Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Barry Callebaut's Three-Month Key Sales Figures Conference Call For 2024-2025. I'm Sophie Lang, Head of Investor Relations, and today's meeting will be hosted by our CEO, Peter Feld, and our CFO, Peter Vanneste. This is our first time doing a Q1 Conference Call, and we'll have a presentation followed by a short Q&A session for analysts and investors. I'd like to remind you that today's session is focused on our volume and sales update, and we will keep the Q&A session focused on discussion of those key figures. Finally, please limit yourself to no more than two questions in the Q&A session. Before we start, please take note of the disclaimer on slide two, and I would also like to inform you that the webcast and conference call is being recorded. With that, I hand you over to our CEO, Peter Feld.
Thank you, Sophie. Good morning, everybody, also from my side. The current disruption creates significant opportunities for Barry Callebaut to win in the market and emerge far stronger. We're here clearly to play to win. It also reinforces the rationale for Barry Callebaut's Next Level investment, which is future-proofing our business and will be creating a far-improved customer experience, better value, service, sustainability, and quality for our customers. When we spoke to you at our fiscal full-year results early November, we had said that we expect a soft start into the fiscal year driven by the spring price increases that we saw in the cacao market and the bean market. Since then, we've seen a new major acceleration in excess of 70% in cacao bean prices, which obviously creates a further impact and disruption on market pricing and demand.
In this environment, our volumes declined down 2.7% in quarter one, in line with the market, which was down - 2.6%, mainly impacted by customer retail price negotiation, delayed orders, and a bit of SKU rationalization, as we guided to in the November discussion. When it comes to the full-year 2024-2025 outlook, we are confirming our double-digit EBIT, recurring growth, and constant currency. At the same time, given the impact of future market volatility, we lowered our volume guidance to low single-digit decrease. In light of the bean price explosion, which was clearly accelerated by hedge fund activity, we have secured additional liquidity, including the recent Swiss bond with CHF 300 million.
We are also planning additional actions to increase returns on the higher capital base. While we welcome recent interventions from the ICE, the dominant markets, we do think that we will be in a more volatile environment for longer.
In terms of crop, overall supply is expected to be well ahead of 2023-2024 but still below the year before that. Given that at the same time we expect to see short-term demand softness from higher prices, we're expecting a slight surplus in the bean market in 2024-2025. As said, the current environment underpins our next-level investment strategy. In quarter one, we again made further relevant progress on implementing BC Next Level, including the important completion of all social plans in Belgium, progress in our negotiation regarding our site closure in Intra, Italy, the launch of our new R&D headquarter for compounds in Singapore, progress on establishing our end-to-end planning excellence, and further relevant improvements regarding our quality systems and culture. With that, let me hand over to Peter, our CFO.
Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. Given this bean price development since the start of the fiscal year, the industry has seen a further impact on working capital requirements. We've therefore secured additional liquidity to address this, in addition to the financing actions we took already proactively last year, specifically a successful Swiss bond launch of CHF 300 million last week, a EUR 1 billion bridge term loan, and an additional revolving credit facility of EUR 620 million. Now, given the higher level of working capital that our entire industry is now working with, we see it as extremely important that we act to drive returns on the higher capital base that we now have. Specifically, we're planning on how we can adapt our pricing and commercial strategies, and we hope to be able to update you on our plans here in more detail in a few months.
Similarly, we're also looking at how we can adjust and optimize the long inventory cycle we have, and of course, we will also benefit from the EBIT and cash step-up that comes from our BC Next Level actions as already announced. Now, what we're seeing in the market at the moment is a short-term pressure on demand, with a deterioration in the most recent Nielsen data to - 2.6%. Compare that to a - 1% over the past year. This decrease comes as customers increase their prices to retailers by about 10% year over year, in relation, of course, to the cacao bean price acceleration we saw several months ago. Mainstream players came under most volume pressure, while premium brands gained share. The recent bean price spike means that further pricing will be taken in the chocolate market.
With that, customer retailer negotiations have sometimes been challenging, which in some cases resulted in products temporarily unavailable on the shelf, meaning consumers could not purchase them. In some cases also, there has been some shift in promotion plans to temporarily focus on non-chocolate categories. The other important trends we've seen is customers delaying ordering from us in anticipation of lower prices. But importantly, everything I just talked about is short-term. Mid and long-term, we are as confident as ever in the attractive growth opportunities for the resilient chocolate category and to resume the growth, we've seen over many decades driven by emerging markets, increased chocolate applications, and demand for innovation and specialties.
Now, going into the quarter one results in more detail with volume growth by product group, you see that in our largest segment, Food Manufacturers, customer retailer pricing negotiations, some short-term consumer reaction to higher prices, and SKU rationalization impacted growth. As I also just mentioned, customers have been delaying orders, which has a knock-on impact. Gourmet has seen a small volume decrease impacted by two factors. Firstly, product availability in North America was somewhat limited due to prioritization following the Mexico quality intervention, and secondly, the effects of our next level SKU rationalization as we anticipated. We reached the final stages of this important SKU reduction project, and that also played a role on this category, particularly in Western Europe. Switching to Global Cocoa, the demand for cocoa powder remained robust, and the business was able to capture some customer opportunities.
Cocoa liquor continued to be impacted by the supply constraint environment that we're all operating in. Now, looking at chocolate regions, volume development in Western Europe was partly impacted by the high base of comparison with a large one-off contract in the prior year same quarter. Excluding this, the decrease was more in line with the declining markets impacted here by customer retailer negotiations and the effect of SKU rationalization, as I talked about in general terms before. Central and Eastern Europe has seen negative growth given lower volumes for large global and regional food manufacturer customers, especially in Turkey. Volume in North America has decreased by much less than the overall market contraction. So while we've seen weak consumer demands impacting food manufacturers in the regions, our regional accounts have performed well. Latin America saw strong volume growth at 13.2% up.
Brazil was the key contributor to this growth, with particularly strong momentum in gourmet. And volume growth in Asia, Middle East, and Africa was plus 6.4%, again also here well ahead of a declining market. Growth is actually double-digits when you exclude Greater China, as Greater China remains challenged due to the overall economic slowdown, which puts pressure on large food manufacturers in several categories. The cocoa bean price acceleration since the start of our fiscal year is creating a further temporary impact on market pricing and market demand. And in that context, we have revised our sales volume guidance for this fiscal year, which is now expected to see a low single-digit decrease. At the same time, we reiterate guidance for double-digit EBIT growth on a recurring basis in constant currency. And on that note, I will hand back over to Peter to conclude. Thank you, Peter.
While we focus with Barry Callebaut on the short-term operational priorities and delivery of our next-level investment program in the current environment, we see significant opportunities to unlock sustainable, profitable growth and value creation in the future. Midterm and long-term, we are as confident as ever in the attractive growth opportunities for the resilient chocolate solutions category driven by emerging markets, increased chocolate applications, and demand for innovation and specialties. The current environment underpins our strategy for Barry Callebaut, and while we clearly see some disruption right now, we are playing to win and setting BC up well for the future. That concludes our presentation, and we will now move to the Q&A session. I'll hand back to the moderator.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our first question for today comes from Alex Sloane of Barclays, please. Alex, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, morning all. Thanks for taking the questions. I've got two, please. The first one just on the guidance. Could you give some context on what market volume you're assuming in your updated guidance of low single-digit declining volumes for Barry? And on the unchanged EBIT guide, is there any phasing we should be aware of there, H1 versus H2? And I guess the lack of any change on the EBIT guide, is that reflecting the fact that you had some buffer in the initial guide, or is this higher tailwind from finance cost passed through? So that's the first one on guidance. Second one on leverage. Have you got sufficient liquidity in terms of cash flow post the recent issuance if bean prices stay where they are today?
Could you give us an update on where you see free cash flow for the year if bean prices stay where they are? Thanks.
That was my question. Thank you very much, Alex. Let me start off maybe, Peter, if that's okay. Just on your question, Alex, on market volume expectations, at this moment, obviously, we're literally two months after the explosion of the bean price that started in the beginning of November. And obviously, the entire market is looking at that and starting to appreciate that that will result in further price increases to consumers that will have to be taken at one point in time. So we do think that Barry Callebaut is setting ourselves up well for gaining more market share going into this environment. That's the play that we have said we want to aim at. But we obviously have to cycle through these increases that have occurred in the beginning of November lasting until today. Yeah.
Maybe shifting over to the second piece of your guidance question on EBIT. So we reiterate double-digit EBIT growth for the full year as we have guided in the beginning of the year already. Obviously, to your question, there's a few moving parts within that. We have adjusted our volume guidance, as you know, which of course has a knock-on effect also on the EBIT side. So that's one evolution, of course. We do see within that context, as I mentioned, customer orders delayed as they wait for better prices. The cost savings on the BC Next Level, we are on track.
And as we said all the time already, they are a bit more H2 focused than they are H1, among other, and especially also because we finished now almost all of the social dialogues, especially the very big one in Belgium, which we're now executing at full speed and pace. So that is obviously a factor that is materializing, but especially in H2. And for sure also, there's likely to be an effect also on the interest side because with the increasing bean price, working capital requirements are higher. We are adding additional liquidity, which basically, of course, also means that the cost of debt will be a bit higher, which will be another factor impacting the guidance that we made. So that's on the EBIT side. You asked about liquidity or I think the second part of your questions was on liquidity.
I mean, we have been adding, as I mentioned in the presentation, a number of additional liquidity elements with the last one, the Swiss Bond, CHF 300 million last week. We obviously will do as we've done last year, right? We track and we are being proactive. We take a very prudent financial policy, especially in the current volatility that we see in the market. So we take a prudent policy on that and we track and monitor, and we'll be adding if and when needed. We will, but of course, again, given that the bean price has such a direct impact on, I would say, debt, but especially the value of our inventories, because that's where it sits, we obviously will adjust as we go forward as per our prudent policy.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jon Cox of Kepler. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, guys. Thanks for this session. Yeah, just to come back to the free cash flow, you seem to maybe have dumped the question a little bit. If cocoa prices remain where they are, where do you see your free cash flow for the year? Maybe a different way to ask it is, is it as simple as looking at where the cocoa price for the spot market was at the end of August and then looking at where it is today, and then assuming every GBP 100 move in the cocoa price is adding 70-80 million to a negative working capital? That's the first question.
And then just added to that, on the sort of margin requirements and all of that type of stuff and the financing line this year, is that financing line this year likely to be closer to CHF 300 million versus the CHF 210-odd million we saw last year? Thank you.
Okay, thank you, Jon. I'll take that. I wasn't trying to dodge a question. I got a bit lost in the number of components on the previous question. Yes, free cash. Of course, I mean, as you mentioned, we see a very direct and immediate impact on free cash and debt that we need based on the bean price. You know the dynamics, right? There's margin calls immediately from the terminal market that we fulfill, and that means that we immediately see that impact even before it hits our inventory, which is why we are proactive and we go fast. Now, it's important. Again, I do want to reiterate that the impact we really see is an increase of the value of our inventory.
You've seen that last year, the total debt increase has been more than explained by the increased value of our inventories, the inventory of our beans, the inventory of our intermediate products, the inventory of our finished products. Now, given the increase that we've seen in the last weeks, obviously, we are more negative on our free cash flow outlook than we have been in the year-end closing in November. That's pretty obvious, especially also because this spike happened in the largest bean buying period, which is the main harvest period that we're now trailing out of. We're not guiding at this point. We're not reporting at this point, as you know, on free cash. We'll obviously come back a lot on that in the H2, in the H1 reporting.
A lot, of course, will be defined, especially for H2, on how the bean price will normalize over the next weeks. We do expect a normalization down, but again, this market is very unpredictable. We've seen a normalization in April. Let's see what happens now. That will determine for a long shot the actual cash outs and debts in H2. But you answered part of your question yourself. I mean, I think it's indeed very practical to refer back to the rule of thumb to have an idea already right now. You mentioned this 70-80 million rule of thumb. It's not that simple, but it gives a good indication. There's initial margins as well. On top of that, we will be making some benefits on next level capital benefits as well.
But of course, at these kind of shifts of the bean price, that's a very dominant factor in how our debt and free cash evolves. And then you had the.
Okay.
And then you had a second question.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Margin requirements.
Yeah, margin requirements and financing costs, right? You were asking.
Yeah.
Yeah. You will remember that in November, we said we expect about CHF 230 million net interest costs, which would be about CHF 50 million higher than what we've seen last year. So CHF 50 million increase of these interest costs. We will, again, we have some outlooks and forecasts. We're not going to elaborate on this in this volume debriefing right now, but it's reasonable to assume that it will be higher than previously communicated. How much higher, again, is going to depend on where the bean price is going to evolve, especially for the second half of the year, of course. But yes, you can safely assume there's going to be a higher number than the CHF 50 million that we have communicated, the CHF 50 million increase that we have communicated in November. Okay.
Just to add, if the cocoa prices stay where they are, do you have sufficient financing now that everything you've done, or do you need to come back and maybe issue more bonds or go back to the banks? That's the first question. Second one, actually, just more on operations. You seem to allude to more savings coming through than you've announced of the 250 and three-quarters goes to the bottom line. You seem to be saying you're looking for more. Can you give us some indication on that as well?
Okay. The first part, liquidity. Yes. I mean, again, as I mentioned before, we are covering ourselves. We're taking a prudent policy to liquidity, and we're adding, as we have done with the €1 billion bridge that I talked about, the CHF 300 million Swiss bonds, increasing our RCF, all of that in the course of the first quarter. We continue to monitor bean prices as they move. And as per that policy, yes, it could be. But again, it depends on the bean price evolution. It could be that we address other sources as well. But at this point, I'm not going to comment more on that apart from that we will be proactive in doing so when we see the need.
For BC Next Level, we continue to commit to the numbers that we have given to you. 250 million of that, 80% to the bottom line, 75% to the bottom line, 80% realized by the end of this fiscal year. We do see, and that's what you probably referred to, John, we do see opportunities through the end-to-end supply chain setup that we're now creating for the first time in the company to further improve on our data inventory health. That becomes obvious, and we will communicate when it is possible. But we're not changing the commitments we currently have. The same is true for savings and synergies that are result of the digitization of the company that we also have in discussion. But again, I mean, we're not changing here the program on the next level commitments that we've given you earlier.
Okay. Sorry, I'm just going to just quickly jump in for another bite of the cherry. Just in terms of more current trading, we obviously saw what happened in your Q1, which was to the end of November. We're almost two months into your second quarter. Has there been any discernible changes in the volume trends at all? Has that improved, or is it still a similar sort of weakness we're seeing?
Jon, I think the bean price increase carried through until the end of December, as you've seen. It's still going up and down as we speak. And obviously, the industry is carefully looking at that right now. We're in close discussions with our customers because we obviously have demand by consumers, but the retail discussions that they have, that Peter was talking about earlier in the results, carries on. And so we will continue to monitor that closely and adapt our strategies to that.
Okay, so basically, volume trends are the same in the last couple of months, minus 2.7%?
We give you more in two months now when we have the H1 update.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, John.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Antoine Prévost of Bank of America. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. So, two on my side. Regarding the volume outlook, obviously a bit weaker on the back of the weaker markets. But maybe could you quantify the volume impact from the delayed orders and the SKU rationalization within your guidance? And also for the EBIT, you keep it unchanged, but the mix is now a bit worse with weaker chocolate and stronger cocoa. Could you maybe quantify the impact from that worsening mix on your EBIT guidance? Thank you.
Thank you, Antoine, for the questions. Let me start with volume. I mean, you pointed it right. I mean, we have delayed orders. We have guided to that already in our communication for the full year in the beginning of November as a result of the cocoa bean price increases and the resulting discussions that our customers have with their customers, i.e., the retailers. That obviously cascaded through as we saw it. In addition to that, there's indeed delayed covering with customers given the new bean price increase in November and in December. The SKU rationalization is something we've planned for since quite a while.
That mainly impacted also Europe, albeit there was a very high comparative in Western Europe in last year because we had one customer in Italy that we actually stepped in as they had their factory completely flooded, and we actually helped them through that period as we have communicated also in the full year results. So that's maybe the comments on the volume side.
Then we had, I think, a mixed question linked then to its profitability. I mean, actually, we still have a positive mix effect as we have in our business because Gourmet and specialties are both above average in terms of versus the -2.7% that we have been growing, sorry, going down year on year in the quarter. Those two categories are above that. That's why we still have an additive mix effect from that.
Thank you. And maybe just to follow up on that, I mean, on the gourmet, your expectations for the coming quarters? I mean, truthfully, we have fairly tough comps. I mean, what will be your expectations for the remainder of the year on gourmet volume, sorry?
We continue to believe very strongly in the underlying momentum that we're generating in Gourmet because of the several interventions that we do in terms of strategically assessing, readdressing the distribution network, our branding strategy. We have regional, sorry, local general managers really focusing on that now, as we discussed in previous talks with the general managers in France, general managers in Germany who have a key focus on this. So we had a few elements, as I mentioned, in North America, prioritization impacting availability and some SKU impact in Europe. We have cycled through that North American story. So we do expect a positive trend in the next quarters on Gourmet.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Joern Iffert from UBS. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.
Thanks and good morning. Two questions, please, if I may. And the first one would be on the harvest. Interesting to see that you expect a mild surplus. Bean price has been exploding. I think we have never seen such a kind of correlation in the last 15 to 20 years, if I remember correctly. So what do you think is really the market expectations when you talk to your customers, etc., when you take all things together, what the bean price is doing over the next three to six months? Because when there's really a surplus and demand is coming down, it should become more balanced. But you also said that you expect an ongoing volatile environment. So maybe if you share some more thoughts on what is behind this would be great.
Yeah, Joern, thank you very much for the question. Look, I mean, what we see in the terminal markets still in this moment, and everything that we're looking at right now is against a very tiny volume in the terminal markets. I do think it's important for all of us to understand that. So when you then have hedge fund activity in the terminal market, that just creates incredible swings and incredible increases. You may have seen and noticed the ICE instructions that start to actually limit that and bring it back to normal. That just was announced in the beginning of January with impact on the 13th of January. We all hope that that will do the same trick as it did in May or in April, late April, beginning of May, when the same reaction from ICE actually course-corrected the price trend in a likewise empty volume situation.
The same thing is happening right now. So I don't think you can correlate the surplus in the market that may be seen through the current bean price in this environment. I think when you look back over the previous probably 20 years, Jörn, you will have always had significant surplus and volume in the terminal market, which is clearly not the case right now.
Maybe if I just adding on to that, we do believe that the price levels we have in the bean price right now are artificially oriented. We expect them to come down. If we look at what the press and the rumors, I mean, you said it, right? It's about balance in interpretation of supply and demand. We see a lot of maybe overemphasizing the supply side and underemphasizing a bit the short-term effect these kind of prices have on the demand side. And that's the dynamic that we see behind those prices.
Thanks. And then the second question, if I may, please, on outsourcing. Given that many customers are suffering from declining volumes, do you see a current insourcing trend, which could also impact your volume guidance to some extent versus your initial expectation in November? So yeah, some kind of outsourcing would be appreciated also.
Yeah. Jörn, we see some insourcing as natural with big customers that have the capacity available. That I would say is limited. We continue to have outsourcing discussions with people around the world where we see that under these circumstances, making cocoa and chocolate becomes more complicated for more people, which is the whole investment hypothesis that we actually put together for the BC Next Level investment program. So we believe there's a balanced situation with a short-term drawback maybe on insourcing.
Thanks, Steve.
Thank you, Andrew.
Thank you. Due to time, we'll take no further questions for today. So I'll hand back to Peter Feld for any further remarks.
Let me just thank you all for the questions that you've asked and participating in our presentation today. With that, thank you very much, and I'm handing back to the moderator.
Thank you all for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your lines.