Hello, everybody here in Kilchberg, and hello more than 100 participants online. Welcome to the full year result presentation of Lindt & Sprüngli 2025. I will walk you quickly through the highlights of 2025, and we'll have a deeper look at the regional performance, then I hand over to our CFO, Martin Hug. He will give us an explanation on the financial results and explain the progress that we made in sustainability. Then I will outline our growth agenda and the outlook for this year and for the years to come. Then we will open the floor for question and answers. We grew 12.4% last year. This was the strongest organic sales growth with the exception of the recovery after COVID. We achieved CHF 5.9 billion turnover.
We improved our EBIT slightly by 20 basis points to 16.4% or CHF 971 million. Our earnings per share increased by 8.5%. Our free cash flow was in line with our expectations, slightly lower than our long-term guidance at 7.5% due to the higher value of the inventories. We operated in a challenging environment. It's not a surprise for any one of you. The cocoa price volatility forced us for the last four years to increase our prices overall in the area of more than 40%. Geopolitical tensions had an impact on consumer sentiment. Global trade wars and tariffs also gave us a tough time to the calculations, and we saw a clear consumer behavior change.
Consumers had to tighten the belt, and consumer sentiment, as mentioned, was weak across the globe. We continued to ramp up our global expansion. We, as you know, we generate 87% of our sales in Europe and in North America, and we branch out to cover the white spots on the map. We opened branches in Bulgaria, signed a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, opened subsidiaries in UAE, in India, created a logistics hub in China to shorten the supply chain, create hubs for co-packing so that we are more flexible and can sell fresher products. We signed an agreement with a retail operator in Malaysia, and we will see results pretty soon there.
Our Global Retail division in general was again, once more, a growth engine of our company with 20.8% growth, mainly driven by comp store growth, so like-for-like growth in the existing stores, but also benefiting from the expansion and opening of 53 new stores. All together, our store network is now 621 stores globally. We opened not only more stores, but also premiumized and upgraded our stores. This means bigger stores in more prominent locations. The best examples were for sure the Piccadilly Circus store that we opened in March last year and in autumn in Vienna 500 square meter stores in the best location, Kärntner Straße 1 on two floors with very promising results.
As mentioned, we also enter into new countries with our retail division as a spearhead. With Dubai Style Chocolate, we were the first big chocolate company to react to a global social media hype. We really could prove the agility of our organization, and it resulted in the biggest innovation ever in our group, not only under Lindt, but you can see also Ghirardelli and also Russell Stover launched products with the Dubai-style recipe. Ghirardelli even launched a Dubai Hot Fudge Sundae, which is today the number one seller in our Ghirardelli's coffee stores. The story goes on. In this year, we extended the range already with different recipes, with dark and white recipes, and the latest launch is an extension of the city range Tokyo Style Chocolate with strawberry matcha.
Also, this started with very promising results, first in our retail stores and now also in the whole, in the grocery stores, in the wholesale. What it did to us, this Dubai-style chocolate, was a clear contribution to strengthening our brand equity. It made us more relevant with the Gen Z, so with the younger target group. We see it in our retail stores. We see it also when we analyze the consumption data. All together, it was not only incremental sales, but it was also a clear signal to the consumers that this is a dynamic brand and open to launch also very exotic recipes.
Coming to the regional performance, you see that 50% is generated in Europe, and we grew with 15.3% above our expectations in the most established markets with the highest market share. It makes us also confident that we certainly did not reach a plafond anywhere, but we can increase our market share also in well-established markets. When we come to North America, you remember that in the first half we had a very soft start last year with 3.5%, and we were pretty nervous even if we knew that we have strong plans for the H2. Then we grew double-digit in the H2. With 8.9% organic growth in North America, we clearly outperformed the market and gained market shares.
Rest of the world with 11.7% growth, slightly below our expectation. I will come to this later when we tackle the individual regions. When it comes to Europe, for the first time, we saw double-digit growth across all countries in Europe. You can see in our big countries, Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Switzerland, growth rates between 12%-15%, so this is really unprecedented. It also shows that the brands are well established. The price increase led to a relatively low price elasticity, and we could really translate these price increases into growth. We saw even higher growth rates in CE, Iberia, Austria, Nordic, Benelux, all between 20%-30%. Key growth drivers were on the one side, our dark tablets, Excellence tablets.
We saw growth rates significantly above the total growth rate that we enjoyed in Europe. We saw strong growth on all recipes that were centered around pistachio. We had Lindor pistachio balls, Lindor pistachio tablets. We have Excellence pistachio, and of course, we have the Dubai-style chocolate, and this mega trend around pistachio really boosted the sales of all products that offered pistachio recipes. Retail expansion. The biggest share of our retail division is also located in Europe. As mentioned here, not only the flagship stores, but also regular stores were opened and contributed to the strong growth in Europe. Coming to North America with 16.2%, we had an outstanding growth rate at Ghirardelli.
Ghirardelli benefited from a trend that people consume less out of home, more in home. The trend to baking in-home was beneficial for Ghirardelli as we are the number one for baking chips. We had growth rates above 30% in this baking category, and this resulted in a 16% growth for Ghirardelli. Lindt U.S.A., as mentioned, with a soft start. They had a very strong success with the Dubai-style chocolate in the H2, so they could catch up to 9.4%. Russell Stover, once more, unfortunately, a disappointing year. The price increase led to hefty discussions with retail partners, and they partly reduced the volumes for Valentine's Day, et cetera. It resulted in a 6% decline of sales in Russell Stover.
Canada, 8.8%, in line with expectations. Mexico, these were some one-time impacts of inventory valuations, et cetera. This is temporary, and we will see good result again in this year. Coming to the rest of the world, you can see we had problems with our distributor business. We indicated it already last year at the half-year presentation. The strong Swiss franc forced us. Distributors are we sell the products on a Swiss franc basis. This forced us to increase prices even above a group average, and many distributors were reluctant to implement these strong price increases, so we had long discussions in the first half. In the H2, we grew double-digit again, so I think we go with a strong momentum also into 2026.
Altogether, of course, this -2.2% dragged down the total growth rate of rest of the world. While all the other countries showed similar growth rates like in Europe, especially Japan and Brazil, where we have strong retail divisions, close to 20%. China also encouraging with the new setup in logistics at a 20% growth rate. South Africa, certainly a market with a low purchasing power, where we still were able, with our price increases, to grow 13%. Global travel retail, we had a very strong presence with Dubai-style chocolate in global travel retail, and we really saw it was a bestseller from Buenos Aires to India, everywhere where we offered it. Chile, this is from a very low base.
We opened six stores in Chile, and we have a plan to roll out to 20 stores like we have in many countries now in Latin America, as well as in Middle East and in Asia. This was my short browse through the highlights of 2025, and I hand over to Martin for an exploration on the financial results.
Thank you. Welcome as well from my side. Everybody here in Kilchberg. Welcome everybody online as well. As Berky said, we have more than 100 people online. Definitely looking forward to presenting to you the financial results. Just in a nutshell, 12.4% organic growth above our guidance of 9%-11%. I think good news there. From an EBIT margin perspective, we're also on guidance, actually. We guided for the lower end of 20-40 basis points, so we get up to 24 basis points and 16.4%. Free cash flow margin, I think we flagged to you guys that because of the higher inventory levels, we will not be at 10% this year. We came in at 7.5%, which is actually in line with our expectations.
Also good news here. After 11.6% last year. Earnings per share, we are at an all-time high of 3,164. I will show you also in one of my charts the five-year development on the earnings per share. Definitely this being one of the key highlights of today's financial presentation. Net debt. Despite the share buyback, we have still a healthy level of net debt. Net debt to EBITDA is at 0.84. We're right more or less in the middle between our target of 0.5-1. I think very strong set of numbers when we look at 2025.
Organic sales growth, when we even look a bit further back over the last five years, we grew 13%, 11%, 10%, 8%, and 12%, which gives an average of about 11%. Definitely very strong performance over the last five years and above our midterm guidance of 6%-8%. Sales in Swiss francs. Out of the five years, actually in four years, our Swiss franc growth was below the organic growth. The Swiss franc, as you know, strengthened in the last five years. Still, we achieved 8.2% growth in 2025, and we added about CHF 450 million to our top line in 2025. We increased our prices, so it was really a price-driven growth last year, 19%.
This actually led to a volume mix loss of 6.6%, which is ahead of our plan. When we did our price increase discussions one year ago or even one year and a half ago, we expected a more of a volume impact. I think that's an important takeaway. Internally, we are not surprised by this -6.6%. That's the minimum elasticity we actually expected. We even expected slightly more. Then from a Forex perspective, we have -4%. Segment information here. We saw the acceleration in Europe from 9.5% - 15.3% in 2025. North America coming in at 8.9%, as Adalbert has shown by subsidiary as well, and rest of the world growing double-digit in 2024 and also in 2025.
Despite the fact that the DIS business, the distributor business, which is a relatively large chunk of the rest of the world business, actually was down by 2%. We still grew double-digit in rest of the world, showing that we have a very healthy business in the key markets like Australia, Brazil, Japan, China and South Africa. I think a very interesting story is as well the difference between H1 and H2. While in Europe, H2 came in slightly lower than H1, which is not a surprise and which we flagged in July, that a 17.7% growth in Europe is not sustainable. We still came in at 13.6% in H2, which is, I think, still a very healthy growth, double-digit.
I think the big positive here is the big acceleration in North America, which is actually above our own expectations, right? We expected a very strong H2 in North America. We did not necessarily expect 12%. That's I think a key highlight for today. Also rest of the world. We also saw a very nice acceleration in the distributor business, but across the region there going from 7.8 to 14.5. If you just look at H2, I think it's actually good to see that we have quite a balanced growth rate of 12%-14.5% across all the segments. Now, moving on to the costs.
You know, you when I presented to you the price-volume mix, some of you may have thought, "Okay, why did they actually do 19% price increase? Did they not overdo it?" The clear answer here is no, because when you look at our material expenses as a percent of sales, we actually lost 270 basis points gross margin, gross profit margin, right? In reality, we were not able to offset the higher cocoa bean costs through our price increases. We lost 270 basis points on our gross profit margin, which is quite substantial. Looking maybe at a bit at the cocoa chart. I did not extend this chart back to 1975 or so, but between 1975 and 2023, not a lot happened in the big scheme, right?
It was pretty flat between GBP 1,700 per ton and one thousand nine hundred and fifty or 2,000 pounds per ton. Then the whole rollercoaster ride started, right? I mean, we have seen a massive price increase. No, no big news here. Of course, this was a difficult period to manage. I think it's also important to bear in mind when a market goes up as steeply as it did, the chocolate industry does not immediately increase prices, right? You kind of start little by little. It's all a bit delayed because you have typically a cocoa bean inventory. You have futures, you know, to cover your future deliveries that you get from your suppliers. The chocolate industry didn't actually do price increases for GBP 8,000, for example, right?
It was all a bit delayed. When you had the coverage, you obviously did not buy at $10,000, so it didn't need to do price increases for $10,000 or for $8,000. What does that mean? It actually means that when the market comes down and the cocoa market comes down, we don't have any. We get lots of questions. Oh, will you now immediately decrease prices? The answer is no, because if you are hedged, your cost base, your cost of goods remains stable for some time. Even if you wanted to, you don't actually have the opportunity to do that as long as you still want to improve your EBIT. I mean, the big question here is where do we go from here, right? With regards to the cocoa market.
We have seen an oversupply now, slight oversupply. We have a very good production, this current season, which started in October. At the same time, the chocolate demand is not so strong, right? It's negative, as you have seen in Nielsen. So we have a surplus of more or less 300,000 tons. So that's the reason why the market dropped substantially. But oftentimes these type of commodity markets, when they go up, they exaggerate. When they come down, they also exaggerate. So I would personally not be surprised if we did see again an increasing market in next months and also in the midterm because some of the structural issues, they are still here, right? We still have diseases in West Africa, swollen shoot disease, which means that the trees are less productive. We will see what happens with the demand.
I think the demand will actually also increase again. We will see a growing growth in volume, not only at Lindt, also in the overall market. Last but not least, we had three seasons, three cocoa seasons of shortages, of deficits, right? The global stock levels, they came down quite substantially. Even though we have now 300,000 surplus, it still means we have relatively low inventories of cocoa beans. Let's say that it's not solved. Not everything is solved. That's why actually the chocolate industry in the next few months, I'm not expecting massive price decreases because of the current uncertainty. In addition to that, we have now new costs that are coming in, right?
We have higher fuel costs, which drive up, of course, logistics costs, which drive up costs for containers across the globe, which drive up in the medium-term packaging material costs, et cetera. We have sustainability costs which are coming in for Science-Based Target for climate, et cetera, et cetera. It's not like that's actually nice that we have some relief on cocoa, but we will have other inflation coming around the corner. Don't necessarily expect a price decrease in the short term. Personnel expenses. As you saw, material expenses are actually up by 270 basis points, but our EBIT margin increased by more than 20 basis points, by 24 basis points. We achieved that actually through all the other costs, right? One of them being personnel expenses.
In the last five years, personnel expenses to sales came down from 21.5% - 19%. That's an improvement of 250 basis points over five years, and it's also an improvement of 50 basis points last year. I mean, of course, our wage increases were not in line with our Swiss franc growth of 8%, more than 8%. We got some efficiencies out of the factories. We have worked heavily on efficiency programs, so it's good to see that we got the benefit here. Operating expenses. A very important category in here is marketing. Actually, I can tell you that the overall marketing spend increased in absolute in 2025. This decrease here of CHF 50 million more or less is not coming from marketing, it's coming from all the other areas.
What are all the other areas? It's supply chain costs. We have heavily invested in improving our supply chain, especially in North America over the last 5+ years, so we can really see the benefits of that. We have costs in there like maintenance and repair. Of course, with the slightly lower volume, we have certain benefits there as well, and we also worked a lot with the factories on efficiency programs. We have other SG&A costs in there, such as sales force costs, et cetera. We also tried to be more efficient. We got almost 300 basis points out of here, even though marketing in absolute went up. Also good news. Then depreciation is more or less in line with 2024 at CHF 300 million.
That means we got some benefits here, also some operating leverage of 30 basis points from 5.4%- 5.1%. You know, over the medium term, we said that in the last five years, over the medium term, the depreciation in absolute will get closer to our CapEx. Our CapEx is currently CHF 330 million. This will be going up little by little, even though we will of course try to manage the percent of sales. Our EBIT came in at CHF 971 million, 16.4%. If you compare that with 2021, we increased it by more than 50%. We increased the margin by 90, 60, and now 20 basis points.
I think this is a very strong story in a very difficult environment, right, with massive cocoa inflation. It was not easy to manage to such a positive bottom line. We did that, as you have seen, through good cost management, actually not through price increases. Price increases, of course, helped that we don't even lose more gross profit margin. Without managing the costs extremely carefully and being more efficient, we would not have been able to increase our EBIT margin. A lot of this increase in EBIT margin over the last five years is coming actually from North America. I did not show this in this chart here, but in 2021, in North America, we had an EBIT margin of 7.7%.
We increased the EBIT margin over the last five years in North America from 7.7% - 13.7%, 600 basis points. It's something we have been communicating. We have communicated in here in this room, and in many also one-to-one meetings that we are planning to improve the EBIT margin in North America by 50-100 basis points per year. It's good that you actually see that we delivered. We got now to 13.7%. The journey will continue. We will continue to increase the profitability in North America over proportionally also in the next years because we are still below group average, and we are still way below Europe. In Europe, we're able to continue to successfully increase the EBIT margin as well.
In the rest of the world, we have invested heavily. I mean, we have invested in the supply chain in Brazil. We have invested in the supply chain in China, for example. We have a good setup now. We have opened new subsidiaries in Chile, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. That obviously has had an impact on the EBIT because if you have a new subsidiary, typically in the first couple of years, they do not create profit, but it's more like a cost center. It's not something that makes us unhappy, the fact that we are lower here. I think from here now we should actually see the benefits in the future, and those new subsidiaries and those new setups.
They will also generate increasingly net revenue, so we will see an improvement in our EBIT margin in the next years. EBITDA, +7.6%. I mentioned the ratio to our net debt. You saw net debt was close to CHF 1.1 billion. Here we are close to CHF 1.3 billion. That's why we have this kind of multiple of 0.84. This being one of the background informations, very important background, why we are launching a new share buyback, right? Because we have a very healthy balance sheet actually. The tax rate has been relatively uneventful. Let's say at least when you look at this chart here, it has been quite a challenge for the team to manage it, especially in 2023, we had quite some noise there with one-off benefits, et cetera.
If you look at just at the high level here, and you don't look at the background, we had a relatively stable tax rate of around 21%. We believe this will rather go up in the future, right? Because of the Swiss tax is going to be higher in the future. Also, some of the higher tax region be becoming more profitable like the U.S. We expect this ratio rather to go slightly up in the future. Net income, not that much to say, also up by around 8% last year. Good news. Capital expenditure, I mentioned and we mentioned in the past, we gave you a guidance of around 6% CapEx to sales.
In the last three years we were there or thereabout, right, we were at 5.8, five point eight and now 5.6. I think that's within expectations. I think also going forward, we'll be more or less at 6%. We are still investing. You know, we are investing in retail. I mean, we are opening more stores than ever. We have opened more than 50 stores, bigger stores. We invest heavily in infrastructure, such as new SAP systems. Of course, we are absolutely convinced that we'll grow volume in the future. We are volume story, right? At the end of the day, we want to be ready for the volume growth that is about to arrive.
We are building new wafer lines, a big and exciting new innovation that we'll roll out globally in 2027. We are investing in our business, as you can see. Free cash flow, I mentioned, or we mentioned earlier in July that we won't get to the medium term target of 10% average, right? Our guidance, 10% is not valid for each single year, but we're saying on average, we want to get to 10% over medium term. We have achieved that. On average in the last five years, we were at 10.3%. We had an outflow of CHF 320 million in the inventory because of the higher value of our inventory.
If you add that back, we would actually be at 760 more or less. It'd be way above the 10. This inventory value, you can just lose it once in your net working capital. Even if cocoa stayed high or had stayed high, this would not be an, again, an outflow out of our net working capital. We have rather the opportunity here in the future that we have actually inflow if the value of the inventory comes down. Therefore, we are positive about our future free cash flow that we'll hit the 10% in one or the other year, probably even above, slightly above. This is another reason why we are launching a share buyback, right?
The strong balance sheet, net debt to EBITDA, future cash flow that we can read well now, which will be double-digit, we believe, being a second reason. I'll give you some more reasons later. Earnings per share at CHF 3.164. Again, here, very positive performance comparing the last five years, right? +54% earnings per share. I think that's good development. I think especially the development from 2024 to 2025 is very positive that we have been able to manage positive earnings per share development, even though our, let's say, the cocoa cost went up, even though our material expenses went up and, even though we had to do 19% price increase. The net financial position, we don't need to go into details here.
We actually gave back more to the shareholder than we generated as free cash flow. We also had a CHF 200 billion capital increase. Overall, we are still in a very healthy corridor of 0.5-1x leverage. I think good situation to be in. Here is the third reason why we are launching a share buyback. I mean, we have increased further our equity. We're almost at 55%, so we are very in a very healthy situation from a balance sheet perspective, 54.5% equity. Not only are we launching a new share buyback, we're also increasing dividend to CHF 1,800. Again, same reasons as I just gave you before for the share buyback.
We are at a payout ratio of close to 58%. Of course, the AGM still has to approve the CHF 1,800. That's what we are going to propose to the AGM. Dividend yield at 1.5%. The market cap is at CHF 27 billion as of end of December 2025. We have increased our market cap over the last four years. In 2021, that was kind of special situation where Lindt had a P/E of 60. I think in general, the stock markets were really high at the end of 2021, so it's probably not a good benchmark there. It's good to see that overall we have been able to increase our market cap as well. I mentioned the share buyback. I'm sure you have read it.
I mean, we are launching a share buyback of CHF 1 billion starting in summer, in June. That's the plan. It will actually be a three-year period share buyback, so roughly buying back between CHF 300 million and CHF 350 million per year. It will replace the current share buyback which is still in place right now, but which most likely will be finished by, at the latest, by the end of May, probably even will be before. That was the financials in a nutshell. Quickly going to sustainability as well. Our 2025 sustainability structure, strategy we have just concluded it now, right? We had targets for 2025. We have now worked on a new strategy for 2030. I will show you the new strategy as well. First looking at the 2025 numbers.
We had a goal to reach 80% of our priority around packaging materials to source them in a sustainable way, and we achieved 93.2%, so we overachieved. We targeted 100% of cocoa to be farm-sourced through our farming program or through other responsible sourcing programs. We also achieved that. Science-Based Target. Climate is a very important topic, right? We committed to reducing our footprint, and we have made around 20% progress to do that by 2030. We then also have a 2050 long-term target. Packaging is important, the recyclability of packaging, and our goal that we set for 2025 was 90%, and we achieved 92.4%.
Maybe not so much as a target more, but more looking at an external organization that is looking at all the companies, how they are doing in sustainability. EcoVadis is a renowned organization where we won actually a silver medal. We are top 7%, so we are better than we are a part of the top 10% best companies according to them in our industry, which is also good news. It shows from a more neutral position that Lindt has made a lot of progress actually over the last years in the area of sustainability. From a cocoa sourcing perspective, which is our most important raw material, we have further strengthened our child protection strategy. We are working together with the ICI. That's the International Cocoa Initiative.
They are a very renowned organization to help companies to improve their child labor remediation or monitoring and remediation system. We have done that. We have also launched a living income program. You may have read in the press that Lindt, together with Mondelez, Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé, created the TogetherCocoa. We are jointly going to set up a foundation based in Switzerland. Jointly, we are going to try to close the living income gap, especially focused on Ghana and Ivory Coast. I think that's an exciting new project or new organization that is going to be founded by the key players in the chocolate industry to really trying to tackle the, let's say, problems that there are in terms of living income gap in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Last but not least, as from 2026, all our cocoa is Rainforest Alliance certified.
What does that mean? It actually means that in the future, when you look at the Lindt product, you will also see the Rainforest Alliance logo on them. Not immediately. It will be phased over some time. But I think it's also good to know that we also have this certification now for our cocoa. I promised you to give you a quick snapshot of the 2030 sustainability plan. It's indulgence rooted in responsibility. This new strategy is centered around three key areas, source with purpose on the one side, care for the environment, secondly, and then also valuing people. Behind all those three areas, we have subcategories, and behind these subcategories, we have KPIs, so we can measure it. We are publishing this, right? Also going forward. In the annual report, you have also a non-financial part where you have the whole sustainability topic covered.
In the future, we'll track against this new strategy, right? You can think about areas like supporting cocoa excellence or reducing emissions. We'll report against how we are doing against, let's say, against our targets for reducing emissions. Or another key area is we want to champion health and safety because we want to make sure that all Lindt employees, if they work in retail, if they work in the factory, that they are in a safe place. As you have seen, we have made great progress in sustainability. From a financial point of view, I think we have seen quite some key highlights. We grew double-digit over the last 5 years in net sales, at almost 11%. We had an increase of the EBIT, overall EBIT over the last five years of 51%.
We improved our EBIT, our earnings per share, sorry, by 54% over the last five years, which is great news. All of this, and also looking at our balance sheet, has made us decide to increase or to propose an increased dividend in the AGM to CHF 1,800 and also to launch another share buyback. I think we are in a very healthy situation. Adalbert Lechner will show you now, how we are going to actually trigger more volume growth again. Thank you.
Thank you. I think we could illustrate that we had rather a strong growth story in the last four years, not only top line, but especially also bottom line. I will outline now how we want to continue our growth story, how we want to continue our top line growth and also bottom line growth. One thing is clear. We had to, or we were forced to increase our prices by more than 40% in these four years. In three out of these four years, we did not see any impact on our volumes. We were flat on volumes, and we could translate the price increase one-to-one in top line growth.
Last year, especially in the H2, when we had to implement a total of another 19% price increase, was the first time that we also saw in combination with a very weak consumer sentiment and the higher price sensitivity, price elasticity for Lindt products, and we came in with -6.6% volume mix. It's our clear target to get back to stabilizing volume and to grow volume again as we did in the last years. What are the measures behind? First and utmost, we want to further strengthen our brand, and we will do this with a couple of measures that I will elaborate later. We want to increase the visibility of our brand.
We are an impulse brand, so it's most important that people really see us immediately when they enter a grocery store. They have to see us in shelf space. They have to see us on secondary placement. They also have to find us in prominent locations when it comes to our retail stores. Here we made big improvements. Of course, the execution has to be perfect on every touch point. As our prices are higher, people are less forgiving and expect a perfect execution in everything. The best example are also our retail stores where we did not see any price elasticity even last year because there is an experience and there is an excitement around the products that is second to none and consumers accept also the price increases.
The preconditions for getting back to volume growth are our brand equity is stronger than ever before. We focus on the core and key innovations, and you have seen last year that with the Dubai-style chocolate, we really came out with a spectacular innovation that strengthened us within the young target group. It brought consumers into our stores, consumers to our brand that never have been buying Lindt before. It really gave us a new momentum and dynamic of the brand. Visibility, physical and mental availability, I mentioned already. Of course, we want to more aggressively expand into new markets and also expand with our Global Retail channel, which is one of the biggest contributors to strengthening our brand equity.
Everyone who has ever been in a Lindt store sees the brand with different eyes and has a better perception of the brand, and we know that we highly benefit also in the wholesale and in the grocery markets from this positive image transfer. I mentioned the brand equity is stronger than ever. You know that Kantar BrandZ does a study about the value of brands every year, and for the first time in 25 years we were able to get the number one rank within all chocolate brands. We were the most valuable chocolate brand in the world with $9.4 billion calculated brand value. Even within the food and beverage brands, we were able to rank within the top ten brands right behind Nespresso, ahead of Nescafé, ahead of Kinder.
Really something the whole organization is proud of, and we will further, of course, invest into our brand. This is the key prerequisite to further grow with the premium prices that we are charging to consumers. If you see our long-term track record, you can also see that we were achieving a CAGR of around 6.5% between 2005 and 2019, so ahead of COVID. It was mainly driven by volume, 4%, 2%, 2.5% were driven by price increases. This picture has changed slightly. We were able to accelerate the growth as of 2021. I eliminated the COVID year, so it's not comparable to the chart of Martin because I said I don't want to count the recovery year in 2021.
As of 2021 to 2025, we had a CAGR of 10.1%. Stronger driven by pricing with 8%, but still with a positive volume across these years. As you can also see, with CHF 450 million organic growth in 2025, we were able to generate the highest absolute growth that we have ever experienced. When we discuss sometimes about acquisitions, there are hardly any premium chocolate companies out there in this size. We prefer to generate CHF 450 million growth organically, capitalizing our strong brand support, capitalizing our strong brand equity, filling the idle capacity in our own factories, et cetera.
We think this is much more beneficial for our P&L and also for strengthening our global footprint than going out for acquisitions, which are normally even smaller than this size. Why do we believe that we still have long-term headroom to grow and potential to grow? Because if you compare our market share to the big players in the chocolate market, we are still a relatively small company. We know from those markets where we are established long-term, like here in Europe, like here in Switzerland, we enjoy market shares between 10%-22%. We have a 22% market share here. We have market shares close to 16% or 19% also in Canada, in Australia, in Austria, in France. There is no reason why we should not have a 12% market share also globally.
We believe that we will increase our market share like we did, by the way, in all the last years, also for the years to come. I will soon explain which trends are in favor of premium brands and especially for Lindt. This should make us confident that the growth story will continue, especially if we look 37% of the total chocolate market, which is around $130 billion. 37% are generated in the so-called rest of the world. We generate 13% there, and we have a market share in this rest of the world of 2%.
Only if we bring these 2% to the average market share in Europe and North America, which is around 7%, we could deliver the growth story that we are announcing. In addition, we also see a huge opportunity to further grow in Europe and in North America, where we have the biggest fans and the strongest muscle also to strengthen the demand for our brands. We published already in advance a very surprising analysis. This is based on Circana data, so this is a household panel, and it shows it's real consumption in the last 52 weeks. We analyzed the consumption of non-GLP-1 users compared to the consumption of chocolate of the GLP-1 users.
Because we always were very nervous and said all those people using weight-losing drugs, will they cut back on chocolate consumption? We will lose them in the category. The surprising outcome was that GLP-1 users even grew their chocolate consumption stronger than the total chocolate market, and especially when it comes to premium chocolate. You can see premium chocolate grew stronger than total category with 6.5%. Here, the GLP-1 users grew their chocolate consumption even by 16, or their spending on chocolate by 16.6%. That really came as a surprise to us. What is also surprising, the usage of GLP-1 increased within one year from 6% last year to 15% this year.
This means 15% of U.S. households have at least one person in the household that uses a GLP-1 drug, so this is really a significant number, and it represents 17.5% of chocolate sales. The good news is that unlike all hypotheses, also from analysts or also our own expectations, these people still long for some indulgence, and when they long for indulgence, they disproportionately go for premium chocolate, hence, for brands like Ghirardelli or Lindt. The total chocolate market globally is sold via different channels, and you can see here 43% of the total chocolate market are generated in the classical wholesale trade, grocery, supermarkets, hypermarkets, et cetera. We have a strong position, but of course we are continuously working to strengthening our position there. That's our bread and butter business.
We expect high single-digit growth across the globe in this, let's say, backbone of our business. You still have 7% in confectionery stores in the global market, and this is where we play with our own 600 Lindt stores. Here we expect also for the years to come, strong double-digit growth, because we have found now a scalable model, a model that is in line in profitability with our wholesale business. There is no reason to hold back in the expansion. This is why you have seen the highest number of store openings last year with 53 stores, and we can imagine even to open more stores in the future as we are entering new markets. This is a channel that we own more or less also exclusively compared to our competitors.
None of them has such a strong direct-to-consumer channel. E-commerce represents 6% of the total global chocolate market. We have an over proportional share thanks to our gifting competence there. As you know, chocolate is an impulse category and therefore less suited to be bought online because online is more a destination. But with our gifting products, we play a significant role also in e-commerce. Convenience is a channel which is especially strong in Asia. We are underrepresented there. We have developed a program to aggressively conquer this convenience channel. It represents 27% of the total chocolate market, so very significant channel. Here we also expect a high double-digit growth in the long term. You have the so-called global travel retail business. It's the duty-free business on all the airports.
We are market leader in this channel, and here we also expect to protect the strong position and grow in line with the market, but it will more be in the single digits. There is another channel. 14% of total chocolate market is so-called discounters. It's a mixed basket. We work together with some discounters. In Switzerland, for example, you know Denner. It's also classified as a discounter.
You have the hard discounters, which represent the majority of this channel, and we decided not to operate in this environment because we believe it doesn't give us the stage for a premium brand that also helps to strengthen the brand equity, and it would be more a competition which is mainly driven via price and we want to keep out of this channel. We are convinced that we benefit more by offering the other channels a premium brand that helps them also to clearly position them as a premium channel, helps them to differentiate from the hard discounters. We have a clear strategy on this. By the way, also as the only big chocolate brand in the world, we are not represented in this channel.
Why do we believe that we have tailwind for our growth story? First of all, we see a premiumization of the category for many, many years across the globe. We will benefit from this. At the moment, probably a bit, let's say, dampened by the weak consumer sentiment, a bit dampened by uncertainties which are in the world, but long term, this trend is here to stay. We see that the growing middle class, of course, is striving for better life, for better quality products. An aging population is also helpful. They are more hedonistic. They are more striving for indulging themselves. We see gifting culture increasing.
If you see out there what people spend today on flowers or also on gift boxes in cosmetics, you know that there are also a lot of specialty stores out there. We see and are convinced that people will also spend more on gifting in chocolate, and we are the number one gifting brand, also this will help us. We expected consumer sentiment to improve with the recent developments. We see or we fear that it might be a setback. I will come to the outlook later. When we analyzed the situation beginning of the year, we were pretty confident mid of January.
End of January, we received the figures from the Christmas market last year, which was, to our surprise, significantly weaker than we had expected, especially volume reacted espe cially on higher-priced items. Then a couple of weeks later, we also got the news about the new escalation in the Middle East, so that we said, "Okay, if we take all the information together, we better be cautious," and we lowered our guidance for this year. In the long run, we are sure the consumer sentiment, which is at an all-time low, especially in the U.S., but also in Europe, will improve again, and it will also foster our growth story. Product availability always used to be number one for any big fast-moving consumer goods.
Today, it's not a big issue anymore because in online you can buy everything at any time, and you get it, ideally delivered within the next half an hour. Therefore, consumers are looking more for shopping experience when they go out because no one wants to spend his life in front of the laptop and ordering everything online. There's people still looking for an enjoyable time and shopping experience, and this is what we offer in our own stores and this is why we also see the strong like-for-like growth and this overwhelming acceptance of our stores also in best locations like here, Piccadilly Circus. Then there is an increasing, ever-increasing health trend, especially with the younger target group, so people strive for a mindful indulgence.
We have seen like GLP-1, also this is in favor of our premium brands. People go less for quantity and more for quality, and also this makes us believe that the long-term trend is in favor of our brands and hence we are confident to deliver our long-term guidance as we have announced it. This brings me to the outlook. As mentioned, we have lowered the forecast cautiously for this year to 4%-6% organic sales growth. We confirmed the improvement of EBIT. We believe that especially by the end of the year, we will slightly benefit also from the raw material relief and therefore also with a slower growth, we will be able to protect the bottom line. In the long term, we want to get back to 6%-8%, mainly driven by volume growth again.
Also for this year, we expect a softer volume in the first half because we still have price increases in place, mainly on the Easter business. For the H2, we expect to get back to volume growth and of course also for the years to come. The EBIT improvement of 20-40 basis points, Martin, elaborated already, driven also by strong improvement in the U.S., but you have seen also last year 80 basis points improvement in Europe. I think of course, rest of the world will also recover. Also here we are confident. With this, I would say we open the floor for answers and questions, and I ask Martin to join me here on stage. Please.
Excellent. Thank you. I'm Matthew Abraham from Berenberg. First question is just in reference to the revised organic sales guidance that you've provided today. Can you just talk through the price/volume shape of the revised guidance and then also the price/volume composition of the decline from the prior target that you referenced? Second question, just in reference to Dubai Style chocolate. You previously said that it accounted for between 2%-3% of sales in FY 2025. Do you have a target as a percentage of group sales for FY 2026 for Dubai Style chocolate?
Okay. For your first question. For first half, we expect double-digit price increase, and we expect a volume mix decline in the ballpark of what we have experienced last year in terms of price elasticity. For the H2, we don't implement further price increases, so we just have a spillover. It will be a low single-digit and we expect a volume growth again. Altogether for the year, we expect mid-single-digit price increase and a slight negative volume mix. For your second question, yes, Dubai-style chocolate was in this area that you have mentioned, and we have plans to even grow in this year. Why?
First of all, we launched the major part of Dubai Style Chocolate not January one, but even in Europe, it took us couple of months to roll it out, and especially in North America, Dubai Style Chocolate kicked in only in the H2. We have, first of all, the full year impact for Dubai Style Chocolate. Secondly, we started with one tablet. In the meantime, we extended the product range to different flavors. Very important was black or dark chocolate, white chocolate, but we have also now different fillings, and we have different formats. We came with a Valentine's heart. We came with a count line, very successful. The count line was in many markets the strongest count line out of all count lines, so ahead of all mass products.
We entered the seasonal business, so we have Easter offers, we have Christmas offers, and we already extended the range to another city style range with Tokyo Style, with matcha, which is also a mega trend, not only in social media, but everywhere, in any coffee house where you go. Dubai Style Chocolate is a range that is here to stay. It will grow. We have growth plans also for the years to come. It is certainly not, it's not a harm for our growth story in this year.
Sorry, just to clarify, do you have a target as a percentage of sales that you'd like Dubai Style chocolate to represent in FY 2026?
Absolutely. We don't disclose our product group's sales. Not neither for Lindor, nor for Excellence, nor for Dubai Style Chocolate.
Okay. Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Antoine Prevot, Bank of America. Two question for me, please. First, you've mentioned a bit of a weaker Christmas than we expected. Does that impact any of the reordering for Easter product? Second question, you mentioned that you would get a bit of cost of material benefits into 2026 at the end of the year. Is it in margin term or is it in absolute term? Thank you.
The first question, the Christmas business was weaker for the total market, and unfortunately, our performance was in line with total market. To your second question, does it have an impact on Easter? Absolutely. The retailers analyze the Christmas business and adjust their orders for the Easter business. This is why we announce a volume mix decline for the first half. Would, would, let's say, Christmas had gone more smooth, I would be more confident that probably we can even get back to volume growth in the first half. It's the key reason why we are cautious also on the Easter offtakes. Material benefit at the end of the year.
I think, you know, as we are covered with cocoa beans, as we have mentioned, the major impact of the decline will be materialized in 2027. But we buy other cocoa products like cocoa butter, where we still have some windfalls, and we can use these windfalls to reinvest in brand support. We can reinvest also partially in volume-driving promotions, which we will also certainly do as we have learned from the Christmas business last year. Of course, we also have to reinstall the margin that we used to have, because in the long term, we cannot fuel our growth story with a lower margin. We have the clear target that the margin get back to the level where it has been long term.
If you look at, let's say, the long term and you go back for H1 EBIT, you may remember that EBIT margin, actually many, many years ago, was even slightly negative in H1. Five years ago, it was probably about 7%. Then we had some one-offs, actually, in certain years. Last year, we got to 11.2%. Because of what Bertold just said, it could actually be that, let's say, H1 EBIT margin is going to be more around 10%, so slightly below 25%, which is not concerning because we actually do know that in the H2, we have actually then certain benefits. We're still carrying relatively expensive inventory into 2026. Don't be concerned if our EBIT margin H1 is going to be below 25%. It's actually what we expect.
Hi, Sam Derbyshire from Goldman Sachs. Can I just ask about how you're seeing the consumer at the moment? You know, you made some very valid points around the fact that the industry doesn't have huge capacity near term to reduce pricing from higher cocoa. Do you think that the price point of chocolate still allows it to be an affordable luxury for mass market consumers now? Or is there a risk now that it will be more difficult to return to the historic volume growth that Lindt delivered while chocolate is at this higher price point? Thank you.
We are absolutely confident that chocolate is still an affordable luxury, a luxury product that is democratized across the population. If you see that an average chocolate bar of Lindt is in the area of CHF 3-CHF 4 or EUR 3-EUR 4, and you compare this with a small little espresso or a small cappuccino that you buy in any coffee house or in any restaurant out there, it's not even needed to discuss if this is an affordable product. Of course, it is, yeah. What we have learned in the past time, it's not the first time we do price increases, yeah. There is a so-called sticker shock in the beginning.
It is in combination also with retail behavior, because once you increase prices, there is also a certain period where retailers are not immediately promoting because they also legally have to establish a new price point, and only then they can claim that it is now a discount. After this sticker shock, normally we see that after six months, consumers are getting accustomed to the new price points accepted, and then as of then, we have a normal volume growth as we used to have before. This is different this time, as mentioned, as we see now that currently geopolitical situations plus economic situations, I mean, today, VW announced 50,000 layoffs in Germany and so on.
We have a situation where consumers are a bit, I would say, insecure and consumer sentiment is really on a low level. If this situation will stabilize, I'm sure that chocolate is further on the list of affordable consumer products.
Also, when you look at Lindor, for example, you have different pack sizes, so we have different price points as well. There's not like one Lindor size, for example. You can buy Lindor in 100 gram, 200, 337 gram, et cetera. We are actually hitting different price points. Some consumers may also choose to go to a lower price point. I think that's also important to bear in mind when you think about volume and recovery, et cetera. There's not one price point.
Here is a hand up.
Hi, it's Bing from Redburn Atlantic. Can I ask two questions about North America, please?
About?
You mentioned North America. North America, you mentioned H2, growth accelerate to almost 12%. That's probably partly due to the Dubai-style chocolate launch and also some retailer restocking. If we strip out these effects, what do you see the underlying run rate going to 2026? Secondly, on Russell Stover specifically, can you give us an update on the strategic review? What's the plan to turn around the brand? Thank you.
Let me start with the second question. The first I didn't fully get. Russell Stover, yes, we are all not happy with the development of top line. Russell Stover was integrated into the North American network in the last years, so that we benefited from a better supply chain. We benefited from synergies in distribution. We benefited from synergies in shared service, in software support, et cetera. I would say to give us the critical mass and be a significant player on the North American market where we benefit cost-wise, and also what Martin has mentioned, that we were able to improve the bottom line from 7% now to more than 10% or 13% has to do with the footprint that we have in North America.
Here, Russell Stover plays an important role. To dismantle this construct is not an option, and is also not what we pursue. What we have to do is to bring back top line growth to Russell Stover. We are working hard on improving the bottom line. You know that we are also working on the supply chain set up, et cetera. The clear answer is Russell Stover will be a part of the Lindt & Sprüngli portfolio in North America also for the years to come. Do you want to take the-
Sure
First question?
I mean, you asked about the underlying growth in North America. I would actually not look at Dubai-style chocolate in a vacuum. I mean, if you as a consumer going to a retail store or to a Walmart and you spend $10 or $15 for a Dubai-style chocolate, you may actually not spend that money for something else, right? Maybe a Lindor or whatever. I think you cannot just say, "Okay, Dubai-style is incremental, and if that incrementality is not there anymore, it's going to fall off." I would not look at it like that. I would rather look at the overall purchase that the consumer does. The underlying growth in North America, you have seen that we had a very strong H2, slightly above Europe even, or more or less in line, let's say.
For next year, I'm expecting North America as well to be in the ballpark, right? So I'm not expecting North America to be below Europe. I think, we clearly have indications also when you look at Nielsen, that actually North American numbers have improved over the last month. So we are confident that also North America can grow probably even slightly above our guidance.
We had a very strong start. We just got Circana data from North America, and we are gaining share again. We have a written question here from Q&A assist from Dennis van Eersel, UBS. How do you feel about promotions going forward to drive volumes versus brand perception? Very good question. I mean, you know, we are a premium brand. We are not a luxury brand, so we are not a Louis Vuitton or an Hermès to say never on promotion. We are a mass market premium brand, and we always did promotions also in our history.
When we speak about let's say enforcing promotions to get back to volume, it has to do with price points that we probably crossed with our price increases to say we do the same promotion with more aggressive and attractive price points where we know that the uplift is significantly higher. It could mean that we also question the frequency of promotions. There are some that most of the time, the promotions are linked to investments with the retail partners. If it could be more beneficial to invest into a higher frequency of promotions instead of having the twenty-first TV copy on air.
We will try to find a balanced approach because we have seen with all KPIs that the brand equity and also the image parameters are in an all-time high. Partly our price points have crossed hurdles where the consumers shy away or react with a volume decline. I think there's no contradiction between brand perception. We will certainly do nothing that harms our brand equity, which is our biggest asset. There's a second question we have on the phone. We have a call here. Tom Sykes, could you phrase your question, please?
Yeah, thank you. Afternoon, everybody. A few questions just on the retail, Global Retail business, please. First of all, would be how much of Dubai Style sits within Global Retail, please, and the contribution to Global Retail growth? 'Cause it does look like your volumes, excluding store openings, are probably down on a like for like basis.
What is the outlook for volume growth within the retail business, specifically, please? Then just, you know, your EBITDA margin hasn't improved, but your EBIT margin has done, and it does look like the D&A, particularly on, well, on both parts, retail and other, has come down as a percentage of sales. Where is the EBITDA margin relative on Global Retail relative to the rest of the group, please? You said it's similar on an EBIT margin, but where is it on an EBITDA margin, please?
To your first question, what is the share of Dubai Style chocolate in retail and was it, I understand, how would like-for-like growth have been without Dubai Style chocolate? I would say it's the wrong question. If you take a retail store of 100 square meters and you have an innovation which is a blockbuster like Dubai Style chocolate, of course you dedicate a huge amount of your most prominent place to Dubai Style chocolate. If you would not have Dubai Style chocolate, it would probably be wafer. If you wouldn't have wafer, it would probably any other innovation. In especially in retail stores, you should not break your brain about cannibalization.
It is in our hands what we promote there, and of course, we always try to surprise consumers with innovations, with newness. When I do store checks in our own retail stores, I always ask the store managers what is the biggest concern of our consumers, and everyone across the world tells me, "Consumers come in and ask what's new." We offer 850 products in these retail stores, and they are concerned what's new. They are really. They want to explore something. They want to discover something that they do not find in their supermarket. Hence, of course, we prominently place innovations more prominent that we will do it in our wholesale stores.
Yes, Dubai Style was a strong product group in our retail stores, but it certainly doesn't mean that our retail stores had a volume decline without a Dubai Style chocolate. The second question. By the way, of course, we play now the full range of our Dubai products better in retail than in any other channel because we can permanently display all the flavors. We can permanently display Matcha. We do degustations with Matcha. We did events with influencers, et cetera. It brings excitement to the stores, and we will continue to do this.
Yeah. You asked about the EBITDA margin. Actually, it's very similar to the rest of the business because when you look at the depreciation in the retail division. If you put it in proportion to the rest of the business, it's very similar. What we actually look at is also the return on the invested capital, and we exclude certain positions such as our financial asset around the pension fund. Also, we exclude things like goodwill. You know, how we look at it internally, our ROIC is more or less at 20%. So when we decide to open a new store, we always want to have an IRR of at least 20%. We are really happy about our retail division nowadays also when we look at all the key financials.
I mean, if you look at direct store profit, if you look at the EBIT margin of the overall business, if you look at the EBITDA margin, if you look at the ROIC, it all is green basically. It's not a concern from a financial point of view at all. Also
Also, to mention, yes, we had some issues with the retail division, historically grown, and we have cleaned it up. We have closed consequently all stores that did not deliver against the KPIs that we have given out as a requirement.
In 2020, remember we announced right before COVID, nothing to do with COVID, to close 80 stores in North America. We have done that. We have a very clean portfolio of stores right now.
Okay, thank you. I mean, one follow-up would just be I know you said the D&A looks similar, but if we look at the right to use asset depreciation, and assume that's part of your retail network, it looks like the D&A is a lot higher compared to the rest of the group. I don't quite understand how the EBITDA can be the same and the EBIT can be the same, but maybe we can take that offline.
Sure.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Happy to show you or talk you through it.
Yeah.
Thanks. Callum at Bernstein. A couple of longer-term questions. Firstly, can you talk a little bit about how the SAP deployment is going and the benefits do you expect to see over the next few years, both from a cost perspective, but also maybe more importantly from a growth perspective? Then my second question is, one of your peers has very recently in the past week or two launched a so-called chocolate product which is not derived from cocoa at all. You obviously spoke about some of the sustainability pressures facing cocoa. I sort of wonder, are these kinds of initiatives things that you might be interested in as well, or are you committed to sticking with cocoa-derived chocolate specifically? Thank you.
Should I start with SAP or do I start with this question?
No. You deserve all the merit for SAP migration because we did it successfully last June.
As you know, SAP is a big word, and it's a difficult project. For those of you, maybe not many of you have enjoyed being part of an SAP project. You know that it's hard work. It's like a heart transplantation, I always say. Especially because also once you have gone live, it's not. You're not done, right? It takes actually probably another 12 months to really be back to where you were before. We are extremely happy where we are. I mean, we had to go live in a very important organization, U.K. At the same time, we also went live in South Africa and Benelux. We really had no disruptions, so that's good news. Of course, you then work through certain things in the beginning, teething problems. That's normal. We are very happy where we are today.
We are on plan actually. We're on budget right now. Benefits, you know, we will standardize all the processes, right? Which will take time, but we will standardize. Right now we don't have one SAP in the Lindt & Sprüngli Group right now, right? We have different instances. We had different instances. We have now one kind of, I would say, pretty aligned system in North America, and we are rolling out in Europe and the rest of the world, Asia, Pacific, and other S/4 instance, which will be pretty harmonized. So it's clear that this will bring benefits in the future. But now in the first stage of the project, we really want to focus on making sure we can land the airplane, right? Once we are stable, once we have processes that are best in class, we can then think about streamlining it more.
You can also think about AI, for example. I think SAP is the perfect platform, SAP S/4HANA to later on put on top of that certain AI agents, et cetera, because we have one database, we have one harmonized master database, so it gives us lots of opportunities in the future. This is still some time out. Now we are still focused on getting it really up to speed and having a successful implementation.
I think altogether it will give us more transparency. We will have common master data which we never had before. In terms of product planning, which means efficiency and forecasting, we should see.
Yes
... major benefits. Also, of course, if the cost structure is more competitive, it should also give us free funds to support behind growth. Your second question, peers have launched chocolate on a non-cocoa base. Look, our brand positioning, our DNA is we are one of the few pure players in chocolate. We stand for highest quality, best taste, super premium and no compromise on quality. I think before Lindt enters into cocoa substitutes, I think all the others would have launched successfully, hopefully, non-cocoa products. At the same time, we observe what's going on in the market.
We even took an investment, a small investment in a startup that works on cell-based cocoa, which is different to non-cocoa products because cell-based cocoa delivers at the end the same result, just on a different way, yeah. It's grown in the laboratory. We can choose the beans, we can even choose the taste, flavor. We are not yet planning to launch a product, but we are observing what's going on. It has mainly to do with consumer acceptance of cell-based products. We have seen ups and downs with meat substitutes. We have seen ups and downs even with milk substitutes. It was a huge boom, then it came. Oatly came down again in their market capitalization.
We are, let's say, a traditional brand that stands for highest quality products and people expect that we use real cocoa. There might be startups, there might be competitors who have a different positioning, a different approach, and they might be early movers in this direction. I would say we observe, and we don't exclude it. One day, we will also enter into this territory, but at the moment it's not planned. Any other questions? Otherwise, we thank for the attention. Please speak.
I think there's a written question.
Sorry. There's a written question. Okay. From Mikheil Omanadze from BNP Paribas. First, would you have lowered your guidance if there was no increase in geopolitical tensions? In other words, to what extent is the guidance cut driven by the weak December data? Let me start with this first question. As mentioned, you know, a guidance is the aggregation of all data points that you have available. If five out of the six data points would have all shown in the direction six to eight, probably we would have ignored the geopolitical tensions. If three out of six are already in this direction and the other three are in the other direction, you are discussing what should we do.
I would say the geopolitical tensions were really the tipping point that moved the needle and where we said, now it's better to be cautious. Because we were expecting really consumer sentiment picking up and getting more traction and being more positive, which has a global impact on our business. In addition, we are directly affected when tourism comes down, and you can imagine that the hub in Middle East is the hub for more or less 80% or 90% of the flights from Asia. We benefit from Asian tourists in all our retail stores in the metropolises in Europe. We benefit in global travel retail from passenger numbers at the airports. We have several impacts. The least impact is the sales in Middle East. It's tiny for us.
The other impacts that we expect, even if the war would end tomorrow, like Trump announced, it will take months that consumers have confidence again to fly or to book a flight via Doha or Dubai. This impact can make the difference in the growth rate for us, if this is enough as an answer. Second, would you say there is an element of conservatism to your guidance? If you see the performance of the last four years, you hopefully understood that there is always an element of conservatism in our guidance. We prefer to overdeliver and underpromise and not the other way around.
While it is clearly early to talk about full year 2027, how may the shape of price, volume, and margin look like if cocoa stays where it is now? I think that's too early to answer. It's clear that the mix should be completely different. It should be mainly volume driven growth, and most likely price will not contribute at all to growth. So it could even be that we have to rely on a reverse price elasticity. We will come back to this in one year time, I would say. There are more questions.
From here, yes.
Yeah. Are you so kind and tell us what was the volume growth in dark chocolate in 2025? The answer is that we had a volume growth and all the price increases came on top. To be honest, I do not even know because we have dark chocolate across all categories, so I don't have this.
It grew clearly above average.
It grew.
I mean, we had really a stellar performance.
We had a negative volume development. We had a positive volume development on dark chocolate. Did you start the year in the organic sales bracket 4%-6% year-over-year in January, February? No, we started significantly above, but it is this is misleading because Easter is earlier and we have a mixed basket of Easter and regular sales. We have to separate this, so it's misleading. Well, as we have more questions on the phone, Edward Hockin, please, can you give us your question?
Hi. It's Ed Hockin from J.P. Morgan. I hope you can hear me okay on the line.
Perfectly.
I've got two questions, please. One is on pricing. What I seem to read is not much in the way of price concession for this year, but can you remind us to what cocoa price level you have priced up to? I suppose with cocoa prices now at GBP 2,500, whether that pressure for price concessions may build as we think about 2027. Also on pricing, how closely do you manage your price gaps looking at your price points versus competition? Then my second question, please, if I may on margins.
Although not specific on 2027, I guess philosophically, if you had a year with significant cost tailwind, then should we expect still 20 basis-40 basis points of EBIT margin, or would it be reasonable to assume you could have a higher EBIT margin delivery in such a year? Thank you.
Let me start with the second question. I think we are in a situation where we have explained that we sacrificed on margin in the last four years, not to overdo it with price increases. We lost 270 basis points in margin. We also probably were not able to increase our marketing spendings in a way that we would have wished because also this was the, let's say, a balanced approach. Not to say we go in full power and have to increase prices more than we should have or we are forced to.
The answer is, if we have cost tailwind, we have again to find a balanced way to, first of all, cover part of the margin loss that we had, ramp up our marketing expenses, and then only then we think about EBIT margin improvements. I think you have seen in the past time that we do not pull the handbrake when we improve at 40 basis points. We had 60 basis points in the last two years and 90 basis points even the year before. Of course, if we are in the position to go higher, but it's not the first priority. The first priority is to get back to volume growth.
The first priority is to secure top line growth because in the long term, this is more beneficial for all stakeholders in the organization.
I think with regards to pricing, it's a good question. I think you really have to look at the overall universe in the chocolate industry. You have private label on the one side. Private label typically is hedged much less than the other, the brand players, right? Private label is probably hedged three months-six months. Private label moves much faster. If the cocoa price goes up, private label also corrects quicker. That's where there is as well some noise right now in the chocolate industry because of course, private label increased fast. Maybe that was not so much of a news, but actually now that they brought down in certain markets the price, of course, this creates noise. The branded players typically are much slower because their coverage tends to be much longer. We have, for example, beans inventory.
All of our competitors, they also have futures. Therefore, I would say overall, the industry has probably increased prices by some between GBP 4,000 and GBP 5,000. The market was at GBP 10,000, so not even close to where the market was. I know everybody gets now excited about the cocoa price decrease, but let's not forget that the fundamentals, the long-term fundamentals, they're still the same. We have, we will have stronger volume growth in the future, not only Lindt, the chocolate market in general. At some point in time, the crops will not be as good as the current crop again, because every five years, six years you have El Niño. At some point in time, there will be, again, the big news are El Niño, and everybody gets nervous again. Cocoa market may go up again.
We still have the diseases in the cocoa trees, swollen shoot. That may also happen again. Therefore, right now, we should not talk about price increases, right? Of course, if needed and if possible, and if needed to grow volume, one may adjust a bit RGM, promotions, et cetera, but it's far too early to think about the price increase right now.
I would add, we also don't exclude price decreases.
Yes.
Of course not, yeah. Neither will we pass on all the tailwind in price decreases, nor will we pass on everything in EBIT improvement. Yeah. I think that's the message.
Thank you. Thanks.
If there are no further questions, I see.
There's one more apparently.
No, no more questions.
Oh, no question. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Frank.
It looked like more questions.
No, exactly.
We have just to skip the Q&A. Now, thank you very much for your attention. Please grab your chocolate box at the exit. Yeah, Happy Easter soon with hopefully some golden bunnies in your Easter basket. Thank you.
Thank you very much.