a normalization of ingredients earnings that will continue into Q4. So we are, through increased value upgrade, somewhat mitigating this trend, and that is a strong focus for us in the coming years to extract the value potential, and it will be, and will represent a substantial opportunity for us. Can we move into next slide. This slide just show you some of the investment we do to support improvement on our business.
On top of this, we're investing a lot in machines for better utilize all parts of the chicken, which will benefit our ingredients business in the future. Can we move into next slide. Then we go into Ready-to-Cook Denmark. A s you can see, it's another leap in the right direction. We are in the process of reversing an unsuccessful full implementation of slow-growing bird strategy, and we see that it will be normalized to Q4, Q1, and it is expecting continued sequential improvements, and we're gradually changing our product offer to be more aligned with the demand. We need to remember, compared to other countries, Denmark is more exposed to the export markets. To mitigate this, we are in the process of increasing the integration with our Ready-to-Eat business, which also will be made possible by the changeover to a high proportion conventional birds.
We expect to reach an optimal breed mix at year-end, 2023, and this will also be supported by a change in customer mix in our Ready-to-Eat business in France. Can we move into next slide, please. On this slide, you can see the channel development more in detail. Through these details, you can notice a strong increase in retail channel in the quarter, which was driven mainly by volume. We have been seeing a strong demand growth in some of our markets in the quarter, and that's particularly Ireland and Finland. We can move into next slide. Now we look into our Ready-to-Eat, and we see temporary reduced activity level. We have this, as mentioned last quarter, loss of breeder contract to continental Europe.
That was a high volume, low margin business, and it was phased out the first of July and the first of October. We see good traction in replacing lost business, and we are aiming for more diversified and profitable client portfolio. If we look into the EBIT in the quarter, it's SEK 32 million compared to SEK 17 million last year, and with further moderate of EBIT drop expected in Q4, but we have a really positive momentum, and it is expected to build and start in Q1 2024. We're also using this window of lower utilization in our Farre plants to upgrade machine and maintenance to meet the higher standards, and we're also preparing for our future expansion. When we look into our orders in quarter four, we see that we're filling up with new orders already. Next slide, please.
This slide shows the strong and even growth, and it's expected to continue. I'm not very concerned about recovery of recently lost volumes over the coming period. We have this historical strong growth and uneven demand, and we expect continuous growth over time. Growth in this segment comes in sequences, and trend drivers are particularly strong for convenience products, and it's typically two main types of business. It's the international breaded business, and it is the integrated local business. Our ready-to-eat business yields a significantly higher return on capital employed compared to ready-to-cook. After 40% growth in 2022, we are now expected to reduce the orders for breaded QSR products for some of our European market outside Nordic.
T he planned expansion of breaded business in France is still being prepared and can be initiated in a short notice when required. Move into next slide. H ere you can see it in figures. It is, of course, encouraging to see that Ready-to-Eat is growing in retail. However, development in food service channels declined in due to the reasons mentioned in the former slide. G rowth in this segment will be a priority for me in the coming years.
On short term, we will see the volume growth due to low sales market outside our home markets, but we are confident that we'll replace it with other more profitable orders in the coming year, and we're already slowly started up to fill it up with new orders, and we'll continue to do that for the coming periods. So Ready-to-Eat will be an important tool in developing our EBIT per kilo and increasing the value of our protein. Y ep, with that, I hand over to you, Julia, for a more deep dive in the financials.
Thank you, Jonas. If you go on to page 18, we come back to the overall P&L. As you've seen, the quarterly performance showed an improvement versus the previous year, with an EBITDA at SEK 248 million, and an EBITDA margin at 7.5%. There was a positive non-comparable item booked in the quarter related to the Rokkedahl divestment, and EBIT landed at SEK 139 million in Q3. The finance costs are increasing with the higher base rates, as we've seen in the previous quarters. This has been partly compensated by lower credit margin due to the lower leverage. All in all, the net income for the period landed at SEK 90 million, far above last year, and indicating an earnings per share of 1.16 SEK for the quarter.
Looking at the Feed Conversion Ratio or feed efficiency, this is measured as 1 kilo of feed needed for 1 kilo of live weight, and here, chicken has one of the lowest levels for animal proteins. In Q3, it was at 1.5 kilos, and it has been at this stable, low level in the last year. Coming to page 19, we look at our return measures. The return on capital employed was at 10.5% for the last 12 months. This is increased versus the previous low year. It is also an improvement versus the previous quarter, and we are on a continued positive trend, and we are now happy to report that we are back at historic levels. At the same time, our equity ratio has improved to 34.5%, versus 31.5% last year.
It is also an improvement versus Q2, and then mainly related to the reduced balance sheet due to the divestment of Rokkedahl and lower inventory. Moving to the next page, we have our cash flow overview. EBITDA, as I said, improving versus previous year. We also have an improvement in working capital, mainly driven by lower inventory. I will come back to this in the next pages. We are stepping up a bit in our investments, but we still see a strong operating cash flow similar to last year. Paid financing items are increasing, driven by the increased rates, base rates, as previously mentioned. T here is also negative timing effect driven by how payments fall between the quarters. The divestment of Rokkedahl Foods has had a large positive effect on our net debt, mainly due to lower leasing values.
In addition, there has been some changes to our leasing asset values and some currency effects. None of this had cash impact. A ll in all, our net interest and debt at the end of the quarter improved with close to 300 million SEK versus the previous period, and the leverage is now at 1.9. We're happy to say that we've come out of a tough period with a stronger balance sheet, which is giving us improved strategic flexibility going forward. On the next page, we have our working capital overview. Inventory is in line now with the same period as last year, and as mentioned, improving versus the previous quarter and the year end of 2022. This is a continued important focus area for us, and I will share some more details on the next slide.
Payables and receivables are increasing, mainly driven by the cost increases and increased sales on top of currency impact. This also impacts in other net working capital items, which is mainly other payables. Note that we have had some positive timing effects in the quarter, improving our working capital. This all leads us to a working capital of [SEK 90 to 100 million] in the quarter. H ence, a working capital to sales ratio of -0.8%. Our target level for working capital, if you exclude financing items, remains to be around 6%. We are currently somewhat below this at 5%. Looking then at our inventory levels on page 22, we have decreased in value in Q3, mainly driven by reduced inventory on Ready-to-Eat, in line with plan.
There's a positive mix effect in the inventory with less valuable items, and even if the volumes are stable versus the Q2, and the value is now close to in line with Q3 last year. We do have some positive seasonality effects driven by higher sales in the summer season, and we do expect some buildup in inventory in the coming quarter, as is the seasonal trend. I nventory, of course, remains a clear focus area going forward. A s always, we try to use flexibility in bird intake to balance the supply and demand. We will always work on optimizing the sales and operations planning to make sure we produce the right products. I n the end, we also use the export channel for surplus sales to not interfere unnecessarily with domestic pricing. On page 23, then you have our cash flow guidance.
Looking at our capital expenditures, we estimate for 2023 to be around SEK 340 million, which is SEK 311 million last year. The priorities are the RTE expansion in Norway and upgrades in Denmark, and also investing in efficiency, as Jonas was talking about. In addition, we have our ERP implementation on top of ongoing maintenance. Interest rate on bank financing is now at 5.5%, if annualized. T hen if we add the IFRS components of leasing, in addition, factoring and then the financing interest cost, the paid financing cost is estimated to be at around 8% of NIBD in Q4. In Q2, we paid dividend of 1.15 SEK per share, which was close in line to the policy of 60% of net earnings over time. We then look at our sustainability KPIs on page 24.
This is a fairly busy slide, but in the table on the left, you see our quarter three performance compared to last year and the targets. In the graph, you can see the performance per quarters. As we've already talked, LTI, the Lost Time Injuries, continues to improve. This quarter, 19% below last year's figures and on track to achieve the 2023 targets. Of course, improving health and safety practices at sites continue to be a key priority in the organization, and it's rewarding to see that actions are giving results. Use of antibiotics, as Jonas mentioned, is mainly driven by the Irish performance, as Nordics continue to be very close to zero. D uring the quarter, we have seen clear effects of the improvement measures in Ireland, and we are now below 5%.
This also means that we are on track to reach this year's antibiotic target. CO2 emissions are improving versus Q2, but we are above last year, and we continue to work to deliver on our targets. The work is ongoing to develop a detailed carbon transition plan, and several projects are in the pipeline. We are glad to report that our animal, key animal welfare indicator, the Foot Pad Score, is improving and also here is the result of focused work in Irish operations. We have had zero critical complaints here to date. This is, of course, a very good step towards delivering the ambitious targets of zero complaints for the full year of 2023. T he feed con, conversion or feed efficiency, as talked, is at a very stable level. W ith that, I hand back the word to Jonas.
Thank you, a nd on this slide, this one shows we are working on sharpening the strategy to develop the potential of Scandi Standard, and this one shows the main pillars of our strategy, but we'll talk more about this the 28th of November. If we move into next slide, we'll talk a little bit about our areas of large potential, and we see the match of domestic supply and demand. That is a super important thing for us to optimizing our business. We are five domestic countries with strong domestic value creation, so it's important for us to have the right S&OP process.
If we look into the value of the whole bird, we have talked about that earlier in this presentation. It is about climbing the poultry ladder for our way, and it is about taking more value out of each detail of our bird. Also the ready-to-eat potential, we talked about that before. When we're integrating ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat and actually able to upgrade our products, we see that we can take out more value. So these three are strong, important factors for us delivering our EBIT going forward. Then we look into our quality and production processes, and it is about yield and quality, so providing the right quality to the customer and taking out as much yield as possible in our production process.
H ere we have a lot of things to do and a lot of things to optimize, but I think that we have a good process to be improving that going forward. T hen, of course, being one Scandi Standard is important. We are five domestic countries, but being as one group when it comes to activities, as using best practice and using our current strength in our export business and finding big strategic clients, international clients, is important for being a group of Scandi Standard. So these are areas of large potential, and we will get back and talk, have a deep dive in that on the 28th on our Capital Market Day. So if we move to next slide and summarize it, we can see that we have further margin improvements in the quarter. We have strong demand growth and increase in profitability in our ready-to-cook segment.
We have a good traction in replacing the lost RTE business, and solid volumes and earnings is expected to automatically Q4 2023, and we see strong demand from existing and new clients. Our Ready-to-Cook improvements expected to compensate for further reduced RTE activity in Q4, and we need to remember that Q4 is seasonally weak due to Christmas season. We're really glad to, the 28th of November, present our Capital Market Day, so we can, shift from turnaround to long-term value creation focus. We also want to give you a deeper insight into the key drivers for growth and EBIT per kilo expansion, and we will also present the final, financial targets when they're decided. So, we see a strong margin improvement in the quarter, and, with that, we hand over for questions.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press star two. The first question comes from Daniel Schmidt, from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, Jonas and Julia. I hope you can hear me. Couple of questions from me then, and starting with Denmark, maybe, where you've taken big steps forward in this quarter. W hen you say that you are expecting to reach optimal breed mix by the end of 2023... is that implicitly, I think you also said that we should expect sequential improvements from here. Should we see that this this business will generate a positive EBIT in at the start of 2024? Is that a fair assumption?
So we're not guiding on the end of 2024. What we can say is that what we said, where we see sequential improvement, we need to keep in mind that our seasonal changes as well, so compared to the comparable quarters for the last year. W e are really proud of that. We see a good traction, and we're working on getting the right mix. A s we said before, we will have the right breed mix in quarter four and quarter one.
Okay. G iven where you are, basically, if you judge it from where you are on an EBIT basis, you're not that far off or break even in this quarter, if I'm not mistaken. I f you do consider some seasonal mix or changes in Q4 versus Q3, and at the same time, you're saying that you are moving forward, it's very hard to not get to the conclusion that this should be something that will generate an operating profit by the start of next year. Why is that hard to declare?
It's more-
What am I missing?
I don't think you need to do your conclusion, but what we see is that we are improving quarter by quarter, and we see that that will continue, and we need to compare it with the last quarter when we're saying that we are moving sequentially better.
Okay.
What it is, that not guide about results in 2024.
No, you see that you can't promise anything, of course, but you can have a clear opinion, I assume. I s there anything that has been exaggerated to the positive in this particular quarter that we need to, deduct going forward?
No, not in the adjusted EBIT. We have this sale of Rokkedahl in our ready to cook business, but not in the adjusted EBIT, not more than the seasonal effects.
Okay. Could you give any indication what the seasonal effect difference is between the quarters in the H2?
No, you can look at the historical numbers to judge, but what we're saying is that overall, we see always a seasonal effect for the increase in Q2, Q3, and then it's the Christmas period comes for Q4.
L ooking at Denmark, you don't see any difference in earnings, at least in the H2 last year or in H2 the year before, it's been the same?
Yeah, for Denmark in specific. I f you look into the overall, Denmark has been a special thing with the slow growing and the radical slow growing strategy. Now we are balancing that one, and it will be more normalized due to the rest of that.
Okay. I still don't get it. Anyway, jumping on then maybe to Ready-to-Eat, if you look at food service, which was, of course, weak, as you alluded to in connection with Q2. C ould you... Was it your, w as it right to believe that you're saying that we should see a further deceleration or a further decline of profitability in Q4 versus Q3, and then as we go into Q1, you'll start to see a recovery of profitability in Ready-to-Eat. Is that correct?
Yeah, that is correct. A moderate drop in Q4. I also want to mention here, it's important to mention that the drop was the first of October, and we're filling up with new orders already. I thought you would see that as you explained.
Okay. D o you feel confident that you will be able to replace what's been lost entirely as we get into 2024? Is that gradual progress through 2024 to get back to square one?
Yeah, we expect to replace it with new orders, and we're also saying that we think that we will see a more diverse customer mix and a customer mix with stronger margins. T hen, of course, the product mix will look a little bit different, but we are expecting during the coming periods in 2024 to fill up the volumes with new orders. W e are really confident that we see a strong underlying demand that is also shown in the slide before, where we can see a strong but uneven demand. So it goes into plateaus, and then goes a little bit back, and then it goes up again, and that is the logic out of this. W e're also preparing now in the period to be ready for further expansion when the order book is full again.
Okay. T he drop that we saw in Q3, is that entirely due to the loss of this contract, or is there any underlying weakness in the food service market? At the same time, you are saying that you're taking on a lot of new contracts, so maybe not, but just to be sure.
No, we don't see any weakness, and it's related to this loss of contract. W e also should be aware that we are putting the factory in the right balance and adjust the production capacity within this period. That's why you see the drop compared to net sales, and you just see a moderate drop in Q4. That's our expectation.
Okay. You also mentioned that the export prices had been rising again, but in looking into Q4, you saw a slight decrease in export prices. Is that meaningful or is it, as you say, slight?
It's slight. W e also, as I started saying in the presentation, we see stable export prices, and of course, it's also a little bit volatility between the periods, but we don't see that much decrease in quarter four. We're also taking a lot of new orders from strategic clients, so we're moving away more and more from the commodity exposure.
Okay. Good, and just, nitty-gritty one. On page four, where you post feed price, packaging, and energy, a bit surprised that feed prices are not down more, and that energy prices are looking to be up, in Q4, versus the index that you had in Q3. I don't know if this is r elating to Swedish, SE3 spot prices, and to my knowledge, they have continued to go down.
It's related to spot prices, and the spot prices are a little bit increasing in this. Actually, I'm looking at yearly, but to-
They are actually not. They're actually further decreasing-
Yeah
So far this year, this quarter.
We do expect for Q4 with the colder weather. I mean, because this index is comparing versus a Full Year of 2021, right? So it is, it's a seasonal effect that you see in energy prices.
Yeah, but the seasonal effect is actually not the, it's actually further down versus Q3, if you look at Sweden. So that has to be a forecast and not a spot price.
Yeah, it's a forecast based on our internal analysis.
Yeah, but it says spot price. So anyway, doesn't matter.
Okay.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Christian Nordby from Kepler. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello, guys. So I have a question regarding the ex-export price development. It's how sensitive is the ready to cook Denmark to changes in the export price? I mean, in going forward, because now you're basically breakeven, and the export price index was 144. If, for example, export price is 130, how significant is that for the Denmark business?
It is more, Denmark is more exposed to... but with an increased integration with our RTE business in France, it will be less exposed and also more strategic client that is and that have a less volatile market price. So it will be less exposed due to historical compared to historical.
Mm-hmm. Right. Jonas-
Julia is taking over.
Sorry, Jonas, unfortunately, have to step out to take an interview. We have a bit of a busy schedule today, so I will try to answer any remaining questions as well. D id you capture his answer there correctly?
Yeah, but for example, if you look at Q2, -SEK 27 million in Denmark, and then in Q4, Q3, -SEK 4 million, and then the export price is from SEK 135 to SEK 144. How much of that increase is due to the export prices and how much is internal?
I would say it's marginal impact of the export prices in this case. It's mainly the internal work and the shift to have a better balance between the slow-growing and the conventional birds that has led to the improvement.
Thank you. T hen my last question, how long term are the new ready-to-eat contracts for ready products? Are they, like, monthly contracts or two-year contracts, or how stable are they?
I don't have the complete overview, but i t's more of a one-year contract, I would say, where you're going to, so that's short.
All right. Thank you.
You're welcome.
If there are any further questions on the call, please press star one on your telephone keypad now. We have no further questions, so I will hand the call back to you, Julia.
Thank you so much. Apologies for Jonas' quick departure here, but I thank you for attending today, and wish you all the best for the rest of the day. Thank you.